Update

07/16/24: Roulette_Final_FINAL

So there was this one more little thing I wanted to do for the R/S/E roulette article: when simulating multiple possible fuzz values, I wanted a ball that bounced off an existing slot to split into two balls that would fall to each side. I could imagine what it was supposed to look like, and it'd be neat, and I wanted to do it. The problem was just that with my weird hodgepodge code for a simple fuzz range calculator with the whole animation thing awkwardly bolted on afterwards, this was basically impossible to do. So obviously, I had to rewrite and reorganize the roulette code into something with a little more structure, so that I could do this tiny minor feature nobody but me cared about.

...And then that took a while, because this was a lot of complex code to refactor, and then I had to implement this additional feature, and then I wanted to double-check and polish up various things and fix some minor issues, and then it managed to hit me with the most obnoxious obscure bugs possible, just to torment me when I was sure I was free. But! It's done now! The roulette simulator will now show the ball splitting into two balls if it bounces off an existing ball when you have selected either the "Highest/lowest/medium fuzz" option or the "All possible fuzz values" option. I should now be Actually Done with roulette, fingers crossed. Totally worth it, question mark? Let me know if you bump into anything odd with it.

There are also a couple of other things I have been doing alongside this that got held back or not actually announced at the time thanks to "I'll just quickly finish this roulette thing first oops where did time go":

  • I quietly added an RSS feed back in May, which is now a little more visible with an icon in the footer as well as being linked in metadata on every page of the site rather than just the front page. I always had the impression very few people were using RSS feeds much these days, so despite a couple of queries about it over the years I never went ahead and got into implementing it. But then someone offhandedly mentioned it in their tags while reblogging one of my posts on Tumblr, and in a manic coding spree I went and did my best to implement it despite not being very familiar with it and finding it pretty kludgy to put together. Let me know if you have any trouble with it and I will try to figure it out.
  • The April Fools' Day joke archive now has a table of contents that makes it easier to find a particular joke, since it's been a lot of years by now.
  • When I first made the Pokémon List Generator, the Spanish and Italian localizations of Pokémon simply used the English names unchanged, so I didn't bother including the ability to show names in Spanish or Italian alongside French and German. By now, though, some Pokémon (Type: Null and the Paradox Pokémon from Scarlet and Violet) do have special names in Spanish and Italian, so I've added the ability to specify those as filters for the name variable.
  • On May 10th, Morphic turned seventeen years old, and for the occasion I wrote a set of three 100-word drabbles, which are now finally up as an extra (they're not super remarkable, and two out of three only make sense if you've read Groundhog Dave, but they're there). As I was adding that, I also reorganized the list of extras to split it into a few categories, just because it was getting a bit long and unwieldy.

My next plans involve porting over some Pokémon-related articles I wrote on my personal Tumblr that there's really no reason not to give a more permanent, less transient home over here, which should genuinely be fairly straightforward to do and will not take months of labyrinthine programming, so hopefully relatively soon... just as soon as I'm done writing this decidedly not-Pokémon-related essay about medieval Icelandic literature that my brain decided to get obsessed with in June.

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Comments

My own messages will be signed as Butterfree, with the Admin label below my name. If someone signs as Butterfree without that label, it's probably not me.

toxicoke
Commenting on: 07-16-24

You reminded me about my RSS feed reader that I wanted to get into in 2024. Thanks! I subscribed.

[23/07/2024 18:18:22]

Negrek
Website: Thousand Roads
Commenting on: 07-16-24

Just so long as we don't see the dreaded Roulette_Final_FINAL_2…

Congrats again on seeing the roulette project through to the end (for now?)! It's looking great. I enjoy just messing around and setting some balls rolling; the animation is really great.

Some nice little improvements here and there, too! Always nice to see more updates around the site.

[18/07/2024 00:26:51]

Cruithne
Commenting on: 07-16-24

yeah the rss feed works perfectly as expected (at least for me using feedbro firefox extension)
thank you again, i'm honoured :)

[17/07/2024 06:35:06]

Page last modified November 2 2024 at 17:42 UTC