Icon Animation Blend Spaces without Triangulation

 

Icon Quaternion Weighted Average

 

Icon BVHView

 

Icon Dead Blending Node in Unreal Engine

 

Icon Propagating Velocities through Animation Systems

 

Icon Cubic Interpolation of Quaternions

 

Icon Dead Blending

 

Icon Perfect Tracking with Springs

 

Icon Creating Looping Animations from Motion Capture

 

Icon My Favourite Things

 

Icon Inertialization Transition Cost

 

Icon Scalar Velocity

 

Icon Tags, Ranges and Masks

 

Icon Fitting Code Driven Displacement

 

Icon atoi and Trillions of Whales

 

Icon SuperTrack: Motion Tracking for Physically Simulated Characters using Supervised Learning

 

Icon Joint Limits

 

Icon Code vs Data Driven Displacement

 

Icon Exponential Map, Angle Axis, and Angular Velocity

 

Icon Encoding Events for Neural Networks

 

Icon Visualizing Rotation Spaces

 

Icon Spring-It-On: The Game Developer's Spring-Roll-Call

 

Icon Interviewing Advice from the Other Side of the Table

 

Icon Saguaro

 

Icon Learned Motion Matching

 

Icon Why Can't I Reproduce Their Results?

 

Icon Latinendian vs Arabendian

 

Icon Machine Learning, Kolmogorov Complexity, and Squishy Bunnies

 

Icon Subspace Neural Physics: Fast Data-Driven Interactive Simulation

 

Icon Software for Rent

 

Icon Naraleian Caterpillars

 

Icon The Scientific Method is a Virus

 

Icon Local Minima, Saddle Points, and Plateaus

 

Icon Robust Solving of Optical Motion Capture Data by Denoising

 

Icon Simple Concurrency in Python

 

Icon The Software Thief

 

Icon ASCII : A Love Letter

 

Icon My Neural Network isn't working! What should I do?

 

Icon Phase-Functioned Neural Networks for Character Control

 

Icon 17 Line Markov Chain

 

Icon 14 Character Random Number Generator

 

Icon Simple Two Joint IK

 

Icon Generating Icons with Pixel Sorting

 

Icon Neural Network Ambient Occlusion

 

Icon Three Short Stories about the East Coast Main Line

 

Icon The New Alphabet

 

Icon "The Color Munifni Exists"

 

Icon A Deep Learning Framework For Character Motion Synthesis and Editing

 

Icon The Halting Problem and The Moral Arbitrator

 

Icon The Witness

 

Icon Four Seasons Crisp Omelette

 

Icon At the Bottom of the Elevator

 

Icon Tracing Functions in Python

 

Icon Still Things and Moving Things

 

Icon water.cpp

 

Icon Making Poetry in Piet

 

Icon Learning Motion Manifolds with Convolutional Autoencoders

 

Icon Learning an Inverse Rig Mapping for Character Animation

 

Icon Infinity Doesn't Exist

 

Icon Polyconf

 

Icon Raleigh

 

Icon The Skagerrak

 

Icon Printing a Stack Trace with MinGW

 

Icon The Border Pines

 

Icon You could have invented Parser Combinators

 

Icon Ready for the Fight

 

Icon Earthbound

 

Icon Turing Drawings

 

Icon Lost Child Announcement

 

Icon Shelter

 

Icon Data Science, how hard can it be?

 

Icon Denki Furo

 

Icon In Defence of the Unitype

 

Icon Maya Velocity Node

 

Icon Sandy Denny

 

Icon What type of Machine is the C Preprocessor?

 

Icon Which AI is more human?

 

Icon Gone Home

 

Icon Thoughts on Japan

 

Icon Can Computers Think?

 

Icon Counting Sheep & Infinity

 

Icon How Nature Builds Computers

 

Icon Painkillers

 

Icon Correct Box Sphere Intersection

 

Icon Avoiding Shader Conditionals

 

Icon Writing Portable OpenGL

 

Icon The Only Cable Car in Ireland

 

Icon Is the C Preprocessor Turing Complete?

 

Icon The aesthetics of code

 

Icon Issues with SDL on iOS and Android

 

Icon How I learned to stop worrying and love statistics

 

Icon PyMark

 

Icon AutoC Tools

 

Icon Scripting xNormal with Python

 

Icon Six Myths About Ray Tracing

 

Icon The Web Giants Will Fall

 

Icon PyAutoC

 

Icon The Pirate Song

 

Icon Dear Esther

 

Icon Unsharp Anti Aliasing

 

Icon The First Boy

 

Icon Parallel programming isn't hard, optimisation is.

 

Icon Skyrim

 

Icon Recognizing a language is solving a problem

 

Icon Could an animal learn to program?

 

Icon RAGE

 

Icon Pure Depth SSAO

 

Icon Synchronized in Python

 

Icon 3d Printing

 

Icon Real Time Graphics is Virtual Reality

 

Icon Painting Style Renderer

 

Icon A very hard problem

 

Icon Indie Development vs Modding

 

Icon Corange

 

Icon 3ds Max PLY Exporter

 

Icon A Case for the Technical Artist

 

Icon Enums

 

Icon Scorpions have won evolution

 

Icon Dirt and Ashes

 

Icon Lazy Python

 

Icon Subdivision Modelling

 

Icon The Owl

 

Icon Mouse Traps

 

Icon Updated Art Reel

 

Icon Tech Reel

 

Icon Graphics Aren't the Enemy

 

Icon On Being A Games Artist

 

Icon The Bluebird

 

Icon Everything2

 

Icon Duck Engine

 

Icon Boarding Preview

 

Icon Sailing Preview

 

Icon Exodus Village Flyover

 

Icon Art Reel

 

Icon LOL I DREW THIS DRAGON

 

Icon One Cat Just Leads To Another

Painkillers

Created on April 22, 2013, 10:10 p.m.

