Cthulhu's Euchre Partner

Standing athwart software development yelling Stop!

Wed, 06 May 2009 00:32:33 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

I’m glad I’m not the only person who read this excellent excerpt from Christopher Buckley’s upcoming Losing Mum and Pup to take from it the profound and moving thought of “Hey! WordStar!” John Derbyshire did as well:

One little detail that caught my eye was Bill’s insistence on sticking with WordStar as his word processor of choice. I understand this perfectly. Once you’ve mastered a piece of software, why should you have to go to the trouble of ditching it to learn a new one? Bill actually out-conservatived me there. I am proud to tell anyone who asks that I write everything (including this diary) using KEDIT, a nifty text editor from the mid-1980s. KEDIT is modeled on XEDIT, which I used in my mainframe days in the early 1980s. I’m well into my third decade with KEDIT and see no reason to change. Still, KEDIT’s first release was 1983; WordStar was already five years old at that point.

I believe I have used WordStar, inasmuch as someone opened it for me and I went “Hey! I can type my name! ooooooh green letters”

… ok, I was four years old.

I have, however, been formally introduced to vi as of last semester, and while I can’t say I’m ready to participate in any holy wars yet, I can see why other people might feel compelled to stand by their text editor with great enthusiasm.

Numbers games

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:08:56 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

The great XKCD.

Or, in other words — Charles Krauthammer has this to say

$165 million in bonus money handed out to AIG debt manipulators who may be the only ones who know how to defuse the bomb they themselves built. Now, in the scheme of things, $165 million is a rounding error. It amounts to less than 1/18,500 of the $3.1 trillion federal budget. It’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the bailout money given to AIG alone.

…

And there is such a thing as law. The way to break a contract legally is Chapter 11. Short of that, a contract is a contract. The AIG bonuses were agreed to before the government takeover and are perfectly legal. Is the rule now that when public anger is kindled, Congress summarily cancels contracts?

At Midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew…

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:06:29 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

I saw Watchmen Thursday night, and I have to say I am joining the chorus of people saying that it was a great film and an amazingly accurate adaptation of the graphic novel.

When I first saw it, I only had one objection, not related to the graphic novel or even the film per se, and that was, when the credits rolled, I went “Oh my god. Is this REALLY supposed to be ‘Desolation Row’?”

My Chemical Romance, you fail at Dylan.

I know, the film has three Dylan songs, which is AWESOME, and expecting fanboys to sit through”The Times They are a Changin’” is more than most directors would give us, but the three-minute rocked-up version of “Desolation Row” commits one of the great musical sins of the Firefly-Verse, which is that the music is over-produced given the theme.

(spoiler cut)

Read the rest of this entry »

Just a post…

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 01:40:30 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

… to say I’ve updated more recently than Guy.

Seriously, though, social networking is dooooom for small personal weblogs, I think. I’ll try and post soon though.

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:01:13 GMT

stolen from ze Dave

The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me! My choice. For you.

Please note:
I make no guarantee that you will like what I make.
What I create will be just for you.
It'll be done this year (year from now, not calendar year)
You have no clue or input into what it's going to be.
I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.

The catch? Oh, the catch is that you have to put this in your journal as well. We all can make stuff!

Getting in the Christmas spirit

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:39:17 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

When I reach the point that even Guy has updated more recently than me (although admittedly only with Naxx videos that would be sure to confound my faithful audience of “my parents”) it’s time to post something.

The temperatures in Michigan are staying pretty consistently below 20 degrees, which means I’ve been getting in the Christmas spirit this year, and that can only mean two things: aluminum Christmas trees, and orcs on flying carpets.

Really.

Bonus: how many people are going to click the first picture just to see how many books they recognize?

Extra bonus excuse: one of the motivators of my sloth is the ease of simply bookmarking whatever I come across on delicious

Don’t blame me, I voted for Thrall?

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:51:04 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

For what it’s worth, I spent my Election Night in Karazhan. We’ve been there a decent bit lately; with WotLK approaching, getting newbies into raiding seems more important than progression — although we’ve had a bit of that too. Anyway, it was a good distraction.

The beer also helped.

