T w e n t y S i d e d

…and probably don’t want to.

A meme, eh? Just the thing for a day like today, when the sum total of what I got is nuthin’. Still, this is a little tricky, because I have the most “insteresting” ones already listed on the About Me page. So now I need five more.

Okay, five stuffs you don’t know about me:

1. I have almost no sense of smell. In my formative years, I had severe allergies and my nose was always running. Because of this (I suspect) my sense of smell was greatly retarded. Once in a while I’ll catch a whiff of something, but mis-identify the odor by a mile. My wife and I have these sorts of conversations all the time:

   ME: Hey, did somebody burn some toast?

   WIFE: No, but I just used Lysol and sprayed the trash cans.

   ME: (sniff sniff) Oh yeah. That must be it.

   I don’t know how to explain this. Yes, I know the two smells are different. I have no idea why I’ll smell one thing and think it’s something else. Sometimes it works in my favor (bad stuff smells nice) sometimes it works against me (good stuff smells bad) sometime it doesn’t work at all (what do you mean? You can’t smell that, Shamus? How could you miss it?) and sometimes it works as it should. I can’t identify any pattern to this. Most of the time I smell nothing. That’s just the way it is.

2. I live the life of a shut-in. I work from home, and I usually don’t like going out. I’ve gone for weeks at a stretch without leaving the house, pretty much without noticing. Once in a while someone will ask me, “When was the last time you went outside?” Sometimes I can’t come up with an answer, and I’ll realize that I need to get out of the house just to see if any new building or roads have been built since the last time I drove. I also don’t listen to the radio (not even in the car) and I never watch TV, so the intersnizzle is pretty much my only link to the outside world.
3. I’ve wanted to program computers since I was ten. I always had a facination with computer games (arcade games, Atari, Pong) and once I saw that you could program them (you could buy a tiny keyboard and a “Basic” cartridge for the Atari 2600) I became obsessed with the idea. I would feel ill – kind of anxious and sick to the stomach – when I thought about the fact that this thing was going on and I was missing out. It took me a few years to get my hands on what I wanted, but it eventually worked itself out.

   And now that I program computers for a living, I find I enjoy writing more than programming. I haven’t tried it professionally, but the grass over there sure is green.

4. I can pull my right wrist out of joint at will. I had an accident on a swing as a teenager that really screwed up my wrist. It was a pretty stupid blunder so I didn’t make a big deal about it and tried to downplay the injury. I never went to a doctor or had it looked it. It took a long time to heal. Now I can tug on my right hand and yank it out of place. My hand slides down and a little back towards the forearm, and you can see all the tendons on the back of my hand stick out.

   It makes a nasty popping sound when I snap it back into place.

   See, now that is something you really didn’t want to know.

5. I was very unpopular in High School. I sort of have a reputation now as a humorous person, but in High School I had a repellant and cringe-inducing sense of humor. I didn’t know how to relate to people. Once I graduated and started knocking around in the real world I started to grow up for real. It happened very fast. In High School I was a “loser” acording to normal social calculus. I went from that to being very popular and pretty much universally respected in Business School. It was very strange, and it took me a while to figure out how much of it was a change in environment and how much was a change in me. It was a little of both.

Jay posted the lineage of this meme. I thought it was really interesting, so I’ll do the same. The history goes: Susan Wu » Raph Koster » Broken Toys » Mythical Blog » MMODig » Gaming Bitch » World IV » Jay Barnson » Me.

LATER: I’m supposed to tag others. Um. If this looks like fun, then consider yourself “Tagged”. Get to it.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Yeah. I’m writing documentation at work today. After eight hours of writing, I’m kind of not in the mood for… more writing. So…

Lots of new people coming to the site these days. I just realized that a lot of people have never even seen the Rollercoaster movie, much less some of the stuff deeper in my archives. Rather than coming up with something clever today, I’m just going to point to some of my older posts that might be of interest to new readers.

Seven Springs

A true story of a couple of strange days in 1990, my senior year in high school.
Part One: Naked Girls and A Hotel-Sized Prank.
Part Two: The Terrors of Room 102, and Lessons Learned.

The Terrain Project

This is a project where I detailed the writing of a terrain engine, more or less from scratch. The posts are written in plain language and are readable by non-coders who might be curious how 3d graphics work and what challenges a game designer might face.

I know Kung-Fu (Part 1) (Part 2)

The depth and complexity of the common First-Person Shooter.

More “best of” posts here.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.