It's a little late, I know. But this is Gloria's birthday present, and better late than never. I have legitimate excuses; Thursday, her birthday, I was really busy and had homework until like 11:30. Then Friday, right after school, we left to go to a no-internet land until late today. So now, when I am supposed to be asleep, I write this.

I have little to write about. I will write these:

I am now going out with one Ashley Chu. I finally go out with an Ashley, dammit. I have had crushes on like 5 Ashleys (Ashlies?) before this and by the beard of Zeus, I have finally succeeded. 6th-grade-Evan would be so proud. And this one Ashley Chu interests me because I like how she is and less of what she is. She tells stories about some of the most boring things I've ever heard and she can make them funny. That is my favorite thing. I would write more, but I have made many a mistake obsessing over a girl and do not want to make that mistake again.

But I also enjoy that we have a similar taste in music. By no means is it identical, but we have traded lists of songs we like and about 1 in 4 songs is compatible. It fills me with joy.

I was going to write "I fear that Gloria does not want to talk to me," but she is going to be reading this. I fear that you don't want to talk to me anymore. Admittedly, I feel this about most people, but you especially. I am sorry if that is or is not the case and am genuinely sorry about either one. I feel sorry for two out of three of these reasons: 1) I am sorry that you don't want to talk to me, and for whatever I have done to make you not want to talk to me. 2) I am sorry if I have misinterpreted your vibes. 3) It is important to feel genuine remorse all the time.

Me and my fambly and my aunt went to the Avenue of the Giants. There were a lot of giants except they were actually redwood trees that were still giant. It was a rural place. It was nice. It was the kind of place where all of the men drive old trucks and all of the women do not shave their armpits. It was nice. I am serious about all parts of this paragraph.

I am trying to speak in more "legendary" language as of late. Take a sentence. "I gave you the old green bag." Certain substitutions can be made. The verb "give" can become "bestow upon thine name." "Green" becomes "jade." "Old" becomes "of yore." "Bag" becomes "parcel." Now look at it: "I have bestown the jade parcel of yore upon thine name." Is that not more legendary? It is more legendary. Of yore.

Nerd paragraph: Smash Bros. Brawl is confusing me. On my first day, I liked Marth. Then I liked Link, then Lucas, then Lucario, then Captain Falcon, now Mario. Tomorrow will be someone completely different. I like Mario because he, like Meta Knight and Toon Link and others, thrives in the air. He also has a beastly f-air spike. I also went back to my roots and played SSB64 and enjoyed it a lot. Throws are actually useful, as are the attacks that lock you in (eg Toon Link's up+B). Aerial Falcon PAWNCHes against recoveries are absolutely sweet.

Speaking of the Falcon PAWNCH, Gil and I are going to build a Falcon Punch machine. Something you attach to your wrist, which hits a button, which plays Falcon Punch, and maybe shoots some red smoke. Imagine the awesome. Stop reading and pause for a minute to imagine the awesome.

I am going to try to plant some slang. Instead of "bad" or "not good," I am going to use the word "bitter." I am going to see if I can get other people to say it. Cross your fingers, future.

I met with a college counselor and a 3.75, my grade, is good. Except now I have two options: 1) Bomb Chem (C), do good in Spanish (A). 2) Do fine (B) in Chem and Spanish. Neither of them sound good but I can deal. I feel like a Macbook. This counselor also suggested that I formalize some of my hobbies, like take a real programming class. So I'm going to learn Java that way, and then make Soldier 2.0, and rock the house with my nerdness.

And I believe that is all.

Happy birthday, Gloria.

I am writing in this. Um.

I have nothing in my brain. Hence the username.

I will share with you some anecdotes.

You know how when phones are getting some informations, they beep the speakers? I was texting Ashley late into the night, and when I finally went to bed, I placed my phone atop my alarm clock. It was doing something, and suddenly, my clock went from 1:00, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7:00, within a couple of seconds. It was creepy.

I was biking to Palo Alto High School and I stopped at a stop sign. I looked left, I looked right, I looked left, and I went. But I looked right again and stopped - had I continued, a car would've hit me. I was still fine where I stopped, but the car slowed down, almost to a stop, and glared at me. It was humorous.

I like how Linda smiles, I like how Ashley talks, I like how Gloria walks, I like how Canadians say "aboot."

