This is more of a chess ramble than it is any other form of log. It's still a daylog though. I've been trying to stuff all my user-subjective rambles in daylogs and keep my non-hidden posts factual, but poetry is difficult not to write. As is fiction. I was going to write Portents of Matrimony Ruin as a way to fill the Iron Noder challenge, but I'm worried IN might make me rush the writing too much. I would prefer it to progress at a natural, organic pace.
I woke up a half-hour late today. I must have been in the deepest layer of sleep when my alarm went off. Usually I wake up easily, but today it was like someone dropped a bowling ball on my stomach. I told my alarm to wake me in half an hour and went right back to sleep. That's one of the problems/benefits of having an Amazon Echo, I suppose — being able to dismiss and set alarms with your voice allows you to shift your alarm forward half an hour while much less alert/awake/lucid than you would have to be to do it on an alarm clock or a phone.
I drank a couple pots of coffee and spent my morning down the E2 rabbit hole. The longer I'm on this website the more time I spend on it. I don't know how I didn't discover E2 sooner. It's probably better that I didn't, though. Anyway, I spent a couple of hours on school stuff. It's for one of my "garbage" courses, I just need the stupid credit. It's considered required but it's legitimately one credit. Anyway, I cleaned a bit, but not much. I also worked on my chess-variant project a small amount, I'm stuck at trying to instantiate the chessboard, which is legitimately step one in a very long list of steps. I don't want to use Python's chess library because it looks non-adaptable, so I'm working from scratch. Right now it's just javascript. Andycyca's recent post reminded me to start rubber-duck programming again, which is a habit I've fallen out of. Which is odd, because I still keep the furby at my desk. Maybe it'll help. Maybe it won't, but it can't hurt to try.
I am an intermediate chess player. I am not good at chess. My chess rating has plateaued at 1200-1400 — sometimes it dips a little lower or a little higher, but I can't seem to get it to stay higher, which I don't like. I played an absolutely sublime chess game yesterday. Made several dumb blunders and still turned the game around brilliantly and won. The guy challenged me to a rematch, and I accepted, and he absolutely pummelled me. Took both my knights and my queen and I only had a knight and a pawn of his. I made three blunders. Two would have been okay, but three? I resigned before I could embarrass myself further. So I suppose we're even. I didn't bother challenging him to a rematch. I've been trying to get my rating up solely by playing more games more often, as well as studying chess puzzles. My goal has been to play six chess games a day; whether against a chess-bot or against a person. Six games seems achieveable, only an hour or less a day. I can set aside an hour a day to play chess, I don't have much to do since I lost my job by way of the pandemic. I didn't manage to get my six games in today, only three. It's too late in the day by now for me to do any form whatsoever of critical thinking.
I've been trying to really, really get my coordinates down. I want to be able to visualize games in my head solely by reading an annotated game. It's a lot easier from white's perspective than it is from black's perspective, just count from left to right and up from the bottom. Right to left and top-down is more confusing and difficult. Once I get them down, though, I'll be able to analyze me games a lot better, as well as visualize the board better.
I came across this writeup today and the guy who wrote it claimed that in 12 months I could get to the point in which I can play with a blindfold. That sounds sick as hell, being able to play with a blindfold. And in as little as twelve months? If I can make progress at such a rate, I'll be a tournament champion in no time. He really seemed like he knew his shit, too. The only downside was that he says I absolutely need a piece of software called Chessmaster 6000, which is evidently from the 90s. I reckon the graphics are a bit dated but the engine is good. It probably doesn't compare to today's engines, but I'm guessing it still plays at a grandmaster level. I could get it on ebay for 5 bucks, but I don't want to spend the money, so I scoured the internet for a free download that didn't look particularly sketchy. The software's been out for 30 years and isn't sold new anymore, I highly doubt the company that made it gives a damn if I download it semi-legally.
Anyway, I found a free download that didn't look particularly sketchy, downloaded it, virus-scanned the .exe file. It all checked out, so I ran the file and it opened a bunch of windows that I couldn't close that asked me things such as "how many people are in your household?" "How much do you earn in a year?" "Are you over 65?" "Do you qualify for xyz insurance policy?". It also installed a bunch of applications that I didn't ask for onto my system. I killed it all from the task manager and uninstalled the applications from my system. I'll have to do a virus scan tonight and hope I don't have anything malicious on my system. I found another free download and this one seems promising. I haven't opened the zip file yet but I have my fingers crossed that it's actually what it claims to be.
Sigh. Here's to another day that I'll never get back.