On Wednesday, May 1, 2019, Flayrah contributor 2cross2affliction wrote in the article 'Sonic the Hedgehog' ... the movie ... the trailer:

Fun fact: no movie directly adapted from a video game has ever scored as "fresh" on the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes. [...] But, a new challenger approaches! [...] The question of whether this movie is going to be any good, perhaps unfairly, has mostly already been answered by the Internet. The answer so far has been no. No. Just no. Okay, maybe Jim Carrey? But otherwise, why? Why the human teeth? Why ten times?

Whoops. Turns out Sonic the Hedgehog somehow, against the odds, is rated Fresh by Rotten Tomatoes, with a score of 64% positive reviews from 175 professional opinions, as of this writing.

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After the bumper here, the review will get into spoiler territory. I will say that if you are a Sonic fan this movie will give you a sense of pride as it is far better than it should have had any right in being. Taking the franchise’s lore and resetting it to tell its own story, but retaining the strong characterization and quip heavy personalities of Sonic and Robotnik that makes their rivalry such a strong one. It also keeps the first entry simple with the hedgehog and doctor being the only two characters from the universe being in the film. This makes the story stronger since it can develop those two far more and not have to worry about any other kind of side character fan service for now.

Hey, at least now Sonic fans can brag to Mario ones that Mario may still be the king of games, but Sonic blew the plumber’s cinematic pieces out of the water. Not that that was a high bar I suppose. Then again, having better quality games than Sonic these days isn’t one either (the author quips while using a quote from Sonic Forces for his review’s headline).

In the video game Sonic the Hedgehog, timing is everything. While at the heart of the game is a fast paced platformer, its foundation has always been learning the layout of a level and timing your actions appropriately. In a twist, the timing of this film and its release had quite a bit of impact on my view of it.

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Animal Crackers (trailer) is a 94-minute computer-animated children's movie. The brainchild of Scott Sava, it caught the early attention of furry fandom at least as far back as 2015. Concept animation showed a guy haphazardly munching on animal-shaped cookies that turned him into the animals. As time went on, Sava brought in financial backers, a co-director (Tony Bancroft, who'd worked on several Disney movies), and a co-writer (Dean Lorey). The finished product premiered at the Annecy Film Festival in 2017... and then vanished.

It turns out that Sava had made the mistake of not securing a distributor ahead of time. With very little bargaining power, it eventually got shown in China in 2018, and some other countries in 2019.

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As governments restrict gatherings of people, furry conventions are being postponed or canceled. Here's a quick run down of events in April, May, and June and their status as of May 5 17:28 EDT (UTC-4) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic - updates to come.

A new section has been added for past events impacted for historical purposes.

Links go to statements if available, or to their Twitter feed or site. See also: Furry Fandom and the Internet forced back to roots by viral outbreak

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Барабанщик METALLICA Lars Ulrich считает, что его родная страна отлично справляется с мировой пандемией COVID-19.

Дания недавно начала медленно снимать ограничения для сдерживания распространения нового коронавируса. Вновь открылись школы для детей до 11 лет, а также малые предприятия, такие как парикмахерские и тату-салоны. Этот шаг был предпринят спустя чуть более месяца после того, как в Копенгагене были закрыты детские сады, начальные и средние школы, а также кафе, рестораны, бары, тренажёрные залы и парикмахерские. Кроме того, Дания расширила тестирование на коронавирус, включив в него людей со слабыми симптомами. Ранее тестировались только те, у кого симптомы были умеренными или тяжёлыми. Другие ограничения остаются в силе по крайней мере до 10 мая. Границы закрыты, а собрания ограничены 10 людьми.

Ulrich, родившийся в Дании и живший там до 16 лет, а затем переехавший в Лос-Анджелес, обсуждал пандемию коронавируса 28 апреля во разговора с Marc'ом Benioff'ом:

«Дания была одним из первых государств в мире, которое действительно пошло на полное закрытие страны, и там зарегистрировали самые низкие показатели заболеваемости во всей Западной Европе. Всего полторы недели назад они начали открывать детские сады и школы. И пока всё идёт хорошо. Но пока ещё рано говорить о полном успехе.

Я думаю, что мы все должны понимать, где бы мы ни были, по мере того, как мир снова открывается, это не произойдёт за один-два дня, как он был закрыт. Так что это будет очень постепенно. Как мы видим, даже в США есть места, которые начинают открываться, — есть они и в Европе, в Азии и так далее. У каждой страны будет свой набор средств и свои способы возвращения к новой жизни. Но Дания, за которой я ежедневно слежу, ведь я читаю датские газеты и общаюсь с моими друзьями в Дании, уже начала этот процесс. И я думаю, что они показывают весьма впечатляющий старт. Цифры, статистика и всё то, что не претерпело радикальных изменений, на самом деле, показатели продолжают снижаться. Как вы знаете, тут совсем не так, как было в некоторых азиатских странах, когда было дано небольшое послабление, и цифры вновь поползли вверх. Но в Дании пока это выглядит многообещающе.

