The Turtle Book

Comedy. Everybody love comedy these day. Mmm mmm. Here's some material from these two guys named Derek and Clive, though you might know them better as him and him, respectively. Yes, Tom, this is the kind of thing I would listen to wif' my friend Razor before we'd go out to roll punchies down at the club. No! No, that didn't happen! I never had that friend! Anyway:

CLIVE: Fff-uck. Dudley, are you not, is...? Fucking, fucking alcoholic! You're so drunk! You must ha' be on something else, you know.

DEREK: Oh, hold on, let's get this rhyme right:

My Mum came into the room and sucked my fucking knob, oh!
She put her mouth right, her mouth right round it and then she done a gob
On the end of it to make it smooth and make it nice and soft
And then she tossed me right off with her, er, Mrs. Mopp
Who came into the... (starts laughing)

CLIVE: Oh yes, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you very much indeed, thank you very much indeed, it is awfully good but it's not quite what we're looking for, erm, some of our...

We finally put the fucking Elizabethan Collar on Mimi, and boy did she hate it. She was very depressed for several days, she wouldn't eat, she wouldn't drink, we had to force feed and drink her. Now she's a bit happier and her gross little rash has basically entirely cleared up, and it's only been a few days. I want to leave the thing on until all the hair grows back, though. So fuck you, cat.

Guess who's getting reading glasses! Yeah, that's right -- ME. I went to the eye doctor a few days ago because it was one of those things that, you know, I'd been promising myself I'd do eventually, and it turns out I've got pseudo-myopia from staring at a stupid screen all day. So I get to have reading glasses that will hopefully relax my eyes a bit and make me more productive in the late afternoon and evening. Sick. The eye doctor was a real big fat dude who I think was cracking jokes about how much he hates exercise. He put a bunch of yellow shit in my eyes at one point to check me for glaucoma, and it felt rilly gross. He also gave me these exercises to do at work in which I have to focus on a pencil and move it to and away from my nose. Totally retarded. The frames cost a lot of money, too, but I'm pretty excited about looking hot and studious instead of hot and squinty.

DEREK & CLIVE: Oh! My old man's a dustman, he wears a dustman's hat

DEREK: (continues with farting noise in tune)

CLIVE: He's got fucking cancer, now what d'you think of that?!

DEREK: Oh... (falls into helpless laughter)

CLIVE: My old man's a dustman, he's got cancer too
Silly fucking arsehole, he's got it up the flue
He's got so much of fucking cancer it drives him fucking mad
He says, "I've got fucking cancer," and he's my fucking Dad
Oh, what a fucking boring cunt, he goes on and on all day
He's got this fucking cancer and he's too gone on the way

For his birthday or something I guess Tom got the DVD of the first season of The Office, and it is pretty funny. We've been watching episodes of it for the past three nights, but I have to say that the first episode is probably my favorite. Ricky Gervais is so manic and hideous, he's great to watch. I especially like it when he's in an awkward situation with another character and starts shooting little sidelong glances at the camera -- there's this implied camera crew that's making some kind of anthropological documentary about this office of a paper company. I also like it when he's in a one-on-one interview bit with the camera and makes this self-righteous grimace where he bears his revolting sharp little teeth. For his birthday I got Tom the Todd Barry album and Mitch Hedberg's album Strategic Grill Locations, which I kind of want to peep from him, since, as Mitch says in this clip I heard, "These are the jokes for the CD."

I finished The Iceman Cometh, and I guess I liked it. O'Neill uses the pat characterization that sort of irked me at the beginning of the play to make the end of the play even more humiliating for everyone, and that was pretty satisfying. Now I'm reading House of Leaves by Poe's brother, Mark Danielewski, and that's a lot of fun, if a bit, you know, pretentious. The centerpiece of the story of is a house that changes its shape, spawning hidden rooms and hallways that couldn't possibly fit inside the bounds given by its external dimensions and eventually a giant staircase leading down to somewhere else. I don't know where, I haven't gotten there yet. But it reminds of the terrible city Alex Roivas discovers beneath her family's ancestral manor in the Pulitzer-prize winning television drama "Eternal Grarkness."

And that, for some reason, reminds me of this funny site I just found again for the first time, Book-A-Minute. Particularly worthy is their summary of Slaughterhouse Five, greatest cause of death of junior high school readers after Catcher in the Rye.

DEREK: (more laughter) He's got cancer of the arsehole, he's got cancer of the bum

CLIVE: Cancer of the knob...

DEREK: Cancer in his eyeballs, he's got cancer on the gob
He's got cancer in his fingernails and cancer in his palm
Cancer up his bumhole where the...

CLIVE: ...half way up his arm!

DEREK: (laughs)

CLIVE: Oh, he's got fucking cancer, cancer everywhere
He's got cancer of the bumhole, 'cause he's a fucking queer...

