Weekly Wisby 16: Merry Winter Depression! …but, like, also Christmas and stuff.




The winters on Gotland here are beautiful. Lots of snow, everyone is hanging lights in their windows to make the town shine, people come together for comfort and drinks… but even Smirnoff can’t safe you when winter depression hits. 12 bottles of Vodka does nothing against the cold energy-draining darkness that, sooner or later, swallows us all. …by which I mean winter depression, not age.






Mixing winter depression with corona measures goes together like Vodka and milk. Even though it’s not that bad here in Gotland, our C++ teacher still needs to remain home since he caught a cold, and the team doesn’t feel the need to meet up this week. Structure is what I could use to get out of this hole. Instead you are left to wallow in your hollow. The words “school” and “social” share 66% of their letters for crying out loud!

Ugh, I’m just mad because it annoys me. The whole week I felt bad and kept underperforming. I don’t wanna be underperforming! I wanna be the Michelangelo of programming, writing code in the morning and taking scripts in the evening! And on top of that, I shrunk my hat in the wash :C how was I supposed to know you need to wash it in a lower temperature T_T T_T T_T It’s not faaaaaaaiiiiiiiiir >,_<

Luckily that’s in the past now. I feel a lot better now: at time of writing it is Christmas day, and yesterday was a lovely Eve with lots of friends and faces I want to remember for a long time after I leave here. The good thing about these slumps I guess is that they reset you. And I needed to be reset, so I can start taking my future seriously. Gotland is going to end and I’m ready to start accepting that. I need to start writing my graduation proposal and supplement my portfolio before I go out into the big scary world of entertainment, where ambition is holy and money is final. Finishing this overdue blog though is a good way to start.



I didn’t sit completely still though! Remember the snake assignment if you will: we need to refactor code from a first year’s student for the game Snake. The code is a righteous mess, and I’ve been exercising it hard to trim out all the fat.

One of the, ahem, features of this game was that it run at 20 fps, which most of you will know is not a lot (the eye needs 60 fps, 3 times as much, to perceive seamless motion). Simply turning this restriction off was NOT an option, because the code had been hard-fitted to run on this specific framerate! There is something so innocently beautiful about a first-year’s being so proud of their infant solution that it almost brings a tear to my eye. Fixing it was a long and hard journey, the details of which are boring and nitpickingly specific.

Luckily I can just show you the result instead:

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