crazy like everyone

bump.

2008-06-28T17:04:14Z

Every one of the things I initially posted for the unique actions meme has been matched. Go try to match the new ones, won't you?

unique things meme.

2008-06-28T03:35:05Z

since half of my friends list seems to be doing it:

Post 3 things you've done in your lifetime that you don't think anybody else on your friends list has done.
See if anybody else responds with "I've done that." If they have, you need to add another!(2.b., 2.c., etc...)
Have your friends cut & paste this into their journal to see what unique things they've done in their life.

I have:

1) ~~Used the phrase "If you are caught I will disavow all knowledge of your actions" in earnest.~~ (vvvexation)
1a) ~~Stored stolen property in plain sight in a semi-public space for months.~~ (queenpam)
1b) Serenaded the grave of Alexander Hamilton.

2) ~~Said good things about GNU Autoconf. In public.~~ (elsmi, echristo)
2a) Written and deployed spyware. (In a virtuous cause, but I'll count black-hat uses too.)

3) ~~Traveled more than three thousand miles to attend a theatrical performance.~~ (elsmi, shweta_narayan, kaolinfire, papersky)
3a) Visited France, but not Paris.

[EDIT: Man. I lose.] [EDIT AT 11: College shenanigans not a good source of material.]

zwol @ 2008-06-26T18:51:00

2008-06-27T02:02:56Z

All day long my language centers have been tied up with doggerel. I haven't any idea where it came from, and it's not even true to the original conception of the named subjects.

Jellicles VERB 1
CONNECTIVE Jellicles VERB 2
OPTIONAL CONJUNCTION The proof of the pudding is FOUR-BEAT PREDICATE.

The FOUR-BEAT PREDICATE rhymes with VERB 2. Example:

Jellicles act
As Jellicles must
The proof of the pudding is under the crust.

There seems to be an unlimited supply of these things.

Jellicles watch
And Jellicles wait
The proof of the pudding is all down to fate.

They prevent me from thinking about much else.

Jellicles plot
And Jellicles plan
But the proof of the pudding is out of their hands.

I'm hoping this post will exorcise them.

Jellicles work
As Jellicles do
The proof of the pudding is now up to you.

I really do have better things to do.

Jellicles see
What Jellicles will
The proof of the pudding is hardly a thrill.

living the clichés

2008-06-24T00:45:21Z

About an hour ago I threw a cup of water at a wailing cat.

It seems to have worked.

zwol @ 2008-06-19T22:00:00

2008-06-20T05:05:55Z

Another month, another change of scene... queenpam and I are again living in San Diego County. She's got a job here, and I've got a telecommuting job, so here we are. We've been here a few days, actually, but it is only now that the internets are here too. Lots of stuff is still in boxes, and the furniture got beat up in transit. Note to self: do not assume movers have correctly packed the truck, especially when it's not their truck.

Atlanta was the furthest from the sea I'd ever lived, and this is the closest: we're in Del Mar, less than a block from the sea cliffs. (Not, however, on unstable ground.) I much prefer the weather here, also the neighbors and the absence of freight trains; and it's oddly reassuring to see desert plants again, somehow. I'll miss some of the restaurants, and it feels like I didn't spend enough time getting out and about to experience either Atlanta or the South generally. We kept saying we should drive down to Savannah or New Orleans and we never did.

nitpicky grammar thing.

2008-06-03T17:37:32Z

In my dialect of English, the word shall can only be used in the imperative and in fixed idioms.

Implementations shall not truncate lines.
You shall report to Main Barracks at 0800 tomorrow.
A person who shall remain nameless.

Those are fine, but this is not:

*Normally, the program shall install itself in /usr/local/bin.

Star. Boldface, blinking, day-glo, 72-point star. If you are predicting future events based on present actions or conditions, and no volitional actor is involved, the grammar in my head absolutely requires will, no exceptions, no mercy. Volitional actors are only okay to the extent that the sentence can be construed as imperative:

All enlisted men shall obey the chain of command, but must refuse unlawful orders and may object to unwise ones. (military regulations)
?Normally, the teenagers shall go for walks as they see fit. (Instructions to house-sitter?)