DEREK: Oh...

CLIVE: He takes his fucking knobs up, he shoves 'em up his arse
And everybody knows it! HE'S FUCKING WORKING CLASS!!!

Okay, computer time: I got around the threading problems in Guile 1.6.4 by consolidating the Guile stuff into a single thread and writing a work queue-ing system for it, routing all requests for Guile service to a thread that reads them, launches Scheme threads to handle them, and then notifies the caller once the evaluation is complete. That was looking promising until I found out that there's no way to cancel a Guile Scheme thread in either Scheme or C, which kind of sucks the fatty, since I need to be able to prevent threads from chewing up system resources indefinitely. The Guile team has been very helpful -- they've promised some improvements in 1.7 / 1.8, but given that this is GNU project, I expect that will not be for a while. I've decided to focus on some of the more trivial and enjoyable aspects of the whole thing, such as replacing my logging system with stuff from syslog.h and potentially replacing libxml2 with libSXML, which is a GNU project. For the sake of perversity, it might be fun to try to build this using only GNU libraries.

Why am I doing any of this again? To get into grad school? I don't know. I'm getting pretty interested in stuff like genetic compiler optimization and similar stuff that I always told myself was masturbatory and stupid; maybe that means I'm ready to hit the books again, I don't know. Speaking of which: Guy, you should post your solution to that problem. Me, I'm just proud of myself for remembering that that big pi thing means set product.

Thank You, MSN

0-4 Correct Ouch! You totally pulled a Monica. As Chandler told Joey, you have to stop the Q-Tip when there's resistance. We suggest you spend ever spare minute between now and the finale watching the "Friends" DVD box sets.

5-8 Correct How you doin'? Not bad, but just like paleontologist Ross, you need to dig a little deeper.

9-12 Correct Could you be a bigger "Friends" fan? You could try... but you would not be successful.

Robert Moses A-Go-Go

I just got back from running around Prospect Park with Tom. It still killed me this time, but it killed me less. I actually ran, I think, about a mile without stopping, but then my shoelaces started getting untied and I had to burp so I had to stop. And after you stop, it's hard to get the momentum back. My leg started hurting pretty bad like two thirds of the way, so I just walked the rest, because last time I pushed it and I couldn't walk the next day. But the park was totally beautiful, really, really green, like the Parks Department's Special Purpose: The country in the city. Except it's not really the country, it's more like a golf course. But it's still totally fantastic looking, and seeing those nice apartment buildings around Grand Army Plaza reminded me of my old friends who lived near Central Park, like Chris and Sophie Pinkham. I even got kind of wistful, and depressed about coming back to my shabby little apartment building. Three. Point. Three. Five. Miles.

I started reading the novel the tech writer at work wrote online. I'm reading it online, he didn't write it online. Maybe he did. It's actually sort of okay, so far, even though he's a creep. He's funny and fun to talk to, but he's got this very immature and selfish reactionary political philosophy and this very indie-rock attitude about heavy metal even though he hates indie rock because people have indie-rock atttitude about it.

I can't work on gzochi any more until I find out this thing about Guile and pthreads -- I sent a message to the Guile mailing list about it, it sounded kind of bitchy, I don't know. It might be one of those messages that nobody replies to because it sounds ungrateful.

So this guy Ben Holtzman, I went to high school with him, and he's got this livejournal, which I read, and he doesn't know that I read it. Which is a little creepy, but you know, I love reading journals. I think he's kind of an idiot, which is ironic, because he certainly doesn't think he's an idiot, but, you know... I mean, he's not an idiot-idiot, but his priorities are all messed up. Anyway, he wrote the following description of what it's like to be obsessed with someone:

It's like finding an incredible sale at a store with only one item left in stock, rushing out to the ATM to get the necessary money together to make your purchase, and seeing it advertised on every corner between the shop and the bank. How could anybody not love her knowing how she laughs and what she laughs at?

Pretty accurate, right? The rest of the journal is about applying to graduate school and trying to say witty things to make inferior people in his Philosophy section laugh and admire him.

Sam Sedar on Majority Report just suggested that NYC liberals volunteer for the G.O.P. convention and be "nice." I'm pretty sure the implication was that we should sign up and then just be the worst possible volunteer. Like, take out-of-town republicans into the deepest, most angry part of Brooklyn and then just leave them there. If I can find a way to do it that minimizes personal risk (por supuesto), maybe I'll do it. You guys wanna do it, too? Come on. Come. On.

Morning Sedition Shift

Well, I don't want to disclose any agreement that I've agreed to non-disclose, but let's just say I make a great sissy and that Tom's got the voice of a big fat dude. Thanks, Devlin!

Okay, so I am not so good about publishing these updates after I write them.