I turned on the TV in time to see Fox call Pennsylvania for Obama and after that there was very little to be done, really, except to see Shepard Smith staring cluelessly into the distance as Karl Rove talks.

It’s a bit like the Cubs’ postseason — after a great season, when it comes down to it, there we are, getting outplayed at every angle, and just like that it’s over; nothing to be done now but wait ’til next year and hope that Piniella has the wisdom to shore up our fundamentals into a World Series team.

The Republicans have to do the same thing — shore up a consistent, reliable opposition to the party that will control House, Senate & Presidency. Get away from folks like Bush and McCain who conservatives have to hold their nose and vote for and be the party it was meant to be. Act like a party that’s ready to lead, fer chrissakes.

Were you beaten with roses as a child?

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:54:38 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve been listening to the Between the Covers podcasts at National Review Online, and there’s a lot of cool stuff there, like interviews with Christopher Buckley and George R.R. Martin (and, yes, Chuck Norris.)

… but! Imagine my surprise and delight when I find a podcast about T.S. Eliot, where the interview-ee is none other than… Benjamin Lockerd! Apparently, he has written a new introduction to a new edition of Russel Kirk’s Eliot and His Age.

Lockerd is a prof at GVSU, possibly the most awesome Brit-Lit-prof in the world, originator of the phrase “Were you beaten with roses as a child?” which I have shared with my father on numerous occasions as he and Dan continue the disagreement that existed between my ex-boyfriend Stefan and Dr. Lockerd about whether something can be described as intrinsically beautiful, or are only considered beautiful because our culture conditions us to believe they are. My father and Lockerd take the former position, leading Lockerd to say “If you see a rose, and you don’t think it’s beautiful, I think: what’s wrong with you? Were you beaten with roses as a child?”

Other great Lockerd moments:

Last time I talked with him, it was January, and I was wearing my coat with a World of Warcraft “druid” pin on it, and he jokingly replies. “Ah, good to see a follower of the old religions! Human sacrifice and all of that!” I laugh, explain its real meaning, and take the opportunity to find one person in the world who understands the origins of my warlock, Duessa’s, name.

Now I guess I really have to read Four Quartets…

It’s your life, you can decorate it as you like

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:46:29 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

I’m so out of it with regard to music now, I only just found out that Ben Folds Five had a reunion concert in September. But! I found the whole video online when I logged into myspace for the first time in forever. The guys play the entirety of The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner live before an incredibly lucky audience — yes, even “Your Most Valuable Possessions,” which Ben’s dad comes out to nervously read from a cue card.

Reinhold Messner has gotta be one of my top five albums of all time, easily, and I know Ben Folds is awesome to watch live. I bought Sessions at West 54th DVD beforeI even owned a DVD player and bought it to my boyfriend’s house to watch, and we were all astounded by it. I bought the official score, borrowed my boyfriend’s keyboard, and almost learned to play “Narcolepsy” except for these chords that are made to played by someone with giant Ben Folds hands amd not freaky midget hands like mine.

So, being unable to really play Ben Folds Five songs, I did the next best thing and named my computer after one of them. Looking back, it wasn’t that great of a computer, so maybe that was unfair of me. At any rate, this got me reminiscing while I watched Ben Folds Five perform, about all my computers:

Firefly, my graduation present, the K6-2, which eventually got cannibalized into other machines by Troy.
Leo, my mom’s old computer, the other K6-2, that we loaded with an absurd amount of RAM and used to run Mandrake Linux after Jeff’s old iMac exploded.
Jane, which I got from Wal-Mart and ran Linux.
Una, which Josh Rowe built, and ran Windows XP so I could play FFXI. But it was NOT named for Yuna or anything like that, but after Una from Faerie Queene.
Daenerys, the first computer I built. It was a learning experience, so I thought her epithet “Stormborn” was quite fitting. I sold it to my father, and he used it until it was stolen just recently.
And finally… Mal. There have been a number of things that I can credit for keeping me almost-sane while working at the casino, and Joss Whedon’s Firefly and the joy that came from building this computer are two of them. When I switched it on and it worked, I went “Aha! I can really do this! I rule!”

Not even counting my family’s nameless computers, all the way back to the Kaypro and Commodore-64. Well, there’s two ways of navel-gazing into my past, right there.