Когда я думаю о Дании, я думаю только о слове "мы". В Дании всё всегда "мы" и "нас", и куда меньше про "я" и "меня". И поэтому, когда я думаю о том, что Дания пережила этот кризис, я очень горжусь тем, что называю себя датчанином. И я думаю, что прогресс, который там достигается, безусловно, воодушевляет и вдохновляет всех нас».

Когда ведущий спросил у Lars'a, не захочет ли он вернуться в Данию, если коронавирусный кризис в США усугубится, тот ответил, что у него всё ещё есть датский паспорт, и пошутил, что он спит, положив его под подушку:

«Мой датский паспорт находится рядом, если он вдруг понадобится!» #Metallica #ModernRock #Modern_Rock #AvantgardeRock #Avantgarde_Rock #HeavyMetal #Heavy_Metal #SymphonicMetal #Symphonic_Metal #ThrashMetal #Thrash_Metal

Бывший гитарист MACHINE HEAD и нынешний участник VIO-LENCE Phil Demmel в недавней беседе ответил на вопрос о том, как пандемия повлияет на туровую индустрию:

«Да, думаю, будет жёстко. С VIO-LENCE у нас было масса классных предложений на этот год, и у меня были ещё кое-какие наметки — очень интересные варианты, так что это всё очень разочаровывает, правда. Если послушать нашего вокалиста, то он верит, что всё быстро вернётся на круги своя, так что я бы заручился его оптимизмом и тоже думаю, что всё вернется к тому, что было, однако я остаюсь и реалистом в плане того, что они вряд ли быстро разрешат потным телам карабкаться друг на друга — возможно, это будет последним, что они разрешат, так что да — меня это беспокоит.

У меня с женой есть бар, так что наше дело уже шесть недель как прикрыто, и вот это вызывает беспокойство. Мы надеемся на лучшее, пытаемся не зацикливаться на этом и не сильно беспокоиться, чтобы не вгонять себя в стрессовое состояние.

Мы в безопасности, мы были подготовлены к ситуации, так что я просто надеюсь, что большинство людей останется здоровым, и мы как можно быстрее вернёмся к нормальной жизни». #Vio-lence #ThrashMetal #Thrash_Metal

На фоне эпидемии мошенники перестроили свои привычные схемы, и теперь спекулируют на страхах россиян, связанных с коронавирусом. Собрали в одном материале самые распространенные ходы, с помощью которых преступники выуживают из людей деньги или данные их банковских счетов.

Судьба и раньше не часто дарила возможность общения с интересным, думающим собеседником, а уж во времена вирусной изоляции эта роскошь стала ещё более редкой и изысканной. Мне повезло. Актуальные вопросы современности – какой будет жизнь после вируса, и какие уроки он нам даёт, какое животное самое опасное, и при чём тут «анропологическая катастрофа», к чему нам стремиться – обсуждаем с доктором медицинских наук, сексологом и психотерапевтом, писателем и общественным деятелем Львом Щегловым.

Почему Беларусь не Швеция? Почему Лукашенко отрицает очевидное и усугубляет последствия распространения эпидемии для Беларуси?..

Real heroes deserve their own comics/Los héroes reales merecen sus propios comics

The post Heroes always come home in David Rubín’s free COVID-19 SUPERMAN story (version en español incluída) appeared first on The Beat.

Taking place tomorrow 1:00PM PT/4:00PM ET

The post WB announces a watch party for JL DARK: APOKOLIPS WAR, the endgame of the DC Animated Movie Universe appeared first on The Beat.

Media in quarantine, live audiences abandoned, presenters self-isolate.

Forty-one years ago this summer I was a young investigator working in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC for the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, a big federal investigation chaired by Dartmouth Professor John Kemeny, who is best known as the father of the BASIC programming language. I learned a lot that summer and fall not only about nuclear accidents but about how governments and industries respond to crises. Some of those lessons apply to the current COVID-19 pandemic, which is also being poorly managed. This may surprise you (that 41-year-old lessons can still apply) but governments, especially, change at a glacial pace. The two federal agencies with which I mainly dealt were the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Nuclear […]






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My last column was about crisis management lessons I learned back in 1979 while investigating the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island (TMI). Let’s just say that FEMA wasn’t ready for a nuclear meltdown. Today we turn to the other federal agency I investigated at that same time — the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). While FEMA was simply unprepared and incompetent, the NRC was unprepared and lied about it. Like FEMA, the NRC had recently undergone a rebranding from its previous identity as the Atomic Energy Commission — a schizoid agency that had been charged with both regulating nuclear power and promoting it. It’s difficult to be the major booster of technology while at the same […]






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My first job out of college was teaching biology, chemistry, physics, and vocational agriculture at Triway High School in rural Wooster, Ohio. I lasted for six weeks. The school environment was such a downer, from the smoke-filled teachers’ lounge to my young co-workers who were teaching mainly, it seemed to me, to avoid service in Vietnam. So when a reporting job became available, I jumped on it, leaving Ohio forever. Years later I returned to teaching, this time at Stanford University, where I worked for six years. Now, 37 years after Stanford, I’m teaching my kids at home thanks to COVID-19. You may be teaching your kids, too. This column is my attempt to make your job easier. It’s not that I’m God’s gift to […]






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IBM suma esfuerzos con Movimiento STEM, una asociación civil sin fines de lucro que busca involucrar a diferentes actores sociales para impulsar la educación en México en Ciencia, Tecnología, Ingeniería y Matemáticas, con enfoque de género.

