Fuck Christmas

It being Christmas Eve and all, and considering the headlines in today's Times (AIDS orphans, Israelis, encephalopathy), I had an almost-compelling urge to quote the lyrics to the above song by the insightful troubadours of FEAR. The thing is, though, that song really kind of sucks. Here's an excerpt from a slightly better one, lyrically at least, that sums things up pretty well. (It's called "New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones.")

New York's alright if you like saxophones
New York's alright if you wanna get pushed in front of the subway
New York's alright if you like tuberculosis
New York's alright if you like art and jazz
New York's alright if you're a homosexual

Truly delightful. My boss literally just called me over after I pasted those lyrics to tell me they're giving me less than half the money they said they were going to -- a real Christmas miracle. It's not like I really, you know, "deserve" any of it anyway, although I would like some shitting, fucking overtime. Here's another selection from FEAR's catalogue, this time from what's probably their most popular piece, "I Love Livin' In The City:"

My house smells just like the zoo,
It's chock full of shit and puke!
Cockroaches on the walls
Crabs crawlin' on my balls!
Ohhh, but I'm so clean cut,
I just wanna fuck some sluts!

This guy Zeke who I used to know in high school called me last night to tell me that his band is back together and playing on Tuesday night. This band... I don't know, it's kind of peopled by people who make me feel pretty bad about myself, and to tell you the truth I was kind of glad when they (temporarily, I guess) broke up -- not least of all because they all seemed to be able to get their act together and get along with each other better than I did with the guys in my band. That makes me a bitter doofus, I know -- to the extent that I don't even feel like linking their web site. So I don't think I'm going to go to their show. SORRY.

Adbusters posted some stupid blurb about how the left is dead. You know, because everyone's a reactionary asshole these days. Well, sorry, Adbusters, I guess all the people you thought were "liberal" just didn't have the cojones to stick with it. "Well, you know, you can't just attack the U.S. and not expect us come and kick your fuckin' ass. I mean, I think of myself as 'liberal', but not when it comes to shit that affects me and my kids, because that is something you just do not do, dude. Execute Saddam!" Scoundrels; scumbags. Anyway, good luck selling your hideous anti-swoosh sneaker to ghetto families who are willing to go without health insurance so that they can have genuine Nike merchandise.

Let me leave you with one that's not by FEAR, it's by The Anti-Nowhere League of London, who are equally if not more profound lyricists. Peep:

I hate people
I hate the human race
I hate people
I hate your ugly face
I hate people
It's such a fucking mess
I hate people...
And I hate you!

I know a lot of people on the Interweb, some of them even having 'blogs, mind you, say they "hate people." Let me assure you that I really actually honestly do hate people, to the extent that I get diarrhea all the time and am pretty much always shaking with rage and unable to make friends. I mean, read the fucking paper for fuck's sake. But, you know, a New Year is upon us, so maybe we should all just hold hands and pray for a world in which our blessed precious baby baby-daddies are free from the temptations of sex, drugs, rock and roll music and modern poetry. Eat a dick cupcake.

My Ears Hurt

Either I'm out of shape or my bike's parts were a bit contracted because of the cold while I was out riding just now in Prospect Park. I suspect it was the latter, since the bike was going pretty slow during the downhill parts, which are usually like that Sony game that Kate and Dade are playing in the Cyberdelia scene in Hackers. I don't know what that game is called. But man, it was really pretty out. The sun had just set, and when I got to the southern part of the park, there all these apartment buildings decked out with Christmas lights just kind of popped up. It reminded me of walking though Central Park after hours like Chris and I used to do and coming upon the Egyptian wing of the Met like some floating Mesopotamian castle hiding behind the trees. It was fairly warm out, but riding the bike made it windy, so you better believe snot rockets got blown.

I had to take Muffin / Mimi to the vet again today because she just won't fucking leave her stomach alone. It was pretty difficult to get her into the carrier. I had a pretty solid plan -- put the carrier end-up in the bedroom, grab her while she was sleeping on the couch, and dump her in -- but there was a single hitch that fouled it up -- she kicked the carrier door closed with her foot while I was trying to stuff her in. So I dropped her, and she managed to pry the bedroom door open and went straight for the bathroom, where she dove into her litter box and puffed herself out and started hissing and swiveling her head around to prevent me from getting the Vulcan neck-grip on her. But I got her and I got her in the box and I got her to the vet (he gave me some prednisone pills for her) and I got her back. I thought she was going to sulk for the rest of the day, but I gave her a salmon treat while she was under the couch and that seemed to cheer her up considerably. She's cuddling me as I type this.

I hate Zionists. On the rilla. Fuck 'em. If we don't support religious states for brown people (and rightly so), we shouldn't support religious states for swarthy, hairy white people, especially when they're so arrogant about encroaching on the territory of other countries. Hearing these people -- on both sides, mind you -- talk just makes me care less about what happens to them. Keep killing each other (please target the ones still within their reproductive heyday, please). It means fewer religious people in the world.

I fixed some irritating bugs in OpenRPG with the indirect help of the nice people in #c on FreeNode. It looks like the networking subsystem is going to require a design overhaul, but in a good way -- it'll be much more in line with the code-organization style I described in the previous entry.

I am not looking forward to going to Florida on Thursday. I do not fucking like old people, and I have much better things to do than visit them while they await death. All the old creeps in my family haven't done anything except spend money on themselves and go on vacation; I'm sure there are nice, productive geriatrics out there, but I haven't seen 'em. We need to legalize doctor-assisted suicide, and we need to make it mandatory, and we need to do it before Thursday morning.

My mom got me a book for Christmas, and that is very nice. But she wouldn't stop bugging me about gifts, so I told her she could write me a check if she needed to give things so badly. Was that rude? It's hard for me to tell. Maybe I'm autistic, I don't know.

