I awoke from a complex nightmare. I was in London or some city with Deb, I was asked by N. to phone an old lady about an art opportunity, but she appeared aloof and not interested. I then discovered that she was around the corner in the next room, and was some sort of cleaning lady, put up to the deception. I left the place, annoyed, with Deb, and we entered a building, escaping the street to send a text message. It was a dance club, and we stepped down to a dark basement. The room was full of people ballroom dancing, the tango, I think. Deb was whisked away by a man seeking a partner and I tried to skulk near the steps to send my message but was grabbed by a middle-aged woman to be her (unwilling) dance partner. I sent some message and we escaped to the street. We felt lost, but by surprise found ourselves near the railway station to home.
The square in front was full on people, and we shoved through the crowd, anxious not to miss the train. I noticed that my laptop, actually borrowed from Deb, and in a soft satchel or cloth carrier-bag in my left hand, was gone; stolen or fallen. I was in a panic, this had the only copy of the book I was working on, stored on an SD-like card. Deb encouraged us to focus and search, retracing our steps but thought it was stolen, lost forever. I imagined a den of thieves playing with it in a basement. Then I saw three troll-like hobos around a fire; they had a broken half of the laptop. It was ruined, yet, the card was still intact in the slot. Joy! I felt that my work was saved, but we had surely missed our train.
We rushed down an empty street towards the railway station, but were confronted by a villain, perhaps the cowboy on the U.S. cover of the David Bowie album The Man Who Sold The World. To my horror he pulled out a gun a shot Deb in the eye with a large projectile, killing her. I awoke in terror and loss.
I've had a few dreams of missing trains or being lost in distant cities recently, all disturbing.
The day has been another long day of Argus programming, a hot and very dark, very humid day. Deb came to visit after a shopping trip, which was lovely.
I started by obsessively chasing the new and delete operators in both Argus and Prometheus. For years I'd simply used delete, rather than delete[] when needed, and so had created a problems in old code that needed fixing. Occasionally I find the wrong operator and, when there are maybe 100 of the things, it easy to miss one and I've become afraid and a little filled with panic and O.C.D. about tracking them all down.
I added the ability to duplicate actors (tracks) and move them up and down. This was relatively simple. I also added record, play and rehearse graphics to the font, and switched the wrads (word-radians, 65536 degrees per circle) to brads (byte-radians, 256 degrees per circle). 65536 is far too many for Argus, and it makes moving and rotating objects unnecessarily complicated. I also added new skin graphics to Prometheus.
Then the big job of saving and loading actors. The save and load of actors is very complex, as we can save or load any modulators, and any associated geometry, as well as events. These are essentially mini-film files in themselves. This was quite buggy and first and took a lot or iterations and testing to get right. That took me up to 5pm. I feel exhausted and headachey most nights but the end is in sight, I think, however I expect I'll be working on Argus all month. I feel a artless and in need to create or do something, yet Argus is a long-term project, and something that needs to be finished.
I've played electric guitar to a CD in my collection just about every night since the start of July. Last night I chose A Curious Feeling by Tony Banks, one of my all-time favourte albums, but very musically complex to play guitar to - even more than Beethoven's 1st Symphony, which sounds remarkably good on electric guitar! I would love to record all of the Beethoven symphonies with new modern instrumentation, for maximum dynamism.
