Winter Nights 2025
2025-10-06 - [54] 7:20
It is that time of year again! Winter Nights! The Winter half of the year begins, even if it did get up to 80F today.
Here is my post from last year's Winter Nights.
I am pleased to say that I kept all of my oaths for this last Lunar year! These 3 update posts show the progress of keeping the oaths.
Now onto making new oaths!
New Oaths
- Read all of the books I currently own but have not read yet. This includes any books I accrue by the next Autumnal Equinox (2026-09-23T00:06:26Z)
- Learn to juggle 3 objects, which at some point must be 3 medium sized onions
- Have all 88 constellations memorized by January 1st (reaffirming this oath)
- Port my Sun/Moon/Earth tracking program "Syzygy" to the Playdate video game console
- Finish the Tarot Card Game Boy project
- Publish the Havamal to a Game Boy ROM
- Solve a Rubik's Cube without cube rotations and with using only F, F', U, U', R, R', D, D', L, and L' moves
- If my body allows for it, be able to run 1.5 miles without a break
Read Books
I own a few books that I have not yet read. I think this Lunar year is a good time to fix that and finish up reading those books
Juggling
Considering I do card tricks, it is a surprise to me that I never learned to juggle. It would be nice to finally just figure it out. Every time I hold multiple onions for cooking, I have an urge to juggle them, and I want to be able to do it.
Memorize the Constellations
I made this oath a little over a year ago, but it was an oath to a single person. I would like to put some more weight on this oath in order to push myself to actually dedicate the time. I do not believe I will be able to quickly point to any star and know which constellation it is in, but I do want to be able to look at a picture of any of the 88 constellations and name out which constellation it is.
Syzygy for Playdate
This has so far turned out considerably more difficult than I expected. Syzygy is currently written in Go and uses 64-bit floats, but numbers on the Playdate in at least Lua are 32-bit floats.
Game Boy Tarot
I am essentially at the final stretch of this project. I just need to actually finish it.
Game Boy Havamal
This is a project I wanted to do for possibly longer than I have wanted to do the Game Boy Tarot Card project. Efficiently encoding the text data will likely be the complicated part of this project.
Restricted Rubik's Cube Solve
I have been very slowly working on a Rubik's Cube application for the Playdate. Instead of making the cube appear 3D, I decided I wanted the cube to be a bit annoying to solve. The Playdate console screen only has 2 colors, essentially black and white. With dithering, I can make 6 different "colors" for the 6 sticker colors. The cube will only be presented as a square that is a single face and the player will be able to do face, up, right, down, and left turns, but not do cube rotations, back turns, or slice turns. To make this cube more annoying to deal with, the faces will be randomized each scramble, so the player will need to move corner and edge pieces around to determine the color scheme of the cube.
This oath is me essentially saying that I promise to be able to solve the cube with those conditions.
1.5 Mile Run
When I was 16, I was able to run 1-1.5 miles without stopping. Now that I am certainly older, I would like to be able to do that again to show that "I still got it".
Winter Nights Cooking
Just like last year and the year before, I made supper in a pumpkin and roasted pumpkin seeds tonight, will make pumpkin bread tomorrow, and will make pumpkin soup the next day. I only really make these things once a year for Winter Nights and I always look forward to it!
Contact/Reply
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