Deal With It

Okay, computer time: For those who Don't Know: Writing in an essentially procedural language like C, your programs are basically structured like a list of instructions to the computer ("Do this, then do this, then do this," etc.). To break up the monotony, you're allowed to create "functions" that encapsulate blocks of frequently accessed code so that they can be run with a single command (e.g., "f(x)", where x is a parameter that presumably affects the behavior of the block of code represented by f). Conditional statements like "if (...)" aside, however, the execution of C code proceeds more or less the same regardless of whether you structure your program "functionally" or just do everything as an extended laundry list of tasks. Since function-structure is a just tool to help humans understand the flow of execution in a program, it's often difficult to decide how best to . For example, if you've got a complicated task to accomplish, like establishing a connection to a remote socket, is it best to write several re-usable functions that accomplish more general aspects of the task, or is it better to keep the number of functions small and write a large function that just sets everything up in one shot? I tend to lean towards the former, 'cuz I'm kind of an object-oriented kind of guy -- you build tiny specific tools and then link them into larger, general tools -- but what if you used a different metric to measure optimal "functionalization" of source code? I've often wondered what it would look like if some source I'd written were optimized, say, to be as compact as possible, so that any repeating block of two or more statements would be abstracted into a single function call. (As I mentioned above, that wouldn't imply a run-time optimization, and might even do some harm, since calling a function involves some overhead in terms of pushing arguments onto the internal stack.) Anyway, this is probably something that people have written papers about -- and that hence Mike Bell already has down pat -- but you know... grist for the mill.

So I saw Lord of the Rings: Rise of the Triad with the peeps and creeps yesterday. It was great! Ten dollars well spent, I think.

You know, if I were Strom Thurmand's illegitimate daughter, I wouldn't wait to show up until he was dead. Man, nothing would have been sweeter than ruining the reputation of that rotten old hypocrite. I like how everyone likes to talk about how much they respect the "service" he's done for the country. A senate full of bigotry-apologists -- truly disgusting; another notch in the old shame-belt for this repulsive country.

I was digging around in a box over in the Q.A. area of the office (also known, no joke, as the "Golf" area -- as many of you have suspected, my job bears a striking resemblance to Club Med), and I found a sound card for my Windows machine, so now I can listen to other peoples' music shares. Not surprisingly, they are mostly full of Belle & Sebastian MP3s; this place is hopping with metrosexuals. O MSN, not since eugenics has there been so effective a tool for simplifying the structure of our society.

Loath as I am to recommend a "web-comic," whatever that may be, the early episodes of Elf-Only Inn are kind of funny.

OpenRPG's server code is now able to process the messages required for a login from the routines in libopenrpg_client -- which don't quite exist yet. That should be easy, though. I still have to make it possible to register a new account on a server. I still have to fucking sketch out a design for how I'm going to handle playing a goddamn game with this thing. My latest anxiety: How to represent complex distance relationships of "Objects" to each other in terms of perceptibility? Like, maybe certain conditions have to be true on one object for it to be able to perceive another object? Do objects have absolute properties, or only properties relative to each other? Do I want to incorporate a scripting language like Lua to manipulate objects? Everyone else seems to be doing it...

I wrote this post at work, but I don't have anything else to say now that I'm home.

12:51

Yay, Saddam Hussein's been captured! Now we can get on with eliminating all those other oppressive dictatorial regimes -- I'm assuming that's what we're doing, okay? Like the one run by Kim Jong Il, or the king of China, or basically every fucking person who manages a country in Africa. You can start with that nationalist psychopath Mugabe, if you want.

Hey, fucking idiot who draws the awful web-comic Sara and David: World events affect you, creep; also, your web-comic sucks.

President Bush gave a press conference this morning: At least Hussein might get tried in a Hague-like institution. But can we please stop bringing up September the Christ-fucking 11th in our speeches and written correspondence? I'm going to invoke my snotty right of birth-city and forbid all you shitfucking Midwesterners from whining and crying about it. You know, I'm a Real New Yorker ®, and I don't even care about it all that much, except that it is unfortunate that a lot of poor people died trying to save some rich people. And if you didn't see it coming, then you're a real fucking idiot. Seriously. So please shut the fuck up and get back to preparing for the terrorists to bomb your worthless two-story mini-mall office park in Akron.

Kelly Brownell is on NPR talking about obesity. That guy sure is fat. But it sounds like he wrote a book.

I'm still on vacation. I was on vacation on Friday, too. This weekend, I saw:

• The Triplets of Belleville: It was okay, but it didn't quite live up to my expectations. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty delightful, but it's real short and it's paced a bit too slow, and it's sometimes difficult to figure out what the directors are getting at -- I mean, it's definitely a wistful ode to the pastoral, but further than that...
• Something's Gotta Give: Well, this is an okay movie. It's not a real edge-of-your-seat, comedy, though, and it goes on literally twice as long as it should. And Diane Keaton's face is so weird and tightly-stretched that it looks like different parts of it are sliding around like tectonic plates whenever she smiles. And Jack Nicholson is a real fat ugly toad, but there's a very funny part where he's giggling and running around in a hospital with the back of his robe open. Sorry, I just ruined your Movie Experience.

On Saturday I went to a co-worker's Christmas party. He'd made some pretty delicious stuff called wassail, and he had three kitties, one of whom didn't like her tummy being rubbed and scratched me. I think it's infected because I've been squeezing pus out of it ever since. Delightful. I also cooked this delightful recipe I found on the venerable Adam Cadre's web site. I highly recommend it.

I have to spend a little bit of every blog entry talking about boring shit that none of you understand. So here goes: I spent some time figuring out what the best data structure for storing these active client records in OpenRPG. Everything that needs to do insertion these days is looking like a good case for a hash to me, so I started to write my own hash for doing this, but then I realized that you can store pointer values in a string (I already have a concurrency-managing string-based hash written) with sprintf and sscanf and the '%p' conversion specifier, so rox0r. What else... I wrote this gigantic ugly login-processing routine, and I'm still writing it. Hopefully I'll finish it today.

Scarlett Johansson's Ass In Underpants

NPR was talking about this piece of proposed legislation in France under which Muslim girls would be forbidden from wearing their head-shawls in public schools. If the referendum or whatever became law, these girls from devout Muslim families would have to transfer to special private schools. This is terrible! Does this also mean that the pre-selected husbands of girls from Orthodox Christian or Orthodox Jewish families wouldn't be able to sit behind them in class and throw glass tumblers full of acid at the backs of their heads whenever they raised their hands? These are deeply important religious traditions we're fucking with here, people? Do you want Parisian men to grow up to have fat, limp, British dinguses?

