Author: Marshall Jiang

I’ve gotta really buckle down in my prelim studying and those sorts. Literally only got a month left before the big day.

So in lieu of other stuff, there’s an ongoing PDF about semigroups which might help some poor bloke down the line.

Link

What a wonderful game. I’m glad I moved from the Witcher to this little gem; it really does show that you don’t need super graphics with a deep storyline to have a compelling gaming experience. Rather, Stardew Valley is a retro-style, “farming” simulator, with just a little story component.

I think the main draw of it is how well it’s implemented. The flow of each day feels so natural, with just the right amount of routine and just the right amount of surprises. The first year feels like you are moving into a brand new home, trying to find friends and start a new life. I’m finally feeling settled into my little farming house.

The main drawback is how time consuming the game is haha.

I’m playing through the incredibly addictive game of Stardew Valley, while also reading through Steinbeck’s East of Eden. It seems a common theme between the two is the setting of valleys; in the case of Eden, it’s the Salinas valley in California.

If Hidden Valley Ranch taught me anything, it’s that valleys hide magical places. In Stardew, it’s a dwarves and magic. In Eden? I’m not sure as I’m only 5

Anyhow, spring break is over.

(This is the last post about the Witcher 3.)

I finally finished the entire pack of Wild Hunt (WH), Heart of Stone (HT) and Blood and Wine (BW) two days ago. The world is absolutely incredible, with so many intricacies tied together. I never managed to complete RPGs before: the old Star Wars were too clunky, Torchlight just felt grindy (and too easy after a few spells), Dragon Age never really took hold of me. So I was surprised how much I enjoyed jumping into such a large universe, and loving every moment of it. By around 10 hours in, I was reading a bunch of the in-game texts and notes to figure out what’s going on.

Still, there are some issues. The combat mechanics felt broken in a sense. I hated how there’s instant kill mechanics for some of the bosses, and the monsters (and people) just felt like paper even on the hardest difficulty. The storyline for WH is so long that I forget the end goals a lot, while there’s pacing issues with WH and BW. After all, if there’s murders with a time limit or a global crisis which only you can solve going on, one shouldn’t be really chilling out and drinking.

But besides these, the game never felt grindy. The income balance felt fine for most of the game, and doing the side quests is actually a pleasure. There’s a few simple quests in the beginning, but by the end, it seems that all the quests had some twists going on. There wasn’t simply fetch or kill quests… it was kill, but note that this monster kills for a (almost) valid reason quest.

I’m really tempted to do a play through over the summer with a different build and ending.

 

I know. I talked about B&W just 3 days ago. But it’s spectacularly engrossing. The story so far is captivating, with characters that have just enough mystic to them. Of course, there seem to be a few background stories I missed from not playing the previous games, but the writers were smart enough to either make them non-consequential or (better yet) imply the past.

Spring break is coming up. I hope to finish this obsession and focus on wine math during.

Oh my goodness.

The Witcher 3 is blowing my mind again. The Blood and Wine expansion is gorgeous. AND I can take super nice pictures using Nvidia Ansel. It’s amazing.

I’m taking the DG course this semester, and most of the homework involve programming the scheme discussed that week. For the first few assignments, my algorithm was to consider each element in a for loop. It made for some very readable code, but was incredibly slow. Essentially, for each time step, I looped through each element individually and applied the appropriate scheme. It broke a lot of rules for fast computing, especially the one about not using too many for loops if possible.

This worked fine for a conservative equation, as the CFL number is reasonable. When we moved to a diffusive equation, the number of time steps had to be squared. Now the run-time was unacceptable. What I did was first try to optimize what I had. I think my total speedup was roughly 20

Finally, I bit the bullet and re-designed the whole code. I relied on matrix multiplication to construct the right hand side (which was actually taking the most time, as it changes each time). The program is far less readable, but the speedup was 100 times.

Moral? Chase after the 80

It’s been a few years since I read the Hitcherhiker’s guide series, and I still remember fondly ridiculousness of the novel; science fiction and humor can mix. The Columbus Day book though… is a bit awkward with its jokes.

The premise is simple: aliens invade Earth, and overwhelming technology pound all the nations down. Another alien race arrives to defend the invaders, but apparently they’re the wrong side to fight for. It’s a really intriguing plot line to start with, that doesn’t need humor in the first place, but the way the author went with it is disappointing.

The author introduced a Marvin-esque AI (except it’s more chippy) a quarter of the way through the book, and used that as an ex machina for everything the humans do. Instead of a feel-good story about human ingenuity, we get a story about an ancient AI telling them how to do everything. Such a good plot line squandered I feel.

The language is beyond colloquial, with little prose worth mentioning. There’s also an incredibly amount of typos throughout the book (for something that highly rated on Amazon…?). Overall, a bit disappointed at how the rating system on Amazon worked on.

After finishing VVVVVV, I downloaded Mini Metro from the Humble Bundle. It’s really a fun game to play, with very nice aesthetics and soundtrack. If you want a nerd’s opinion, there’s even some graph theory I reckon that one needs to fully optimize the game.

 

For all the advancements in medical science, the lower back still seems to tread in the Dark Ages. I sprained my lower back three weeks ago, and all the resources online seems to indicate to be extremely careful as there’s no surefire way to treat the pain. That’s scary.

I’ve never really considered how aging will affect my physical health till now. From a tweaked shoulder, to now some back pain, I really need to watch out when I exercise.