Yesterday I did some manual labor with Tetley, helping him clean up the stick apocalypse that is their "back yard." In the process we found about a trillion snails, nice big ones with yellow shells, and we started thinking, what about a TERRARIUM? So I got a cheapo plastic box from the pet store and put some dirt and sticks and worms in it, along with a banana peel and a couple of baby carrots, and just like that we started to reap the benefits of a real, working terrarium. Like, for one, Emma and Katie didn't want it in their house, but I was like, it's Ted's, not mine, so it stays here. That was one benefit. Later on, we all went out to get burgers at Parkside, and I took all the gross gigantic chunks of iceberg lettuce and stuffed them in my pocket so I could give them to the snails. That was gross.

We watched Neil Simon's Murder By Death, which is more like Murder By Sucks if you ask me.

Mmm... Almond-Poppy Muffin and coffee. No combo is better.

A To Z Maintenance finally but also totally fixed the plumbing, so I can now sleep through the night completely -- the downside to this is that I've been having rilly weird dreams. Last night I dreamed I was rescuing a bunch of HIV-positive vampire hobos from some kind of government research facility. We were all running around in a big hedge maze, kind of like the one in the Alice in Wonderland cartoon, and I had a special tuxedo that would let me walk through these laser fences that were totally out of the video game Beyond Good And Evil -- or, as I like to call it, Beyond Good And Sucks.

Guy, how bad do you want to go to this thing?

I'm actually getting gzochi pretty close to being useful. I've written the code that sets up all the object-set relationships, now all I have to do is

• Finish the game file parsing code, including adding suppor for strict / non-strict error checking
• Write the event-queue loop code, that, you know, makes the games "go"
• Learn more about Guile environments / modules so that I can make sure the bindings from one game don't bleed into other ones
• Write the Guile API for the game designers

Long-term goals include

• Making a nice GUI for game / resource editing
• Making a "standard" reference client for each of the major tiers of graphical resource capabilities
• Making a real good sample game to illustrate how good the software is (if it is, in fact, good)

No sweat.

Oh yeah, one more thing: I fucking did not win anything in Adam Cadre's Lyttle-Lytton contest. My entries:

• Worse first sentence in a novel: The carrot mouldered; the rabbit stank.
• Worst opening line in a political speech: Folks, I'm from a simpler time, when a boy from a humble circus family could shoot himself straight outta a cannon and into the Presidency.

Given the constraints set forth in the rules, I think those were pretty good.

Resource Enumeration

The DSL is acting the fuck up, so I might lose the stuff in this entry. I already lost it once. I don't know.

A To Z Maintenance "Up Graded" the plumbing in our building on Monday, which naturally led to the ceiling in the bedroom starting to leak. I put a bucket under it and now the bucket is, you know, not full by any means, but very heavy with water. Pregnant or, say, fat, with water. Like a person with edema. I picture edema-water to be sort of milky / yeasty. The water in the bucket is brown.

I went running around Prospect Park with ol' Murder on th' Wind on Saturday. I didn't think I was going to make it at all, but I did, though I only actually ran ran like less than 50% of it. Well, I guess I'm in kind of lousy shape, because I must have pulled a bunch of real secret muscles -- I could barely walk on Sunday, no joke, and was literally unable to do things like lift my left knee to put on a shoe, say. I'm mostly better now, but my back still hurt -- what's up with that? You don't run with your back.

(22:48:36) [My Sister]: bobo would oyu be my friend if i looked like jack osbourne?
(22:48:46) Nintendo Julian: I guess
(22:48:48) Nintendo Julian: why not
(22:49:05) [My Sister]: thats a good additude

Tedious progress on gzochi. I'm still in the middle of writing the code that parses the game files. Once I've done that, it's on to the event queue and some code for the API, and that should yield an actual, usable system. I'm kind of depressed over how much time I've been spending on it and how it's not done yet. It just eats me up, really. Just having to be at work takes up so much of my time, and since the code I write at work is tedious as a rule, I don't always have the spirit to do more of it when I get home. I don't know if I could pull off doing the Master's part-time. The degree, not the golf thing.

I had some food from Tsing Tao tonight, though, and it was good.

Reading Myla Goldberg's Bee Season, which is good and deeply creepy.

The Onion -- not that funny any more, right? But you know who is kind of funny? I'm embarrassed to say so, but I really enjoyed this episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live that I saw last night on ABC. It seems like it's sort of a different flavor from his usual work -- he talks about how he hates the FCC, doesn't care much for Jesus, and, you know, that's all it takes to win me over. I've gotten to the point where I enjoy comedy if and only if it appeals to my sense of political propriety. It's stupid, I know, but it's my little way of fighting the War on Terror. I blame Air America.

The Horses Keep Her Up At Night

Turn the fucking heat off, A to Z! Fuck damn it! Agggh!!! Turn it off! The fucking banging is driving me nuts! Shut it off, for Christ's sake! Bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang!!!