I bought tickets to Return of the King. I'll tell you, I really don't like buying movie tickets, because as I grow more and more obsessed with money, $10 just seems like too much to pay to see something, even if it's good. I would really like to download these movies from the Internet instead of paying to see them; can someone e-mail me a link to the .torrent file for Troy? Kthx. P.S. Fuck you, you set-painting shit sandwich! I hope your children starve while Jack Valenti jerks off to Donald Duck porn over the gaping hole in your roof.

Boring computer stuff: If there's no local console for a server instance, how do you set up the account for the administrative user? What about granting administrative access to whoever logs in first? Is there a significant security problem with that? Also, I've got this XML document type called "form," which is a list of questions that I want the recipient to answer. I'm trying to figure out if it'd be possible to use the same DTD on the recipient side when you're formatting the answers to send back. It's looking like... no.

It is super-hilarious that we are asking for debt relief from countries from whom we are witholding cronyism contracts. I don't have anything to say about that.

I would remiss in the web-log tradition if I didn't mention this wonderful Cruel Site.

Also, I'm on this mailing list for this open source MMORPG called Arianne. The whole project is pretty much a mess, but they've been restructuring and they've decided that the server that runs the game is going to be called "Arianne," but the game itself is going to be called "1001 Gladiators." What?! Anyway, I got this in my Inbox this morning from the lead developer for some reason. I guess they are evaluating similarly-themed game interfaces:

>http://www.armchairempire.com/images/previews/xbox/gladius/gladius-8.jpg
>
>
>BTW it is me or just the game looks a bit gay ( nothing bad with gays... )?

He may be a Brazilian white supremacist ("Arianne?!"), but that game does look a little bit gay.

Fraidy Cat

Let's talk about the news. The news is what's popular when you're writing a blog, right? This is what I saw on CNN today:

"Under the circumstances, it is difficult to envisage the United Nations operating with a large number of international staff inside Iraq in the near future unless there is an unexpected and significant improvement in the overall security situation," Annan said in a report released Wednesday.

"The security environment is unlikely to improve in the short to medium term and could deteriorate even further," he wrote.

You're darn tootin', Mr. Secretary General! What a clusterfuck of a situation this is. Iraq is so fucking fucked, and no one knows what the fuck to do about it. I can't even believe it. Someone is going to learn a very shitty lesson, and I would be filled with glee about that, except that it looks like only people that are going to get learned are economically disadvantaged Midwestern Christians who agreed to kill brown people so that they'd be able to go to college and major in Media Studies when they got back home. And that's a shame, pretty much. The whole thing is a shame. Media Studies degrees should pay for themselves. I mean that in almost the least sarcastic way possible.

Get Your War On is new, as of last night, maybe.

So here's another thing that's pissing me off: There was this piece on Ed Koch in the Metro section today, and they mention how he was criticizing Madeleine Albright for talking shit about our foreign policy while promoting a book overseas. Let's get a few things straight: The U.S. is not like some kind of magical secret that will disappear if everybody stop believing in it. Everybody already knows that our foreign policy is full of shit, and saying so is not going to be a revelation to anybody. In fact, if I were to go abroad, I would not fucking shut up about how stupid I think this administration is, just so people would know that I wasn't a fucking idiot.

The database initialization routines for OpenRPG are pretty much done. Apparently I only need one table for administrative purposes -- 'Users'. I'm wracking my brains trying to think of what else I might need to store.

Thank The Fuck Christ

I'm on vacation today! This is great. I already cleaned up the living room, shaved, and tied up some newspapers. Then I had pea soup. Later, I might bring some stuff over to the Salvation Army. But right now I am watching daytime T.V. shows about poor people.

Here's the thing about poor people: They don't know how to use birth control. Maybe you didn't know that. So imagine, if you can, that you're poor -- like embarrassing accent, mustache, way too much make-up poor. Now try to think of the one fucking thing that would make your shitty life worse, and then multiply it by like six. That thing is a kid. Now you have six fucking kids. Christ damn it. Judge Hatchett had this bundle of white trash on -- the husband was a physically abusive prick who'd been on and off welfare for the past decade, the wife was this big fat blubbery mess who couldn't stop having affairs with other white trash. See, the reason abortion has to be legal is so that poor people have the option of having abortions, because rich people will always have that option, regardless of the law. You just have to fucking use that option, guys! You will be much, much happier. But I guess that would offend God, who has already done so much for you. Bleed a holy bowl of milk. Jesus shit.

All the snow is melting now.

I saw Bad Santa on Saturday, even though I was still real sick. That movie is a delight. I feel like I should have some kind of critical reaction to it, but it's very difficult. I guess the thing I'd say about it is that it's very much the kind of thing you'd think was super funny in high school, but it's way smarter than anything you could have written when you were in high school. And it's still super funny. I only wish Hermione hadn't died. Flipendo!

Paris Hilton is so fucking ugly, I can't believe it. What a stupid, mean little face she has.

I finally got the socket-level communication for OpenRPG working with zlib. That was really a fucking nightmare. Now I'm trying to work out the details of the database back-end. libdbi should help with that.

But it won't do anything to help with Ryan Seacrest's new daytime talk show. Man, that looks awful.

Okay, one more thing. Here is a tip for people writing to or calling technical support: Please do not say that your problem is "urgent" or explain that you can't "go forward" on your new "project" until the problem is solved. I saw some people doing it on the libdbi mailing lists, and let me tell you, that is absolutely the wrongest way possible to go about asking for help with Free Software. It's also a pretty stupid way to ask for help with proprietary software, too. In my shameful experience "technically supporting" the latter, I can assure you that it does not in any way speed us up in getting back to you. The only thing that speeds things up is being crystal clear about what the problem is so we can figure out what the fuck you're talking about.

I think that I shall never see a web-comic with a disparity between quality of art and quality of writing as great as the one in this one. Woof!

Everyone Likes A Good Joke

Man, I just crapped out a salty sea of diarrhea. It's so uncomfortable, having stomach cramps. I don't know what to do when I have one. It's probably worse even than being nauseated. I'm still sick with whatever I picked up at the office. However, I am doing alright because I am home watching Time Bandits and later, Intacto. Last night, I watched 13 Ghosts. That movie is awful. I mean, it's not awful, but it's pretty disappointing. Check this premise: This guy wants to build a machine powered by fucking ghosts. Awesome. And what does the machine do? It tells the future. That's real cool. See, the movie's actually a remake, and you can tell that the writers really wanted to make it something more intense, like, "the machine can make a bomb that is more powerful than the sun and it's primed to explode," but they grudgingly stick to the original. I like the idea that seeing the future is something that only Satan, or, you know, whoever, can do. But after that, it's all downhill.

