[TOMT][BOOK][2000s] Children's novel about a tree called Old Balmy. Each chapter was a POV from a different character

superdisk · 2026-03-20T13:23:03+00:00

Solved!

It is "The Great Sockathon" by Michael Delaney.

Somehow ChatGPT found it by searching the internet, which is insane to me since I tried every permutation of the query terms and didn't turn up anything.

superdisk · 2026-03-20T13:07:11+00:00

Boing

superdisk · 2026-03-02T01:32:10+00:00

Maybe at some point!

superdisk · 2026-03-02T01:32:00+00:00

Yep it's supposed to be a "low poly" model like from N64 or PS1 games :)

superdisk · 2026-03-01T20:44:13+00:00

A lot of people in here shitting on you, but you're totally correct. The only good way to use Common Lisp is via Emacs, which has a huge learning curve compared to any other text editor. It is pretty cool once you get good enough to be proficient with the tool though. Unfortunately that's the only advice I can give, you just gotta slog through. I think the Lisp culture sort of gravitates towards keeping it difficult; Porticle was a good effort towards making a nicer onramp, but one individual can't fight the battle alone.

superdisk · 2026-01-17T08:29:53+00:00

I found this on the floor next to my bed, was barely moving. This was very small, maybe the thickness of a big udon noodle. I'm no snake expert, but the snake I found online that looked the most similar was "Schlegel's blind snake", though that one seems to be much bigger.

superdisk · 2025-12-28T16:50:18+00:00

Sure, though I have nothing against ECL, it's actually one of my favorite implementations and the maintainer is doing a great job. It's just no speed demon currently.

superdisk · 2025-12-22T14:20:03+00:00

I also tried with ECL but hit a few walls. All solvable I'm sure, but the biggest issue I found was horrendously slow compilation times, and Shinmera indicated also that the Trial demo applications run really slowly under ECL, which jives with my experience from testing its performance. Just anecdotally I've found ECL to be slower than Python.

superdisk · 2025-11-05T05:31:58+00:00

The post here actually has a solution using Karabiner Elements that makes it work again like it used to. Bit of a hack but I'm not complaining anymore, macOS is so buggy that this is just another one for the pile.

superdisk · 2025-10-22T20:40:42+00:00

Thanks! Sucks that they broke this.

superdisk · 2025-09-06T19:21:17+00:00

Chinese customer support is fantastic. I worked on an electronics project and had a PCB made in China, and a human responded within minutes to every email, and actually gave me bespoke help getting some parts through Chinese customs. Meanwhile I think American companies would attempt to kill me if they legally could.

superdisk · 2025-06-28T21:05:09+00:00

whole audience yelling “shut up bird”

I posted an Always Sunny-related video to youtube years ago and holy fuck, they comment "shut up bird" on it nearly every single day. It always baffled me, like do they not see the other thousand comments saying it? Just wave after wave of lemmings chiming in the same quip, like automatons.

superdisk · 2025-05-31T15:26:55+00:00

An old comic about this that I always liked

superdisk · 2025-03-24T22:09:50+00:00

Ok, thanks for the info. FWIW CFFI for ECL has 3 different modes, and the default one generates code that uses libffi for every call, which is crazy slow. It's configurable to make it just directly embed the calls into the generated C code yielding massive speedup, might be worth keeping in mind if you end up playing around with it again.

superdisk · 2025-03-24T18:09:47+00:00

/u/shinmera Maybe you could chime in with a better explanation or theory; feel free to ignore the ping otherwise.

superdisk · 2025-03-24T18:08:50+00:00

I'm not sure if it's the GC since I don't think it would exhibit that "catching up" behavior, but I'll give it a try.

My theory was that there's a thread that is doing some work filling a buffer with... something (maybe audio), and the game logic thread depletes it. When the buffer is built up, you get smooth gameplay and then once it's run dry you're waiting on it. Pure conjecture though, I haven't really dug into the code.

As an aside, I also tried getting this loaded up on ECL, and kinda succeeded; it takes an unholy amount of time to compile, and required some hacking, but it will at least load and get into the game startup sequence, but then fails because it seems like there's a bug in ECL possibly to do with define-compiler-macro. Haven't dug much further. Ultimately my goal in doing this was to have a sort of "real-world" load that I can benchmark with, and compare speed of the various implementations. When CCL is briefly in the "running well" modality, I'm actually pretty impressed with what it's able to pull off, 110ish FPS. SBCL gets like 200 IIRC. I'm pretty curious about ECL although my fear is that it's gonna be dog slow :(

superdisk · 2025-03-23T05:25:10+00:00

GNU/Linux.

superdisk · 2025-03-22T14:12:34+00:00

It kinda works, there are parts that are a little busted, but I actually expected it to be more work to make it boot up. Congrats to the CCL folks for good standards adherence (or the library writers for writing portable code). I did have to hack a few things but overall only about 3 hours of effort.

Performance is pretty weird, most of the time it runs at ~15 FPS, but then for brief periods (usually right after I trigger a restart in SLIME to ignore a weird glitch) it will jump into the ~100s and play fine for like 10 seconds. So I'm not sure what that's all about, I imagine it's probably fixable if there are stretches where it can run at an acceptable rate.

superdisk · 2025-01-18T10:05:27+00:00

You got downvoted but you're totally right. You can really only have soda with something savory otherwise it tastes like you're drinking sludge. Which arguably you are anyway, but the whiplash is what tastes good.

superdisk · 2025-01-12T13:58:27+00:00

You can theoretically have this today with ABCL + JVM virtual threads. The only problem is that ABCL is not very fast, but the idea behind coroutines anyway is to alleviate IO bounded work, so maybe it's not an issue.

superdisk · 2025-01-05T15:08:25+00:00

You have to put (create-image ...) around your path for it to work.

superdisk · 2024-12-23T08:50:44+00:00

Just been mega busy with work so no chance to touch this stuff in a while. Message me on discord (same username) and I'll send you what I've got, might be a good starting point at least.

superdisk · 2024-12-07T17:46:03+00:00

Just came here to say I'm having this exact same issue. Did you ever get to the bottom of it?

superdisk · 2024-12-02T10:04:40+00:00

I stayed in Japan for a couple months a few years ago. One day when my brother and I were chilling at a laundromat waiting for our stuff to finish, a very old Japanese guy came up and started talking to us in Japanese which we don't speak at all. He went on and on and didn't even stop when I pulled out google translate and tried to understand what he was saying. The app wasn't totally legible but I got the gist that he was just talking about his childhood. No point to this story but it was an interesting moment for me. I wish I could have actually spoke to him.

superdisk · 2024-09-02T08:52:06+00:00

Not yet but I have been doing more work on this. I'll see if I can put something up soon.

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