Seguridad, aplicaciones estratégicas y analítica móvil son clave para que las organizaciones inteligentes mejoren sus resultados

Empresas y organizaciones como bancos, agencias de viajes, restaurantes, proveedores de salud y gobiernos municipales en toda América Latina están adoptando nuevas tecnologías de nube, movilidad y analítica que llevan a una mayor eficiencia, menores costos y un mejor servicio a sus clientes y ciudadanos.

IBM anunció que fue nombrada líder en el informe 2013 IDC MarketScape, que analiza a los proveedores de consultoría en movilidad empresarial a nivel mundial. El informe cita al recientemente anunciado Customer Experience Lab y la iniciativa Mobile First de IBM como ejemplos de su liderazgo en Consultoría en Movilidad Empresarial.

IBM today announced the opening of a new data centre facility in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, Queensland. The data centre will augment IBM’s existing recovery centre located nearby, to provide exceptional and unrivalled risk mitigation for client information and data.

North Queensland capital Townsville is among the first cities globally to use a new United Nations&rsquo; Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) disaster resilience scorecard developed jointly by global fully integrated infrastructure firm AECOM and IBM.</p>

IBM today announced the signing of a new five-year infrastructure services agreement with The Westpac Group, which marks a key step in Westpac’s technology transformation program.

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Пандемия ставит под угрозу голосование по Конституции, и делает ненужным удержание курса нацвалюты

Hey, there's a pandemic. Have you heard?

Looks like we might be spending a lot of time in the house with our immediate family these days. Maybe that family includes kids. And maybe they are starting to go a little stir crazy.

Keep reading for some ideas for any lighting photographer who might be looking to make the best of some unscheduled family time.Read more »

After some discussion with the applied math research groups here at UCLA (in particular the groups led by Andrea Bertozzi and Deanna Needell), one of the members of these groups, Chris Strohmeier, has produced a proposal for a Polymath project to crowdsource in a single repository (a) a collection of public data sets relating to […]

Just emailed this to a family member and thought I'd put it here for my later reference:

Thanks for the update. Sorry for being brief before. They closed my school to move to online instruction (and UCSD; and most or all the K-12s; I don't know about SDSU yet). We're off for at least two weeks, and they'll let us know for sure on the 23rd if we're going back on the 30th. They're paying us, thank goodness (and thank labor unions), and they've given me remote access so I can work from home, which I'm happy about.

Mom has finally gotten it in her head that this is serious, so she's bowed out of her big weekly bridge game, which is actually illegal here now -- more than 10 elderly people or more than 250 people, period, is outlawed.

Today, I'm taking it easy except for a visit from the kid and some work-from-home stuff that's not difficult. For the next two-plus weeks, I plan to read a lot, write a lot, and play cards with mom, who will develop cabin fever pretty quickly. We stocked up on necessaries last weekend, so we've decided that barring actual urgency (not, like, "I want ice cream" urgency, that is), we're not going to shop at all during my break. This will be harder for mom, as you can imagine.

My baby brother (he will be 48 this week -- a mere embryo! -- is near ground zero in Washington State, but so far, his family is okay. He's worried about his wife's grandparents, who are quite old and quite ill. He (my brother) is in management at the cable company there, and he's just making sure his installers keep their distance, etc.

Love you, and hope to see you soon. Don't touch your face. :-)

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Téměř 40 procent Čechů pocítilo dopad pandemie na své příjmy. Třetina jich má finanční rezervu na čtyři a více měsíců, 42 procent maximálně na měsíc. O zaměstnání v době krize přišlo sedm procent dotazovaných. Většina se ale jeho ztráty nebojí. Vyplývá to z dubnového průzkumu NMS Market Research pro Raiffeisenbank.

Koronavirová krize výrazně ovlivnila český pracovní trh. Ve srovnání s loňským rokem evidují personální agentury v posledních měsících přibližně poloviční nabídku nových pracovních pozic. Ubylo práce v gastronomii a cestovním ruchu, naopak logistika zažívá žně. Pro firmy zůstávají nejcennějšími pracovníky lidé z oblasti IT.

SETI@home will stop distributing tasks soon, but we encourage you to continue donate computing power to science research - in particular, research on the COVID-19 virus. The best way to do this is to join Science United and check the "Biology and Medicine" box.

The utter chaos in America’s response to the pandemic – shortages of equipment to protect hospital...

The pandemic is putting America’s deepening class divide into stark relief. Four classes are...

Říká se, že po krizi spojené s onemocnění covid-19 se probudíme do jiného světa. Otázka je, zda to bude platit i pro realitní trh. Podle odborníků s největší pravděpodobností ano. Což platí jak pro prodejní ceny nemovitostí, tak pro ceny nájemního bydlení.

Mohlo by se zdát, že pojišťovny budou v koronavirové době zaznamenávat zvýšený zájem o sjednání životních pojistek. Zejména kvůli krytí rizika pracovní neschopnosti, což se vztahuje i na onemocnění infekcí covid-19. Praxe je ale zatím opačná.