Here's a joke:

Q: What's purple and commutes?
A: An Abelian grape.

So it snowed today. Pretty incredible -- looking outside my window some of the stuff was swirling around in a column, while some other bits were just falling in sheets. I was feeling too sick to go play in it, but it sure looked fun. Another joke courtesy of this Slashdot article.

Old programmers don't die, they're just cast into the void.

That's what I'd like to have happen to me, I know. I'm starting to feel too lousy to write in my blog any more, but are you guys aware of this clever attempt to sway the political willow tree in the direction of the left? For the non-technical, here's how it works: Actually, I just realized I don't really understand how it works. It has something to do with establishing a link between the desired concepts, optimally two specific phrases that haven't been paired before, and then promoting that novel pairing by searching for it a lot. That's right -- search queries do affect Google's PageRank system. Two more jokes:

In C++, you can see your friends' privates.

and

Two strings walk into a bar. The first says, "Barkeep, I'll have a whiskey sour."
The second string says, "Hey, that sounds good. I think I'll have one too.(&!@(**(#$^(*(*&@(*!$&(*@#&(*(!@#)(*(*@!$(&!@( *#&@!(#^$*#$_(*@!&#*&@!$#"
The first string says to the bartender, "Excuse my friend, he isn't null terminated."

Hey, when I was searching for the IMDB link for 13 Ghosts, I came across a little gem called 13 Erotic Ghosts. Apparently it doesn't have much to recommend it, except I do notice that one of the stars is Aria Giovanni, who is always bored and hot looking, and who is willing to do unbelievably filthy things on camera. I wonder if Royal Video has it for sale. Finally, one last joke:

Q: What did the webserver say to Slashdot?
A: HRRRRRNNNnnnnnnghhhh......

Okay, two more:

[A red sign posted on my professor's door]
If this sign looks blue... SLOW DOWN!

That one was for Ted. But I think we all need to slow down a little bit.

I'm Sick

That's right. I felt like such doo-doo this morning at work that I put some serious thought into going home and answering e-mails through the VPN. But now I'm feeling *slightly* better, so I may just stick it out. But you are all a'going to get sick, too, because I snuck into your kitchen last night and licked all the forks.

I got a lot done on OpenRPG since last we talked, Interweb. Producing output for my messaging format was made easy by libxml2's xmlwriter API, though using it means I have to require people to install at least version 2.6.0. I also solved the DTD problem -- that is, that there is no simple way, in libxml2, to construct a DTD in-memory with against which to validate documents. I solved the problem by keeping my DTDs in a special directory of my source distribution and then using a shell script to convert them into valid C files at compile time, using the

char foo[] = { 'a', 'b', 'c', ... };

style of array declaration. The script gets automagically invoked by the Makefile generated by Automake. Thank you, Automake -- I still have absolutely zero idea how to write a valid Makefile on my own. Finally, I also sketched out the network transmission system that's going to go in libopenrpg_common. I'm using zlib for compression, which has the added benefit that the receiving side can tell from the structure of the incoming compressed stream when the entire message has been sent. NEAT.

I was peeping the web site for Xouvert, which is the "people's" fork of XFree86, and I came across the home page of this guy, who is the project leader. His home page said he was married to a fairly prominent Philipino journalist and blah blah blah, so I peeped her page. Apparently, they got into a car accident together and she took the brunt of the injurious force and has since been pretty disabled. Though she's had two kids since then, and he's also apparently deserted her because he wanted white babies? What?! This guy sounds like a dick. Not that I really know anything about either of them. But he must not update his page very often.

Anyone want to see a movie with me today or tomorrow? I rilly rilly wanna see:

• Bad Santa (not to be confused with www.badsanta.com)
• The Triplets of Belleville

Tom pointed out that I was maybe a little bit hard on that play Clouds Hill -- that, e.g., the fanatical Navy intelligence guy was supposed to be a bit of a charicature. I'd argue that in the country we're living in today, such fanaticism is recognized by everyone as fanaticism, but it's become a kind of mark of true devotion. You know, like, that kind of behavior is what's called for these days. It's like those creepy housewives who go to those big Christian circus events and have seizures where they spin around on the floor, gibbering and dribbering. It means you really believe.

It Is Snowing, Cretins

Yeah, it just snowed. Incredible.

I dragged Tom to a reading of a really awful play last night. The play was called "Clouds Hill," and was a production of the Manhattan Theater Club, sponsored in part by the Sloan Foundation, who, for some reason, want to promote depictions of science in the arts. It was about two professors and a Middle Eastern visiting student at a small liberal arts college. One professor, a square-jawed ex-Navy chemist, thinks the student might be a terrorist in training; the other, a hysterical and hopelessly naive sociology professor won't believe him. Guess which is right. Well, the play is a mess and really doesn't have anything to do with chemistry, or any kind of science for that matter. However, you will learn that American men are pathetic because they're afraid to oppress women; that the desire to oppress women is something that we share with Middle Easterners, but we have to kill them because we have some tangential assets to protect; and that the United States Navy is MORE POWERFUL THAN YOU CAN COMPREHEND, MOTHERFUCKER. At best, "Clouds Hill" is a poorly written "very special" episode of a sitcom; at worst, it's an inflammatory piece of jingoist bullshit.

However, I did recognize this guy in the audience who was in Hal Hartley's movie, Amateur. He played the wild-haired CPA who bites all the cops after he gets electrocuted by the porn-magnate's gangsters. He's merely an okay actor, but he is weird looking. It was almost as cool as when I saw Liev Schreiber at Han's Deli licking all the cinnamon off the rice pudding. That man is an animal.