Oh yeah, so I spilled some water on my laptop the other day and some of the keys stopped working. But I hunted down the actual manufacturer and ordered a new keyboard. It should be here tomorrow. Also, I grabbed the Microsoft Natural Keyboard from my desktop and plugged it into one of the USB ports on the 'aptop, and it just worked -- no configuration, no monkey business, no nothing. And they say Linux isn't ready for the desktop.

Word to the wise -- [:digit:] != [[:digit:]]

Look, has anyone else besides me and Big Baby O'Donnell noticed that Ted Rall is a whiny little shit? I for one love the man for being unlovable, nay, loathsome, even, but I can imagine that he might be alienating people by

• Claiming that Air America sucks and that he wouldn't be on it even if he were asked // complaining that no one's asked him to host a show on Air America even though he's such a great radio guy
• Coming up with unfunny, weepy, Very Special-style comics like this one.

M-biddy was regaling me with tales of this super-enthusiastic Networks professor we've both had and that he's got now:

ekiMlleB: the other day in class he said that every CS major should try to break at least one NP-complete problem
ekiMlleB: "because maybe you get lucky"

Dismantle Me

Yo, I'm still sick. I even had a mild fever tonight, but I wasn't gonna let that stop me from going to the Distillers show that I walked all across town to get tickets to. So I just got back, and, you know, it was okay. They'd rigged up this ill-conceived set involving red fairy lights and dangling mannequin body parts that I guess was supposed to echo the concept behind their new album, but, you know, any kind of mannequin art ends up looking pretty stupid. They seemed to be pretty proud of it, though. Brody looked like a hotter version of Barbara Ramone -- hot. Their set was pretty okay. They sounded almost exactly like they do on the album, which is lame -- it's always cooler when the band plays their set a lot faster or the singer sings it different or something. Definitely a lot of steakheads in the audience, also a lot of young girls with they moms. About 10 people got pulled onto the stage and herded out of the place for crowd-surfing.

Courtney Love showed up halfway through their set, a couple of thirteen-year-old girls scraming "Courtney!" in tow, and walked right by me up the stairs. She's actually not too hard on the eyes. And I thought I saw my friend Chris pushing through the crowd in front of me at one point, but it turned out to be some hipster doofus with the same haircut he used to have. I kind of miss that guy.

When I first got to the place, I had to pee real bad, so I went straight to the Men's room even though The 'stillers were already on and playing my favorite song. I pissed a real long time and I kind of had to fart, too, so I farted a long, low fart in the empty bathroom.

Tetley got us tickets to see Match today, so we saw that. Ray Liotta's in it, and he tells a faggot that toenails don't have nuclei. I need this!

Computer thing going okay; GNU regex library making itself frustrating. I'm reading the new William Gibson book. The main character is physically allergic to trademarks, which is a bit pretentious, premise-wise, but it's sort of an interesting story.

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.

The "Other" Eurydice

What up, hombres?

Google found my blog, so I had to take it down for a few days while they processed my "removal" request. I'd never seen an Earthlink home page come up in my search results, so I figured Earthlink had some kind of restrictive /robots.txt file, but I must have been mistaken. Anyway, now I've got my own robots.txt, ready to get re-processed 90 days from now. It's so hard to have a blog, don't you find?

The stupid copyright stuff I've been bitching about for so long got resolved sort of informally, which makes me a little nervous, but we'll see what happens, I suppose. I'm allowed to work on gzochi, at least. Now I'm jus' eating some carrots.

Last night was sort of hellish -- I bought this tiny little microwave on eBay a little while back, and UPS, in characteristic fashion, had made two failed attempts to deliver it to me at times when I would definitely, definitely not be home. So yesterday I was like, "I'm'a get this thing tonight." So I called UPS and they told me I could come out to their Brooklyn facility (104-01 Foster Ave.) between 8:00 and 10:00 PM -- decidedly non-optimal time, you know, but I ended up having to stay late at work, so, you know, okay. So the first bad thing that happened was that I forgot the trouble that Mer had had when she'd gone to pick up a package there and just pasted the address from their website right into MapQuest. So MapQuest gives me an address that would be easily reachable by taking the F to Avenue I. I leave home at 7:00, reach Ave. I by 7:30, and start looking for it. I'd remembered Mer saying it was right outside the station, so I knew something was wrong when I'd walked down Foster Ave. for 30 minutes without finding it. Finally I popped into an auto-body shop and asked the mechanics on duty. They said, "Yeah, people are always coming in here asking about that. I have no idea where it is." A bad sign. But I kept walking and eventually ran into a bona fide UPS guy in his truck. I said, "Hey, do you guys have a warehouse around here?" He said, "Not around here -- we've got a warehouse on Foster, but it's all the way down at Rockaway." I said, "Okay," and kept walking, thinking if I just grit my teeth I could walk from E. 7th St. to Rockaway. Well, 15 minutes later I found myself at the B/Q station for Something-or-other St. and I'm like, "Maybe I should just go home, because I don't know where I'm going."