Как меняется политическая повестка во время эпидемии? Сколько денег нужно на поддержку граждан и бизнеса? Какие активы падают, а какие, наоборот, растут? Ольга Орлова обсудила эти животрепещущие вопросы с экономистом Александром Аузаном в программе «Гамбургский счет» на Общественном телевидении России. Публикуем отредактированную расшифровку беседы.

Каким образом вирус SARS-CoV-2 корректирует ошибки при транскрипции своего генома? Как эта способность связана с безуспешностью клинических испытаний ремдесивира? И можно ли считать эти испытания окончательно проваленными? На вопросы Юлии Черной отвечает Дмитрий Жарков, член-корр. РАН, директор Центра перспективных биомедицинских исследований НГУ, зав. лабораторией геномной и белковой инженерии Института химической биологии и фундаментальной медицины СО РАН.

Normal life up to February or March 2020 was clearly the Before Times. (I like that better than calling it BC for 'before corona', because the latter seems slightly offensive to Christians, and Before Times is ironic but immediately transparent.)

ironed_orchid pointed out that the period we're in now is clearly the Time of Isolation.

So what are we going to call the post-Covid future? Maybe we'll never really be post-Covid, any more than we are post-flu or post-TB, but I am daring to hope for a time when it's not the dominant feature of everybody's lives. Anyone heard a term as memorable and fitting as Before Times and Time of Isolation?

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Well, here we are on the eve of SIGBOVIK 2019. I'm in the midst of a long day of video-making for one of my projects, but I can get 2 for the price of 5 by posting now about four of my papers. This year I've been on a chess kick, which I think I've successfully gotten out of my system by writing all these (previous posts alluded to there being five, but one of them didn't really go anywhere and/or just became part of the other(s)). They are sort of intertwined:

Survival in chessland is about how to stay alive if you are being a chesspiece to the death

Color- and piece-blind chess is about, among other things, playing chess without being able to tell what the pieces are (only where they are)

Elo World, a framework for benchmarking weak chess engines is about exploring the full spectrum of computer chess play

CVE-2018-90017117 #KingMe is just a short joke, but based on a true story


My last paper is on a different (maybe even weirder?) topic, and I'm putting together a video for it now, so I should be uploading that tomorrow some time. It's been a bit rough going, though, since I replaced my computer a few months ago and forgot that I hadn't actually set stuff up for this kind of work; I'm experiencing small problems like custom key commands aren't set, and bigger problems like audio drivers acting crazy. Looks like I will be able to finish with some vacation time, at least.


Speaking of vacation, this month we also went to Belize, which was pretty cool. The highlight for me was swimming/scrambling 1km into a cave ("Actun Tunichil Muknal") to access an approximately 1000 year-old Mayan site where they performed human sacrifices; it's remarkable because almost all of the artifacts are still in situ, including a number of calcified human skeletons. Was pretty wild. I got some good running done, found some New Haven-style pizza (!?), and wrote papers about chess (?!).

Well, April felt simultaneously short and long! I should have just posted these at the beginning of the month, my SIGBOVIK papers from 2020:

Is this the longest chess game? is another needless chess paper, here trying to figure out the longest possible legal game. There are several rules that make sure games can't go on forever, and some surprisingly subtle details/ambiguity to those rules. The whole game is of course included in the paper (17697 moves), but I was far from being the largest waste of space in this year's proceedings, as one provocateur had a paper with 150 pages of citations. Mathieu made a 5-hour video of the chess game I computed for his companion blog post.

What is the best game console? A market-based approach is a silly idea taken too far. It was a year in the making (mostly waiting) and didn't quite turn out the way I was expecting due to world events, but that's part of the "fun" I guess!

Conditional Move For Shell Script Acceleration was another collaboration with Jim (mostly his doing, but I like to lather on an additional patina of absurdity).

This month I have mostly been trying to keep sane and healthy during the shelter-in-place order. It's been harder than usual to find the energy to be creative, but I have had some spurts. I basically only leave the house to run (not going anywhere near other people). But I have been doing that pretty regularly, so between that and the prohibition against going out to bars and ice cream, I'd say I'm currently in the best I have been in ~6 years. Yesterday I claimed some course records for some Strava segments in my neighborhood! I also finished up Doom: Eternal, which was good but you pretty much already know what it's like and I'm playing Animal Crossing and haven't yet gotten sick of that. The timing for the release of that latter game couldn't have been more perfect, huh? Sometimes I need something with a little challenge, so I just started Nuclear Throne. I'm liking it but not sure if I have decided whether it's good enough to invest the time in to win (I almost always play games to the end but these randomized roguelikes demand a certain kind of potentially infinite investment. Like I never did beat the last boss in Wizard of Legend, and even in Dead Cells, which I loved, I had to settle for some modest personal criteria for "winning.") Any other recs? Could use a good Metroidvania perhaps?

(in-package #:cl-pestilence)

;;   This is _not_ a simulation. It's just a game. And any resemblance
;; to any world, real or imaginary, is entirely coincidental.

;;   You can copy/paste this post in its entirety into a Common Lisp
;; REPL and play around with it if you like. I'm documenting it where
;; possible, but it's just a small toy to poke at for the moment.