Speaking of oppressing women, NPR was talking about Afghan women being prevented from voting in the upcoming democratic elections by their husbands / imams / whatever. I've said it before -- that whole country ought to be be razed and replaced by a Planned Parenthood or maybe a Doctors Without Borders clinic the size of a Wal-Mart -- but maybe we can start by summarily executing men who try to stifle the female vote. That probably means all of them. And that goes for the U.S., too: Those administrators in Florida who mislabeled all those black people as felons in the last election to keep the minority vote low should get the gun-clap, too, but maybe they should be put in a zoo first. Think about it -- it's pretty treasonous. It makes me as mad as the new Spy Kids / Silmarillion cross-over (forthcoming from New Line Cinema) makes Tom.

Flatliners is actually a pretty good movie.

***ITEM***: David Rees apparently does the lecture circuit, and he's gonna be in B-town next Sunday. Peep from his site:

Sunday, December 7
Brooklyn, NY
Sunny's Bar
253 Conover Street
(718) 625-8211
3:00 PM

Get your questions ready! ("What was in the briefcase? Was it Marcellus Wallace's soul?")

Life Is A Game For Grown-Ups. It's A Game You Play For Keeps.

So says a bizarre online quiz on MSN. I can't really comment -- what the fuck does "Play For Keeps" even mean? Does it mean you die if you lose? I mean, you die if you win, too. Everything is so stupid.

Fuck Thanksgiving and fuck you, too.

I got a margin of work done on OpenRPG this weekend. The common library now lets you generate a "message" object in XML. Now I have to finish the code that lets you validate a received message and parse it into a hash. The wheels of creation are not being lubricated by libxml2, which has, in my opinion, a real spaghetti API. I shudder to think what the GNOME source tree looks like if that's what their whole base system is built around. Still, it's the only show in town, I think, if you want to do XML in C. I find that I spend most of my time on this project just thinking about how it should work and then writing code very carefully. I'm hoping I'll hit a watershed at some point when all of the dependent functions have been set up, but it may be slow going forever.

Yo, guy: When were you at an MIT CS ball? And how do NFAs help you do anything with natural language? I mean, you know me, I don't really know anything about anything, but if your language is powered by any kind of finite automaton, you probably don't have anything terribly interesting to say. (Though you may be prone to vicious epsilon-driven mood swings.)

I just got a flu shot. The RN who gave it to me said that giving flu shots is pretty much a freelance thing for her. She said, "Most of my regular patients can't say anything to me." Then she said, "Most of my regular patients can't say anything to me because they have their hearts open in front of me." That must be embarrassing, to have your heart open. And you can't even zip it up surreptitiously.

For Christmas I have to go visit my grandmother and Mer's grandparents. I don't mind telling you that I absolutely fucking hate old people. Go read a book, old people. Stop begging to see me!

Peep this. Quote:

"You know China is not friends with us," Skelton said, speculating about the explanation for what she fears is a subliminal message hidden in the toy. "They're trying to get back at us. What's the best way? Teach kids when they're young to hate. It's scary."

That is scary. Also scary? This little piece of prophecy, scooped from the pages of Cigar Aficionado by the good people at IndyMedia.

I Hate My Fucking Job

So I had to come back to Crooklyn today at 11:30 to let the DSL guys in, and I told the other support guys where I was going and how long I'd be gone, and I even called in from home to make sure everything was okay, but when I get back to my desk I've got an e-mail from the fucking CTO that says, "Why have you been gone for 2 hours?" What. The. Fuck. It reminded me of working at Personnel Express, where you were supposed to check with someone before going to the bathroom because somone might fucking call your idiot "banker" and have to talk to his fucking voicemail, godforbid. FUCK!

This makes me crazy, too. Good thing the whole "slave" / "master" metaphor is the last piece of jargon on earth that might be confusing to people who don't know what they're talking about. Great job, fucking idiots, you've got everything covered. That article reminded of this, which was delightful.

Also:

Bug Review: i always thought [Tetris] was just a game
Nintendo Julian: it is a game
Nintendo Julian: but if you lose
Nintendo Julian: some russian guy dies
Bug Review: he'll die anyway

Blogger fucking deleted this post the last time I tried to make it so I copied it to the clipboard this time. Fuck you, Internet.

Everyone's Got A Blog Now

Okay, I have a lot of things to blog about, but I couldn't blog them over the weekend because my DSL was down. I called the DSL people, and they said they would send someone on Wednesday, and then my DSL was working again so I called them and told them not to come but they said my upstream rate was not so good so they were still gonna come, so I went out and bought some short pieces of modular cable because the modem and the answering machine were currently attached to industrial-sized spindles of it, but when I was doing that, I broke the DSL again but I fixed it this morning but they are still coming on Wednesday.

Someone besides this guy has mentioned Cavalcade of Assholes, says Google. Unfortunately, my new friend seems to be slightly on the hysterical side.

Mer and I went games-shopping yesterday at GameStop. We'd gone in to reserve a copy of Final Fantasy X-2, but it turned out it was already out, so we bought it. We also got Super Bust-A-Move 2, Tetris Worlds, and a second PS2 controller. Unfortunately, X-2 seems to be pretty much a dancing simulation with serious Barbie's dream-house undertones. I guess that's not a problem -- Mer really likes it. For my part, I'm getting pretty into Super-BAM, but it comes with this Story Mode which is pretty fucking awful. This is what the venerable GameSpot has to say about it:

While each character theoretically has his or her own story, you'll notice they share many of the same story elements, often recycling the same video clips. The clips themselves are almost embarrassing to watch. While the PS2 could render these sequences in real time with ease, all the cutscenes are prerendered, and bad MPEG compression is constantly visible. The script itself seems like it was translated from Japanese in a bit of a hurry, with lines like "I am scared! I should be brave!" delivered by voice actors who apparently had no previous voice-acting experience.

FYI, that "I am scared" line is delivered right before Puzzle-Master Weepy transforms into Puzzle-Master Smiley. Tetris Worlds is shit.

Over the weekend we rented Raising Victor Vargas and Owning Mahowny. Quite a pair of gerunds. We haven't watched "Owning" yet, but "Raising" was pretty wonderful. I thought I had a good story to write about meeting girls in the city, but it looks like they've got it covered.

Fuck, I had this link to peep to Tom, but now I can't remember what it was.