I get home at 8:30 and Mer informs me that she'd tried had the same problem -- MapQuest is stupid and doesn't understand the number 104-01. If you punch it in as 10401 (which, given the numbering on the houses where I was walking, seems reasonable), then you get a totally different address. Basically, you have to take the L to the end of the line, and then you're right there. Now, a normal person might just put it off until tomorrow, but that's another day of having UPS stupidly try to drop it off while I'm not home, even when I've told them on the card that they can basically leave my package anywhere they want, and I like to wait until a situation is really ugly before I cut my losses and leave, because then, you know, it's just so much sweeter when you get what you want. Anyway, Round 2. So I decide I'm gonna take the B to Prospect Park; transfer to the S and take it to Franklin; take the C to Broadway Junction; and take the L to the end. It's like 8:40, and I'm kind of ticked off, but , you know, I'm gonna get this thing. So I get to the S and it finally chugs out of the station, and I'm thinking, "Okay, the S only makes three stops -- there's Prospect Park, the Botanical Gardens, and then Franklin." Wrong -- there's something between Botanical Gardens and Franklin, and that's where I get off. Unfortunately, no other trains stop at this mystery stop, and by the time I realize that I'm in the wrong place, the S is fading off into the distance, and, you know, it only comes like once a month. So I leave the station (actually, I leave the station, have second thoughts, pay again, then realize there are no other trains and leave again), and pop into a deli. I ask the proprietors if they've got the number of a cab company, and they're nice enough to call up Evelyn for me. (I buy a bag of Utz to be a good patron while I'm waiting for the cab.) The car finally comes, and the driver takes me to Foster and Rockaway. Well, it's not there. But there are some police officers just kind of hanging out, so we ask them if they know where the place is. "Yeah," one of them says. "Um... just... um... take a left up here and drive all the way down. It's the tallest building around here, you can't miss it." Okay, thanks, officer. We do, you know, what he says, and we're driving, and we're driving, and finally we're at a big intersection, and no UPS. So my driver flags another person down and asks where the UPS building is. The guy tells us to just keep driving straight for like 4 or 5 blocks. So we do that, and we pass the place where we were before, where the cops were, and finally we find the building and I get my microwave. The whole cab ride, which lasted about an hour, only cost me $22.00. Top marks, Evelyn.

But man, Mer'd told me there was nothing out there, and she wasn't kidding. It's all one-story warehouses and garages and lots full of towering heaps of scrap metal. It's like a different fucking planet, especially at 9:30 at night during winter. It was like the chilling perpetual pre-dawn wasteland where Fraidy Cat and the ship full of gay pirate mice dwell in a limbo of fear and despair. The graffiti on all the buildings was particularly surreal -- it was all done in the old-fashioned balloon style, and the accompanying pictures were mostly figures from 1980s pop-culture, like Mario Mario and Michael Jackson. I felt like I was in some creepy arcade game like Bad Dudes -- you know, that part of Bad Dudes where a car service drives you around.

I read Italo Calvino's Numbers in the Dark. It's a mixed bag. "Dry River," "Numbers in the Dark," "World Memory," and "Montezuma" were good. The other ones I could take or leave.

Fuck

Life sucks. The world is shit. I haven't been making a lot of entries, lately, in my little journal of pithy observations about the world, because frankly I've been in a bad mood.

The first thing: Apparently the standard New York State employment contract contains this irritating clause about how anything you think or say or fucking whatever during the "term" of your employment is owned by your employer. Fuck. Here it is:

Any and all inventions, discoveries, improvements or creations (collectively, the "Invention Ideas") which Employee has conceived or made, or may conceive or make during the period of employment in any way, directly or indirectly, connected with Employer's business, shall be the sole and exclusive property of Employer. The term "Inventions Ideas" means any and all ideas, processes, trademarks, service makes, inventions, technology, computer programs, original works of authorship, designs, formulas, patents, discoveries, copyrights and all improvements, rights, and claims related to the foregoing that are conceived, developed or reduced to practice by Employee alone or with others...

Granted, I took that from a California State employment agreement, but it's pretty much the same thing. This is bullshit! I know what you're saying, "Boo hoo hoo," right? Well, the little "Invention Ideas" that I work on in my spare time happen to be the only things that keep me going. I don't give shit one about my fucking job or "Grid," whatever the fuck that is. As far as I'm concerned, Grid is something gay people get. Maybe you guys have a hard time relating to this -- imagine that someone told you you couldn't play your XBOX or listen to Jay-Z tell you that he's got "99 problems, but a bitch ain't one." You would be upset.

