It’s been a while since stuff has happened on the site, and for that I do apologize. There was a family tragedy which has taken up a lot of my emotional bandwidth of late, and editing the podcast was something I just wasn’t up for.  However, one is finished and will be up soon, and I hope to have another up on a slightly accelerated schedule.

In exchange, though, it did cause me to throw myself into programming.  I think it’s the combination of programming requiring such intense focus for me, and of my finally starting to get the hang of it.

Well, I say that, anyway…

  while playlist2 == []:
        for songs in range(int(playlist_length)):
            playlist.append(random.choice(song_list))
        for songs in range(int(playlist_length)):
            playlist2.append(playlist[songs][0])
        playlist.clear()
        for songs in range(int(playlist_length)):
            playlist.append(playlist2[songs].rstrip())
        song_names_in_playlist(playlist)<

Sometimes, it seems like the gap between how I solve problems, and how someone who knows what they’re doing would solve some of these problems is a chasm.

In case you’re wondering, that was my attempt to take a list of song filenames (e.g. C:\Band\Album\Song.mp3), and strip out a bunch of junk data that got attached to them so I could use a particularly annoying Python library to get their ID3 data.  And in doing so, I wind up with what is basically a list playing hot potato with itself.

Programming sometimes seems fractal in its difficulty.  Every time I reason out a solution to one problem, it seems to ripple backwards to cause another.  And every time I learn something that gives me an awesome new idea, I need to learn 4 other things to implement it.

But, my slight whining aside, I did finally get myself a Github account.  So if you’d like to see some of my stuff for yourself, you can check it out at https://github.com/Spitball-Sessions.

Right now, the only things I really have worth checking out are the stat generator I made for my game Dragon Kvetch and a playlist randomizer from which the above code came.  Both are still in the works, though.

But don’t worry.  I plan to come back to programming games once I know what I’m doing.  Or, at least, once I can fake it.  I’m not sure, either, how I managed to go off on this 4 month detour, but I’ll get back there.