So I'm pretty sure the Right thing to do with OpenRPG is to make it validate XML config and game files using an XML Schema to specify types, ranges, and defaults for values, but libxml2 doesn't currently support Schemas, only DTDs, and it's currently the most sophisticated XML-parsing library for C. So I'm currently a little cheesed-off on that front. I'm thinking of using libdbi for database independence, but it's really only for doing SQL abstraction. I'm pretty sure I still want to provide a flat-file option, so I might have to write a second abstraction layer. Also, users should be able to log in to the administrative console over the Internet; and maybe there should be a chat area, too? That sounds like it might be feature-creep.

On Sunday I went to go see Master and Commander with Emma and Mags. It's pretty good; very accurate boat sounds. Some guy almost invents the theory of evolution before Darwin, but is thwarted by some tricksy French privateers. There is a part where this albatross starts flying around the ship and the sailors are using it for target practice. Maggie and I were like, "No!" They didn't hit the albatross, but they did get the ship's doctor by accident.

I finished reading Red Mars this morning. Hermione Chalmers dies -- sorry, kids. I have not done one shitting thing at work today.

Back On The Late Shift

Yeah? Wow, okay. Hey, thanks a lot.

So I don't have to come in to work early for the next two weeks. Having that extra hour and a half in the morning is great! Today I woke up before my alarm went off, fed the cat, vacuumed up about 10 lbs. of litter from behind the cat box, and then sat on the futon staring at a blank screen on the TV for 20 minutes.

I've been spending most of my free time working on OpenRPG. It's going to be a meta-server for massively-multiplayer online role-playing games -- so clients will log in to OpenRPG, log in to a game, and they'll get to play it, and it's great. What I'm trying to do though, is support dynamically-loaded client-side code among heterogeneous clients, so that the first time you connect, you download the client component to the game as compressed XML, and it's going to different depending on the capabilities of your client. Like, if you just wanna play using a text-base console, and whoever designed the game has written in support for that, you'll download a bunch of text descriptions instead of a whole bunch of 3D models. This 'client code' is really just going to be mappings between user-input and outgoing messages to the server and mappings between incoming server messages and client display actions. So you might type 'go n' and your client sends a request to move your avatar north in the server's model of the world. What's going to be difficult is maintaining the 'model-world' on the server side of the things. That's probably going to be where I get sick of this project. I've just finished writing the parsing system for the server console. Now I just have to make it do something. Oh yeah, and the whole thing has to be i18n-compliant.

Man, Tom's blog raises some VERY INTERESTING points. Like, heroism: What is it? What does it take to be a hero? If you're a firefighter and you save a bunch of people, you're a hero, right? What if you're some scumbag businessman who worships at the idol of Greed all day making sure that rich white people stay rich so that you can send your kids to expensive prep schools and renovate your kitchen? What if you're the same scumbag, but you read to old people on the weekends or some bullshit like that? Does that make you a hero? Or are you only a hero when someone crashes a plane into you? What if you're so pious and religious that you're willing to do anything to serve your fictional space-fairy of choice? Surely, that must make you a hero. This is my other favorite Get Your War On:



When I'm not worshipping at the idol of Greed or the idol of Hypocrisy myself, I'm getting all worked up over Final Fantasy X-2. That game looks like it's going to be great. Hey all you New York Hero Urban Professionals! Which do you prefer, Gawker.com or Gothamist? That was a trick question. It turns out you're all catty little homos!

Mild props again to SomethingAwful, the unofficial Jessica Lynch fan club:

A True American Heroâ„¢, she is always accompanied by a crying eagle that sits on her shoulder draped in an American flag while the Stars and Stripes plays solemnly in the background. During her appearances [on a forthcoming sitcom called Cabbage Farm] viewers are reminded that although it is OK to laugh sometimes, we should never forget the great sacrifices made by great patriots that make the country what it is today and that freedom comes at an immense cost.

Mike is definitely a hero for posting these videos of an adorable kitten.

Mer bought this Best of REM album, and it doesn't have It's The End Of The World As We Know It on it. I mean. come on, I think REM's as full of shit as much as the next guy, but that's a pretty good song, right? Tonight I definitely want to go drink beer at Tom's house. I was going to go over there last night, but I thought I might be getting sick like every fucking person at my office is right now. For those of you who are fans of the asshole businessman-speak that goes on on the other half of the cube farm, try this on for size:

So when I called insurance company to send someone over to give the flu shots, I was like, "Hey, don't send us any ugly nurses over here! We only want your hottest nurses!" Ha ha! They're probably going to send the ugliest nurse they got, now. It's gonna be like some Russian bitch with a mustache!

The Strokes Are Fucking Depressing

I'm serious. Kill me or something.

Tom's blog is like a cross between Jackie Harvey's The Outside Scoop and Get Your War On. Speaking of the latter, here is my very favorite strip:



Last night when I got home, I found the bathroom door shut and some plastic bag sticking out from underneath. I went to open it, since the cat can't go to the bathroom if the door is shut, and I found her in there, in the dark, clutching some pieces of bag. She had apparently dragged the bag from the living room into the bathroom so she could be with the bag and her litter box at the same time, but it most have hooked on the door and pulled it shut. She sulked when I took it away from her. There were pieces of plastic in the throw-up I'd found that morning, so it's not like she was doing anything good with it, anyway. She sulked more when I had to move the furniture around to change all the lightbulbs in the house, replacing them with low-wattage bulbs. She sat in her litter box and hissed.

I tried to make fish last night but failed miserably. I wanted to broil it, so I set the oven temperature to "Broil" and put the fish in the drawer underneath the main drawer. That is the broiler, no? Well, it didn't get hot. at. all. It was awful. Maybe I'll try again tonight.

When I got into bed with Mer, we had the following conversation.

"Did you staple the thing? The staple... is it okay?"
"What thing? You want me to staple something?"
"No... is the staple okay?"
"Yeah, it's fine."
"It's fine? What do you mean it's fine?"
"Hey, hey. Calm down, you're dreaming. You're asleep."
"No, I'm not. Why did you staple it?"
"Woah, I didn't. I didn't staple anything!"
"Bastard! That's so annoying!"
"Don't call me bastard!"
"Okay, sorry."

Is it a party foul to link to Blogger.com on your blog? They know what to do when your mom finds out about your blog.

