A Random Post

I should probably post something, as long as I'm here. This post is likely to be random and cover a variety of subjects - just a warning.


First, what I'm currently working on: Story Creator. Story Creator was made as a text-only program that simulated the reactions between two different people. This later moved up to a maximum of five, and finally a maximum of fifty people - it can handle interactions between fifty people at once. It's not realistic at all - in fact, it's really cartoon-like - robbing banks, smashing cars, winning the lottery and other such things are pretty common, and it only takes a day to learn karate or kung-fu. But that keeps things interesting. I actually think I made a post somewhere in here about Story Creator already, but I'm not sure...

Story Creator was originally designed in Visual Basic 3.0. I then moved it to Visual Basic 6.0 and kept working on it. It wasn't too much after that that I recreated it in Phrogram, massively upgrading it to where it is now. Instead of just writing out interactions, it now examines these interactions and writes a cover-over story for them. For example: if somebody loses their job and then vandalizes someone else's property soon after, the program says it was because they lost their job - and it likely was. It's often surprised me, the detail in the relationships - and I'm the programmer.

Now I'm moving the entire thing to C++, as I'm learning it. I haven't worked on Story Creator in at least half a year... and I'd forgotten how complex it was. It's probably the most complex program I've ever written. And unless you're a programmer, you probably don't want to hear about the sizes of the arrays, the loops within loops, the carefully programmed interactions and such. Just know I'm having a hard time - not because I'm learning C++ - but because Story Creator is too complex. Also, the moron writing this post somehow thinks he's going to make it even more complex once he's done. Someone should hit him over the head with something heavy, and fast.


Second: For some reason, people tend to assume that I'm hitting on them when I'm actually just complimenting them. Why is this? Are nice people so rare that it becomes necessary to assume that when someone is nice from you, they want something from you? In older days, it was considered gentlemanly and admirable to do something out of kindness and honesty, instead of being considered manipulative.

Part of this, I suppose (and I have the opinions of several other people behind this, both male and female), is because of the feminist movement. Hardcore, overzealous feminists will on occasion get onto a guy for even holding the door open for them - I've had it happen to me once. Of course, the gentlemanly thing to do is assume that the person is simply having a rough day... and of course that's what I did, though it made me feel like I was doing the wrong thing. The event stuck with me for a while. I imagine this would "kill off the gentleman genes", as a friend of mine put it. It's hard to be nice if it's frowned upon.