Warning: geekiness ahead!

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:02:27 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

Well, apart from the whole “worrying about money and getting job” bit, I could handle being unemployed. Without the restrictions like “going to work,” I find all sorts of projects to throw myself into.

The first projects were web-related; redesigning Action Entertainment and the Grunts page to take advantage of some CSS tricks and get everything validated. But that was not enough, so Friday I decided it was time that I install Ubuntu.

I had already purchased a second hard drive for this purpose, so I’m now dual-booting Ubuntu 8.04 (”Hardy Heron”) and Windows Vista (which my bootloader likes to refer to by its production name of Longhorn, for some reason).

Read the rest of this entry »

Not the only person unemployed….

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:45:13 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

Jack Thompson is so disbarred, he’s not even allowed to approach the bench at a picnic table
Jack Thompson is so disbarred he can’t even play contract bridge.
Jack Thompson is so disbarred he can’t even practice the law of gravity.
Jack Thompson is so disbarred, his porn magazines are just called “Barely.”
Jack Thompson is so disbarred, he can’t even use legal tender.
Jack Thompson is so disbarred he has to just swing on monkeys.
Jack Thompson is so disbarred that his candy options are limited to M&Ms and Rolos.
Two guys walk into a bar, but the third guy couldn’t because he was Jack Thompson, who is so disbarred.
Jack Thompson is so disbarred, he’s only permitted to use pie charts.
Jack Thompson is so disbarred he’s only allowed at bat mitzvahs
Jack Thompson is so disbarred he has to measure ambient atmospheric pressure in SI compliant pascals

(twitter via lore; story here)

Too long for a tweet — too short for a post?

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:24:47 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

“The Devil Went Down to Georgia” should really end with the Devil laughing: “I have your soul anyway, for the mortal sin of Pride! Now take your shiny thing, stupid American!”

Neil Gaiman offers perspective

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 13:01:48 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

When Sarah Palin was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, she (allegedly) attempted to get books she didn’t approve of out of the public library. This is scary. Are free speech organizations like the CBLDF and the First Amendment Project going to take this issue on?

No. They are too busy fighting actual cases of censorship from all the way across the political spectrum, to bother with partisan silliness. (Here’s the Snopes report on Palin’s non-existent Bookbanning.)

What you fight is specifics: bad laws, bad arrests and the like. People trying to ban books and comics and people trying to stop other people selling or publishing or creating comics and books and suchlike.You don’t fight “alleged attempts to get books out of a public library” ten years ago. To “take this issue on” I suspect would consist, Father Ted-like, of people walking around Sarah Palin with placards saying “Down with This sort of Thing” and “Careful Now”, which would probably not result in increased freedom of speech. Although it might be funny.

(link, scroll down towards the bottom)

About a week ago, we had CNN on in the break room and all day the hammering home “This is Sarah Palin’s first time on the national campaign trail all by herself! Can she handle it?”

First off, it’s one week after the convention where she was first announced. One week where she campaigned with the presidential candidate she was supporting (and, no doubt, gathering more enthusiasm than the top-billed McCain.

Second, isn’t this sort of thing incredibly sexist? Oooh, can the little girly go out on the road and take care of herself?

Sickening, but I still think it’ll all backfire incredibly, help McCain/Palin, and serve as the deathknell of traditional media.

I be claimin’ dis ship in de name of Grunts! Yarr!

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:02:56 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

It be International Talk Like a Pirate Day again!

For the record…

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 02:28:52 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

Yes, I did resign today. No, I didn’t run in there and go “ZOMG THIS PLACE IS EVIL” — I told them I was going back to school, which is true, I just had been planning to stay another couple months.

All my supervisors and coworkers have been thoroughly decent, which is why I gave two weeks noticeand spared them the lecture. I just couldn’t reasonably live with myself in that position.

I’m a hunter! PEW PEW!

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:31:22 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

We constructed a guild specifically to play World of Warcraft in a reasonable way, with a focus on five-man instances and a schedule that was compatible with human lives. The trouble is that the rewards for doing the more elaborate raids are almost nonsensical by comparison, ridiculous. I’m not talking about bosses, or middle management, or whoever is being gutted tonight. Even their undead pool man, a Goddamned civilian, drops a ancient, spiked crown that peers deep the future.