From the New York Times Arts section:

One might expect that a woman with a privileged background who was educated at the Chapin School in Manhattan and Princeton University would have been sheltered from many of the hardships that "The Moonlight Room" unflinchingly explores --- the street drug Special K, buying guns, a teenager locked out of his own home blah blah blah

Yo, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't all that stuff NYC private school to a tee? Except for the part about getting locked out -- I mean maybe if the doorman on duty was busy helping someone with a suitcase and you forgot your keys or something, then it makes sense. Those kids from Collegiate used to steal my lunch money and use it to buy Advil!

I don't feel like writing anything else in the blog now. I don't know. It's very difficult for me to get motivated to do anything creative once I get home. Like every creepy young man out there, I have an idea in my head for a book that I may not ever write. I mean, there are lots of ideas every day that you get where you're like, "Hey, that's interesting. I'd like to write a novel or a story or design a game about that," but there's this one plot or ambient feeling that I've had for a long time that I want to work on, and I never do. I'm walking home from work or from Tom's place or wherever and I'm a little bit drunk, maybe, and there are dead leaves all over the sidewalk and I'm walking past the deserted basketball courts on Sterling St. or wherever and I think to myself, "hey, that would be fun to work on when you get home." But all I do is program the Christing box all night. Want to make your code i18n-compliant? Try GNU gettext.

I've Got You To Let... Me Down

Had a happy weekend, did you? I sure did. Mer and I found a slightly soot-stained loveseat at The Salvation Army -- it only cost $99.99. I make that much in about... okay, just made it... wait... wait... shit, I'm earning money too fast to show you. Here's one thing about money, though. I just bought some plane tickets to go down to visit my remaining grandparent in Florida (and Mer's papa and li'l gam'ma, too), and that is ex-spense-sieve. I don't even feel like paying that much to do this stupid thing which is visit old people. I just don't care, I'm sorry. It's four fucking days I could be doing stuff that is more fun. Christ, I hate old people like God hates the dinosaurs.

The new The Strokes album is pretty the good. Actually, I only really like a couple of songs: They are called "What Ever Happened" and "12:51". And yeah, they're the most likeable songs on the album, so that fact that I like them will come as a mindfuck to those of you who think I only like stuff that no one else likes and to those of you who think I'm not mature enough to like a song that isn't catchy. Listen, none of that's important. The important thing is: "The Strokes are the new Beatles." I just made that up.

I just found out that there is some open source project already called OpenRPG. I should'a seen that one coming, really. Mine's a better idea, though, anyway.

Did I mention that I beat Eternal Darkness: Ulyaoth's Electric Boogaloo? Well, I did. It's not as satisfying a game as it could have been, but it's great fodder for the upcoming movie Blue Stuff vs. Red Stuff vs. Green Stuff vs. Blue Stuff.

Tom has a blog now. Hey Tom, if you edit your "Template" on Blogger.com, you can add a link to mine. That way all the girls that think you're funny but not mean and he has a beard will read my web-page as well. Having people you don't know read your online diary is what makes the internet's cogs rotate. That and fixed-income securities.

Didn't something funny happen recently? I can't remember. The cat threw up on something write before I had to leave for work and I just left it because there wasn't enough time.

The Tonight Show

This morning's entry was stupid.

I forgot to mention -- the other day, I stopped by Golden Deli on my way to work. Alex made characteristic small-talk about hot water in private houses as if he hadn't practically fucking killed a guy the last time I was in there. Then this guy comes in and he gets a coffee, he's wearing a trenchcoat and a pretty nice suit under it, and he goes, "Do you sell any sex magazines?" Alex is like, "No, we don't." So the guy goes outside and I can see he's sort of peekin' at the newspaper racks and the awning, and he's got a little pad that he's scribbling on. A few minutes later, he comes back in and hands the top sheet to Alex, and he's like, "Okay, give me these numbers." He was picking lottery numbers, somehow using the paper and the deli storefront, but he'd rather have used porn. Sick.

I'm on the Edward Roivas stage of Eternal Darkness. Anyone got any tips on how to beat the invisible thing in the basement? Like Mantorok's little brother, I'm all ears.

How bad does everyone want to see The Triplets of Belleville?

Left my fucking work in my home directory at work. Can't work on that tonight. More links:

• Linux Is For Bitches
• The Memory Hole
• These comics made from forum posts
• Krakow Studios - I'm sorry and embarrassed, but I think the demon-girl in this is somehow pretty attractive, and the worse the guy draws her and the shittier he writes the comic, the hotter she gets.

The Christ-Fucking Early Shift Again

That's right. It's very early and it goes until very late. What a nightmare. Last night we rented Chinatown, which is always great, and Wonder Boys, which I hadn't seen. It is okay. I mean, I pretty much liked it, but there are some parts with the Robert Downey Jr. character that are a bit too silly for me. Maybe they could have cut him out and replaced him with more scenes with Katie Holmes, who was doing a pretty okay job in the movie, believe it or not. She kept the mouth-scrunching to a minimum, at least. Okay, here is something I was proud of noticing: You guys know that T.V. miniseries IT? (Is there any other version of Stephen King's IT? It's the only one I've ever seen at the video store.) You know how all the actors in it are just so depressed-looking and ugly that it looks like they're all amateur porn stars? Well, the blonde guy with the pony tail from IT, the main character pretty much, he plays Frances McDormand's husband in Wonder Boys. He looked like he had some serious suicide action coming to him after wrapping up IT, but I guess instead he's jus' chillin'.

The name Jonathan / Johnathan -- is it merely a contraction of the names Joseph and Nathan?

I'm planning and working on a game server similar to Arianne (I've given up on them -- they can't seem to get their act together). Surprise, surprise, it's pretty difficult. Especially since I'm doing it entirely in C. ROCK.

SomethingAwful++:

That night when the doctor got home he took his secret telephone out of the closet. In Iraq that had to have two telephones because of the secret police. One telephone was the one they normally used and it could only call certain numbers and there were always secret police listening. The other telephone was kept hidden and it could dial any number and the secret police would just hear a conversation about women's hats if they listened in. The doctor used his secret phone to call President George W. Bush in the White House and the doctor told him about Jessica Lynch. The President immediately rushed to Air Force Eight - the presidential attack helicopter - but was dissuaded from attempting to rescue Lynch by Robert Rumsfeld (Donald Rumsfeld's identical twin brother who is a commando). Robert Rumsfeld agreed to lead his ultra elite commando team "Special Ops Omega" into Iraq to rescue Private Lynch.