Well, I asked my boss delicately what the company policy was on employee contributions to open-source software, but he hasn't gotten back to me yet. Apparently, it's a "complex issue." For fuck's sake. Well, guess what -- it's still a small enough company that it would be pretty inconvenient for me to quit, because they'd have to train someone all over again to use their bullshit software that doesn't even do anything anyway. Business "people" are so fucking stupid. I'm the one that signed it, though, so it's not like I'm not stupid. And don't think I don't know that posting any of this in this stupid Online Journal is grounds for termination.

Second, I took the GREs a week ago, and fucked up the math part. That sucked. Apparently the math part is really easy, too, because getting an 800 only puts you in the 92nd percentile, but getting a verbal 800 puts you in the 99th. And most grad school CS programs have this thing where they don't have a stated policy about GRE scores, but they pretty much use a math score below a certain number to weed you out, and usually that score is something like 780. I'm not fucking kidding. I got a 730 on the math. The only school I looked at that didn't have some kind of obvious "fuck you" statement about it was Columbia, which will only cut you if you have less than a 650. I thought I was through with this shit after I got into college.

I'm reading Philosophical Investigations, but I feel like most of the stuff in it that's gee-whiz stuff for most people is covered in Intro CogSci and AI / Compilers. I got a book of Calvino stories out of the library yesterday so that I have something non-boring to read on the subway.

• The Big Bounce: Suck
• It's A Wonderful Life: It's a horrible life, but it's a pretty good movie
• Underworld: Suck, boring.
• Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season One: Funny, a bit

Does my upstairs neighbor know that the whole block can hear his stupid rap music? I think he's an amateur freestylist, too. Do all of you college faggots out there who "write rhymez" in your free time know how awful you sound? You're worse than those white suburban kids who wear backwards baseball caps and wifebeaters, because you have the naivete to believe that someone wants to listen to you read a grade-school level poem about how Euripides and Grand Theft Auto have a lot of things in common.

Don't Want To Meet Your Momma

I just want to make you comma? What? Okay, who would have thought that most rational point about Titty Masada would have been made by Dave Matthews? From the NYTimes' Grammy coverage:

Commenting on the incident backstage, Dave Matthews, who won for best rock vocal performance, said deadpan that "the interesting thing" about the uproar was that there have been breasts "since before there was entertainment."

I mean, maybe a lot of you did. I guess he's a good person? What?! I don't know!!! And I completely agree with P. Diddy...

...who performed at the Super Bowl halftime show, [and] said: "I have three sons. I don't mind. I'm very happy for them that they were able to see one of Janet Jackson's breasts in their lifetime. I don't think they'll be scarred for life."

How cool was the OutKast performance at the end of the show? How bad did you want to see Jack Black jump on stage and chime in on the "You know what to do" part? Too bad, faggots. Tom and Devlin thought it was funny when I pointed out that Andre's squaws were "not wearing proper underpants." We salute you, Space Teepee! I borrowed Max Payne 2: Max Payne Dies At The End from Devin.

Praiseworthy peepings:

• Suicide Club
• The Secret Lives of Dentists

Falconcrest Manor

Today's Times had a characteristically even-handed if boring analysis of Sunday's Titty Holocaust. But what is up with everyone making all this fun of the NYT? It reminds me of my old college days, although the 'Times is a whole lot better than Gawker, the e-zine for hometrosexuals.

Something gross: I was walking to work today and this pigeon's sitting in the middle of the sidewalk and as I approach it, it tries to sort of shuffle out of the way. Apparently it's been hit by a car or something because it doesn't seem like it can fly and it's spraying blood all over the snow as it tries to heave itself out of my way. Naturally I tried to pucker up all my mucous membranes; I don't think any got in my mouth.

[Now it's Wednesday.]

Mer pointed out that the bird I saw yesterday was very likely the same bird she saw that had chosen the garbage alcove near our building as a good place to kick the bucket. She said some if its shoulder meat was exposed. It'd had to have gone all the way around the corner to get there. Gross.

Eric Raymond: Smart, but a bit teched in the head. His solution to the problem of terrorism:

I agree with you in conceding that the state is at this time the only way we have to answer the terrorist threat. The world in which Osama bin Laden would be killed by troops hired by a consortium of crime- and disaster-insurance companies rather than a government does not yet exist.

The reasoning here, I guess, is that profit is a purer or at least more consistent motive than statecraft or whatever it is that motivates people to go into government. But if you watch the news at all, you have to wonder if maybe the desire for profit makes people treat other people poorly sometimes. So if this consortium is accountable to a separate body, then this body is probably a government. And if this consortium is, by its charter, accountable to a group of citizens, then it is itself more or less a government. Right?

[Now it's Thursday]

Okay, time to publish this fucker. Links:

• Farnon's (I think) latest ouvre
• IBFT, linked for reference purposes
• Tom pointed me to this. Initially I was grumpy about it, but now I like it.

