Category: Blather

Categories
Blather Software and Programming

Humbug 2006

Looking at my “friends list”, I ran across three “grr, how I hate New Year! It sucks!”-type posts. The mandated new year’s cheer appears to provoke some people’s inner misanthrope. Of course, these aren’t really true misanthrophic specimen: they are cloudy weather curmudgeons (the complement to “fair weather friends”), cuddly grumps that surround themselves with company to laugh at their grumbles. To these people I say:

Shutthefuckup. At least we don’t have Christmas. THAT would give you something to grumble about.

True misanthropists don’t need special occassions to shun human company.

I just spent the first two hours of 2006 playing with <GEEK> the clusterfuck that is Worpress 2.0, and with improving the RSS feed for comments on my blog (which you wouldn’t know about, since I deleted every reference to it from my template). </GEEK> This will help me socialize asynchronously, and thus shun human company more effectively.

At least that’s the story I’m sticking to.

Categories
Blather long Roleplaying Software and Programming

The graveyard of stillborn blog entries

Yep, it’s another one of those Fridays where I wake up at noon, spend an entire day reading the web, and generally mess up my inner clock by not even looking out the window or talking to a human. Then, at 2AM, I am seized with the need to do something so that the day won’t be a total write-off, and… post something to my blog.
Because that would make it a worthy day.
And since I can’t be bothered doing something worthwhile (like a recap, or a review of all good/bad media consumed this year), I am just going to clean away my “drafts” – unpublished weblog posts that I entered but never finished or published. This is going to be short.
Geek stuff:

  • Perl best practices, an article by Damien Conway that is probably worth reading even if program in a different language.
  • Becoming familiar with a too-big codebase? – I ran across this discussion in PerlMonks which touched a nerve. I shudder to recall the hairy code I was handed, and how long it was before I learned to use the perl debugger, which is pretty easy (compared to some of the C++ debuggers I’ve had to use) and very useful.
  • One day I should read this online book, called Text Processing in Python. God knows I’ve had to process some text in my time…
  • I meant to link to an utility called SlickRun. Well, now I did.
  • The Open JavaScript Archive Network is an attempt to do for Javascript what CPAN does for Perl. CPAN is probably the most amazing thing about Perl (beyond the language itself); a single, central repository for libraries and extensions, filled with wonderous stuff, that seems to have just the right thing you need for, well, anything. Almost.
  • The Internet keeps taking to me about AJAX, which is the technique of using Javascript to load stuff from the server without reloading the whole page. A couple of months ago, I helped upload and debug a trivial web form that someone (Guy Weiner, I think) managed to write using AJAX (and XSL!) instead of simple CGI. I shuddered at the wrong-headedness of this. That’s probably why I thought this was really keen: AJFORM, a simple javascript library that lets you make normal web forms “AJAX-enabled”, while still let them work normally as a fallback. I thought this could be a good way to try and gradually convert a regular CGI application to a more responsive AJAXish interface.
  • A list of CSS tips. You can never have enough CSS tips.

I also made a list of books I read more-or-less over the past year. Actually, from sometime in May to about a month or two ago. Somehow it looks too short. I think there are gaps. Or maybe I don’t read much.

The king of Elfland’s Daughter (Lord Dunsany)
Ash (Mary Gentle)
In Search of Zarathustra (Paul Kriwaczek, non-fiction)
Dread Empire’s Fall: The Praxis (Walter Jon Williams)
Down and out in the Magic Kingdom (Cory Doctrow)
Singularity Sky (Charlie Stross)
Atrocity Archives (Charlie Stross)
Once on a Time (AA Milne)
Rapture of the Nerds (Charlie Stross and Cory Doctrow)
The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass (Philip Pullman)
Anubis Gates (Tim Powers)
Darwin’s Children (Greg Bear)
A scattering of Jades (Alexander C. Irvine)
Lucas Kasha (Lloyd Alexander, Hebrew translation)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Prince (JK Rowling)
A Fine and Private Place (Peter Beagle)
The Gate of Worlds (Robert Silverberg)

And look, here’s a free soundtrack from a Conan computer game! Great if you need moody music and have over-used the Basil Poledouris masterpiece.