;;   I've been thinking a lot about asymmetric multiplayer games and
;; <gestures wildly to world at large> all this.
;; I'm not actively _trying_ to model it accurately, but it's probably
;; obvious what's been consuming my thoughts lately.

;;   Let's get right into this. I'll explain as I go, and tie a few things
;; together neatly at the end. I hope. Regardless, there will absolutely
;; be a repo sometime fairly soon.

;; A place can be tagged arbitrarily, and can contain occupants.
;; They also collect points.

(defclass place ()
  ((tags :initarg :tags :initform nil :accessor tags)
   (occupants :initarg :occupants :initform nil :accessor occupants)
   (points :initform 0 :accessor points)))

(defun place? (thing)
  (eq (find-class 'place) (class-of thing)))

(defun place (&key tags occupants)
  (make-instance 'place :tags tags :occupants occupants))

(defun gen-place ()
  (let ((tag (pick '(:apartment-building :house :cottage
		     :office-building :factory :store
		     :cafe :lounge :theater))))
    (place :tags (list tag))))

(defmethod details ((place place))
  (format nil "====================~%~a {~{~a~}}~%~{  ~a~^~%~}~%"
	  (first (tags place))
	  (rest (tags place))
	  (mapcar #'details (occupants place))))

(defmethod show ((place place))
  (format nil "~20@a ~5a [~{~a~}]~%"
	  (first (tags place)) (points place)
	  (mapcar #'show (occupants place))))

;; A peep goes places.
;; They have
;;  - their daily routine (a list of places to visit)
;;  - their todo (the part of their routine they still need to do;
;;                they are currently at the first place in this list)
;;  - their health (a number from 0 to 100)
;;  - a list of plagues
;; Finally, they _also_ collect points.

(defclass peep ()
  ((routine :initarg :routine :initform (list) :accessor routine)
   (todo :initarg :todo :initform nil :accessor todo)
   (health :initarg :health :initform 100 :accessor health)
   (plagues :initform nil :accessor plagues)
   (points :initform 0 :accessor points)))

(defun peep? (thing)
  (eq (find-class 'peep) (class-of thing)))

(defun peep (&key places)
  (make-instance 'peep :routine places :todo places))

(defun health->string (health)
  (cond ((>= health 90) "@")
	((>= health 80) "0")
	((>= health 70) "O")
	((>= health 50) "o")
	((>= health 30) ":")
	((>= health 1)  ".")
	(t "☠")))

(defmethod details ((peep peep))
  (format nil "[~a ~3d [~{ ~a~^ ->~}]]"
	  (health->string (health peep)) (health peep)
	  (mapcar
	   (lambda (place) (first (tags place)))
	   (routine peep))))

(defmethod show ((peep peep)) (health->string (health peep)))

;; A world is a list of places, occupied by peeps. The world we start
;; peeps in also determines their routine.

(defun gen-world (&key (num-places 20) (num-peeps 100))
  (let ((places (loop repeat num-places collect (gen-place))))
    (loop repeat num-peeps
       do (let* ((routine (loop repeat 5 collect (pick places)))
		 (peep (peep :places routine)))
	    (push peep (occupants (first routine)))))
    places))

(defmethod details ((world list))
  (format nil "~%~{~a~}~%" (mapcar #'details world)))

(defmethod show ((world list))
  (format nil "~%~{~a~}~%" (mapcar #'show world)))

(defmethod all-peeps ((world list))
  (loop for place in world append (all-peeps place)))

(defmethod all-peeps ((place place))
  (loop for o in (occupants place) if (peep? o) collect o))

;; `tick!`ing a world means moving every peep through their routine once.
;;   We `tick!` each peep, then `tick!` each place until all the peeps are
;; done. Then we reset their routines.
;; You can think of this as a turn in the game.

(defmethod tick! ((world list))
  (let ((peeps (all-peeps world)))
    (loop while peeps
       do (setf peeps
		(loop for p = (pop peeps) while p
		   for res = (tick! p)
		   if res collect res))
       do (mapc #'tick! world)
       do (format t "~a" (show world)))
    (loop for p in (all-peeps world)
       do (setf (todo p) (routine p))))
  world)

;; Don't worry about the details of how to `tick!` peeps or places yet.

;;   Ok, here's where it gets a bit darker. Although we _did_
;; foreshadow this in the definition of `peep`. And also in the title
;; of the accompanying blog post.

;; A plague is another living thing.
;; It has
;;  - a host (a peep that it's infecting)
;;  - a signature (a token representing its lineage and strain)
;;  - health (how well it's doing inside its host)
;;  - virulence (how likely it is to spread to another host)
;;  - efficiency (how efficient they are at feeding)
;;  - reproduce (a function that returns a new instance to push into a new host)
;;  - and a strategy (a function, possibly closed, that takes
;;    itself and its host peep and mutates)

;; Plagues do not collect points; they score differently.

(defclass plague ()
  ((host :initarg :host :initform nil :accessor host)
   (signature :initarg :host :initform "SIG" :accessor signature)
   (health :initarg :health :initform 10 :accessor health)
   (virulence :initarg :virulence :initform 10 :accessor virulence)
   (efficiency :initarg :efficiency :initform 0.2 :accessor efficiency)
   (reproduce
    :initarg :reproduce
    :initform
    #'plague
    :reader reproduce)
   (strategy
    :initarg :strategy
    :initform
    (lambda (plague peep)
      (feed! plague peep 30))
    :reader strategy)))

(defun plague ()
  (make-instance 'plague))

;; Plagues can `feed!` on peeps or plagues. To feed means to
;; take away some of the targets' health and add some to your own.