So, you build your organization out to grasp that fruit. For a time, you aren’t jiggered for five mans, because now you have eight. And once the tens have arrive, you have thirteen. It’s some magical Goddamned ratio, written into existence, that ensures human suffering.

Fuck the rest of this shit. I want our next President to have managed a guild.

(Penny Arcade, natch)

Well, see, it’s not all bad, there’s a job opportunity for me. My fifth grade teacher said that I’d be the first woman president.

Of course, I don’t want to be the first woman president, because I want the McCain administration to be so astonishingly, mind-bogglingly successful that Sarah Palin is elected by a landslide in 2016.

I also want a puppy.

And a Cubs world series.

Well, we’re one step closer there, with Zambrano’s no-hitter yesterday.

Things are looking up.

No more.

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:57:01 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

Today, I’m putting in my two weeks notice at my job.

I think the assault may have had something to do with it. Not alone, not by itself, but as a last straw, a kick in the pants.

There was an old Asian couple at the baccarat table. They were fighting. She slaps him.

He hits her, hard, with his cane, and she falls straight back onto the floor.

He was arrested.

She keeps playing all day.

They’d been there four days and didn’t have a hotel room.

Four days. Eighty years old. Assault.

I’ve been doing this job for too long knowing it was really, really wrong, and I kept doing it, because I am lazy and afraid of change.

No more.

If fire doesn’t melt steel, how do forges work?

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:28:35 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

This right here is why I don’t give a rat’s ass what other countries think about our politics.

Of course, it also took me a few seconds to realize “DK” meant “don’t know” … it would be more amusing, IMHO, if 25% of people thought Death Knights caused the 9/11 attacks. As it is, well, it’s just depressing.

Your Tuesday Morning Absurdism

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:23:50 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

WoW Insider asks, “If you were an NPC, what quests would you give?”

Quest 1: Estra’gorn Longthwaite asks “Goddo is coming?” and gives you the quest “Waiting for Goddo” which has quest text that mentions another nearby NPC Vladimir De’Lay who you notice has a completed quest icon above his head.

Quest 2: Vladimir informs you that he thinks Goddo may be coming but to check with his friend Estra’gorn about Goddo’s whereabouts, giving you the quest “Still Waiting for Goddo”

Quest 3: Estra’gorn asks you if you have heard if Goddo is coming? He mentions that Vladimir may know.

rinse, repeat. The first two quests give xp but the subsequent ones do not.

Goddo is a wisp only visible while players are ghosts and patrols around the zone where both Estra’gorn and Vladimir are situated. Goddo offers two quests to talk to both Estra’gorn and Vladimir where you inform them that Goddo will in fact not be coming to meet them any time soon.

(WoW insider user dj)

Full. Of. Win.

More Sarah Palin!

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:46:32 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

66 rumors about Sarah Palin — very much worth reading for anyone who’s tired of the same nonsensical stuff being carbon-copied around the media and blogosphere.

I don’t think any of this stuff is really gonna hurt her. I even watched the video of her talking to her old old church in Wasilla that was supposed to be so terrible and it seemed like standard evangelical-Christian-speak, which I suppose is scary to some people. Fine. Let them be scared and drift that much further from the American mainstream.

Sarah Palin is a true conservative in many ways that John McCain isn’t. She has energized voters not only with her youth and charisma (which easily rivals Obama’s considerable skills) but also because she reminds people of how all these disparate issues, from family values to tax cuts, really do make a whole; that the family is the building block of society, and the government will never take its place; that faced with self-sufficient, free people, the best thing the government can ever do is simply to get out of the way.

The attacks on her are pointless and will get nowhere. Anyone with half a brain knows that one trip to the doctor could have easily eliminated the pregnant daughter “issue” … that she stands by her beliefs even when it means letting the whole country catch a glimpse into what could be viewed as a failing as a parent… means a lot to this suburban girl, who saw her teenage classmates take that doctor’s trip when far less was at stake.