OpenRPG is currently a big mess of segfaults and damaged stack. Flaunting the rules of software development (e.g., compile and test often) is fun while you're doing it, but sad after you stop doing it.

Finger Daemon Rides The Bang Bus

A dialogue.

Creep At Work: Don't do the install over the network -- we have the files cached locally.

Me: Oh, okay. But even if you do the network install, it only takes like 20 minutes.

Creep At Work: Yeah, but that's 20 minutes that's wasted.

You fucking asshole. Don't give me that "speed of business" bullshit. Fuck. That really pisses me off. I'm here for 10 fucking hours every day. If 20 minutes of that is spent downloading WebLogic and not Increasing Value™ then so fucking be it.

The copy of ACM Communications in the bathroom at work has an argument in the letters page about the value of math courses in a CS curriculum. The resolution? They're valuable, but let me say this: People only seem to like to teach math to savants. That is, even if I can integrate a function with 10 variables around a 4-dimensional curve or some shit, I will get a C- in the course if I can't solve a brain-teaser on the exam. I realize that a lot of psychotic geniuses take math classes and need to be challenged or they will start rocking back and forth and stabbing their stuffed animals with sporks, but if you can't enter a math major with no real prior experience with math and expect to graduate in good standing -- like you can with almost every other major -- then I'm not going to be shedding too many tears about under-mathed CS graduates. Eat dicks.

Can someone who wasted their evening on Sunday please tell me what this is all about? Did Britney's titties shoot a roman candle into a patriotic kitten's eye?

"We were extremely disappointed by elements of the MTV-produced Halftime show. They were totally inconsistent with assurances our office was given about the show. It's unlikely that MTV will produce another Super Bowl halftime."

Whore!

[Postscript: Apparently a titty was responsible for a disaster during the blessed halftime program-related activity. Thank you, CBS, for apologizing for the public display of a filthy genital part -- and also for protecting us from Commie scum. I thank the holy gonorrheal semen of Jesus Christ that I didn't see any titties until I was 17, when my dad and his Promise Keeper friends took to me to a prostitute so I wouldn't become gay.]

I got interested in OpenRPG again and finished the new common_message-based transmission format and updated the server code to use it. The client library comes next. It's looking like I should probably pick a new name for this thing, too, since there are already two other projects using this name. So anyone (i.e., Mike Bell) wanna come up with something? Here's what the project is supposed to provide:

• An XML document-type-definition / schema for creating a world and defining rules for your own massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Formats for including resources such as graphics and sound in XML will also be provided, and the author of the game will be able to specify several distinct sets of resources per game, so that clients with different display capabilities (ranging from non-ncurses-text-console to fully-accelerated 3-D card) can all participate simultaneously. I'd also like to include some sort of GUI tool to make it easy to code up all the XML and visualize your game.
• A threaded server to host these games for an arbitrary number of clients
• A client library to enable people to write their own clients. The library will handle all aspects of communication with the server; the author of the client itself is responsible for the user interface and for writing handlers for a discrete set of messages from the server. A few sample client implementations will be included

What should I call it?

Like any good poseur-in-training, I have obtained from the library and am reading a copy of Wittgenstein. Wish me luck.

I did manage to rock out with Ted on Friday. I love Ultrasound -- it's only three dollars more to have another dude in the room with you as long as they don't turn on the P.A. SICK. Ted, though, like most people, was only really interested in getting a crack at the drums. It's like being a girl -- you want them to stick to the clitoris, but they just wanna play with the boobies. The boobies are my job. Don't get me wrong, though, I like all types of music (except Country ROTFL). Just be cool and maybe we can smoke some kind bud in my chill-out room. Let me tell you, though, it's hard to get real experimental when you're working with another person, so if he wants to do it again next week (well, do ya?) maybe I'll come an hour earlier or something and do some practicing on my own.

Sands Of Time, Sans Up-Time

What the fuck?

Well, Kerry took NH, and will probably take the nomination. He most certainly will not beat Bush in an election. This must make Ted Rall nigh-hysterical:

Bush is a disaster. He has nearly bankrupted the federal government and many states with his profligate spending policies. He has planted the seed of fascism in the highest levels of government with his concentration camp, red-baiting and increased surveillance powers for Das Homeland. And it's a fair bet that he's planning more unwinnable wars for 2005. The Democratic Party needs its best chance at defeating him this fall, and that chance isn't in the form of John Kerry.

I fear that too many Democrats, and too many Americans, don't get it. If Bush wins this election, there may never be another one.

No question about it. By the way, how wrong is Dean on this one:

At every turn when there has been an imbalance of power, the truth questioned, or our beliefs and values distorted, the change required to restore our nation has always come from the bottom up from our people.

