One of the things I like the least about running classes is the situation in which students have to beg for extensions, accommodations, special circumstances, things like that.

Or grubbing for their grades. FFS I hate that the most. "Will this have *partial credit*??" "Do I have to *write comments* on this??" Or the very worst of all, "can I do this", "do you want me to..."

Look. We're here to learn how to write software. I want you to learn to own the process of writing software and learn to write what you mean.

And it's OK if you do it later. It's OK, I swear it's OK and I'm not offended in the slightest that you didn't finish this artificial weird programming exercise that I made up to give you a weight to lift, yet. Do it later. Whenever you do it, you'll get exactly the same benefit out of doing it.

I don't ever want to give anybody a grade again. I don't ever want to make up a thing and inflict it on 300 people who are all at wildly different points in their programming journey again. I hate basically all of this, except for the moment when students understand something and go "oooooohhhhhh."

It'll all be over soon.

I applied for a faculty job?

Going to put in for a few more, and probably some postdocs too!

I really want an office though. Gimme an office where I can put a bunch of books on the shelves.

Also, shooting to publish some stuff, at least at a workshop -- collaborating with folks other than my advisors at IU.

Happy new year <3

I've been talking about this a bunch on Tumblr and Twitter, but I guess not here!

I decided, on my birthday, which was September 1, to stream 100 different fighting games before the end of summer. So I did. I finished the project last night.

Please see the "hundred game kumite" tag on my tumblr for all the vods.

What did I learn?

Fighting games are really fun. Still. It’s a joy to fight other people, it’s a joy to stream and have friends come through.

Most of the people who came through, to be totally honest, were my IRL friends, and that was a great emotional boost. I’ve been lonely since quarantine started and I wish I could see them. There were some local FGC people who supported the endeavor too, either by encouraging me or showing up in the stream. Also a few random Twitch folks came through just due to the game I was streaming at the time.

Remarkably few Tumblr folks. Step it up, Tumblr folks :-O

Lindsey was really supportive of the project ♥ ♥. She tried being a co-commentator one evening, but she decided to just make that a one-time thing.

Surprises finding online matches – some games more active than you'd think, others less so

Some games that I would have thought would have active online scenes, I couldn’t find any matches! The new Samurai Shodown game, for example – when I tried at least, no matches! Dead Or Alive 6 seemed dead; no good. Fighting EX Layer was empty when I tried it. Several more games too.

Games that I was happily surprised to get online matches: Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown, Tekken 6, Vampire Savior, Mortal Kombat 2 and UMK3 (all on PS3!) – and Dead Or Alive 5 LR on PS4, it was still going down! Despite its successor not having any matches going. And the Steam version of Melty.

Also the "online arcade" mode in Super Turbo (in the SF Anniversary Collection) was quite active, and that was a bunch of fun.

Where did I mess up?

I had a few snafus getting some games going, either in general (input issues with Steam games, one time when I forgot my laptop was running Folding@Home), or particularly with my two-monitor stream setup. I could have done a better job making sure the games for the night were configured correctly before starting the stream.

Also, I probably did too many versions of Street Fighter II.

I FORGOT GAROU: MARK OF THE WOLVES, WHAT THE HECK. Somehow I never wrote it down in the planning spreadsheet?? That would have been way better than, say, yet another version of SFII, or Gang Beasts, which is a fine game, but turns out not to have any single-player content.

What do we want to do in the future as a result of this?

Keep playing fighting games.

This series really renewed my love for KOF, Virtua Fighter, Darkstalkers and Killer Instinct; I want to git gud at a KOF game, VF5:FS, Vampire Savior, and KI 2013. Also I would really love to understand Fighting Vipers more. That game is super charming.

Aaaahhhhh maaaaan. And Guilty Gear Xrd Rev2. Maybe I’ll dig into GG Strive.

There are so many good fighting games in the world.

Thanks for reading ♥.

Here are all the games I streamed, by series...

( ...expand... )

The packages that Fig Newtons and their more socially-conscious counterparts, Fig Newmans, come in, are way too small. As a family of three newton enthusiasts, we blow through a package really fast, like a day or two.

UNEXPLORED BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY: what if they came in packages of like 3x as many newtons?

Lindsey suggests they should be called "Big Newtons". I think it's a winner but we'll have to run it by some focus groups.

"I'm a kangarooooo!" -- Sylvia, avoiding pajamas and bedtime
"OK, hop into Dada Kangaroo's pouch!! ... wait, dada kangaroos do not have pouches, usually?? ..."

We will sell external pouches for kangaroo fathers.

They will visibly not look like fuzzy kangaroo-brown fur. They will look EXTREMELY MASCULINE, maybe gray or black, maybe ~~tactical clips~~ and mesh webbing. Kinda like the Ergo Baby we used.

That way, kangaroo dads can (a) be better fathers and (b) get all the social credit associated with conspicuously carrying a child around, as a dad.

How much money do kangaroos have, and how do they give it to us?

At a fighting game tournament events, you're sitting around with a bunch of game setups and people who love playing fighting games. So naturally, even when a tournament match is not happening, people run short sets against each other, to warm up, for practice, and for the love of the game.

The typical scenario is that you're standing around watching people play, since there are not enough setups for everyone to play simultaneously. Invariably (I'm pretty sure this is mandated by federal law) somebody comes up and stage whispers "yo, is this tournament??". Because a tournament match looks exactly like a casual match. If it is a tournament match, they must then inquire about the score.

