Well, I'm in Ottawa for my Reading Week now. Managed to get some reading done, though not as much as I'd have liked, due to my foolish decision to reinstall Planescape: Torment on my computer. Gods, but that is a great game...if ever a video game deserved to win a literary award, Torment is it. How can you not love an RPG where your most important stats are Intelligence and Wisdom, followed by Charisma, when virtually all other (especially Infinity Engine) games are all about STR, CON and DEX? Absolutely everything about that game is great: If you have never played it, you owe it to yourself to do so.
Anyway, I unfortunately have not done much (read: any) work on my parser. I was reading the Dragon Book and Beautiful Code, and I decided it would be more fun to implement the "Top-Down Operator Precedence" parser presented in Beautiful Code in Common Lisp. That's the plan...but I've already so many books to read, and coming to my grandparent's house always seems to end with me having several more. So, it will probably be a while before I get down to some serious programming. Maybe on the train ride back?
My Personal NBL
So, for the—third? Fourth?—time, I decided to try to get back into Factor. It is a really neat language, Slava is a cool and very smart guy...I like the idea of concatenative languages, and learning a new programming paradigm is always a fun thing to do. If I can just get Emacs integration working, and then figure out how to actually do things (I guess I'll go and read all the archives of Slava's and Daniel Ehrenberg's blogs). Wish me luck!
Politics Annoys Me
So, I've had some trouble coming up with something to write in the past few days. I blame this on Noam Chomsky: I started reading Failed States the other day, and it fills me with rage—I can't read it for more than forty minutes at a stretch, or I just get too filled with rage to read. The only things I was considering was how best to overthrow the corrupt regime that currently rules over the United States. However, I really didn't want to start writing about politics on this blog, at least not anti-Bush/US articles, for reasons that I will now elucidate: Other people are stupid. You see, I both take great pleasure from being an elitist snob it all things and believe that the general public is deeply stupid. Therefore, when I have the same opinion of something as the aforementioned "General Public", I feel that I must either conceal that opinion, or assume that this opinion is wrong, and begin seeking some new, untapped, and contrary viewpoint that I can get behind.
Well, that was weird. Just wanted to write something, to maintain momentum. Hopefully the next entry will be more interesting.
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