The Fool on the Hill

The Fool on the Hill

Thoughts on bent cycles

By Simon Brooke || 11 September 2024

Thoughts on bent cycles

I'm getting old.

I've decided to give up my car, mainly for environmental and political reasons, but also for economy, so these days I'm largely dependent on bicycles for transport. In an environment with a lot of wet and windy weather especially in winter, I find that bad weather is a deterrent to cycling. Also, as I age, my balance is getting noticeably worse — I regularly fall. Thus far, it doesn't seem to affect me on a moving bicycle, but I particularly often fall when getting on and off bicycles.

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The election, and after

By Simon Brooke || 6 July 2024

The election, and after

The Losers

The first thing to say about the 2024 General Election result is this: Labour lost, and lost badly. They lost, in fact, half a million votes compared to their 2019 result; they lost three million votes when compared to their 2017 result. They also failed to win anything remotely resembling a majority of the popular vote.

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3D file formats

By Simon Brooke || 10 June 2024

3D file formats

I'm going to be doing a lot with programatically manipulated models. Therefore there's a benefit to me in using a file format which is human-readable, and also easily parsed. Compactness is also a virtue, but it's a virtue I can achieve by compressing human readable files, I think.

Loading time is an issue, but I will be loading relatively few models and manipulating them in memory to produce large numbers of variants, rather than loading a new model for every asset I wish to place. So both from the point of view of total disk space and from the point of view of performance, I think that formats which are optimised more towards my needs as a developer than to raw performance or storage size are probably justified.

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The Triumph of the Mediocracy

By Simon Brooke || 6 June 2024

The Triumph of the Mediocracy

Sumer and Starmak

[Yes, actually, the title of this essay was intended to be 'the triumph of mediocrity'. I mistyped. Sometimes, to err is divine.]

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The Game Engine Problem

By Simon Brooke || 18 April 2024

The Game Engine Problem

View of the model of the city of Tchahua, as it exists at the moment

[this note was first written on the 18th April 2024 and substantially revised on the 25th of May and 24th of June]

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