(defmethod feed! ((self plague) (peep peep) (amount integer))
  (decf (health peep) amount)
  (incf (health self) (* (efficiency self) amount)))

(defmethod feed! ((self plague) (plague plague) (amount integer))
  (decf (health plague) amount)
  (incf (health self) (* (efficiency self) amount)))

;; Plagues can also `infect!` peeps by `reproduce`ing into them.

(defmethod infect! ((self plague) (peep peep))
  (unless (infected-by? self peep)
    (let ((child (funcall (reproduce self))))
      (setf (host child) peep)
      (push child (plagues peep)))))

(defmethod infected-by? ((self plague) (peep peep))
  (member (signature self) (mapcar #'signature (plagues peep))
	  :test #'string=))

;;  `tick!`ing a plague causes it to weaken and also carry out its strategy.
;; This models the background effect of the immune system of its host.

(defmethod tick! ((plague plague))
  (decf (health plague) 1)
  (funcall (strategy plague) plague (host plague))
  plague)

;;  `tick!`ing a peep means moving them to their next place, and also
;; `tick!`ing any plagues they may have contracted. Also, peeps are
;; resilient; they heal a small amount each time they tick (to a
;; maximum of 100).
;;  If a peep dies, they no longer move. And their plagues probably
;; won't do well. Peeps like to go places. They score points for each
;; place they go to.

(defun dead? (thing) (>= 0 (health thing)))

(defmethod tick! ((peep peep))
  (unless (dead? peep)
    (let ((location (pop (todo peep))))
      (incf (points peep))
      (setf (occupants location) (remove peep (occupants location)))
      (push peep (occupants (or (first (todo peep)) (first (routine peep)))))
      (setf (health peep) (min 100 (+ 5 (health peep))))
      (mapc #'tick! (plagues peep))
      (unless (empty? (todo peep))
	peep))))

;; `tick!`ing a place causes it to score for each `peep` present. And it causes
;; any `plague`s on present `peep`s to try to `infect!` other nearby peeps.
;; Places also lose points for each dead peep they contain.

(defmethod tick! ((place place))
  (incf (points place) (length (occupants place)))
  (loop for peep in (all-peeps place)
     if (dead? peep)
     do (decf (points place) 2)
     else do (loop for plague in (plagues peep)
		do (loop for victim in (remove peep (all-peeps place))
		      if (>= (virulence plague) (random 100))
		      do (infect! plague victim))))
  place)

;;  So, now we've got the basic framework of the game in place. There are three
;; players in this game: places, peeps and plagues.
;;   A plague player automatically loses if they are completely cured, and
;; automatically wins if they manage to kill everyone. That's fairly simple.
;;   A place player wins if they manage to cure the plague. They automatically
;; lose if all the peeps die. Also, fairly simple.
;;   A peep player is trying to survive. If they manage to make it some numer
;; of turns before dying, then we have to score the game instead of declaring
;; an outright winner regardless of game state.

;;   A peep player's score is the total number of points plus remaining health
;; on all of their peeps, minus the number of active plagues on said peeps.
;;   A plague player's score is the total number of health of their plagues,
;; with a multiplier equal to the number of places fully infected by
;; their plague.
;;   A place player's score is the total number of points in their places.

(defun score (world)
  (list :peep (let ((score 0))
		(loop for p in (all-peeps world)
		   unless (dead? p)
		     do (incf score (+ (health p) (points p)))
		   do (decf score (length (plagues p))))
		score)
	:place (let ((score 0))
		 (loop for p in world
		    do (incf score (points p)))
		 score)
	:plague (let ((score 0))
		  (loop for victim in (all-peeps world)
		     do (loop for p in (plaguesvictim)
			   do (incf score (max 0 (health p)))))
		  (loop for target in world
		     if (every
			 (lambda (victim)
			   (not (empty? (plagues victim))))
			 (all-peeps target))
		     do (setf score (* 2  score)))
		  score)))

;;   I think that's all I've got for now. This is definitely an idea I want
;; to run with. At the moment, it's just a tiny, in-repl proof-of-concept,
;; and not particularly fun, but I'm going to try developing it further with an
;; eye towards turning it into an actual web game playable from this site.

;; As always, I'll let you know how it goes.

(defun pick (lst)
  (nth (random (length lst)) lst))

(defun empty? (lst)
  (null lst))

So recently, I had to use zippers at work. Specifically, the Clojure implementation. There were some close-to-arbitrary transformations I needed to do with some close-to-arbitrary trees and it turned out that zippers were more efficient than the alternatives¹.

Using them this way, combined with the general state of the world and my free time, finally tipped me into doing some more Common Lisp development. Before, I go any further, let me be clear about something.

I Like Clojure

Seriously.

