Notes

The artist is Adam Ellis.

As for me, it's a great illustration for an everlasting moan “why do you always stare at your smartphone blah blah blah”. A reason is quite simple: people have their friends, books, podcasts, games, and YouTube in their smartphones. It's much more fun than a frowning man or a grim women with guru syndrome next to them, for example.

The same is true of children. Social networks are full of arguments about it, but a reason is still the same: if a teenager flips through pictures in his phone in front of you, you bore him and a problem obviously is you.

31 Marth 2018 meanwhile

I was trying to understand how to transliterate my surname properly yesterday. Ministry of Foreign Affairs says it should be written as “Kostianetskii” in English — with double “i” at the end. It's the quite rare combination: “skiing” is the only frequency word that I'm able to remember.

It caused my curiosity and I googled it. The possible reason I came across is funny: cursive writing! Double “i” looks well only on a computer screen but it suddenly turns into “u” when you try to write it on paper.

More details are here.

9 Marth 2018 English

Feedback is one of the coolest things in my work. It's not my first year of programming and I've written a lot of tools, mechanics and interfaces. However, ever complicated mechanism working as it should is… I don't know. It's like hearing “yes” on a graduation party, again and again :-)

It partially compensates another side of the coin. I mean a case when you are trying to understand one hundred levels of some application's abstraction for the hundredth time, again and again, through a lot of mistakes. Meanwhile, it's 2 a.m. already and coffee had replaced blood in your veins ages ago.

5 Marth 2018 work

Sometimes when you developing some complex mechanic you don't have enough time time for the adequate naming of variables. As a result, there is a lot of mysterious WhatTheHeck, ApplyMagic and bunch of other LivingFailures.

It's what you should avoid despite it looks funny. You'll rewrite code you've written month or two later and it will be hard to shame its author because it is you.

17 February 2018 1С films

I have translated Stardew Valley fan manga on a wave of enthusiasm at the end of July (SV is an enormously addictive farmer simulator which went out a couple of years ago).

It was an amusing experience. Firstly, an author of the manga is Chinese and her work was already translated from Chinese to English. I'm not sure what was the bigger problem — cultural differences or language skills, but several frames were a bit difficult to understand what's going on. Secondly, I've figured out that it's a real challenge to pick proper Russian words and not to get something like a quote from an official government's letter in the end.

So, a part of sense had lost during the process, I guess, although I tried to keep everything I could and even had a word with the author in order to solve the most problematic cases. It was quite funny — I don't know Chinese, she doesn't know Russian, so our a bit poor English was the only way to understand each other.

Something could have been translated better, I suppose, and several pictures definitely could have been changed more accurately. But you know what? Hell it out, perfection is a cruel mistress and I like the result yet. Yeah, there is no big deal or something like it — a drawing style is quite common, a plot has no significant differences with the game, but… I don't know. Perhaps, visual novels made a too sentimental son of a bitch out of me :-)

Thanks to Alice for helping me with image processing, Lem for helping me with the translation and Marika for the inspiration. And, sure, thanks to Quantus for the manga.

14 August 2017 English videogames

Just finished reading “Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality” — the epic fanfic based on the you-know-whose universe. An author is a tough specialist in the field of artificial intelligence and interesting on his own, but his book is what I insistently recommend to read.

First of all, it is the magnificent rethinking of the original saga. Many aspects seem not less fascinating, I may say; moreover, the plot itself is certainly excellent — I read two-thirds of the story without switching Gene Wilder off :-) Nevertheless, the author was skillful enough to make all points meet and finish a storyline in such a pretty way that I had almost nothing to complain about.

In any case, this book is a well way to meet with a lot of scientific and just interesting things which were mentioned along the way. The author is smart and his book is a smart one too.

6 November 2016 books