Other stuff, random passing fragments embedded in blog like woodchips in amber: I wanted to lament about losing the iGo Juice universal power supply I had for my laptop when I moved, and having to buy a new power supply for my weird Dell laptop. But since then, the laptop with its newly-bought power supply have been stolen. I wanted to rave that my brother was one of the winners of a big animation contest; I wanted to rant about assorted roleplaying theory posts I read, and what they make me think about my gaming in general and Il Nostro Gioco in particular. I wanted to write about going to see Suzie at the end of a kind-of bumming day back in July, and being overcome with emotion and beauty – that entry had just this opening line: Candyfloss clouds grazing in a watercolor sky, sunset shadows cutting across golden fields, waves of greenery breaking by the side of the road. Such a beautiful day, I drove to see Suzie.)
And finally, I once wanted to blog this funny quote from Nick Locking’s LJ:

I just made [[his girlfriend – DD]] watch The Empire Strikes Back, the undeniably best Star Wars film (seeing as it doesn’t contain ANY dodgy bits at all and has some of the best action scenes in film history, and I was expecting a bit of her trademark charming inability to understand nerd things as a result of being extremely Italian, but nothing really prepared me for her pointing at the AT-ATs majestically stomping over the snowfields of Hoth in puzzlement and asking “what animal are they supposed to be?” I can’t even begin to understand how her mind works. It’s like she’s from an anti-matter universe or something.

Categories
Blather Science Fiction and Fantasy

We’ll always have Jadis

Bo dragged me to see Narnia at 2AM this Friday. Throughout the movie I kept wondering if the image quality was somehow compromised, like those horribly low-res posters they have up, with Tilda Swinton in the polar bear drawn war chariot. I crave more pixels! Particularly if those pixels reflect the delectable sight of this movie’s White Witch. Tilda Swinton and Jadis queen of Narnia, two longtime crushes that go great together… I’ve adore both since I first encountered them, in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio and C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew respectively.
But this infatuation doesn’t blind me to the fact that the White Witch, that pagan goddess in a Christian mystery, is trapped here in a Pantomime. Or, as Shimon Adaf put it, a Festigal (which is the local equivalent).
At least there aren’t any songs.

Categories
Blather

KOOOONG!

King Kong is a Big Movie for a Big Ape. Has this movie been compared yet to one of those painstakingly constructed reproductions of cathedrals built by obsessives from matchsticks and macaroni? It’s like that, except that Peter Jackson has built his devotional reconstruction out of the finest pixels and the glow of their reflection in Naomi Watts’ dewy eyes. And he’s lavished visual riches and attention on every fragment of the original film’s story, from the 1930s scene-setting to the giant bugs.
Now, despite the cramped seating (the Seven Stars Mall at Herzelia; Cinema City sucks at internet orders), the film swept me up like a dream. But three hours was too much for the rabble of kids and venomous plebes (Ars’im). So at the most heartbreaking moment of the story, some ass yells, Die already! at the screen.
Now, maybe my phobia of crowds wore my fragile anger management faculities, or perhaps I got too excited by watching Kong wrestle tyranosaurs, but at that moment, I would gladly have cleared out the cinema with a tommy gun, moved to a more comfortable seat on row 9, and ordered the projectionist to start the film from the top, so I could see it without interruptions.
Hmm. Except for the audience, I think my only complaint with the film is Adrien Brody. He’s a nice guy and all, but, two-fisted playwright and love interest? uh, no.
Oh, and in Jackson’s version, the reason Kong falls for Ann Darrow is the same reason Jessica Rabbit falls for Roger: She makes him laugh.

Categories
Blather Oddities

M/F/Non

Seed: Girls Gone Wild … for Monkeys

The researchers found that while straight men are only aroused by females of the human variety, straight women are equally aroused by all human sexual activity, including lesbian, heterosexual and homosexual male sex, and at least somewhat aroused by nonhuman sex.

[via kottke]
This build on research done earlier (by some of the same people) which showed that a man’s sexual arousal correlates very well with his sexual orientation, but women (both gay and straight) get aroused by pretty much any old thing (One presumes that it isn’t an artifact of their testing equipment…)
I found the commentary by the female psychologist at the end of the article entertaining: she’s clearly trying to explain why women’s reactions are normal, and wondering why men react differently:

Barbara Bartlik, a psychiatry professor at Cornell, said she was not alarmed by the women’s response to the nonhuman stimuli.
“I don’t know why this has surprised everybody that women get aroused watching humans and animals,” she says. “Animals, because of the way they function in an uninhibited manner…can be very arousing to look at when they copulate.”
However, Bartlik was surprised that the men did not have the same response as the women.
“I would wonder if the men weren’t concerned about being labeled as homosexual or perverse by being interested in these things, and therefore their erections were inhibited,” she said.

Uh, right. Men restrain their erections because of their stronger inhibitions. Clearly, a statement made by someone who was never on the other end of the penis.
I wonder if male arousal is focused on the actual act of sex, while females arousal is tied to the concept of sex. Men think about having sex, women think about sex in the abstract.
Women. Abstract Thinking.
Now that’s bizzare.