Shitting The Bed

I got a haircut, today, at Astor (where my mom would never take me when I was a kid, seeing as they wouldn't boil all their combs. New York City in the grip of a lice epidemic!) The barber kept asking me how it felt. "How was your day, good? How does it feel?" "What's that?" "How does it feel, how does it look?" "Good, it looks good." He had warm hands, like a grand-dad.

In the seat next to mine, a guy with frosted tips was getting a trim. "What's this, you got a big scar back here." "Yeah, lots of surgery." "Surgery? You okay?" "Yeah, it's a... well, it's a brain thing. Long story." "You okay now?" "Hope so."

I'm sorry, Mike, but the guy who writes Questionable Content is a creep. Examples:

• Go fuck yourself, fascist.
• You making less than a career construction worker does not mean that you can claim to be worse off than him. Get back to Googling Malkmus at your cushy office job.
• What are you, like five years old?

That little robot is adorable, though.

I Don't Like Your Peaches

[I meant to post this last Wednesday, but... well, I just could muster up the initiative to type it and click. It's so hard sometimes.]

I played some poker at Joel's house last night [i.e., last Tuesday]. Just dime-ante stuff, some draw, some hold 'em. We played a fun seven-card game called Anaconda. Oh, and I learned a new game -- not quite poker, but way more exciting -- called Guts. It works like this: You get dealt three cards at the beginning and there's no betting. The best hand you can make, naturally, is three-of-a-kind. Everybody holds their cards in their hands over the center of the table and the dealer counts to three. On three, you can either drop your cards, in which case you're out of the current round scot free, or you can hold onto them, in which case you lay down the hand you've been dealt against those of the other remaining players. If, at this point, you've got the best hand, you get the pot. The losers each have to contribute the value of the current pot towards the next round's pot. The game ends when you hit a round in which only one player sticks to his guns during the drop-out phase. I invented an extension to the game (I call it "Ultimate Guts") where, if all the players drop out of the round (which happened a few times when the pot got too big) all players have to pick up the same cards again and go through the count-off again, each player knowing that the other players weren't confident enough in their cards to stay in.

Work is pretty shitty these days. There's this big "project" we're supposed to be finishing, but it's just... unfinishable, really. I mean, whenever we talk to our "manager," he's like, "Yeah, it has to have this, and it should include this," like he's some kind of reclusive billionaire building a Mystery House with a thousand rooms. Your house is never gonna get finished, guy. Death march. Just FYI. Like I was saying to Devin, though, it's hard for a little baby job. I have a little baby job, really.

Now for the computer stuff: gzochi is coming along... okay. I need to restructure the shared linked-list type; it's just too fucked up and crazy for use. I'm also at the stage where I have to start thinking about content presentation. Maybe you guys can help. Here's the scoop: A game has sets of "resources" -- images, 3-D meshes, sound files, etc. -- and in order to display, rather, present these resources, the server sends what I'm going to call "presentation hints." So if you send a panel image to be used as the backdrop for a sidebar menu or something, there will be a little cue in the object XML that you receive that'll have a hint for the client to that effect. (The client is free to ignore the hints.) What I'm trying to do is draft up a lightweight... mark-up language, I guess, for game components. Peep the project entry on SourceForge and sign up and we'll discuss it.

I peeped Intolerable Cruelty last night. It was okay. Tonight Tetley peeped some tickets to McFiddler on the Roof. So we are going to see that.

I have to go to work now. Christ.

Seacrest Out!

Good morning, blogstars. It looks like I only write once a week in this thing. Sorry.

On Saturday, Ted called up and was like, "hey, do you know where to get poker chips in Brooklyn?" I'm like, no, but do you want to take a walk? So we go off walking down 7th Avenue, and we don't find them anywhere. We get to like 7th and 19th St. and still nothing, so we take a right and walk back down on 5th Ave. The deeper parts of 5th are apparently some kind of discount store mecca, so we're popping in and out of these stores asking people who barely speak English whether they sell something as admittedly bizarre as poker chips. None of them have it. Finally, we're standing next to a bar from which this drunk old man is being noisily evicted and we see a toy store across the street. It's a crapshoot, but it's the only honest-to-god toy store we've seen so far, so we go in and ask. The owner's like, "No, we don't have that," but his young assistant pipes up from the video game section, "Wait, hold on, I thought I saw some kind of poker thing over there a while back," indicating a teetering pile of boxes in a corner. He digs around for a while, and sure enough, comes up with "Star Poker," which he claims includes "seven racks of poker chips." It's only $4.99. "If you find poker chips somewhere else," he says, "they're gonna be $4.99 anyway." We think he's got a point, so we buy the thing and take it home. When we open it up, there is a dime-bag-sized pouch of tiny, tiddly-wink-like chips. Ted says, "Julian, how many do you think are in there." I guess 70. Turns out there were 71.

