Meta Blogging

Three Anouncements

Posted by Shai Shapira on August 15, 2012
Posted in: Meta Blogging, Personal. Leave a Comment

1. I’ve been working on a commercial project lately, you’ll hopefully hear more about it soon. It does mean I haven’t had much time for free stuff, but hopefully this thing succeeds, I’ll have some money to pay the bills, and I’ll be back to making purely fun stuff.
By the way, that’s not why I haven’t been blogging lately – I also had a lack of inspiration for writing. It’ll probably end soon.

2. I’m almost definitely going to attend Eurogamer Expo 2012 in London! It sounds like it might be fun. So if you can’t get enough of my ancient wisdom and want to hear it in real life, you’ll be able to find me there.

3. Something slightly less happy – I’ve been starting to prepare for immigration lately. As you may already know, I currently live in Israel. For various reasons (some of which you can probably guess), I do not see it as a place where I want to spend my future. Not having a clear alternative, my current plan is to continue from the aforementioned visit to London to a little tour of the world (mainly Europe, at least initially) to find a place where I want to live. If you have any recommendations for (or against) your country, or anything else that might be interesting (maybe an awesome job offer in your awesome country, with an awesome working visa?), I’ll be happy to hear.

Back to Normal (kind of)

Posted by Shai Shapira on July 22, 2012
Posted in: Meta Blogging, Personal. Leave a Comment

Wow, this was quite an intense week. I don’t want to get too personal here, but I might as well share a little insight I got during that time.

Some people look back at their families and tell of some great war hero grandfather. Some have a great leader to tell about, a famous artist, a successful businessperson. Some can tell about great charity work or academic success. Meanwhile, one of the most famous stories about my grandmother is that hers was the second family to have a piano in her entire city.
Why is that meaningful? Because as part of a notoriously difficult immigration, of which many people remained in the lowest tiers of society for several generations, she didn’t think about anything but working extremely hard for one main goal – providing the best education possible for her children[1] (of whom one would later become my mother). This is quite certainly one of the important factors in making me what I am today.

So, rest in peace and all that. This blog, and my life in general, will start going back to normal now.
[1] Not that a piano is the most important part of good education, but it’s certainly a reasonable part.

Recommendation – Swarm Arena

Posted by Shai Shapira on June 4, 2012
Posted in: Games, Meta Blogging. Tagged: . Leave a Comment

How long has it been since you found a game that was really innovative? Something that didn’t just take an existing idea and added something to it (not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course) but really introduced a completely new gameplay idea?

It was very long for me, and that’s why I loved Swarm Arena so much. It’s a relatively new indie game (about a year old, I think), and here’s what it looks like:

If you have no idea what you just saw, don’t worry. That’s how humans are supposed to react to something like this. Basically, you control one of those shiny fluorescent blobs, and you have those shiny little grains of rice hovering around you. when they hit the opponent’s grains of rice they cancel each other out, but when they hit the opponent he gets hurt. Every hit lowers your ability to control your rice, and eventually you lose. There are powerups that pop up randomly around the map that increase your abilities (there are two types of abilities, that give you different ways to control the rice). The point is to control your rice well enough to defend yourself from the enemy rice, keep him away from the powerups, and eventually defeat him.

(note – the game refers to the things floating around you as “drones”. But I think it clearly looks like shiny rice).

Not only is it innovative, but it has the added bonus where everyone who looks at you playing it will think you’re either an alien, a robot, a robot alien, or an insane genius.

The game is on Steam, costs 5$, and has a demo, so there’s no reason not to play it (well, except that it’s Windows only, so, sorry about that…). And this is a good opportunity to introduce the new page in this blog – Play with me. Where I invite everyone who likes reading this blog to also join me in shooting things, building things, and whatever else we will find desirable.

Back from Athens

Posted by Shai Shapira on April 29, 2012
Posted in: Meta Blogging, Personal. Tagged: , , . Leave a Comment

I’m back from Athens, and will go back to making quasi-successful attempts at programming soon. Meanwhile, some insights:

1. Very fun city, very nice people. The Plaka is one of the best neighbourhoods I’ve seen.

2. They have police *everywhere*. I don’t exactly live in the most relaxed region in the world, but even I’m a bit surprised to walk along a street and see five uniformed people with riot shields and body armor, just standing around. On the other hand, the streets felt quite safe.

3. Like Hebrew, Greek has that weird thing where the same word is used for “please” and “you’re welcome”. I never understood how that started.

4. Conspicuously absent from all the tourist / historical areas: Aristotle, Zeno, Diogenes, Xenophon, and almost every other famous ancient Athenian, even Socrates is barely present. On the other hand, there are around 10,000 things names after Eleftherios Venizelos who, if I understand correctly, single-handedly won the first world war, expanded Greek territory to several planets and trained an army of tigers as personal servants.

5. They have a dude’s heart kept in a box in their national history museum. I don’t really know what to say about that.

I’d end this post with Γεια σου, but it turns out that unlike the popular image I grew up on, they don’t really say that much. So… Καλημέρα?

Linux support coming soon

Posted by Shai Shapira on April 18, 2012
Posted in: Meta Blogging, Software Developement. Leave a Comment

At last, I found out what made my programs fail on Linux. Now I want to test it more seriously, and then release new official versions.

If you’re wondering what took me so long (and why I’ve been so quiet lately), I’ve been pretty sick for the past week. And next week I’m on vacation[1], so there won’t be any news here until the week after. But hopefully, we’ll see some good things then. Starting with a little post about writing cross-platform code in Java, I guess…

 

[1] Finally going to see Athens, a cradle of western civilization. Γειά σου!

New Domain

Posted by Shai Shapira on March 4, 2012
Posted in: Meta Blogging. Leave a Comment

A little piece of meta-blogging – this blog’s URL is now http://shaishapira.com. Old links should still work, but this is now the main address.

The blog’s name is a playful little title, but I have some big (and fun) plans for the future, and I think they will work better with a more serious sounding address. Hopefully this is just the first of many improvements to come in the near future.