Song idea: Canadians saying aboot.

Gloria has made me realize that I am simple. I originally decided to become less simple. I realized this would have been a mistake. Being a complex individual carries no weight to me. I know it does to some people (like Gloria), but, naw. Complexity makes me have to do the talking and then I don't get to listen. And even if I have nothing to contribute and am a brick wall, I still like that more than having to talk about myself - after all, I'm boring.

I feel extraordinarily tired and incompetent at this moment especially.

I have to go to sleep now. The sleepy aboot calls.

9:28:40 PM Me: do i have to write you another blog?
9:28:59 PM Gloria: make it more interesting this time
9:28:59 PM Gloria: :)
9:29:07 PM Me: prompt?
9:29:11 PM Gloria: eliza

If I could come up with a hilarious insult to call Gloria that carried no weight, I would. But I have nothing, so I have to write her another blog entry. Oh, and how original of me, it's going to be about Eliza. Never talked about her before. Ever.

I think she's changed a pretty good deal, and for the worse. I remember her as this girl that who was great when she was herself. She was funny, and she was shy, and she was interesting, and she was very...cute. Cute in all ways. But now she's changed; now she's overconfident and takes millions of pictures of herself, and now she insults me, which is funny every once in awhile, and not every couple of sentences.

There was one thing I remember pretty well, that I think is a comedic, defining moment in what I think of her:

I once told her that I couldn't imagine her as a porn star. And she took offense, and I had to tell her that I couldn't imagine her personality making her a porn star, not that she didn't have the looks or something for it.

I laughed about it later.

I figure it's better to have her out of my life constantly, and just hang out with her every now and again because I should.

Two things in national nerd news. And I mean, seriously, a lot of people care:

1. Because of Smash Brawl's customizable control scheme, you can set B moves to the C stick. This seems pretty useless, but for some reason, using the C stick instead of the B button as an aerial dramatically changes the movement of some characters. It's called a wavebounce at the moment. Marth's aerial side-B can now be used extremely defensively.

2. AKA (of the 0-star SM64 TAS) just figured out how to, yes, how to get through the Door of Time with no medallions. It...oh my. It's the coolest thing ever. This guy and Kazooie...this means that you can beat the entire game without ever finishing any of the dungeons. That game has had the crap beaten out of it.

I need to stop caring about what people think about me. I could give you a million examples and reasons. That would be a waste of your time and mine. Think about it for yourself.

Bears?

I think I have ADD of the mind. I can concentrate on doing something fine, but I find it very difficult to think about something on my own. I have a terrible example:

When I, um, master my bation, I try to imagine a ridiculously fake woman. But then I lose that image, and because I do, I think I'm gay. And so I try to imagine a man to test that. But then I think of how different my life would be if I was, and then I have no idea what's going on, and I try again.

That's a great example.

Well I'm out of stuff to write until a little later. I'm sure I'll come up with something.

Gnight.

I have this amazingly bad, and weird habit. I shall explain, semicolon:

I tend to be exactly what I think someone thinks I am, around them. To put that better with an example, semicolon: I think Gloria thinks I'm quiet and boring and not funny. I may not have been that way originally, that's another debate. But now, I believe she thinks I am. So now, I am. Now, when I'm around her, without even thinking about it, I'm quiet and boring and not funny. I don't think about it - it just happens.

I do that around everybody. I believe my friends think I'm too generous but confident, so around them, I'm generous and confident. I believe some people on my cross-country team think I'm gay, so I act a little more gay around them. I believe Rehaan thinks I'm a little stupid, so around him, I seem a little more stupid. It becomes a vicious cycle.

That's why I've been trying to make first impressions so important. If I don't convince myself that they like me, I won't be confident and I'll act like an idiot in front of them.

And I should stop. Why in the world should I have to rely on first impressions?

Why do I do it?

I'd like the answer to be because I have a habit of giving people what they want, down to the subconscious. I wish I was truly generous, but that's physically impossible.

Perhaps it's because I'm shapeable. If someone wants to change me (not too drastically), they can, and I just want to help them because it's easier. I don't want to stand up for who I am, I want them to decide who I am for me. My guess is that's actually what's going on.

Why do I have no confidence that the way I act is the right way?