Then Ted and I made this great if ersatz Vindaloo. It was basically just mustard, pork, and coconut milk, but it was delicious. I crapped most of it out in nauseous agony when I got home.

My parents came over last night and took me and Mer out to City Lighting, this bar / restaurant that opened up on our corner. I was a little nervous when they were building it that it was going to be some kind of hellish nightclub, but it turns out it's a pretty quiet place, and the food is pretty great, if fabulously expensive. I had the wild salmon -- $13.95? Give me a break. It was really good, though. Lo malo es que right when I was about to go to bed last night, fucking Mimi heaved herself off the sofa at something, dislodging, the process, my laptop, which landed right on its metaphorical tailbone, the little AC power input thing, with the adapter still in it. This is the second time it's happened catastrophically -- when I opened it up this time, the little power feed thingy was hanging on by a thread. I doused it in superglue, but if it happens again, the laptop is toast. Fuck custom laptops, man. I'm gonna have to get a Dell laptop, that's how much fuck custom laptops.

Today is real beautiful outside. Is summer coming? I'm having actual confusion with this weather over whether we're done with winter and heading into summer or vice versa. Maybe that's what happens when you don't have an academic schedule to go by. Anyway, it reminds me of summer days I spent in high school loping around the Lower East and West Sides with friends and sort of scheming about forming bands, drawing comics, designing video games, and drinking -- scheming about drinking and actually drinking, too.

Links:

• Elijah Woods is Very, Very Gay
• Not Johnny!

The Only Card I Need Is The Ace Of Spades

I'm a hell of a C programmer. I'm crazy. Here's the thing: gzochi launches a lot of threads. Creeps, think of threads as a bunch of concurrently executing blocks of code -- you've got to run things in threads if you want your program to act like it's thinking about more than one thing at once, like say, printing messages and listening to the keyboard at the same time. gzochi, for instance, has a thread that listens for new connections and other threads that talk to existing connections. The problem is that sometimes one thread needs to stop the execution of all the other threads in a coordinated way, for example, when you want to shut down the gzochi server and have the game threads politely hang up on the clients and save all the information about currently executing games to the database. This is a tough problem because there's no built-in way for one thread to kill a thread it didn't launch -- most of the time, each thread has no idea that other threads even exist. Well, try this on for size: I've written a wrapper function for the thread creation call that records an identifier for the thread object in a "registry," launches the thread, "joins" (i.e., waits) on its exit, and then removes it from the registry. If, between the time the thread gets launched and the time it exits, the shutdown function runs, it goes through the thread registry cancelling all the threads, which in turn causes each thread's cancellation handler, which does useful things like saving user data and closing connections.

SICK.

I bought a ticket for the April 4th Distillers show at the Bowery Ballroom. Picture me nuzzling Brody Dalle's massive bicep.

If you listen to Howard Stern (who, by the way, deserves a Pulitzer for doing an hour long bit about constitutional speech and the fallacy of decency and then putting a guy on the air who needs women to vomit on him in order to get off and having some willing listener come in and vomit on him; someone called in and said he'd had to run out to his front porch to puke, he'd been so disgusted, and saw people pulling over in their cars to puke out the windows) in the morning like I've been doing for the past week or so, you'd think there's going to be some kind of cultural apocalypse in this country in the next decade or so. I'd been reluctant to agree about that sort of thing, but it's looking more and more likely. Creepy, huh? It's not like I'm as attached to this country as all you simpering immigrants out there, I just don't quite know where to go when it happens. Japan? Scandinavia? Okay, but let's say that all the people that generate capital for this country were to up and leave and go somewhere else -- it's not an entirely unreasonable proposition; these guys who work at Goldman Sachs and what have you are real sick puppies, thoroughly corrupt and selfish, but the majority of them are atheists, I think. Then the only people left would be the religious trash, who, in the face of an economic meltdown, would whip themselves into a frenzy over all those Islamiacs, say, and then start firing missiles and invading Middle Eastern countries. That would be great -- nothing makes me happier than people who believe in an afterlife slaughtering each other on the altar of self-righteousness. I'm serious; I'm sorry if that creeps you out, but I get totally gleeful over the idea of a bunch of mangled theist bodies.