UNTAPPED BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY. We offer big LED signs that will sit above the monitors for the gaming setups. And they will display Whether This Is Tournament. They will display The Score.

The baseline model will be operated by a big satisfying switch (to toggle whether This Is Tournament) and chonky mechanical buttons to change the score.

The more advanced version will intercept the video signal of the game (you pass the HDMI output of the gaming console through it) and do computer vision to automatically determine the score.

The only problem I foresee here is whether there's enough space in the marina for our extra yachts.

So I'm having conversations with UC Santa Cruz professors about helping out teaching over there.

They're going to run a masters program specifically on NLP, and I went to campus with Lindsey today to give a talk!

In a sense, it was kind of a job talk, although not like... formally a job talk. But I got introduced by the professor I've been chatting with as "he's interested in starting to teach classes"...

I feel like the talk went really well! I managed to cram both talking about my doctoral work and recent industry stuff into an hour. Couldn't go into too much detail about the industry stuff, but I covered some of the difficulties and linguistic background on what we're doing and why it's interesting and hard.

People seemed to like the talk! Got a bunch of good questions. Lindsey asked questions to get me to explain terms for the non-NLP-specialist people in the room, because a few of her PL/systems colleagues came out!

UCSC has really friendly vibes. Everybody seemed warm and welcoming; it felt good to be there. I really loved talking with people about their research.

Really nice experience <3 We'll see what we can do to keep making this be a thing...

- My bike ride to work, by my normal route, can be exactly 6.66 miles. I HIT IT JUST RIGHT BOTH WAYS TODAY \m/ \m/

- LOTS OF CROWS, YELLING LOUDLY. (mostly on my way back, close to Murphy Park -- all up on the power lines, everywhere. cawwwww!!)

- Sylvia has a dinosaur costume now and she loves it and it's adorable and baggy <3 <3

Last weekend, I took a little vacation to go to Las Vegas for EVO, the world's biggest and premier-est fighting games tournament! It happens there every year, and this is the second time I've been. It's *wonderful*.

For people who care about fighting games, this is (arguably) the place to be. For this community, it is like the Super Bowl, like the NYC Marathon, and like Christmas morning all at once. Champions will be crowned, you get to compete and see how well your training has paid off, and lots of Important Game Announcements happen! There were about 9000 competitors coming to EVO in total, and about 1900 of them were there for Tekken.

I signed up to compete for two different games, Tekken 7 (which I practice pretty seriously) and Samurai Shodown (which I haven't, but then it just came out). Both tournaments were set to start on Friday, so my plan was to get there on Thursday afternoon to get settled in before the battles.

Took Thursday off, got to the airport just fine, ran into some NorCal Tekken folks, including Andy, who's this warm, encouraging fatherly figure for Bay Area Tekken-ists. And hanging out with Andy was your favorite famous professional Tekken player from Thailand, Book! Niiice!

Unfortunately, my plane on Thursday got cancelled.

Fortunately, I got on the first plane out on Friday morning! More than enough time to get to Vegas, get settled in, take a little nap, and warm up before my matches!

---

The event happens in the convention center at Mandalay Bay. It's *enormous*.

My dad was visiting toooo! He appreciates the hobby. I think he understands it in terms of competitive poker, which is his game. He hung out with me in the convention center, took in the scene, learned that cosplay is a thing, thought about getting some T-shirts, but then thought better of it.

Critically, he was there to watch my first match, in which I trounced a relatively new Tekken player. (he was a cool, friendly guy; asked for tips after the match) ... the match that makes you look like an unstoppable badass is the one you want your father to see.

I ended up going 4-1 on Friday, squeaking it out and escaping my first-round pool by defeating a dude who used to play with my buddy Paul, back in the DC area, years ago. (storylines last *years* and Tekken players are often grown adults). I was elated! I've never made it out of my pool at a big tournament before.

What happened next was probably the most interesting bit, competitively.

Once the brackets settled out, it became clear that I would play a specific person on Saturday, and I stalked him out online. I found out what character he was going to use: Hwoarang, a Korean character who fights with tae kwon do. Complicated character, lots of little things you have to keep track of. Can be a hassle to fight against.

So what I did, I found people I knew who play that character, and asked for tips! I found Rob From The Bay Area and Vasil from Seattle and asked for pointers. Vasil sat down with me for like a half hour to work on the matchup, and he gave me really concrete tips.

And they worked! I beat that dude! The tips probably pushed me over; it was close. But in the end, I picked my favorite stage, and I got him.

My last match, I lost, but it was super close. Came down to like one guess situation, and my opponent clutched it out. So I got eliminated from the tournament at 5-2, and I was super happy with that. Tied for 257th place, out of like 1900 competitors.

---

Super good time overall. Also the finals on Sunday were extremely hype, wonderful things for games got announced, there's a new Guilty Gear game coming next year (woooo!), and the whole thing was a party. Yay for devoting a weekend to the thing we love!

Also super lovely to get to hang out with my dad and share the thing with him! <3

If you want more posts (including pictures!), see the relevant posts on my other blarg: https://alexr-fightgames.tumblr.com/tagged/evo-2019

Whatever else is going on with my employer, somehow or another, I'm now close enough with one of my personal heroes where he just sits down to chat while I'm having breakfast?

I've occasionally referred to P. Norvig as my patron saint, and uhh... yesterday he just popped up at breakfast and we had a chat about consciousness and simulating brains and determinism. Also where programming is maybe going. Also he told me about the provenance of some of his aloha shirts -- his wife makes many of them! Sometimes out of bed sheets!

So that's pretty cool.