If someone asked me, "Are you sure about moral values?" I would instantly start to run through everything and wonder if everything I ever thought by myself was wrong. Every time I decided to do something, that was based on the wrong decision. I wouldn't stop thinking about it, and I would try to change my moral values, even if they were totally fin.

But why do I have no confidence that the way I act is the right way?

Probably because the way I act IS the wrong way. Or, at least, I believe it is. My morals might be right, my actions might all make total sense, whatever. But I feel like everything I do is probably wrong, and everything I'd think to do has some negative outcome.

And of course it won't, but I take no risks, and I just speculate about myself and don't bother to change myself. Which, let me say, is a lot easier, and makes for better emo discussion topics, or JOURNAL (not diary) entries.

I suppose, that after thinking about this all on paper, the moral of the story here is, slow and steady wins the race.

Gloria's being lame and not talking to me so I'm going to blog so that maybe she'll be happy and that she'll talk to me. I don't want to have to internet-bitch-slap her again. Hurts the internet backhand.

Today was my second day on Maui. My dad and I made our first XNA program. Basically, the C# development environment is scary as shit, and I don't quite know about classes, but I made it so you could move a green, bullet-shaped sprite around the screen.

Compilers? Classes? Libraries? I have a lot of learning to do before I get started on Soldier.

But today's Soldier discussion was about a lot of little things, and collision detection. There were a lot of enormously complicated ideas bouncing around, but we decided the most efficient idea would simply be to constantly change the hitbox size, depending on latency.

Another problem arose. It was like this:

If you shoot a guy, even if the message hasn't bounced back confirming that you've killed him, you still want him to fall over. The problem is if you animate his
death and kill his health, and the player's not dead. We didn't quite figure this out, but here's an idea that seems flawed but would work that I thought of really just now:

If you think you've killed a guy, animate him, but don't drop his gun or the health value you're storing. Now two scenarios can happen. One, the player's dead. Allow his animation to complete, drop a dead body object, drop his weapons, display the message, lower his health, change your scoreboard. Two, the player's not dead. Simply change his animation back to moving, continue him from the most recent messages you have.

Seriously, very little happened today, other than nerd stuff.

I learned Mr. Pit, Mr. Pit, Mr. Pitiful on the piano; turns out it's incredibly, incredibly easy. Also MAYBE came up with a chord progression for my Animals Don't Care song, but I haven't tried it out.

Played Brawl; am writing an FAQ for GameFAQs for it; it has a ton of placeholders. It's mostly a single-player Event Match guide so far. Unlocked More Rules today, so I've got a bit more on the Maui console than at home, and this one was from scratch just like at home. Hitting Start to get through 450 VS mode matches is a little boring.

The kids over on YouTube are getting close to glitching through the Door of Time, which is crazy. If they do that, no dungeons will be required, I think. I'm not an OoT glitcher so I'm not certain about all of this, but if it's what I think it is (or even slightly different), it's still awesome.

I'm reading Harry Potter 7 now, finally. I'm around page 100, esque, and I'm at the part about the magic.

We went to Joe's for dinner, which turned out to be the best meal I've eaten in awhile. Bread, calamari, crab dip, and then something-cheese chicken which was godly. I wish I'd eaten more of it.

*** "Gloria Yu" signed off at Wed Mar 26 22:47:10 2008.

Aw. I meant to send this to Gloria so that we could keep talking, but she just logged off. Well I guess I'll send this to her in the morning, and she'll owe me a blog.

I guess I should be optimistic; this is just an opportunity to write a lot of my...feelings out. Yes. I have those. Like 5 of them.

My arm smells like old ocean. "Old ocean" sounds like something poetic. It's not. But it certainly could be. Certainly could be.

I admit that I'm a little bummed that Gloria logged off. I really like talking to her. And yet I don't - she brings out the quiet in me. It's like committing social suicide with her, acting more like myself all of the time. I wish I was more fun for her to talk to, because I'm not really.

The old ocean laps
At the old shore
And we often forget,
We forget what it's for.
Stare at the horizon
A view so rewarding
We remember now -
It's for naked waveboarding.

That was really some great poetry. Also, not funny, even if I tried.

God, I need me a twelve. I could use one. But just right now. I won't need one tomorrow. Just someone to lie in bed with and hug.