Of course I wouldn't be grumping about this on LiveJournal if it were a hypothetical. There is a person who consistently uses shall where I would write will in situations like (4) above. In documentation, which I have to read. Because he does this so consistently, I have to consider the possibility of his dialect sanctioning shall for that sort of prediction. Various online sources address the general shall-vs-will question but do not speak to this particular point, that I can find.

Thus, the question, O my readers: Can you name a dialect that allows or requires shall in (4), and if you were editing formal written English, would you substitute will?

zwol @ 2008-06-02T20:49:00

2008-06-03T01:21:52Z

We're playing God of War again and have gotten Kratos killed, oh, at least fifty times now, by falling off the rafters that you have to thread your way through while avoiding the rotating knife arms. In the Challenge of Hades. If you've played the game I'm sure you know what I mean.

Anyway, every time he dies we just restart from the convenient save point at the beginning of the room with the rafters. Often we think of save points are an entirely out-of-game-world mechanism for making death be a minor frustration (or a major one, as in this case) rather than end of story. In light of my previous rant about the inappropriateness of the "send the hero off to the deathtrap of a temple" strategy for saving Athens, though ... what if we construe them as in-world? Every time Kratos dies, the gods restore him to life and dump him back at the most recent save point or checkpoint. (I guess they aren't allowed to put him ahead of the trap that keeps killing him, for the same reason they can't just teleport him to the room with the godslayer weapon...) There's nothing overt in the game to indicate this, unlike some (e.g. Ultima, as madmanatw pointed out last time) but the save points do say "Zeus offers you the opportunity to save your progress".

If so, Athena's strategy is less horrible than it seemed - Kratos will eventually, if only by sheer luck, get through the temple. Perhaps there won't be any of the city left to save, but at least she can have her revenge on Ares. On the other hand, it's a good thing Kratos is completely insane already, because otherwise he would be after a few dozen cycles of that treatment!

[ETA: Ok, so now we hit a completely different headache: the minotaur boss. All the walkthroughs seem to assume that the O-button minigame is trivial; we are finding it impossible (well, we got it once but only by chance). I don't have any idea how to integrate that into this theory.]

[SON OF EDIT: Pam, having gotten sick of it, informs me that she knows how to do the minigame now, but that you have to do it just exactly right or you fail. We do not approve.]

text adventure, almost forgotten

2008-05-28T13:46:06Z

[I played a text adventure back in the 1980s. I had a damaged copy, so the room descriptions stopped about halfway through; somehow I made it to the end by guessing commands possible in any given location. I'd like to try to find a good copy, but I can't remember the name anymore. All I can remember is:

It started on a spaceship, which was leaking, and eventually crashed on a planet.
The rest of the game was wandering around trying to find a working ship so you could get home.
In the process you collected alien artifacts, which determined your score at the end.
Fairly early on it started saying "You feel a localized discomfort". If you did not deduce that it wanted you to issue the command PISS, you would shortly die of an exploded bladder.
At one point you were captured by a beautiful princess, and could only escape by summoning a monster to eat her.

Anyone have any idea which game this was?

a puzzle

2008-05-26T04:29:23Z

Given two shell variables, A and B, each of which is a space-separated list of numbers, how would you iterate over the lists in parallel, comparing each pair? That is, compare number A₁ to number B₁, A₂ to B₂, and so on. You may not use features not available on old systems (such as functions, arrays, and local variables) and you may not mess with the positional parameters. Comprehensibility is not important.

Save the world? Sure, but let's collect every bit of treasure first.

2008-05-18T05:08:01Z

queenpam and I have been playing some old (or not-so-old) PS2 games: we're totally done with Kingdom Hearts 2, are going back through Ratchet and Clank to pick up all the skill points (optional mini-challenges), we're about half done with Shadow of the Colossus, and God of War is currently on hold because we got fed up with the underwater stay-ahead-of-the-thing-that-smashes-you-into-the-wall task, after being smashed into the wall ... I'm going to say at least two dozen times. So I am in a mood to blather about game design.

