What you doing at home during this pandemic?

[Tim Cooke]

Yes thank goodness. Although I do still hear on the local news regularly enough "a man is in hospital following an attack in [north|west] Belfast by masked men in what is being described as a paramilitary style attack". Which is daytime radio code for getting shot in the kneecaps.

A side effect of all this is that our local hospitals are leaders in the treatment of orthopaedic trauma.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Just as, when I was young, our local hospital became a centre of excellence in high‑speed road accidents when it had a junction on the first long motorway in Britain built about a ¼‑mile away.

[Stephan van Hulst]

Tom Joe wrote:Side note - I have always seen nerdy people & couples playing games that require a lot of thinking, even after their day job of "thinking" (ex. programming). I wonder how they get the energy and will to do even more thinking. I guess I'll never know because I am not really nerdy or sharp.

I've heard this from some of my close friends as well. They don't understand how I can program on hobby projects (or events like Advent of Code) at the end of my workday. I tell them I'm just a nerd like that.

The truth is that it's relaxing for me to work on my own projects, or play games that require some thought, because it's an outlet for me to make my own choices. With my day job, I have to write software that conforms to the wishes of other people, which is rarely what you want the software to be like.

It depends on the complexity of the game as well of course. Games that require you to make many choices with far-reaching consequences I usually reserve for the weekend. During the week I rather play either casual games or games that I'm very familiar with.

That's not to say I don't have non-nerdy hobbies. I enjoy bar tending and making cocktails, and I help out in bars that I frequent. Obviously that's not really an option now, with the pandemic.

[Tim Holloway]

Paul Clapham wrote:
It was only later that I realized, it used to be that if you had masked men in your bank branch then you were in trouble. Now it's the opposite.

That was a recent cartoon. Teller sees masked man in lobby, exclaims, "thank goodness, they're only bank robbers!"

Actually, not that recent anymore. We're settling in for the long haul...

[salvin francis]

I made this game while passing time at home :
http://salvin.in/BlockSquares

There are still a few rough edges and bugs, but it's stable so far !!

Update: This works only in selected environments. So far, I've tested chrome on a Mac and Chrome/Firefox on a windows laptop. It also works in Chrome on my Android phone.

I've also deployed a stripped down version without much animations or particle effects that seems to work on Safari:
http://salvin.in/BlockSquaresGLES2

[Knute Snortum]

Hmm... I couldn't get it to work on Chrome in Ubuntu.  The game screen is frozen -- no movements or controls.

[Tim Cooke]

That's fun Salvin. Quite difficult, but fun.

[Tim Moores]

On OS X, it stopped with error messages on both Firefox and Safari, but it worked in Chrome. Challenging, but I don't have a lot of time to spare just today :-)

[salvin francis]

Knute Snortum wrote:Hmm... I couldn't get it to work on Chrome in Ubuntu.  The game screen is frozen -- no movements or controls.

Weird. Probably there could be some issues with compatibility with WASM. However, I'm targeting Android as my platform. This is just an HTML export.

Tim Moores wrote:On OS X, it stopped with error messages on both Firefox and Safari, but it worked in Chrome. Challenging, but I don't have a lot of time to spare just today :-)

Are you stuck at a level particularly ? Let me know.

Tim Cooke wrote:That's fun Salvin. Quite difficult, but fun.

Thank you. Any suggestion to lower the difficulty ? I can tweak some of the level settings.

The game can be difficult since it does not follow the usual convention of making a "row" of blocks. This could be counter-intuitive, but it's my unique twist to the thousands of games out there with a similar concept.
I've tried to make it easy to understand but difficult to master.

[Eran Morad]

Watching the news and sometimes watching the show - Who is America.

[Randy Tong]

I started to go to office yesterday.Hope everything goes well.

[Tim Holloway]

Unwittingly, I think the USA is about to give another test to Supply-Side Economics.

By forcing certain industries to re-open, the Powers That Be (not just the ones in government) hope to push things back to "normal". Since the USA stands virtually alone in having health insurance tightly tied to employment and since unemployment compensation can be terminated if work is available, people are having to sit down and do the math as to whether the potential ruination of their health and/or that of their loved ones is worth more than the ruination of their finances. And it's actually not guaranteed that finances will win.

On the consumer side, what I'm suspecting is that a lot of people have been flooding out to newly-reopened businesses just to get out of the house, but I would be unsurprised to discover that once some of the pressure had been let off that they retreat back home again and fail to return with a sustainable frequency, leaving many local businesses in worse financial shape than if they'd stayed closed.

Is it not fun to be part of a cosmic science experiment?

[Liutauras Vilda]

Randy Tong wrote:I started to go to office yesterday.Hope everything goes well.

I just got an email, that our plan to go back to office is 1st of September. That came as a slight suprise. So still 3.5 months to go. Seems quite a lot.