2024.01.29
Coming off a period of unemployment followed by starting in a challenging job - having to put a lot of mental and emotional work into tasks with uncertain payouts for the team - it's easy to wish for a better societal balance. One where I had finer-grained options about how I spend my time - enough confidence in access to health care that I could still work but also more freely pursue some more entrepreneurial projects, or lean more into my band communities, or just relax.
Of course for me there has to be the recognition that in a 'more balanced' society, I might easily have less material well-being that I enjoy now. But I still wish we had a structure that was more based on getting a good baseline for everyone and less on show-y accumulation for a few.
I guess I have ambivalence about the interesting diversity of stuff and ideas society offers - I mean we almost all have easy access to a worldwide diversity of flavors and images and songs that even kings of earlier centuries wouldn't have. But for many of us, that comes at the cost of exchanging the one unreplaceable resource we have, our time and attention. (And of course in the USA, it always feels like the false hope of "well maybe someday I'll strike it rich!" drives people to be ok with letting Billionaires hoard as much as they need to placate their egos, more so than in the pre-Reagan days where a tax system could ask more from them while still leaving them with vast wealth.) But we also seem to be losing the thread of community and relationships.
My online buddy Nick responded to some posts about Penn Jillette's pivot from Libertarianism:
It made me think of Rick and Morty: "Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV." No one asks to be born, and I think better societies do a better job ironing out the unlucky rolls of the dice some people get born with. Those societies have to get through or around a paralyzing fear of "cheaters" and "moochers", and I guess despite automation and resource extraction there's still a good amount of work that can only be done by humans, so you probably still need to align incentives to work. But the way we still see "work ethic" as an intrinsic good is kind of messed up.
Horses contemplate a bun-bun (Sean countered with "holy_hand_grenade.gif")
2023.01.29
2022.01.29
Open Photo Gallery
I'm feeling like maybe i haven't had any gum mint or otherwise since the pandemic started. How about y'all?
If the entire world was vegan, we would breed exponentially fewer chickens over the course of existence. If you were to ask a chicken if it would rather live a year of life and be slaughtered for food or never to be born at all, the chicken probably wouldn't answer, cause it didn't understand you.
2021.01.29
"Man, you must have a deep understanding of TIA. I think for a lot of casual atari devs (funny that that's not a contradiction in terms, quite), everything is just there and kind of arbitrary, but you must have some idea of like... how the player 'tripler' flag change circuits."We're having a cordial conversation about programming (both Atari and modern web) on the Atari Age forums, a spin off of my recent Sisyphus project.
"As a matter of fact, all sprites on the VCS are represented as counters that increment with the pixel clock (and wrap at 160). These go into a decode matrix that triggers drawing when certain trip points are reached. Changing the number of copies activates different parts of the decode matrix --- if you have three copies, drawing is triggered for tree different counter values."
His point blew my mind a little bit... (especially interesting since he gives props to my early 2600 tutorials helping him when he first started out) I've dabbled a bit in Atari and read "Racing the Beam", but never thought about this particular merge of Time and Space: everything that puts a graphic in the right place is fundamentally based on these timers! (The amazingness of this point probably has a pretty small audience, but still...)
2020.01.29
What Cheer? - starring Richard Kind from Five Eyed Films on Vimeo.
Code geek alert - and one I hope not too many future hiring interviewers see... Sometimes it feels like unit tests are like writing tests for individual Lego bricks.
95% of bugs I see that make it out of the developers play area are emergent - they arise from the interactions and poorly understood expectations between the bricks! But when you write a mock or a stub, all you are saying is "if the rest of the world matches my little toy fake-y model here I'm setting up with my mock... then my code is all good, baby."
Returning to the Lego metaphor, the scaffolding you use to hold up your Lego brick for inspection seems at least rickety as the damn brick... combine that with the unlikelihood of a coder hunting really hard for something they don't want to find (i.e. a bug in their own code and indication that they aren't so great...) - again, maybe a good coder codes so someone ELSE doesn't find a bug in their code. Which is good - but again, I feel like a telltale of a properly scoped unit isn't there isn't much in that should be subtly going wrong.
