This one doesn't start off being about Perl. Greppensie for "###PERL" if you'd like to skip the part where I ramble about what I did today.
###DRAMA
Early this afternoon Amy IM'd me and made concrete our tentative plans to hang out today. The Plan was simply to run get a DVD she wanted and then watch some MST3K. Like most plans, it did not survive contact with the enemy.
We got to the local megaplex and she found her DVD quickly enough. At checkout, however, she discovered that her wallet was missing from her bag. I covered her, but she started having a low-level freakout over the whereabouts of her IDs and credit/debit cards.
It wasn't in her car. It wasn't in her apartment. Phone calls to everyone she was out with the night before revealed that it wasn't in any of THEIR cars or apartments either. She went to check the car and apartment of a nearby friendly ex in person.
In the interim, I made the aquaintance of her roommate, who was pleasant to talk to and the owner of a Snowbook. Never an icebreaker needed when you're both Mac users:
HER: HiNiceToMeetYouSorryILookLikeThisIJustWokeUp.
ME: Oooh, Snowbook!
HER: Yeah, it's great!
Thus was the time until Amy's return happily consumed. Turned out that the wallet wasn't over there, but she *did* catch him prepping for a nice big wank session, which was trés amusant. She gave up and called her mom, asking her to initiate card-cancelling procedures.
There was one last-ditch place she wanted to check, so we headed that way before getting some dinner. Seems that after becoming quite inebriated last night, she and a friend slid/fell down a slope on their way back to their car, and the hypothesis was that her purse may have been wrenched about and been at just the right angle that her wallet fell out during the descent. I thought this complete bollocks because I couldn't for the life of me figure out what kind of "slope" one could fall down in downtown Athens, but (1) I wasn't there and (2) no reason to be an arse to a friend who's already on the upset side.
As it turned out, she musta been REALLY drunk, because the slope in question was an extraordinarilly steep and narrow landscaped section of the grounds of the local civic center, around the back, by the loading dock. This is located within the accepted definition of "downtown", but is pretty far from the watering holes. She claimed that they decided to visit someone living nearby and forgot where their car was, and stumbled through there in the darkness.
Sure enough, there was an obvious track through the pinestraw mulch where someone slid down the embankment, and there in the resultant heap of straw at the bottom was her wallet. Unbelievable.
This bit of luck made her go from kinda depressed to pretty dang bouyant in a snap, which made me happy because who likes having their friends feel bad?
By now it was approaching 1800h, her car was low on fuel, and she was getting really hungry, which was exacerbating her already stress-exacerbated hangover headache, so we headed for the nearby Kroger shopping center where both gasoline and good, cheap Mexican cuisine were to be found.
As we crossed campus and neared my apartment, however, traffic began to get more and more congested, which was very unusual for that time of day (there is a light afternoon rush, but it starts around 1600 and clears out almost entirely by 1730), and there were cars backed up on sideroads which are never congested. Eventually we were forced by fuel concerns to change our plan and head for the nearest gas station ASAP. We escaped the traffic snarl and fueled up easily enough, and decided to head to the desired shopping center via a southern rather than westerly route, but once we neared south/eastern campus again traffic backed up once more.
Eventually we reached Campus Station Road, which is the main thoroughfare across south campus and discovered that *something* was going on at the Riverbend research facility.
Facilit*ies*, actually. There's the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, the Center for Applied Isotope Studies, a large Environmental Protection Agency lab, part of the Genetics department...it's a veritable wonderland of terrifying science.
And it was surrounded by emergency service vehicles.
And there was a helicopter hovering overhead.
And firemen were putting on HAZMAT suits.
Poop.
We followed the direction of the nice fireman waving traffic in the opposite direction from where we wanted to go and drove away fairly quickly. We now know that it was nothing to be alarmed about but at the time we couldn't see any benefit in hanging around.
After that it was all downhill, drama-wise. We enjoyed a nice meal at another branch of the same local Mexican place we were trying to get to before finally making it back to my place and watching a bit of TV.
###PERL
So last night I got this crazy idea. One could extend Games::Nintendo::Mario to include the enemies, powerups, and traps, then write a text-based Mario clone. I imagined it going a little something like this:
You are standing alone on a plain made entirely out of bricks. You begin running forward.
> WAIT
Some bricks pass by overhead. One of them is yellow!
> J
You jump and hit the yellow brick. A mushroom pops out!
> J
You jump and grab the mushroom as it falls from above. You become Super Mario.
Where success or failure is determined by how long it takes you to execute an action after the description is printed (assuming you do the right thing).
A Goombah approaches!
> S
You stomp the Goombah and gain one coin.
A Koopa (Green) approaches!
> S
You attempt to stomp the Koopa but your timing is off. You are no longer Super Mario.
> S
You stomp the Koopa and it slides out of its shell!
> J
Jump (on the shell)
You jump on the Koopa shell but it slides away from the Koopa. The Koopa flips off its back and comes toward you.
>
This appeals to me so much. I am such a tool.
