What I've been doing with my life for a few weeks:

Playing around with the Skyrim Creation Kit.

So I finally bit the bullet and decided enough fiddling and tweaking 
(there were a few things I wanted to do that are beyond me) and uploaded 
my Skyrim mod to the Steam workshop already.

Stupid scripting tricks, including:
- location-triggered lights (because Skyrim's render engine is stoopid 
and can only handle, what, 3 lights at a time? so I set it up so the 
lights are only active if you're in the right place, else not.  well, 
except for one...)
- a candle you can turn on and off!  woohoo!
- a pair of archery targets that reward your marksmanship skill for 
hitting them, and moreso for bullseye (wanted to make a moving target, 
but playing around with stuff resulted in some ugly bug-behaviour)
- a cage that slowly drains your health down to 15%, because I wanted to 
train my restoration magics without having to hunt down one or another 
draugr blade trap that'd take forever to whittle me down
- a 'sun' light source that shines through some windows and causes 
lovely 'scattering' effect, which moves across the walls and floor as 
the day progresses (was a bit of work to get this functioning, and some 
questionable math...and I think it's causing some lag, but if they 
/could/ do this, why didn't Bethesda, in the regular game places that 
have this...?)  Looks absolutely lovely...even if Skyrim's sun cheats 
and doesn't have any seasonal variation in its path.  That does reduce 
the strain on the CPU...
- ...enough for me to throw an orrery at it, representing Mercury, 
Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, and Jupiter.  my crowning achievement, I 
guess you'd say...the code for it's been on a long journey, from a few 
sources on the internet, through a few iterations on my MUD, and now 
into glorious 3D form in Skyrim.  except the solar system has absolutely 
nothing to do with the universe in the game (Space Sphere mod 
notwithstanding).

And, if anybody wants to check it out for themselves...
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=100555194

Next step is to somehow build a raytracer...

(just kidding--THAT math is /way/ beyond me)

--
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.sjcook.com

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