I swear I rescued her sandal from the pond. She would never admit it. She said I was too drunk to remember.

The morning after I'd had one of my first, and worst, hangovers. I remember sitting under the bus shelter in the blistering heat. I was sat surrounded by camping bags, deep in the valley. I had volunteered to watch the bags alone while the others sat in the bus station. My belief at the time was one of karma - that eventually this selfless act would be rewarded by the universe in some twist of events. I should have wished for my hangover to go away.

We were sixteen and on a camping trip by the beach. Some other kids had left us their crate of wine. A couple of us had drunk most of it in that sand dune crater, bits of charcoal and glass littering the sand. We got pretty drunk, splashing the wine on the sand.

She was pretty drunk too - we kissed. She was sitting on my lap and swinging her feet over the pond. I tried to kiss her again but she didn't want to. She told me to stop, shifted her weight, and swept her feet across the surface. I saw her sandal roll off over her long thin feet and into the water. As it was falling I reached in and pulled it out from under the water. I slipped it back onto her foot. She didn't notice a thing. Or so I remembered. Shortly after that we were separated. She was upset that I had tried to kiss her, that I had kissed her.

Not just my hangover was painful that next morning. The group had tightened support around her. The cold shoulder received was a refreshing contrast to my dry mouth and the penetrating sunshine. No one wanted to hear how I'd rescued her sandle. Sitting amongst the bags I was acutely aware of all my other flaws. I was sweaty, awkward, and I wasn't popular. I had to get it together. I had to work - for what I had done wrong.

Formally I blamed the wine. It was in the dark evening sky, the cold vast sea, the pond that sandal dropped into. I remember peeking into that thick black liquid, fishing around for the sandal. I couldn't see it, I could only feel it. Everything had been a reflective inky black, moving in slow motion.

Before that it was so different. Standing on the cliffs at the coast. It was windy and cold. The sun was going down. I watched the tufts of grass and the small flowers rocking in the wind. My thoughts were toward the future. What grown man would I be in five years? Would I stand on these cliffs again? Who would I be in love with? I thought I knew the person's character, but I wasn't clear on the specifics.

 

Surprisingly I wasn't too far off. Fast forward I was standing on a different set of cliffs near Newcastle. But I was with the same girl, and the same sandals. By some chance she had ended up going to the same University as me. We'd lost contact during sixth form, and had been in separate halls in the first year, but became close friends in the second year. We dated for a while. I didn't have much experience in that. We went mainly on dinner dates. I don't think we had a lot to talk about, but we certainly had a lot to say to each other.

For some reason she had mentioned her diary. It had stuck in my head. I had kept a diary too, until a similar time. When I asked her how she felt about it she laughed in embarrassment. She was glad of what she had become now. She said she could barely relate to the person in her diary. She had changed since then.

My diary I had destroyed. Not because I was ashamed of it. One thing was true. The person who wrote my diary was a gossip - petty, emotional and reactive. But I had never thought of that person as the real me. That person had fulfilled a outlet, but was not the whole person, least of all the most honest expression. I don't know if I had changed. I felt I had just drifted forward.

When I had first started my diary I had had juvenile dreams of it (once I became famous) being stumbled upon. Read by others for interest in what experiences had shaped my early life. In reality the content was pretty boring. I was proud. Too proud to be remembered for that. I wanted to be remembered for the good things.

 

She told me about the time she had overdosed. I tried to imagine what it would taste like. Painkillers crumbling on the tongue; a synthetic white dust. It must be a sticky, bitter taste. Rolling around a paracetamol tablet in the mouth, slimy powder, anxious and knotted. A familiar hint of worry and suffering. Like the nervousness before an exam - knotted stomach, nauseous illness.

I imagined her lying in her bedroom vomiting and fainting. Her sandals slip off her feet and onto the cheap, brown student carpet. Like a silent movie. I imagined one of her flatmates knocking on the door, finding her choking on the floor, and calling the emergency services. I imagined the quiet panic and the sense of danger and loss.

She told me something explicitly. That the cheating ex boyfriend hadn't come to visit her in hospital. This was something she could not believe. "How could he not come and see me?" She had said. I had cringed. I knew I would not have visited her. On that rocking warm bus by the sea I had closed my doors to that currency. Shame. The taste of that white power she had so readily consumed. She had had so much to spend and no one to pay. Not even me.

Worse. He was happier now. Had a super hot girlfriend and a good job, had graduated first class.

Back on that bus how I had wished for painkillers. How I would have longed for that taste. For all future hangovers. Painkillers readily available by the bedside and a cold glass of water. I was as bad as him. A dog. I would not learn. I would be stoned in public. I would walk out the next day and try to smile.

I remembered she had spoken something to me that day, as I had asked around for paracetamol.

"Painkillers are bad for you." She had said. "Taking them builds up a resistance, a dependency. Suffering is always a better approach. If you can do without the painkillers you should."

I still liked her even when she was being spiteful. And I think she really had cared for me. But I gave no reassurance to her dark kernel. To her I was still the young boy who had never accepted his shame. She believed punishment was required for reward - and would hurt herself to get what she wanted. She would never admit I had rescued her sandle from the pond because I hadn't deserved to. When a person hates the good that happens to bad people, they question themselves when bad happens to them.

github twitter rss