These games all feel very different, but fundamentally they're the same kind of game: single PC (possibly with one or two helpers) goes through 3D world in over-the-shoulder-vision, fights monsters using a variety of hand-to-hand and ranged weapons, solves lethal puzzles, eventually confronts Big Bad, saves world. (Or maybe just Athens. Or his dead girlfriend.) And they all have the same odd relation to time: time only advances when player actions trigger plot events. This is most blatant in Kingdom Hearts. You fight the Nobodies all the way to the top of their castle and drive their leader to retreat into the giant floating candy heart. Mickey Mouse¹ tells you that you must follow immediately, and defeat him once and for all. But there is a save point. Like all save points, it allows you to warp back to the over-map, which means you (the player) can spend as long as you like polishing off all the optional challenges, collecting every single treasure chest, and leveling up the PC until the final battle is a cakewalk. In terms of gameplay hours, I think we spent almost as long doing optional challenges as we did playing the main game, and we weren't done! We gave up on some of the ridiculously hard or irritating ones.

This doesn't especially bother me in Kingdom Hearts, because, after all, most of zones in the game are the settings of various Disney movies. You're not playing this game for the internal self-consistency. Also, I haven't ever played a Final Fantasy game from beginning to end, but I have the impression that this is part of the furniture of that series. It would bother me more in Ratchet and Clank, which is trying for internal self-consistency (if not for plausibility), but it's also rather less blatant there: you have the option of delaying the final confrontation as long as you like, even though the Big Bad is going to destroy your planet Real Soon Now (and you may need to, in order to earn enough bolts to pay for the uberweapon without which defeating the Big Bad is ridiculously hard) but the Big Bad is the sort of lunatic who would postpone the completion of his project just to laugh at you for showing up just barely too late. (Also, you can go back and do the optional challenges after you defeat him.)

It really, really bugs me in God of War, even though they may not be doing the postpone the final confrontation indefinitely blatant version (we haven't got there yet) — the PC has to go off to some desert and find a weapon that can kill a god, so he can defeat Ares, who is laying waste to Athens. Right then. With an army of monsters. Retrieving the weapon takes something like a week of in-game time. I don't see how there can possibly be any of Athens left by the time the PC gets back! ... Really, though, my objection here is not to the timescale, but to the whole plan of saving Athens by sending a hero off to the desert to retrieve a god-slaying weapon from such a deathtrap of a temple that Indiana Jones himself would quail. We got him smashed into the wall at least two dozen times. That's twenty-four universes in which he never came back. Never mind all the other traps, many of which killed him at least once. And did I mention the monsters? If I were Athena I would go kill Ares myself, and worry about how to patch things up with Zeus later. (Or maybe I should just kill him too! He ate my mother because he was afraid their child, me, would kill him! This is Ancient Greece! You know that means I've got to do it one of these days!)

It doesn't come up at all in Shadow of the Colossus, but only because that game's more linear than any of the above. You can't even kill the colossi out of order. (There must be something preventing your dead girlfriend from rotting away all this time, but I'm prepared to assume the disembodied voice who's promised to resurrect her if you just do this small favor for it first [Wikipedia tells me its name is Dormin] can do that.)

... I had a point somewhere in here. Maybe it's that this is another way it's hard to make a game also be a convincing secondary world. My suspension of disbelief is impaired because these games have done enough that my brain is filling in things that should happen and being tripped up when they don't. But if you made those things happen, the game would actually be a worse game! You don't want to force the player to do the final battle before they're good and ready. Also, I probably wouldn't have noticed so much if the optional side quests had all been interesting rather than tedious; and if there are simple adjustments one could make to the plot to alleviate these problems (like, Ares' army is going to be in Athens in a week, and Athena wants you standing at the gates with the godslayer weapon when they get there) one should make those adjustments.

¹ Yes, that Mickey Mouse. The same one who's in Steamboat Willie.

Pacific Northwest folk:

2008-05-12T18:32:51Z

How would you recommend one get between Seattle and Vancouver, if one were to be making this trip somewhere around the end of July of this year?

One way trip, direction to be determined, not in a hurry, rental car is not an option, and I am disgruntled to discover there is no direct ferry service. I like ferries.

things i think i might be happier not knowing.

2008-05-10T01:19:58Z

In CSS, url() is defined as part of the lexicon, not the grammar. If you write

  .x { background-image: url(  "foo/bar"  ) }

everything from the u up to the close parenthesis is ONE TOKEN. As far as I can tell, the only effect this has on anything is to make it more difficult to implement a CSS parser.

zwol @ 2008-05-03T21:18:00

2008-05-04T01:28:12Z

I couldn't leave well enough alone: I had to redo the books meme with the categories I wanted. Behind the cut, since I don't want to spam everyone's friends pages with nearly the same content twice. However, for additional incentive to read it, there are explanatory anecdotes in there now!