And no sex. I promise.

It's difficult for me to find a woman that I love, but can also fulfill my rabid, sexual animal desires. That is what we call a "hook" in writing - something to get the reader to read the rest of it. Of course, now that I've acknowledged it, my hook-plot has been ruined. Damn.

I'm in Maui as the seconds tick by. It's around 10:00 PM here, but it's 1:00 AM at home, and it's my first day, and I'm awake. I shouldn't be. I feel relaxed.Relajado. Rela....no. Nothing else. No other clever ones that I know. (リラックス? That could mean nothing.)

Glor-glor wants me to write something in this blog. I admit I'm a little out of material, because absolutely nothing happens in my life, but I've begun a song about how animals don't care. It's called "Animals Don't Care" and it's not finished. I have no idea what the melodies and harmonies andrythmies are going to be, but here it is:

Sittin' with my pen and paper
Whiddling out the rhymes and times
Of songs that'll never be heard.
Sittin' with my pen and paper
Trying to get the poetry out of my mind
And throw it all into words.

As I chew on the back of the pen
Again and again and again
Again and again and again
Pulling out the hair
As I'm sitting on that chair
Whiddling out the rhymes and times,
Why do I even care?

I look for inspiration in my cat's empty eyes,
She stares that she knows all she needs to know
She doesn't care about the rythm, or the chords that sound like skies
After all why would she, they're just stupid notes.

Animals don't care about all the bells and whistles
And it's nicer they're not evil in their greed
We care oh so much about trains and cars and missiles
Food and water's really all they need

All I know about that song is that the rhythms don't quite line up to four; the first stanza is six lines, and the two lines of "again and again and again" put that whole stanza at 7 total. By the horns of Pan, that's crazy. Stella came up with "by the horns of Pan." She's my cute Asian genius fair-weather friend. I only have like two or three of those, so they're gems. Gems!

She has one of those laughs that I can call nothing but the cutest laugh in the world. She and Gloria and I'm-sure-other-people have this laugh, where they laugh and then their head bounces around. It sounds (and when you think about it, looks) incredibly stupid, but the way people move intrigues me, and when people laugh like that, I lovey-dovey love it.

I am hyper. I seriously need a picture of a sausage now:

Fuck you, Wikipedia, for not instantly having a picture of ONE sausage that doesn't look like a curved mansausage. Not. That. No. Regret saying that. Backspace fails me. Why. So stupid.

Hey, Mr. Pit, Mr. Pit, Mr. Pitiful, is probably my favorite song at the now, as it encompasses all qualities of good music from all genres and combines it into a medley of really only one song. But it's by Matt Costa, which makes me think of Costa Rica, which makes me think of crazy bald Spanish guys with glasses, and Gloria. I promise that Gloria and crazy bald Spanish guys with glasses have nothing to do with each other in my head; no associations are made.

Well, NOW I'll associate them. Damn commies.

This is hecka random. Hecka rand. I'm going to look back on these words in this order and wonder how high I was - I promise it was just a little late and I was a little giddy. No, it was probably some secondhand wine that my dad had.

Oh, so I'm here in Maui with my dad, embarking before my grandmother comes. And this grandmother is an extremely smart, nice, person, but for no reason, she's conservative. I've got nothing against being a conservative (damn commies) but she seems to have nothing to back it up other than religion. And that's just a bunch ofbullhonkey.

Religion! Oy vey. Gets my knickers in a twist. Now that I think about it, twisting your underwear would hurt beyond imaginable nouns. Oh my. Different thoughts, different thoughts....I'm at Disneyland. I. Am. At.Disneylannddd.

I promise it's just a little bit late and I'm a little giddy. Pinky swear.

Ashley and I have a very similar taste in music, and I look forward to exchanging musical music with her at some point in the future. She's pretty cool. Also, she will never cut my hair again, not unless we're both in love, and drunk, with some scissors, and I have a bad haircut. I believe 2 out of 4 of those things are likely to happen. I will never tell you which; this is because I don't know the second one.

My feet. Holy gosh. They're cold. I believe those three sentences sum up like half of my life.