Speaking of Howard Stern, a friend of a friend of Mer's is staying over at our place. Apparently she's interviewing with a bunch of companies in New York and doesn't know anybody who lives here. If that doesn't make her sound a bit suspect, she's "interested in media management." For fuck's sake, that sounds like this Epsilon semi-moron Nari who I took Princeton Review with. She wanted to go to University of Miami where she could "study the music industry, which is like no other industry on Earth." Where do these people get these ideas? Is there a big machine somewhere that cranks out slightly-below-average-intelligence babies in black pants suits with congenitally attached textbooks on Marketing and no ambitions? Anyway, this girl mentioned that she'd interned at Clear Channel her sophomore year, which made me mad until I told myself that it's kind of like interning at Microsoft, which is something I tried to do once -- unsuccessfully, I might add. Is it? Who knows.

Links and stinks:

• DownSyndromDolls [sic]
• World's Fattest People

San Quentin, You Been Livin' Hell To Me

Okay, it's Super Tuesday. I have no idea who to vote for. Is it wrong to vote for a very good but no longer campaigning candidate in the hopes that everyone else will do the same or that one of the two surviving candidates will take notice? Or should I vote for the Senator from Massachussetts so that fucking Edwards, a religious shrimp of a man with a sincerity rating hovering slightly below Tom Cruise's, won't be put forward as a lamb to be slaughtered by the Republican slaughtering machine? It's a tough one.

On Saturday, Tom, Devlin and I peeped out a White Castle at 4th Ave. and 31st St. in B'klyn. It was one of those drive-thru franchise configurations, so we thought it would be an ironic time to go eat our tiny hamburgers in Greenwood Cemetery. Well, it was such a beautiful day and it was so nice and quite in there that we ended up spending a couple hours just strolling around. A lot of the mausoleums have glass windows / apertures built into their doors, so you can peek in. Tom asked whether I'd be scared about being in the cemetery at night, all by myself. I think maybe, if only because its right smack in the middle of a populous city, but no one would be able to help you if you got into trouble. It's like urban legends -- they're totally terrifying because the circumstances in which the awful shit they describe occur are so utterly mundane. Case in point: You're munching on some preternaturally soft bubblegum on the subway and all of a sudden a billion tiny spiders start pouring out of your mouth, and you're surrounded by people but there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. Wild.

Brave New World does not hold a candle to 1984, I'll tell you that much.

Continuing to sketch out (with broad strokes) the important parts of the unfortunately-named Gzochi. I designed a sort of abstract set object for grouping in-game entities, as well as a kind of queue for dealing with game events in a synchronous way. I also implemented Base64 encoding / decoding from scratch, right from the RFC. For those who don't know, Base64 is a way of converting binary data (which tends to be difficult to look at for humans and simple lexical analysis systems) to data that only uses the characters '0' through '9', 'A' through 'Z', 'a' through 'z', and '/' and '+'. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to implement something from a spec that's already been written for you, with reference implementations against which to compare yours, etc. Inventing new things is hard. Gzochi's on SourceForge, now, too: http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/gzochi/, but only via CVS for the moment.

From House UnAmerican Activities Coordinator Adam Cadre's page:

In the country where I live, the current top movie at the box office, made by a sodomy-obsessed Holocaust denier, is a sadistic snuff film about the torture and execution of a charismatic schizophrenic whom the vast majority of people in the audience believe to have been an omnipotent deity who created the universe.

Looks like it's Death March time at the old job, sort of; sometimes it really gets me down.

Last night I woke up with all this thick, gross saliva (mine, I hope) in the back of my throat -- so thick, in fact, that it was hard to swallow. I went to the bathroom and managed to spit most of it out.