Well.
The ranch sale was supposed to be yesterday. (supposed to. That’s a hint) Lots of ‘oh wow this is the end’ feelings to process last weekend.
And then the title company, of all people, went out of their collective minds and it’s been a solid week of mind melting craziness, except that we stepped out of the game way early and handed it all over to the lawyer. Thank goodness for probate and the way it forces you to get a nice lawyer relationship going. And this is the guy who handled our wills, too. We like him. He’s great. He has a nice dog. And whatever he’s going to charge us for this last week is worth it.
The new closing date is next Thursday. We might go out to the ranch this weekend just because.
And I’m not really believing this “Thursday” date till it’s done.
So that leaves the class project. This is the last major project. I don’t really know the programming language. I certainly don’t understand the project. We have to write our own version of this incredibly inane game. I had to look it up on Wikipedia just to understand what was going on – which is nothing. But I couldn’t quite believe that it was this much ‘nothing’ going on, especially as the class assignment characterized this as a ‘popular’ and ‘super engaging’ game. But sure enough, Wikipedia explained the nothingness of it, and confirmed that it was popular and considered to be engaging.
I swear, there are times when I feel like a cultural anthropologist, trying to understand this bizarrely inexplicable culture.
There are lots of variations on this game. We are encouraged to make up our own variation. The basic mechanic is: you click on a thing. This gives you points. When you accrue enough points, you can turn points in for things that will give you points. The things will then require more points, so you have to continue getting points so you can turn them in for increasingly expensive things that will get you more points.
That’s it.
I still don’t quite believe that this could ever be ‘engaging’, but wikipedia has convinced me on the ‘popular’ count. But it can’t have been popular by being engaging. There must just be a lot of closet nihilists out there.
So this is the project I have to do this weekend. Wrap my head around the concept. And then program it.
I’m playing with the idea of clicking on a book to fill your bookshelf, and then getting to buy library cards or something to let you get more books. Because as endless loops go, this is one I understand.
I’m also considering a worm ouroboros thing, where you click on a section of a snake (that progresses, perhaps, but never ends) and there’s some countdown to ragnorok and you have to keep getting hammers and eventually maybe get to turn them into mjolnir. But you see, that would have an ending and have a point, so I guess that’s out.
And I’ve been toying with making something that seems just about as pointless as I can make it. Like … I don’t know. What could possibly be more pointless than clicking on a cookie? One classmate shared his nearly completed project. You click on a gold coin and can use the points to get diggers, miners, and excavators. So .. theme. But still pretty dang pointless. So .. you click on a dirty dish or a mound of laundry and there’s a counter that says “clean house” that is always set 25 points higher than where you currently are? You click on a cat and the clicker reads “cats herded”?
Click on one of the goth kids from Southpark and there’s a counter that says “Things that are pointless” and you can add the other goth kids as add-ons and the ‘things that are pointless’ counter goes higher the more goth kids you get in the club? (this kind of amuses me. maybe I will do this. ha!)
I have not started this project at all.
So. This weekend was supposed to mark the end of the ranch project and see the end of the class project. Neither is looking really likely right now.
And Eleanor is sick.
sigh