Read all the way through and would recommend wholeheartedly

Anansi Boys
Brave New World
Dracula
Foucault’s Pendulum
Frankenstein
Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Neverwhere
1984
Pride and Prejudice
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Hobbit
The Iliad
The Name of the Rose
The Odyssey
The Three Musketeers
Watership Down
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values

I realize some of these will not be to everyone's tastes. These are the books on this list that, having read myself, I think everyone should at least attempt to read.

Read all the way through and might recommend but not to everyone

A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
American Gods
Anna Karenina
Cryptonomicon
Moby Dick
Quicksilver
The Confusion
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Prince
The Silmarillion
Wuthering Heights

Whereas these books are more likely to be unsuitable for any given reader, and so I am more cautious in my recommendations.

Yes, I really did read A People's History of the United States because it was assigned for a class: 11th grade US history. The teacher gave us parallel readings from that, a generic survey textbook, and Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition throughout the entire course, in order to demonstrate that secondary sources have agendas. This is still on my list of best pedagogical tactics ever, although I suspect it could go horribly wrong.

Read all the way through but would not recommend

David Copperfield
Dune
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Great Expectations
Oliver Twist
Sense and Sensibility
The Scarlet Letter
The Tale of Two Cities
Treasure Island

Man, there's a lot of Charles Dickens in this set. I think this is more to do with my having been required to read them for junior high school English, than the actual quality of the books. I read Bleak House for fun and liked it, after all. Also, if there were any Jack London on this list it'd be in here too, for the same reason.

Dune and Treasure Island are in this set despite my having enjoyed them quite a lot at the time, because they're like Heinlein: good if you're a pubescent boy, not so much otherwise. I don't know any pubescent boys anymore, so.

The only thing wrong with Sense and Sensibility is that it's not sufficiently different from Pride and Prejudice, which is a much better book.

Freakonomics suffers from being a popularization of a science I know something about, and thus I can see the oversimplifications and they irritate me.

Started and mean to finish someday

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Crime and Punishment
Don Quixote
Gravity’s Rainbow
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
Les Misérables
Lolita
On the Road
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Canterbury Tales
The Grapes of Wrath
The Once and Future King
The Satanic Verses

This group also includes books that I think I read all the way through but don't remember well enough to be sure, so clearly I have to read them again.

I also might recommend these, but not to everyone, because if I intend to finish a book, I generally think other people might get something out of it too — but there's often a reason why I got stuck on it, and other people might have the same problem.

There's a funny story about why I never finished Les Misérables. I read all the way through the first half of a two-volume edition which I found in the public library — except that the second half was checked out so I didn't realize it was a two-volume edition. The first half ended right after the big confrontation in Paris between the Thénardiers and Jean Valjean, and that seemed like a perfectly good ending for the book, so it didn't occur to me to look for another volume. I was then very, very surprised when I saw the musical a few years later.

Started and gave up on

The Aeneid
The Catcher in the Rye
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
To the Lighthouse
Vanity Fair

Most of these have the same problem: the characters are neither sympathetic nor sufficiently interesting to make up for it. I'm very picky about what books with unsympathetic casts I will read.

Mean to read someday

A Clockwork Orange
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Catch-22
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Dubliners
Emma
Jane Eyre
Love in the Time of Cholera
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Northanger Abbey
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Persuasion
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Slaughterhouse-five
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Brothers Karamazov
The God of Small Things
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Kite Runner
Ulysses
War and Peace
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

Despite having written Sense and Sensibility off above, I really like Jane Austen.

I have bounced off Gregory Maguire before, but I love the concept behind Wicked so much that I'm willing to give him another try.

Have no desire to read

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Madame Bovary
Mrs Dalloway
Oryx and Crake : a novel
The Fountainhead
The Mists of Avalon
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

For all books in this set, either I gave up on a book by the same author, or I have heard things that make me believe I'll hate it.