I know there's some side effects of testing that are positive, like breaking things up in small pieces, getting dependency injection going, whatever. But I feel like most of the benefits happen testing higher up, and I don't understand why so much of the coder world loves pouring over individual Lego bricks... are the people who love them that much smarter than me, more brain-washed, or just different, like how prescriptivists and descriptivists are different?
Sometimes they say unit tests help explain what the code does, but honestly, reading a test is usually harder to parse than the code itself - maybe there's some good example data that's a good crisp read, but compared to naming functions and parameters properly, and commenting where needed?
I feel like unit tests come from the same people who think a github site with a minimalist README.md is good enough to describe use of their framework...
2019.01.29
Do some people's sinus cavities make sneezing more likely? Or something? Or am I an outlier?
"He's the kind of guy who would listen to his meditation guidance podcasts at 2x speed."
At Arlington's Capitol Theater to see "Into the Spider-Verse":
[reaches for popcorn]
"For a second I thought you were going to put your arm around me--"
"Can I even reach the popcorn that way?"
2018.01.29
via
2017.01.29
He speaks, thinks, lives in the present tensely.
There is nothing as ridiculous as the verbal outpourings of a young poet in love. Outrageously exaggerated. I laugh. But I am also touched. Old as I am, I remember my first loves, the fire, the torrents of words, lightning-sheathed, ache-winged. Dear lasses, most of you are dead; the rest, withered. I blow you a kiss. --Grandpa
The first forty years of life give us the text: the next thirty supply the commentary
"Oh-h-h... bitchballs," growled Bux, his anger visibly deflating. "Buggerly bangin' bumpin' *bitch*balls."
I said, 'Well, how about that.' It's the one phrase I know that can be said any time about anything.
2016.01.29
Let Me Get That Banana - Kind of rough in language and content, but I admit it got me laughing.
Binder Clip "Life" Hacks - a few too many iPhone stands, but I'm really enamored of the second one, using one of the giant clips to hold laptop wires. (You have to use the big ones for average thickness desktops) I've been looking for a solution for that for my desk at home - adhesive backed holders weren't lasting, and I hadn't gotten around to looking for maybe a drilled in eye-bolt.
Also, I liked that it did it using funky music instead of spoken words or even screen captions.
2015.01.29
It's only a mistake if you don't learn from it.
My entire work as a computer expert consists of adding to the data, the cross-referencing, the criteria of rational decision-making. It has no meaning . To tell the truth, it is even negative up to a point; a useless encumbering of the neurons. This world has need of many things, bar more information.
Cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.
2014.01.29
2013.01.29
via http://part12studios.com/promo/ggj2013/ :
After a long game jam weekend and serious crunch time at work, by 7:30PM I am making dumb and weird coding mistakes. Better hold off until tomorrow for the checkin...
2012.01.29
click to play
(Here's the official ggj site about it.) It came out well. I was especially pleased with the level of graphic design we got on it. It's a variant of Snake/Nibbles, where you're a snake who has to protect its gems from the maurading peasants. Unlike traditional "Snake", you can cross your own body, and in fact you have to bite your own tail, because this was this year's official GGJ theme:
Some teams at MIT/Gambit took it literally (like Hoopsnake who absolutely had the funniest entry) and others as a more figurative symbol of recurrence and rebirth.
My favorite other entry was Sleepwalking Backwards, an emo-ish (in a good way) art piece that actually ran on a C=64.
So it was a good weekend. Like last year's sredavni (invaders backwards) I'm a little worried that my project was a bit of a genre piece, but I guess if a bunch of people are going to sink a whole weekend into something, it makes sense to be a bit conservative and end up with a fun quality thing, rather than force something to be more experimental.
NOW OR EVER
2011.01.29
what's kirk been
up to this weekend?
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
It's kind of awesome being the sole programmer for a well-scoped gamejam game, bringing team member's ideas to actuality...
I like to make games the way I like to watch movies -- on my ass.
2010.01.29
--via JZ. I dig it, reminds me a bit of CAKE (the band not the food).
dream: cafeteria w/ "soup too hot" insurance. They had a service w/ everything from "guy blowing on it" to fridge equipment to liquid nitrogen.
http://www.xkcd.com/695/ - touching XKCD tribute to Spirit rover, no longer roving but still fighting the good fight.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1525368&cid=30913324 - summary of the Spirit Rover's plight.
