pretending to be a food bloger 2

large wiki gotten image ahoy.

As programing has been boring debug code removal I think I'll switch to something with a little meat on it.

As of late I've been switching up to some home made food that is relatively cheap. My standard problem when I did this before was I'd try and make sandwiches with really cheap processed meat or uncooked meats I'd cook poorly in one way and get sick of in a day. But I have seemed to have found a solution.

It seems that I love pita bread and just in luck my somewhat local grocery store has it. Slightly more expensive than cheap loafs of bread but considering it's about 10 pieces of large flat bread I don't quite mind. After that I went about getting fillings from the deli. While it looks expensive in the 7 to 10 dollars range that's per pound. Asking for a third or half a pound did wonders to reduce the price for my budget. A little bit of hummus on the side for turning the pita bread into snacks and I'm doing quite well with this. Almost done with my first batch of deli meats and cheese and I have a second stack of pita bread waiting for fillings and I'm considering this a success in diet and budget. What I do for dinner is always the problem though I've been working on it.

So what staples have you guys tried over the years for food? Or have tried and found them to have utterly failed?

Prognosis Terminal.

For a change of pace I think I'm going to talk about programing. In this case about the Python language.

All rights to Python belonging to Python Software Foundation and all and is quite open source at the moment.

With that hopefully leganise fulfilling line I have to say I like python. During a class called principals of programing I was introduced to this little language and was both astounded and annoyed by it. To this day the feeling hasn't changed much. It's easy to get on any computer and for most applications of it you don't have to download a bunch of dlls or development kits to work with it. It's also very easy to program in from my perspective at least. I've used it almost exclusively for a while now as I haven't been bothered to get anything more complex than it. It gets my simulation data done and I don't need anything heavier at the moment.


Though it does raise some ire in me. For one it uses white space to separate blocks of code, may not mean much to the laymen but when I have a scroll horizontally to see what I'm working on it gets on my nerves.

I really should use spaces but they look ugly

Granted this is a very messy nested loop that I possibly could have done better through diving up the load in different methods but it was a quick dirty Monte Carlo test, along side some actual expected averages,  I wanted to get done. The next on the list is a blessing most of the time until it comes to debugging. Python being an interpretive system does not care about variable decleration or even type until it tries to do something with it. More than a few times I have been stuck debugging a misspelled variable that was oddly another variable of a different type while looking for a logic error.

Another down side that doesn't quite bother me is the GUI or visual portion. While it does have an inbuilt one of TkInter though I question some of it's practices. Though I'm not much of a visual person, terminal output and input is often enough to acomplish what I've done. Most of this is easily remedied if you know what you're doing visual wise or even if you hunt down some modules to expand python. Eve online is made with python if I remember correctly. How much python is hard to say, I have never looked into the guts of their system files to see if there would be any reconcilable extensions.

Hmm a bit short. Maybe tomorrow I'll try my hand at making some sort of python tutorial.

Statistical analysis

An image I didn't make? Madness. QWOP will have more to do in a minute though.

There has been a long standing tradition in games to take a nature vs nurture approach in games. Nature being your innate abilities that are largely unchanging, though can grow in minor ways , and skills which are constantly being increased in decent numbers. There is a lot of weird things to this, so I'll begin with the parts I know decently well.

I know there were other games around when chain mail became Old Dungeons and Dragons but I just don't know how to find them, a lot were probably lost to the passing of time. But D&D had Stats. Back then stats didn't matter quite as much, in fact I think it had weird system of bonus EXP when you did things involving the bonus from your governing stat and magical things.

First things first, D&D is rooted in wargames so is a little weird at times. I know the modern statistics are Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Don't know if any were added along the way and not in the mood for long research, which I may take up later for fun, on the original game. I do know stat "bonuses" were calculated completely differently making an 18 in them a godly thing. Supposedly wasn't too different throughout the years until 3.5 started making them mater a lot more and be prerequisite to a lot of feats which were needed, or spells cast, or even just hitting something.

The approach to this is a little weird. A lot of stats line up with one thing, sword hitting things intelligence hitting another, and in latter editions exceptions get made everywhere. 3.5, and possibly 3rd, in general had feats or little extras that you can get when you level up allow you to use Wisdom to fire bows and arrows. Strength has added to accuracy for melee attacks, except for light weapons which could use dexterity if you took the feat for it. Wisdom is some where between common sense, experience over time, and flat out natural instinct as every natural animal has high wisdom. The more "what is this stat actually representing?" of all of them is Charisma. It's always been described as a "force of personality" while having attractive races get bonuses to it and ugly races getting penalties, until 4th edition but another box of dead horses.

What does this all mean? Stats, attributes, and characteristics are somewhat silly. Though they serve a purpose. Table top gaming or even computer RPGs need some amount of abstraction to not be horribly cumbersome and not understandable by the people who use them. This is where QWOP comes in, it's a game that is realistic to a degree. You don't hold left or right to move the guy along, you actually go to the source of how he goes about moving muscular movement. Legitimately categorizing how a character should realistically go about things would be about as elegant as making QWOP man jump a hurdle, it can be done but I doubt most people will enjoy it. All games use some form of abstraction for this reason, reality isn't clean and fun. The most we can ask is that we can only eye roll a little at the designers choice and keep them constant. I'll probably revisit this under different systems, nWoD had I think 9 stats in total and comparing it to D&D could be fun.