Its logo is up top in the language bar, I was one of the inaugural members of the Toronto Clojure User Group, I recommend it as a first lisp you should learn, and have for about six years now. I'm also painfully aware of the shortcomings of Common Lisp, and make no excuses for them.

However.

• I don't like the JVM. It's slow as balls, its' deployment options are less than ideal for my purposes, its' error system is at best useless, and Clojure without it is unlikely.
• Clojurescript build incompatiblities are, if anything, worse².
• I don't like the underlying licensing decisions.

These are deep reasons to stay away. They're not the sort of thing I can paper over with a library or two. Fixing them would mean a superhuman amount of work poured into the underlying technical and social infrastructure, and I'm not into it. I wouldn't be into it even if the community was interested in heading that way, and near as I can tell, they're not particularly.

Whether or not I think you should learn Clojure as your first³ lisp, it definitely wasn't my first lisp. The more uniform, mostly-better-thought-out interface, lack of historical baggage and functional data structures are not enough to pull me all the way over.

It is enough for me to start plotting a smash-and-grab of as much of the stuff I like as I can carry. Which is exactly what clj represents. As of this writing, it defines and exports exactly four symbols: if-let, when-let, -> and ->>. This is a tiny beginning of the list, and I fully plan to put something more substantial together using cl-hamt, named-readtables, test-utils and possibly optima. Stay tuned to that repo if you're interested, but it's not the focus today.

cl-zipper

The thing that percipitated this thought was having used the Clojure Zipper implementation. So, obviously, this is something I want next time I need to manipulate trees in Common Lisp. The paper is here, and unless you have a terminal phobia of datastructures⁴, you should go read it. It's six pages, they're light, and one of them taken up by the intro and references.

The operations defined in the paper are left, right, up, down, insert_right, insert_left, insert_down and delete. There's a few conveniences defined for the Clojure version, and I've implemented some of my own stuff too. Lets go through the main file in almost-literate style.

First up, we have constructors.

(defstruct path
  (left) (path) (right))

(defstruct loc
  (node)
  (path)

  (fn-branch?)
  (fn-children)
  (fn-make-node))

;;;;;;;;;; Constructors
(defun zipper (branch? children make-node root)
  (make-loc
   :node root
   :fn-branch? branch? :fn-children children :fn-make-node make-node))

(defmethod make-zipper ((thing list))
  (zipper #'listp #'identity (lambda (node children) (declare (ignore node)) children) thing))

(defun make-node (zipper children)
  (funcall (loc-fn-make-node zipper) zipper children))

You can see influence from both clojure.zip and the paper here. I'm taking the lead from the paper by explicitly separating the path triple our from the loc definition. However, I'm not explicitly defining my own type tree the way that Huet does. Instead, I'm going to be dealing with assorted lisp trees. These could be implemented as lists, vectors, hashes, or any number of other formats. I'm going to implement a few type-distpatching built-ins, including the make-zipper list method above, but the basic zipper function just needs to take an interface as input in the form of branch?, children and make-node arguments. This is the same solution that the Clojure implementation went with, and I see no reason to go a different way. The only material difference is that theirs uses the Clojure metadata system, while I explicitly define slots in the loc structure.

Now that we can construct, we need to be able to select.

;;;;;;;;;; Selectors
(defun branch? (zipper) (funcall (loc-fn-branch? zipper) (loc-node zipper)))
(defun children (zipper)
  (funcall
   (loc-fn-children zipper)
   (loc-node zipper)))
(defun node (zipper) (loc-node zipper))
(defun path (zipper) (loc-path zipper))

(defun lefts (zipper)
  (when (loc-path zipper)
    (reverse (path-left (loc-path zipper)))))

(defun rights (zipper)
  (when (loc-path zipper)
    (path-right (loc-path zipper))))

The basic navigation is four functions; down, up, left and right

;;;;;;;;;; Navigation
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Basic navigation
(defun down (zipper)
  (when (children zipper)
    (let ((fresh (copy-loc zipper)))
      (setf (loc-node fresh) (first (children zipper))
	    (loc-path fresh)
	    (make-path
	     :left nil
	     :path (loc-path zipper)
	     :right (rest (children zipper))))
      fresh)))

(defun up (zipper)
  (when (path zipper)
    (let ((fresh (copy-loc zipper)))
      (setf (loc-node fresh)
	    (make-node
	     zipper (append
		     (reverse (path-left (path zipper)))
		     (cons (loc-node zipper)
			   (path-right (path zipper)))))
	    (loc-path fresh) (path-path (path zipper)))
      fresh)))

(defun left (zipper)
  (when (and (path zipper) (path-left (path zipper)))
    (let ((fresh (copy-loc zipper)))
      (setf (loc-node fresh) (first (path-left (path zipper)))
	    (loc-path fresh)
	    (make-path
	     :left (rest (path-left (path zipper)))
	     :path (path-path (path zipper))
	     :right (cons (loc-node zipper) (path-right (path zipper)))))
      fresh)))

(defun right (zipper)
  (when (and (path zipper) (path-right (path zipper)))
    (let ((fresh (copy-loc zipper)))
      (setf (loc-node fresh) (first (path-right (path zipper)))
	    (loc-path fresh)
	    (make-path
	     :left (cons (loc-node zipper) (path-left (path zipper)))
	     :path (path-path (path zipper))
	     :right (rest (path-right (path zipper)))))
      fresh)))

The main difference between this and the paper is that I've chosen nil as my Top representation, which lets me pull the trick of using when to check for the presence of a path, and its' non-Top-ness at the same time.