Geek note: man, writing webpages via XSL transforms sucks. It's all nouns. For me programming is verbs.
Going to Northeastern for the Global Game Jam. Last year my team at the MIT/Gambit site made Fling: http://alienbill.com/fling/
2009.01.29
This is no longer very browser friendly - see its sequel drawblood4
drawblood - source - built with processing
A kind of macabre paint program, draw with the mouse, and watch...
this program I made in literally 10 minutes during the MIT Mystery Hunt; I joined the goings-on at Glorious Trainwreck's KotMK 19 with half hour left, tried to make something new, realized after 20 minutes it just wasn't happening, and so made this simple sketch program... I had already made something like this on the Palm, but in b+w only, and without the animation.
Personal News of the Moment
In other news I got laid off today. I'm pretty relaxed about it thus far. I think I have one reasonably solid lead, and am trying to find the balance between "OMIGODOMIGODOMIGOD THE ECONOMY ***SUCKS*** AND WHAT AM I GONNA DO" and taking a breath, and actually enjoying that I have a pretty generous severance situation going, not to mention some very cheap living options.
Not like it hasn't happened before. This recession is probably worse than the previous one, but Tech isn't the ground zero it was previously.
My '99 self would be hyper impressed by the web on iPhone. Would my '89 self be impressed that it took 15 years from the 1st web browsers?
Teaser headline I did not expect: "Did Beatniks Fuel the Financial Crisis?"
Ah, joy... "restructuring" meeting. Pulse going 120 bpm! Stay tuned.
Only now, trying to figure if I get the axe or not, do I notice that the 6 digits from my RSA security keyfob could be made into an I-ching
But are odd numbers broken i-ching bars or unbroken? How do you calibrate an oracle?
Probably getting the axe. Retroactively, I wonder if my manager was being especially nice to me, though who knows if he knew. Probably.
So, yeah, laid off. One of my better send off packages, 1 month of "employment", 4 weeks severance. Should I enjoy the time or rush back?
2008.01.29
Is it just me? Or does this feel like a particularly bad season for that kind of stuff?
Atomic Theory of the Moment
The way it was explained to me is that protons give an atom its identity, electron its personality.He begs off on describing valance numbers, but this summary goes well with what little I know of atomic theory, and I like it.
Quote of the Moment
I was hesitant. But it is what it is. [My friend] needed help. There was beer. Good times. It was worth it.
2007.01.29
Next target: a milk crate full of neglected Atari 2600 games that I generally have emulated as well. The only thing I want to keep around are multiplayer games (admittedly a bit optimistic, but I hope that retro vibe can hit now and then among some of my gaming buddies) and the hardware itself.
On a video game message board, one that's prone to over-analyzing and sometimes pretentious pondering, "Nana Komatsu" wrote (in a thread on looking for "spiritual uplift" in games)
I've found that we sometimes outgrow our hobbies and yet because we feel attachment to them we try to find things that are not there.Boy. Ain't that the truth. Like Arlo of "Arlo and Janis" said:
As I get older, I don't enjoy the same things I once enjoyed.I think that can be part of a defensive mechanism as well. Hobbies help form our identity; unlike family and job and even friends, a hobby is a deliberate choice, a specific and focused decision to divert attention and resources into an idiosyncratic pursuit.
But I enjoy new and different things!
I just don't enjoy them as much as I used to
enjoy the things I no longer enjoy.
Sometimes I feel as if turning my back on old hobby is a rejection of the "old me".
Sometimes I feel like rejecting the "old me" is more difficult than it should be, that it forces me to admit I'm fallible in ways I'm not entirely comfortable dealing with. Which is a pathologically off-kilter way of being, but I don't know if a force of will could shake that, and I'm afraid of what kind of external event it would take to put me on sounder footing.
(Which is crazy, right? I mean I admit that I'm wrong all the time, but I think it's some kind of subconscious effort to lose the battles and win the war, of some sort of insane superlative pedestal my self-image tries to insist on.)
Any of you know what I'm talking about there? Is it that unusual? Some sort of horrific side-effect of being an only child growing up in neighborhoods without a lot of kids?