Okay, I just checked that ponytail guy out on IMDB. His name is Richard Thomas, which is not really much of a porno name. The name of his character in IT, though is William 'Stuttering Bill' Denbrough: 100% porn.

Everything That Has A Beginning Has An Ent

Man I've felt shitty this week. I think I got a bad breakfast sandwich or something at Golden on Monday -- I've had the fire-squirts ever since. Now let me tell you all of the fascinating things that happened to me:

I had made an appointment to see a dermatologist because fucking Christ and everyone is always telling me to get all these awful things that are growing on me checked out. So Monday was when my appointment was, so I walked over to Beth Israel on 14th St. at lunchtime. I'd never been there. It's really nice! You should go the next time you have an ambulatory disability or are dying of cancer. I liked my doctor well enough. He was very direct -- as soon as I took my shirt off, he saw the dry skin on the backs of my arms and was like, "Just so you know, that's blah-blah-blah. You'll never get rid of that, but you can put moisturizer on it if you like." He didn't think any of the moles on my chest were significant, but when I went to show him the one under my scrote, he said, "Woah, that's a wart." I'm like, "A wart? No way, I've had that since I was 7. It's a mole." He was like, "I'm pretty sure it's a wart. I'm going to shave it off." Why not, right? So he gave me a little shot and just... shaved it off, I guess -- I didn't really see, but I could feel him picking at it, which was a little weird. He also had to cauterize it. "It won't stop bleeding!" he said. The thing he used to cauterize it looked like a water pic, but apparently it squirted fire because all this smoke was floating up from my taint. I didn't feel any of it. Anyway, so now I've got this little star-shaped scar down there, and it still kind of hurts, but not very much at all. Don't get any ideas, by the way -- I don't have goddamn genital warts or something. This is the wart that you get when you are a little kid and have a wart on your hand and you play with your fucking dick all the time.

That night, when I was walking home from the subway, I thought I'd stop at the Golden Deli for some cider for Mer. They didn't have any, but what they did have was a big fucking fight between Alex and some guy who maybe works one of the night shifts there. Alex was like, "You come into my shop and say that to me? You want to hit me? Go ahead, hit me! I'll fucking kill you, motherfucker!" And the guy he was yelling at was saying to Alex's wife, "Your husband is very stupid. He is drunk. You see how stupid?" At first they were yelling at each other over by the gambling video game that doesn't give you any money, but then Alex started chasing the guy around the store while his wife tried to hold him back by his undershirt. He was like some kind of Bangladeshi Stanley Kowalski

Okay, so I saw this Matrix: Revolutions movie, and guess what -- I didn't hate it that bad. I mean, look, the cache of these movies is founded on the premise that you think the idea, "What if what I think is real isn't, like, real," is really groundbreaking. Come on -- I was already over that one before I even knew what a matrix was. There's even some proof that I read in Ethics about how it doesn't really matter whether the world actually exists the way you perceive it or not. My point is, if you are really disappointed about these movies, you are an idiot. But there are some pretty incredible images in this one, like horrifying clouds of those squiddy terrors just coming right at you like your worst Captain Eo nightmare. These guys know art direction. Oh yeah, and Hermione dies. Sorry, kids.

Links, links. Fuck, I can't remember now. Try this and this and, uh... this. My e-mail tried to send me that last one.

Oh yeah, and if you think my blog is racist, consider this: I am watching some PBS special about Muslim preacher-singers and there is some Arab guy wailing like a baby that came out of a hyena mating with a toucan while about a billion guys in white robes twitch and bow like the worst kind of retard, and I'm lovin' it. Just keep them the hell away from me and my kids.

Good thing Christianity is so dignified.

Eat A Teat

I love The God-Damn Onion. Peep this week's story about the Pope, titled Pope John Paul II: 25 Years of Laughs. Best quote:

"I can still remember seeing him do his classic 'Galileo' bit in the early '90s," said fellow comedian George Carlin, referring to the pope's 1992 declaration that the church erred in condemning Galileo. "Here was this man, appearing on televisions around the world, making a proclamation that the sun does not move around the earth. I laughed until tears rolled down my cheeks."

Delightful. What a hateful fascist that man is.

Today's paper had an article about this Norse woman who wrote this book that's apparently unfavorable towards this Afghan family she'd been living with. From the purportedly tyrannical patriarch who's suing her and the publisher:

There were lots of misrepresentations about me, my family and my country.

Let me tell you something that country: Afghanistan's a luddite cesspool of misogyny and Islamo-fascism. The whole country should be paved over and turned into a big Planned Parenthood clinic. Culture is a farce, tradition is a farce; when you're stuck between culture and human rights, guess which one's gotta give. I mean, I know which one does tend to give, but you know...

The 1.10 Patch for Diablo II came out yesterday. It's alright. I guess my interest in the game has kind of waned. I'd been watching the official Forums, and most of the posts seemed to either praise Blizzard for funneling resources into a game that's getting pretty long in the profit-tooth or take them to task for not being supportive enough of a fan base that they were courting for the purchase their Christmas offering, World of Warcraft. Pretty characteristic of the dilemmas surrounding capitalism in general. I don't know which side of the line I fall on; probably the gratitude side -- I'm just happy to have some new items for my little one-inch high projection of masculine agency. However, the NYTimes had a piece on Monday about the work attitude of Generation Y (that's me). Apparently, we don't trust the Company to provide for us the same way Mom and Dad did. Well thank Chaturr'gha for that -- how humiliating. I'm just saving up to get my MS, anyway.

Speaking of games, though, I've been thinking about the kind of game I'd like to make if I had the wherewithal to make one. You guys remember those games called Manhole and Spelunx by Cyan? They weren't so much games (as far as I remember) as much as they were complicated objects that you could explore. You could click on different parts of a scene and sometimes it would take you to a new scene and sometimes there would be a little animation or sound effect. I was explaining that to Tom, and he was like, "That's not a game I'd really wanna play." Yeah, I know, it's not much of a game -- it's more of something like a novel or a Faberge egg or something. The only game-like example of this I can find is the Inform game Aisle, by Sam Barlow (review here). I've played it, it's really pretty interesting. So that's what I want to make.