Welcome to feuerx.net, the blog that used to be called The YOOL-blog. I'm, feuer, your host tonight. In fact, I've been your host here since 2009 and hopefully will be for a long time, but that's beside the point. The point is, this year is finally coming to a pass, and we all know what that means: a wrap-up!

Well, it doesn't always mean a wrap-up. Last year it didn't. Last december my life was, how to say, in a flux though. There was no stable moment around the last december where I could run a metaphorical ‘git commit -m 'a midwinter wrap-up'‘. After the summer of -15 I spent a lot of time in train running between my GF's then-home and the polytechnic. The christmas of -15 was the first I didn't spend with my parents. When I went to my parents' house I was in a familiar enough environment that writing such a blog text might have been possible, but after a lousy night's sleep off I went to goddamn gran canaria or somesuch.

Suddenly I found meself amidst the january. Were I to graduate, I had to bust my ass off at making a sort-of kind-of thesis in a couple of months. Well, after an almost sleepless couple of months (the only really stressful months I had during my degree) I had a thesis I didn't really feel proud of. Thank $deity proudness isn't necessary for graduation: I was able to graduate last spring and move on with my life.

So, last march I began searching for an apartment in Tampere. A month later I had found such a thing. The first of may, when the rest of the finland was having a heck of a party, I was emptying boxes in my new apartment. Two weeks later the GF moved there too. During those weeks I built a rudimentary portfolio in Clojure. That portfolio was kind-of ridiculous, but I managed to get a job in Clojure. Which was kind of a nice achievement in a world where one has to pay one's bills.

June was spent running around finland. In fact I think I ended up visiting Tallinn too. By the end of june I was in London. None of those trips were really important in the context of this blog. They were cool though, especially the UK one. I bought a fuckload of books: about OCaml, OpenGL [12].\d+, git, fantasy...

Three days after my return to finland my appendix began hurting. This was the same day I started working. I managed two days in the office and then that useless organ was taken from me. That episode delayed my "engineering" career by a month. During that month MERPG got the most love it has gotten during this year and I finally started to reap the fruits of that experimentation. The idea of having a lisp with bindings to an UI and graphics toolkit, with which you wrote as much of the engine as possible and used the language also for scripting the levels, could work. The problem with that particular repository is that Java2D's performance is ridicolous and I need to do some game design before I'm able to make use of these fruits of my labour.

In august I finally got to the office where I got to know React, JS and such a lot better than I had realized could be possible.

September, october and november I mostly busted my ass off at work. By the second half of november I had realized I wish to kill the old blogspot based blog. I wrote a hackish blog engine with Clojure/Reagent. That might've been a stupid idea in the age of static blog generators. Most of them seemed to require source material in markdown, though, and my material was in whatever rubbish html format blogspot spat out. Plus, I needed a clojure/cljs web project I could be proud of, so I wrote my own engine. It's not nearly done yet, though. The first half of the year I'm going to spend hacking it. When I'm tired of doing server-client stuff, I'm reading my Small Red Book of OpenGL. I don't know whatever fruits these two plans grow, but I'm fairly certain I'm going to like them.

I'm also reading about Haskell, OCaml and Lambda Calculus in case I ever get the urge to make the weirdest game engine ever and use them for making a compiler and a virtual execution environment.

So that's that, how's your 2016 been?