Hiii I'm Bucky!

[bucky1729]

(ok I’ve been putting this off for long enough)

Hi all! I’m Bucky!

I’m a mechanical engineering student working on getting my master’s degree, with a focus on marine monitoring and engineering , and reducing the negative effects of humans on the ocean , particularly with things like sound and underwater construction.

I’ve had an interest in games and game development for a while and decided to give it a go about a year ago. So far I’ve participated in a few jams and found myself enjoying working on pixel art. Here’s some of the stuff I’ve worked on (and some works in progress):

I do also have a more ‘long term’ game project that I’ve started working on which is a 2D platformer that plays around with parallax background effects, but I’m still figuring out core ideas and mechanics. I look forward to sharing as I make progress!

Interesting things to ask me about: that time I manually counted and measured the size of hundreds of bubbles for a research project , work I did with high-speed photography , the pain and suffering I am subjecting myself to in my effort to collect all golden strawberries in Celeste , the reason why I use 1729 in my usernames , or why my favourite programming language is MATLAB. (Before all the rage comes in, just joking on that last one , I’ve been forced to use it a lot, and it’s much easier to bear it if you can convince yourself it’s good.)

Great to meet you all!

Here’s my itch page for the jam games I’ve worked on: https://bucky1729.itch.io
And my bsky where I sometimes post pixel art: @bucky1729.bsky.social on Bluesky

[exodrifter]

Welcome to the community, Bucky! Happy to see you here. ^^

I’m curious, why do you use 1729 in your username? I enjoy seeing the thought process behind the names people pick.

[bucky1729]

I’ve often had trouble deciding on a unique username, so I usually opted for name/nickname followed by meaningful numbers, whether it be birth year or favourite number or such. But sometimes those felt too personal.

So I remembered a story from an old maths teacher I had, about an Indian mathematician who was once in England and was visited by a colleague. The colleague commented about the number of the taxi he had ridden, which was 1729, saying it was ‘rather dull’. The mathematician replied, that no, it was very interesting because it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways (i.e. 1^3 + 12^3 = 1 + 1728 = 1729 and 9^3 + 10^3 = 729 + 1000 = 1729). (apparently these are called taxicab numbers: Taxicab number - Wikipedia)

Anyways, this was from one of my favourite teachers, and the story about this number stuck with me for some reason, so I decided to use it.

It’s unique, it has no other weird historic significance as far as I’m aware, and it shows how much of a maths nerd I am , so it works.

[exodrifter]

Ah yes, Ramanujan! Very cool guy. I know about him from Numberphile videos, his life story is quite interesting. Thanks for sharing.

[Anihan]

I will take careful note of this new piece of buckE lore.