2006.01.29
Slashdot linked to a collection of classic game endings...mostly from the 16-bit SNES/Genesisera. Some good stuff in there. I always liked the Super Mario Brothers 2 ending, even if it has that element of "it was all just a dream". Actually, endings that displayed the cast of bad guys and their names, like Star Fox, are pretty cool. I kind of wish the movies showed more of the final boss fights though...
Quote of the Moment
Turn the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.I wonder if some people suspect that this has already happened.
2005.01.29
Anyone got any more of those?
Snark of the Moment
"Ooh, look who cleans up nice...FoSO gives with one hand, takes with the other last night before I headed out to a birthday dinner for a friend of Ksenia's family. And yes, I do own an iron. I think the problem is I don't really believe in clothing wrinkles, they don't seem like any kind of exact science.
...do you OWN an iron?"
2004.01.29
So I dunno. Overall, I'm much more aware of my mental process than I used to be, so it might be this phenomenon has always happened but now I'm more aware of it. Which would be a positive thing. Or maybe it's just me getting older. Or maybe it's premature dementia. Or somewhere in between! Still, any time you notice your mind ain't what it used to be, it's potentially very scary.
(Huh. I was thinking that, along with all of this, I'm more aware of becoming immersed in books and video games and what not, and worried that it was a new phenomenon, but now I can remember in sixth grade or so...I'd really get into books, to the point where I wouldn't notice people calling my name. So I guess brains change, not always for the better, not always for the worse. Also, I am more likely to notice this kind of thing lately. Rather un-Zen of me, I'm afraid.)
Anybody else get this kind of feeling?
UPDATE: speaking of random brain functioning: in the morning on the drive to work I was feeling really up: energized, ready to take on the world. (Now there's a word that never looks like it's spelled correctly.) Shortly thereafter, the opposite. But it doesn't feel like it's associated with any particular thing, even though it would seem like I have a lot to be depressed about these days. Mmmm, borderline manic-depressive. (Well, not even borderline, some kind of "shadow syndrome" if anything.) Guess I'll try self-med'ing with a 20 oz bottle of Coca-Cola...I find myself craving that, even though I always drink Diet...
Link of the Moment
Not quite as funny as last year's installment, Business 2.0's The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business is worth a quick skim. Best headline: (which is where most of the funny bits are) "61. Soon to be replaced by 'You can't take it to the grave, so you might as well buy a damn watch.'", for Timex replacing "It takes a licking and keeps on ticking" with the utterly depressing "Life is ticking." Not as funny as the headline series I quoted when I linked to last year's edition, but still.
Dialog of the Moment
"Believe me, friendship lasts much longer than love."
"Yeah, but it ain't as much fun."
Game Links of the Moment
Do 3 non-stellar, related links put together equal one really good link? Well, here goes... Sports Blooper Reel, 8-bit Nintendo style. I think more than anything it shows the comic power of "Yakety Sax". Paule Neave has put together (yet-another) set of Flash version of arcade greats. I liked Hexxagon, a hexaganol port of Attaxx, but mostly I loved the mouse-wobbly border of the site itself. (For some reason, you have to download the games rather than play them online.) Finally, an interview with Wes Cherry, the creator of Windows Solitaire. I like how he sounds a little bitter about "FreeCell".
2003.01.29
Slashdot had some talk about if one can have an entire career in IT. (Comes from this editorial at MSN.) I think I'm generally good at some things beyond computers, but I'm not entirely sure what...
Cross Culture of the Moment
| (^_^)
smile |
| (>_<)
ouch |
| (-_-)
fuming | (@_@)
confused |
*^_^*
blushing |
(^^)//
applause |
The Japanese smilies have the advantage of a much wider range of characters in their fonts. That's the 1-byte vs. 2-byte thing the author talks about... the "John Lennon" emoticon was pretty amusing.
Heh, this ties in with yesterday's Davos link I guess, about Japenese youth culture. The author claims the first set is pretty widely used. I know American Emoticon Dictionaries can be huge, but people tend to stick with :-) :-D :-/ and :-P (Software that automatically translates these into their yellow cartoon equivalents is a really dumb and overplayed idea, taking away the charm of the concept...and AOL Instant Messenger gets it wrong-- :-D is not big toothy smile, it's "laugh"...duh.)