FALSE. My feet are usually warm because I wear socks almost all of the time. How you like them apples. Because like...the apples. Refer to, her breasts? You had to be there. If you don't get that joke, I promise it's funny, and I promise it's your fault that you don't get it. If it's not, you can punch me in the ovary. Score, bitch, I don't even have one. Evan: 1, Ovary: 0.

The sad bit is that that is not the first time I have made a scoreboard, however fake or small, between myself and an ovary.

This is how my thoughts work, I'm not even kidding. Not even joshing. Not even....um....chortling? Chortling is the wrong word but it shouldn't be. Any word that amuses me should mean whatever I want it to me, like flummox, or brickabrak, or smeet. Smeet is a word I came up with. It's the children's version of smut - not smut with children, that's wrong. The children's equivalent of smut is candy. Smeet! Gems!!

Let's pretend, for a moment, that the letters "JDF" mean that I am laughing like a crazy person. Ready?

JDF!!

Ahh. This is so random. So raandom. You know what this is? Brainwash. Brainwash from the Russians.

Damn commies.

Okay, so, basically, I'm super excited for this nerd project.

With my dad, I'm going to build Soldier 2.0, which is going to be awesome. We're going to talk about it in Maui, but so far, this is how it works:

The game is played so that all of the players join a game, and then run around shooting each other. Online. Plays fairly simply, works amazingly well but impossibly confusing.

First, a game is created by two means. One, a host creates it, in which they are the host. If they go to the next round, the host may change, looking for the person that has the best connection to all players. Second, it could be done on a matchmaking-esque style, which I'll figure out later. Either way, players join a game, which can be done with TCP or a very reliable version UDP.

Once all of the players get put into the game, all of the players sync clocks. This is done by averaging the halves of ping times for like 100 pings (or whatever's necessary). The game only stores the "delta-ticker" time as a variable. The computer's extremely-accurate-never-failing ticker clock is one, but then it stores the ∆ticker, so the time is always the same and consistent.

Hopefully now, all of the players have some connections to each other, and all have synced clocks. These clocks can be synced at any time during the game, but don't need to be, assuming they're correct.

Because all of their clocks are synced, data about the player (location, looking, firing) can all be sent long after it happens. Ideally, it would be sent instantly, but because it can't always be, it comes with a timestamp.

Now, if the time is currently 610, and Player A gets where Player B was at time 600, Player A will be able to, pretty accurately, guess where Player B is right now. This also allows you to log it and replay matches, speed them up, slow them down, look at them from different places. It even lets you skip ahead, unlike Halo 3's Theater.

This is, I believe, an incredibly efficient system. It's really done in three, almost completely separate parts. Part 1, getting all of the players to be able to talk to each other, probably with UDP. Part 2, sync times. Part 3, be able to log events and play them, and if you don't know where a player is all the time, be able to accurately guess where they are and play it back.

The meshing of those three parts is pretty minimal. It's nice, too. Part 2 calls Part 1's functions, and Part 3 takes the input of Part 1 and plays it with something already established in Part 2. But Part 3, when replaying stuff, is completely independent of the other two parts.

It's so cool. Wow.

Ranks!! I'll have online ranks!!

It'll be awesome; I'll get Gil and Brian and Rehaan and a ton of other kids to install the game and we'll play some gigantic match and it'll all work so well. You have no idea how cool that would be.

And I'm really excited to be able to play some random YouTube fans around the world. TheSilverAce? Maybe I can get BoredDanMan and Revenge690 to play with me, find a PC. Or, if he gets his laptop working, I can play with my British fan, TheHeadDoctor. Or verystrangestranger. I bet IceCough is cool. monotonehell. Or even fun3tika. Haha.

I wonder if I could beat them. The thing is, I'm really good at it because I've played it for countless hours, but I wonder how good you can actually get at the game. Soldier 1 was challenging, but I could beat it.

And the engines for this stuff are pretty expandable - I could certainly take this engine off of Soldier and put it onto Bullet, or because I'll be doing it in XNA, a 3D game.

How fucking awesome would it be to make my own FPS. Oh my god. That would be the greatest game ever. Low sys req's, anyone can play, and free, of course.

I want to call this engine....hmmm. Something like what already exists, like Havok. Like....I kinda like Fiesta.

But it's pretty cool. I'm damn excited. Soldier 2.0, online. That's gonna be apeshit.