Posts in category 'frustration'
The Spectacular Pie Failure
Well, it had to happen eventually. For the first time ever, in the history of my pie baking experience, I had a complete, utter, total, truly spectacular pie failure. Well, they say a picture says a thousand words:
Frankly, I’m at a loss for words. Obviously, I pulled it out well before it was “done”. But it’s clear the crust simply melted in the oven… honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it.
Now I’m trying to figure out what I did wrong, and while it’s very possible I just measured the fat wrong, I’m actually wondering if it was how I decided to use the food processor this time ‘round. In the past, I’ve just used it to cut the fat into the dough, and it’s worked quite well for that purpose. But this time, I decided to add the water to the dough and bring it together in the processor, as well. As a result, my only guess is that the result was the fat getting over-processed into the dough
But the real killer is I spent, literally, two or three hours last night preparing dough, and then another hour and a half peeling and slicing apples today, and that doesn’t count all the rolling effort and so forth. Am I choked? Yeah… just a little. And I’ll be damned if I’m gonna bake another pie any time soon…
Bitter Defeat
The current version of NHDS does a kind of funny thing when you die: instead of returning you to the fancy schmancy splash screen, it powers the DS off. As it happens, it does the same thing when the user saves their game (which is a good thing, IMHO), and this is no coincidence. It just so happens they share the same shutdown codepath.
Well, a couple people mentioned this, and I thought, yeah, I should try to fix that. It is, after all, rather irritating to have to power the DS back on after YASD. But, alas, I stand defeated. The problem is this: the NetHack core contains a lot of internal state. And the initialization of this state happens in a variety of places, and it’s not very neatly factored out. As an example, the core function, moveloop(), which is what gets the game going, performs a bunch of state initialization for the player.
Now, on, say, the Unix port, when the game ends, the program terminates. There’s no concept of the game restarting. And so all of this state isn’t a problem. But the case of NHDS is different. If I attempt to start the game again (and trust me, I’ve tried), the core gets mightily confused, puzzled why various bits of state are initialized, and further puzzled when it’s attempts to initialize others bits of state fail. It’s all quite the mess, really.
The consequence? I can see no way of fixing this problem. It’s an inherent issue with the way the game is structured. Oh well… on the bright side, at least I can just blame the DevTeam.