The bad news is that since Common Lisp doesn't have pervasive functional data structures, I have to explicitly copy locs while moving through a tree. The good news is that the copy is fairly light weight. Effectively, I'm copying out a set of 5 pointers, and could get that down to 3 by defining an intermediate struct.

Hm.

Which I probably should do. Note to self.

Out of those, we get three compound navigation functions. With more probably coming soon. Specifically, I found find useful for the work I did. It's easily externally definable, but would be even easier to bundle along. The ones I've already implemented are root, leftmost and rightmost.

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Compound navigation
(defun root (zipper)
  (if-let (z (while zipper #'up))
    (node z)))

(defun leftmost (zipper) (while zipper #'left))

(defun rightmost (zipper) (while zipper #'right))

...
(defun until (zipper f)
  (let ((z zipper))
    (loop for next = (funcall f z) while next
       when next do (setf z next))
    z))
...

That's the traversals done. Next up, we've got modification, without which this library is fairly useless. The basics are replace, delete and the insert/child twins.

;;;;;;;;;; Modification
(defun replace (zipper node)
  (let ((fresh (copy-loc zipper)))
    (setf (loc-node fresh) node)
    fresh))

(defun delete (zipper)
  (when (path zipper)
    (let ((fresh (copy-loc zipper))
	  (fresh-path (copy-path (loc-path zipper))))
      (cond ((rights zipper)
	     (setf (loc-node fresh) (pop (path-right fresh-path))
		   (loc-path fresh) fresh-path))
	    ((lefts zipper)
	     (setf (loc-node fresh) (pop (path-left fresh-path))
		   (loc-path fresh) fresh-path))
	    (t (setf (loc-path fresh) (path-path fresh-path))))
      fresh)))

(defun insert-child (zipper node)
  (replace
   zipper
   (make-node
    zipper
    (cond ((not (branch? zipper))
	   (list node (node zipper)))
	  ((children zipper)
	   (cons node (children zipper)))
	  (t (list node))))))

(defun append-child (zipper node)
  (replace
   zipper
   (make-node
    zipper
    (cond ((not (branch? zipper))
	   (list (node zipper) node))
	  ((children zipper)
	   (append (children zipper) (list node)))
	  (t (list node))))))

(defun insert-left (zipper node)
  (let ((fresh (copy-loc zipper))
	(fresh-path (copy-path (loc-path zipper))))
    (push node (path-left fresh-path))
    (setf (loc-path fresh) fresh-path)
    fresh))

(defun insert-right (zipper node)
  (let ((fresh (copy-loc zipper))
	(fresh-path (copy-path (loc-path zipper))))
    (push node (path-right fresh-path))
    (setf (loc-path fresh) fresh-path)
    fresh))

The paper defines an insert_down function. It fails on a Leaf node, and otherwise inserts a singleton branch at the given location. The insert/append child functions above also insert nodes at a lower level at the current loc. They give you a choice about whether to insert the new node as the leftmost or rightmost child, and additionally succeed on Leaf nodes by including the leaf value as a child of the new branch.

There are, thus far, three compound modification functions; edit, splice-left and splice-right.

(defun edit (zipper f &rest args)
  (replace zipper (apply f (node zipper) args)))

(defun splice-left (zipper node-list)
  (reduce #'insert-left node-list :initial-value zipper))

(defun splice-right (zipper node-list)
  (reduce #'insert-right (reverse node-list) :initial-value zipper))

edit takes a function instead of a new node, and replaces the node at loc with the result of running that function on the existing node. The splice-* twins are fairly self-explanatory; they're like insert-left/insert-right, but work on multiple nodes rather than single ones.

I haven't yet implemented next, prev and remove because these might relate to the different representation of the traversal end? state. The reason for this seems to be that next/prev/remove assume a depth-first traversal. The reason I'm being weasely here is that I haven't thought about it hard enough to be sure that the end? marker is really necessary. It also seems odd to privilege depth-first over breadth-first traversals; ideally, I think you'd want to be able to support either. Possibly interchangeably.

Minor Housekeeping

That wraps it up for this edition. My immediate intention is to do more work on the cl-zipper and clj libraries, as well as that game I mentioned last time. Ideally, I'd like to up my blogging output too. Probably not to the same volume as I had at my peak, but it was definitely helpful to keep some sort of written journal around for a while. The current state of the world is, hopefully, going to make it easy for me to get more programming time in. All things considered, I'd count that as a win.

1. Although admittedly, it does require me to explain the concept of zippers to a few other people for maintenance purposes. So ironically, this adds complexity despite being much more technically elegant than other options.↩
2. There's a reason that langnostic.js is a raw JS file, rather than compiled from clojurescript source, and that reason is like 90% that the compilation process is nontrivial to set up.↩
3. "First", not "only". You can probably make educated guesses about which other ones I think you should learn.↩
4. In which case, why are you here? This blog could kill you accidentally with an errant click or two. You should probably just go do something else.↩