Never heard of

A Confederacy of Dunces
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
Angels & Demons
Beloved
Cloud Atlas
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
Life of Pi
Middlesex
The Blind Assassin
The Corrections
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The Historian : a novel
The Sound and the Fury
The Time Traveler’s Wife
White Teeth

Capsule reviews encouraged ;-)

well, if queenpam did it, I'd better.

2008-04-29T22:48:54Z

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read 'em for school in the first place.

I want to add quite a bit more information to — which books I mean to read/finish reading, which books I wish I could un-read, which books I would recommend to everyone, which I would recommend only to people with compatible tastes. But that would be work.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights*
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose*
Don Quixote
Moby Dick*
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad*
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World*
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum*
Middlemarch
Frankenstein*
The Count of Monte Cristo*
Dracula*
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys*
The Once and Future King*
The Grapes of Wrath*
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984*
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay*
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince*
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere*
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values*
The Aeneid
Watership Down*
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers*

Dorky poll not entirely unrelated to hypothetical roguelikes

2008-04-06T01:56:43Z

Square or hexagonal grid system? You must pick one. State your reasons.

attn rysmiel

2008-04-04T03:10:52Z

if you haven't already, you should read http://www.quartertothree.com/inhouse/news/411/

zwol @ 2008-04-02T22:34:00

2008-04-03T03:11:35Z

I'm trying out this RSS feed-reader thing for the first time in years and years — I tried it in maybe 2002? and it didn't do what I wanted and I gave up. It still doesn't really do what I want, but it's a whole lot closer now, to the point where maybe it's worth trying to find add-on solutions.

My use case is pretty simple. I want the feed-reader to replace the list of bookmarked blogs and webcomics that I check obsessively, so that the computer is doing the obsessive checking for me. For this to work, it's got to replace the entire list, otherwise I'll just keep obsessively checking the ones that aren't included. Also, all the content that I want to read needs to show up in the feed-reader, because clicking through is slow and requires me to mentally context switch over to web-browsing. Thus, I have two problems: sites with no RSS feed, and sites that provide title-only or first-paragraph-only feeds.

It seems to me that there ought to be feed-readers or feed-reader plugins out there that can compensate for these, by screen-scraping sites with no RSS feeds and/or chasing links from sites with incomplete-content RSS feeds. Can anyone recommend such devices?

(Also, is there any way to get an LJ basic account's friends page, with locked posts, as RSS? No, I am not willing to give LJ either money or ads.)

photography

2008-03-28T03:53:43Z

Pictures from my recent not-mentioned-here-due-to-laziness trip to New York City.

http://flickr.com/photos/zackw/tags/newyorkcity/
http://flickr.com/photos/pamgriffith/tags/newyork/

zwol @ 2008-03-24T22:15:00

2008-03-25T02:20:13Z

There's nothing like filling out IRS forms to make me resent having to pay taxes.

I wonder if they do it on purpose.

dear california department of motor vehicles,

2008-03-03T23:32:23Z

I'm already peeved with being on hold.

Where do you get off playing me ADVERTISEMENTS instead of hold music?!

irritating corner-case c++ question

2008-02-29T08:24:58Z

Is there any portable way to read [as in the system call] from a file directly into a C++ standard string? One would like to do something like

  str.reserve(filesize);
  got = ::read(fd, str.data(), str.capacity());
  str.enlarge_to_cover(got);

(error handling and loop until EOF omitted for clarity) but I can't actually find a method that does enlarge_to_cover(). Also, data() returns a read-only pointer.

... why am I still awake?

reposted from my sister's blog

2008-02-27T19:31:33Z

My sister Dara has a theory, which I reproduce here in full:

I have a theory, which probably derives from Harold Bloom, that we are directed in the course of our work as theater artists in the English-speaking world by the first Shakespeare play we ever saw. (If it was Bloom’s theory, it would expand to include all people, theater artists or otherwise.)

I tested this theory on two of my Convergence colleagues. Sure enough, we all had different answers - Robert had seen HAMLET first, which is remarkable. (I’ve never seen a live production of HAMLET.) Tony saw ROMEO & JULIET.