Here's another page of 'Anime' Emoticons, with some overlap, but that can all be done with regular characters. I don't know if most people use the parens on the side or not.
Science of the Moment
Alas, it looks like the Spike Report, a good source of oddball news links, is going away. But what might be the last issue has a cool link about a new psychology experiment that shows how little of the world we really observe, compared to what we think we do. In this case, a guy asks you for directions. As you answer, two men pass between you, carrying a wooden door. Chances are that you won't notice that you're not talking to the same guy you were before the door passed between you. Amazing! Spike pointed to this page with video footage and this page with some cool links as well.
This indirectly ties in with some of the points in my mortality guide...coming back to the idea that our sense of self is more of a story we make up as we go along. Also, the first link really echoes what scifi author Douglas Adams described when he proposed the SEP ("Somebody Else's Problem") field: a way of making an item-- even a large one, like a spaceship-- effectively invisible by getting the brains of potential viewers to edit it out as "somebody else's problem".
2002.01.29
This is a little embarrassing...the frilly things to the left are garters. They're from the two Euclid High Proms I attended (and it's always "prom" never "the prom", kind of a "Pop"/"Soda" thing.) One of the traditions of prom seems odd to people who didn't go there... (though it may be a general regional tradition, I'm not quite sure) ...it's the "garter dance". Most of the gals who go are wearing a garter that matches their dress. At some point, the DJ announces the dance, chairs are brought around the dance floor, the gals sit and their dates get to remove the garter. The guys generally use them as armbands for the rest of the evening. It's kind of goofy but sexy fun, and I have always thought goofy sexy fun is a good thing, even though the whole affair is a bit tacky. For sentimental reasons, I'm probably gonna keep the garters forever, a bizarre personal totem. Somehow getting rid of them now would retroactively diminish those evenings.The beer mug is from 1991 (as the mug has inscribed on it, the year of eXCItement...get it?) when I went with Veronika though I was but a junior. That year, they gave champagne glasses to girls and beer mugs for the boys, which is a bit direct of a message to send when you stop to think about it. In 1992 it was champagne glasses for everyone.
Link of the Moment
This was on slashdot: Norrath's a place plenty of people haven't heard of, but it's the 77th most wealthy nation in the world, right behind Russia. Or rather it would be, if it really existed. It's the fictional world of the online game EverQuest, but that New Scientist report is talking non-fictional money. Strange but true.
2001.01.29
Watching the Superbowl. Actually, Sting in the pregame show (for his desert rose song, it's kind of odd, the dancers keep showing us their underwear and pantyhose... must be poorly designed costumes.) Man, String singing bad covers of his greatest hits... ugh.
Anyway, It's 5:48 pm. It's light in Florida but dark here. I live too far North. It's not just the cold, but the dark as well. Darn it all to heck. At least then it would be warm.
Funny Link of the Moment
In the spirit of Wicked Spanish and Wicked French, it's the Zompist Phrasebook.
Political TechnoProtest
The protestors in Switzerland have come up with this cool way of getting their message to the Davos delegates.
Quote of the Moment
As I said in Ansible 152 about another piece of technology, "I may be as disappointed in this as I was in the error-correcting modem, the magnetic stud finder, the universal remote control, and the Radio Shack male-to-female, female-to-male conversion kit."
Whoa- Mo got a 23% raise, not a 17% one. That's cool, though based on non-slackingess she should be getting a much higher percentage of my salary...
and Mike wrote to say he got his girlfriend knocked up. Sigh. It seems so- I dunno- White Trashy? Something.
99-1-29
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This keyboard may be making KHftCEA entries more verbose. Reminds me of where I read something like "Would the Constitution have been written differently if under the glare of flourescent lights, banged out on typewriters?"
Also, maybe I should go back to the KHftCEA name.
99-1-29
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"Why Do You Persist In Tormenting Me So?"
--Quote I Posted at IDD
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"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . we need believing people."
--Adolf Hitler, 1933-04-26
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A co-student of Mo's calls any friend's boyfriend "Steady Eddy". That amuses me.
98-1-29
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