Sarah Palin Facts

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:34:22 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

Sarah Palin’s enemies are automatically added to the Endangered Species List
Sarah Palin can win a game of Connect Four in only three moves!
Sarah Palin will give birth to the man who will lead humanity’s war against the machines.
The Russians sold Alaska to America because Sarah Palin would not submit to autocracy.
Sarah Palin is on loan from the Justice League.
We don’t know who would win in a Chuck Norris - Sarah Palin cage match because they’ve never invented a cage that can hold Sarah Palin.
Jesus has a bracelet that says, “WWSPD?”
Sarah Palin is the reason compasses point North.

Many more here.

If you hadn’t guessed, I like Sarah Palin. I think the left is massively underestimating her as being added to the ticket for her sex and youth, when really — she won a highly contested race to become governor, she has a fearsome reputation and a HUGE approval rating. These are all good things.

Also, she certainly gets the base out in ways that McCain really, well, doesn’t. All the folks who “cling to religion and guns” certainly love her. Even the libertarians like her, with good reason — she’s been a true reformer in Alaska, vetoing tons of pork bill, stopping the “bridge to nowhere,” etc.:

Palin, for example, vetoed 300 pork projects in Alaska in her first year in office. She made a habit of knocking out big-government Republicans in her brief political career. For this, the 44-year-old mother of five enjoys a sterling approval rating in a state with arguably the nation’s most libertarian-minded populace. (The Libertarian Case for Palin on RealClearPolitics)

Clap 19 times for Boswell’s London Journal…

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:06:49 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

A sentence I never expected to use: James Lileks is blogging about Boswell’s London Journal:

Oh, I love that. Not just because Boswell was 22, full of vim and pretense and hungry for fame, but because it’s obvious he poured himself a tall glass of port and set to writing and was highly pleased with his own genius – unaware, of course, that 200 years later his work would be held up, examined, and dismissed in a footnote. A footnote in his own book.

It’s all a caution for young writers. Your chances of being another Dr. Johnson are microscopic. Your chances of even being Boswell to a Johnson are remote. But keep at it.

I might expect such a topic from Lisa - she wrote a paper on Boswell, for reasons I still fail to understand. I suspect the inherent lasciviousness of Presbyterians may have something to do with it. At any rate, it gave me an opportunity to tell everyone “I gave my roommate gonorrhea” — in plush form. Named Boswell.

I mailed it to her parents’ house, too. The real wonder is that she still speaks to me.

Anyway, read Lileks’ current bleat for Boswell, and to never hear the word “quaint” the same way again. Also, more Dark Knight, if you somehow are not yet tired of hearing about that.

The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 04:13:10 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

Joss Whedon’s brand-new, free (for now), online supervillain musical.

The Too Much Money Files

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:19:30 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

Today at my table there was a doctor from India who claimed that he used to carry a million-dollar diamond around in his pocket until a friend of his, who did the same thing, got beat up and mugged in Detroit.

For me, I think, that practice would have ended a lot sooner, when I tossed those pants in the drier and my million-dollar diamond wound up lost in the aether like a spare sock.

I didn’t check the soles of his shoes…

Berenger the Drunk

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:33:10 GMT

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

When we meet Berenger, first scene of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, there’s very little to admire about him. He’s likable enough, compared with the anal-retentive Jean, but he is at best an amiable drunk (the American film version cast Gene Wilder as Berenger opposite Zero Mostel’s Jean, hoping to recreate the chemistry of The Producers). At any rate, Berenger is a lazy, slovenly, uninspired drunkard who shows up to lunch late, hungover and generally disheveled.

By the end of the play, he is the last human being on Earth. It is an unlikely and largely unexplained metamorphosis.

It makes sense only when you stop thinking in terms of heroes and villains and remember that Berenger is the point-of-view character — a strange notion in theatre, but particularly true here: by the conclusion, he is the only character capable of maintaining his own point of view, unlike the “rhinoceroses,” Ionesco’s friends and associates who, one after the other, all fell prey to the unthinking, group-oriented, animalistic appeal of fascism.

We all have doubts, like Berenger: who am I alone to say this is wrong? My friends are better than me in every respect: better at their jobs, more respectable in their social lives, more intelligent, better at attracting the opposite sex. If I say “I will not do this; this is wrong” who am I to get on my high horse and pass judgment over these people?

And yet that is what must be done.