The very first Shakespeare I saw was MIDSUMMER, at the Theatricum outdoors. I remember these things from it:

- Puck swinging in on a rope from an enormous oak tree. The element of surprise. The feeling that the stage was alive with actors, that anyone might jump out of any crevice. That the ground, the hills, the walls were exploding with language.

- “But what of that? Demetrius thinks not so.”

- the lovers running through the twisted paths of a Topanga Canyon hill.

- the fairies saying “And I. ” “And I.” “And I.” (A chorus?)

- Bottom’s mask of a donkey’s head.

- The Mechanicals. “O kiss me through the hole of this vile wall.”

- laughing so hard that my face hurt.

- “If we shadows have offended” - the fantastic power embodied in that one actor, who was carrying all the threads of the play lightly in his mouth.

- Rhyme.

MIDSUMMER is about magic and love and language games, and I think I could even argue that it’s a landscape of imitation - between people and semihuman god-things, people and animals. Imitation being, of course, the founding principle of the improvised chorus. And it’s set in Athens, too. Which takes me back to the Greeks.

So I can derive all of my influences from it. I think I derive the other half from the film of “The Little Mermaid,” especially the fish-choruses.

Let us (er, me) know what the first Shakespeare you ever saw was. What do you remember of it? Do you think it shaped the direction of your work, or relationship to literature, or theater? If so, how? If not, Harold wants to talk to you.

obsolete electronics for teh lose :-(

2008-02-27T05:45:54Z

I bought a cheap-ass TV off Craigslist to watch movies on.

Then I discovered that the TV is so old that it doesn't accept any sort of input except plain old cable. (could be worse, i suppose; could only have antenna screws.) So I went and bought a handy dandy "RF modulator" from Rat Shack, which takes your standard red/white/yellow feed from the DVD player and puts it on cable channel 3 for the TV. About the same price as the TV.

This works, except that a few seconds after you turn the signal on, the picture develops lots of horizontal white streaks which appear and disappear. They seem to be worse the brighter the picture is. Large areas of white in the signal make the entire picture jitter around as well as streak.

After some headscratching, we drug out queenpam's old Super Nintendo, which has the RF modulator function built in (channel 3 or 4! Luxury!) — this worked better, but still had streakage.

Anyone know what the hell is wrong with the thing, and just how hard it would be to repair? It's a "Quasar" brand TV from 1989. Note that anything that's going to cost me more than about ten bucks is not worth doing.

notes toward a roguelike, 4 - vague game mechanical musings

2008-02-23T20:40:42Z

(Yes, this thing really is eating my brain now. Probability of code getting written is no longer zero.)

I really like Leonard's suggestion of consistently applying the notion that one gets better at what one practices. I am wondering whether it is practical to do away with character attributes as well as levels, and rely exclusively on skills, or perhaps I should call them aptitudes. There is an enormous list of these, and they are all organized in some sort of cluster network by how closely related they are. If you spend all day swinging a long sword, you get better at that; but you also gain a few points in closely related skills, like bastard sword and saber. You lose a few points in other skills like rapier and dagger; the notion is that you've got entirely the wrong habits for those weapons. The higher your actual practiced skill is in something, the less it's affected by practicing other skills, even if they interfere. And, as queenpam points out while reading this over my shoulder, unpracticed skills decay.

Is this good enough to cover all the times when the computer's got to pick a random number, is the question.

notes toward a roguelike, 3a - grab bag

2008-02-20T04:36:30Z

Basic flavor elements:

magic is wild; somewhat unpredictable, from the heart as well as the head
The High Elves were Not Nice. I'm thinking more like Pratchett's depiction than e.g. Michael Moorcock's. Also, they're all dead.
from Earthdawn: putting back together a very broken world
keep the horror subtle, though (rugose, squamous ascii art! ha.)
references to high fantasy kept small - mob monsters ok, plot monsters not
take plot monsters from where? perhaps mythology?
references to real world should not be exclusively European
e.g. Chinese dragons, not European (also, dragons are much too badass to fight)
steampunk technology is fun and could add interest
high technology doesn't fit, though

Fun stuff:

Ursula Vernon wombats and weird fruit
Secrets of the Gnomes gnomes
Nomadic carpet makers? Flying!
Non-Euclidean overworld map
...gets more Euclidean as the plot advances?
Jelaza Kazone-type sapient trees
At least one type of magic done with bells.