Apparently last Sunday's Magazine was a bit off when it came to the sex-slave story. I didn't even read it, it sounded too depressing, but the title they ran for it was "Sex Slaves on Main St." What I want to know is: Is the title a joke on that Rolling Stones album? I asked Mer, and after a few minutes of trying to explain to me what a Main street was, she admitted that she'd never heard of the album.

So, here I am, fulfilling my duties as web-logger:

• PowerPoint Anthology of Literature
• Please read this. It is completely hilarious.
• An indirect primer on Computer Science and the nature of reality. Mindfuck!

That is all.

These Naked Women Love Animals!

Contempt, contempt, contempt

Maggles wanted a new 'blog thing so bad. What, Big Hot-Dog In Little China doesn't do it for you? I. Thought. Not.

(21:23:48) Nintendo Julian: it's just gonna be full of computer shit
(21:24:03) missmagsy: no there will also be some wry criticisms of reality
(21:24:10) Nintendo Julian: maybe
(21:24:13) Nintendo Julian: let me see what I can do
(21:24:35) missmagsy: yes, see what you can do

I'm so brave; I'm practically Todd Barry.

I finally tracked down the copy of George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails that's apparently been hiding out in the basement of the Brooklyn Central Library. NEAT. It's okay. He's kind of a hack, but I'm already kind of attached to the story, so it's going quickly. I keep seeing little EGA-color portraits of the characters in my mind. Man, this game Circuit's Edge, right, the one that's based on this book -- see, there's this bar named "Chiri's" that's basically a cathouse, and in the game you could pay to have sex with any of the girls even mentioned tangentially in the novel. Wild. That's how I found out what titties look like -- they are a dithered mix bright red and magenta, and the nipples on titties are always hard.

Ted graciously got us some tix to see a brilliant new work of contemporary theater. It was all about boners. And how the only thing that's important in life is making things expensive and beautiful. Oh wait, maybe that's a big waste of time; no, wait again, it's good. Ted, though. This guy! I hope to rock out with him on Friday at Ultrasound.

I kicked so much ass on the kit there last time. Did you know that almost all of Ringo's drum lines are pretty much the same? He has this fill that he really likes to do a lot, too. It goes "snare, snaresnare" -- pause -- "tomtomtomtomtomtom."

Okay, it's politics time for the 'blog. That surprises a lot of you. Okay, I'm going to come out and say it -- I think Wesley Clark might be a better candidate for the Democrats than Howard Dean. Don't get me wrong, I do like a candidate who looks very scary and seems to deliberately want to make me angry by defending the ass-shitting second amendment, but I don't feel like he can take on a nation of people who like their liberals like they like their minorities and women: Non-uppity.

I'm happy because the way Lua works finally got through my thick skull. I was worried because I knew people would want to be able to script objects in OpenRPG and I thought I'd have to Write My Own Scripting Language. Writing Your Own anything is always a bad idea; designing your own language is a real sink -- like for dishes, only for time. But Lua is nice, since the script is an object that you can manipulate, and from which can call certain C functions that you register. So an object would know how to try to move itself around, and maybe it could call this function to submit a command to the action queue. How to pace the scripts, though? Do we let scripted objects run as much as they want but only submit one action per "beat?" Or maybe we need to pace them so that the scripts can only execute a few lines per beat. I think the former, so that, for example, scripted AI can make as many calculations as it needs to. NEAT.

But I'm not even working on it, and haven't been for the past week -- just thinking about it. And you know what? That's just great. Ugh, this ramen that I ate makes me want to throw it up.

Out Come The Wolves, Man. Out Come The Wolves!

I started thinking, you know I started drinkin'.

Give 'em the boot, the roots radicals. Come on now.

I was feeling pretty down; I've been having what I guess you could call bad dreams. It's not so much that they're bad as it is that they leave me feeling completely miserable when I wake up. But then I spent some time talking up Konrath, who went sky-diving in Vegas for his birthday and seemed, for some reason, to be even more down than me. We went to get some Wendy's, and now I feel a bit better.

I also bought a bag of fun-size Clark bars. Those things taste like paint thinner.

I can't get motivated to do the work that needs to get done on OpenRPG. I'm trying to think of the best way to organize objects in the model world that the server has to maintain. A lot of similar pieces of software do it by creating "zones," in which a particular ruleset is active / particular script runs / etc. That might not be a bad idea, except that I'd want to have zones defined in three dimensions, like arbitrary shapes, and if ray-casting has taught us anything (and I do believe it has!) it's that testing for inclusion within an irregular 3-D solid is a place you don't want to go to, sister.

You know what would be interesting? A protocol-specification language for finite-state-based client-server / peer relationships. You could use it to jot down the relevant details of your protocol, and then people could write "compilers" that generate networking code in the language of your choice. Maybe that'll be my Master's thesis when I stop dicking around and get my life together.