Another year, 2015, has gone by!
I have therefore created my LONG, LONG list of new years resolutions:
And much like last year, I’m hoping to accomplish most if not all this list.
Yes, Cluster Headaches.
This morning my alarm goes off at 6:09am of which I could feel the approaching of the common pain in the left hemisphere. I naturally hit the alarm, downstairs, grabbed some water and drank some, ran back upstairs and passed back out, mumbling that I needed to sleep a bit more.
I fiercely woke again at 8:20am with a roaring scream, the pain storming the entire left side of my cranium. I stumbled downstairs and made it into the bathroom, the light piercing my left eyelid and causing me to tilt to port. I threw the hot water on in the shower, stripped down to nothing, and proceeded to sit in the tub while the water beat my hair over my face. I sit for what I felt was an hour in the rushing water, nothing disorientation and water. I managed to gain a moment of reprieve, standing out of the shower enough to dry off and get a new set of clothing on before grabbing some water and bumbling back upstairs.
Lying in bed again, my stomach started to feel. It was a wierd feel, too, and the water I had consumed ended up making it into a bucket beside my bed. Throughout all the pain, stumbling, moving, vomiting, I had passed back out.
WebMD gives it the following helpfulness:
The term “cluster headache” refers to a type of headache that recurs over a period of time. People who have cluster headaches experience an episode one to three times per day during a period of time (the cluster period), which may last from two weeks to three months. People who suffer from cluster headaches get them at the same time each year, such as the spring or fall.
A cluster headache typically awakens a person from sleep one to two hours after going to bed. These nocturnal attacks can be more severe than the daytime attacks. Attacks appear to be linked to the circadian rhythm (or “biological” clock). Cluster headaches can be more intense than a migraine attack but fortunately do not last as long as a migraine headache.
The headaches may disappear completely (go into “remission”) for months or years, only to recur without any warning.
So, that’s it. My “remission” period is gone and my term has started again. I used to track this on a spreadsheet to track the frequency and guesstimate when the next episode was going to be. I had since lost that, which was unfortunate when I went to look for it and found a MOUNTAIN of old google documents that I never remembered.
I had originally blamed my old cigarette smoking habit on the cause of this, but after my 12 April “Stop” date I haven’t consumed any nicotine and have significantly cut down my caffeine intake to the point of “no cream, no sugar, black coffee”.
I even found my injections of Sumavel Dosepro, which should have been discarded on 16 August 2015 after being filled a year before when these Cluster Headaches last came to light. I have 2 full injections of them, and I bought them at $50 each (that’s without copays cause insurance doesn’t cover), and I finally needed them and…..ugh….
Cluster fk’n headaches.
This has been quite an interesting series of Youtube videos. Allow me to explain:
It started off with a Fark article lovingly entitled Guy creates an artificial intelligence that learns how to play and beat a Super Mario Bros. level, of which the guy was the one and only Sethbling. Sethbling has been an amazing staple in the Minecraft community, and previously unknown to me is also a Super Mario Brothers speed runner.
He explains MarI/O (Mar + I/O, for those keeping up), in which he uses an emulator, some LUA, and a method of artificial intelligence to play and finish the first level of Super Mario Brothers.
The actual article from the University of Texas and the subsequently linked Wikipedia Pages (Neuroevolution, Evolutionary Algorithm, and Artificial Neural Network) are excellent readings.
This led me to the Credits Warp method. For speed runners, their goal is to finish the game as soon as possible, and with the Credits Warp this method is now the fastest.
The whole “Credits Warp” got me thinking about how this was actually done, so I found an amazing explanatory video on this specifically.
Rewriting a SNES using the console controller sounded amazing, and led to the next video on the list from tasvideos (the explanation) and the tasvideo where arbitrary code was executed for an amazing result (Starts at 32:00):
So, now i’m chilling with an amazing TAS execution of Super Mario World being fully run, and it’s pretty cool to see how people could just let computers do their thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9Y2voAvVz4
He flew Evan Young out to his show to give his Graduation Speech.
I love it.
Killing time on beautiful monday night before my tuesday morning work and I realize that my train of “links” tonight span 15+ years and need mentioning.
I was killing 10 minutes in World of Warcraft when I came across a quest to “Subdue 6 Clefthoofs”, but there was a counter from 1 to 5. Typical bug that has existed for 6+ months in an MMORPG. I ended up looking this thing up, and while “Subduing” you get to use a gun called the Blixthraz’s Frightening Grudgesolver, or BFG for short. Long story short, this gun that subdues actually nukifies these Rhino-type mobs, and then the night begins.
A comment on Wowhead links me to DoomWiki’s BFG9000 Page, which takes me back many, many years. I ended up eating dinner while spending 40 minutes watching a Doom 2 Speedrun:
So, I ended up attempting to play Doom 2 from my computer, only to be disappointed in the 32/64 bit issues with the old DOS/4G program. I fired up Doom95 only to get a stupid DirectX error. Thanks to overclock.net it was as simple as copying dplayx.dll to dplay.dll in my C:\Windows\SysWOW64 and i’m Doomin’ away!
After getting a bit bored of actually playing it and reminiscing too little, too late, I found SLIGE and Doom][ Control and kept thinking to myself “Man, alot of these websites look to be going the way of the Dodo”.
I’m just glad I could walk down memory lane, finding expected dead links and surprising live ones.