rangerBlog

Control Pannel, where art thou?

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:33:14 GMT

I have decided that I hate Plesk.

I hate its sterile white layout with no visual cues or hierarchy.

I hate how it's not clear what 'level' you're in.

I hate its obfuscating control titles. It's like trying to find something int he MySpace controls. (which I also hate.)

Plesk looks very pretty and Web 2.0, and is probably coded with much cleaner, lighter HTML.

I hate that.

User pannel white
pushing buttons blind, with luck
I shall do something

Free Association Samples, Limited to Sinus Episode Recovery Periods

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:30:10 GMT

The girl next to me in class Thursday had that thing that's going around. Nothing remarkable about that- I had it two weeks ago. She'd been hit hard by it because she had another medical condition, but now she was in the final phase- the sniffles.

I listened to her sniffle and snort all through class half-aware. My own sinuses were gumemd-up, not leaky-- and I hate that. I wished I was in her phase- with that sweet painful-pleasure sinus pressure that comes when you snort through mucus-filled lines that every time leaves you reeling, just a little.

So with 15 minutes left, as conversation turned to students individual projects that I didn't have to pay attention to, I jotted a short note on a piece of paper and slid it over to the girl next to me. She read it, stared at me for a long second and then (because she's also the quirky intellectual-artistic type) she shrugged and started jotting notes.

I charted her responses on the spectrum of emotional-to-intellectual below. The 'ghosted' chart-point is where I initially placed a seemingly-random thought. I moved it when she informed she it wasn't entirely random- she had this person's online portfolio up in a browser window and was suddenly struck by a curiosity about her.

I charted her responses in good-faith (considering each one independently and not attempting to place them in a pattern) and was enormously pleased to see the nice wavy curve they represented snaking back and forth between intellectual and emotional responses.

I charted point 8 as two separate inter-related responses- one a 'discovery' (awareness of an event usually pushed below her conscious awareness) and another metacognitive- making associations that placed it in a context within the exercise.

By contrast I charted point 9 as a single reaction, but one which occurred simultaneously on the emotional and intellectual axes- without particularly straddling the centerpoint between them- it's either an intellectual experience of an emotional response, or an emotional analysis of an intellectual response.

Point 10 is a logical followup to point 9. (I'm familiar with her situation, and the two are tightly linked.) I classify is as emotional-intellectual-in-synch. It's also the only data point that directly proceeds from the previous- where the thought-derailing effect of the snort did not producer a 'new' association. (I like to think that it provided a 'blank spot' for such an unambiguous growly-thought to form in response to #9.... but that's unprovable. Following from the general dissatisfaction of points 6-9 #10 does seem to represent something she can do something about and thus could represent a sort of 'conclusion' to a larger thought.)

Conclusions

Snorting-girl's responses appear to form a gentle curve from intellectual to emotional and back. She reaches a centerpoint towards the end as the experiment itself ceases to distract her and the associations she's making themselves become the center of her attention. Following a 'split' reaction that's both emotional-intellectual, her associations occur on both axes simultaneously. These reactions have a more focused quality and could probably described as things she's she tried to avoid thinking about/dwelling on because they are out of her control. (Though again, the apparent 'climax' of this pattern is something that is.)

The nice smooth curves here might not occur if she had been focusing on something to force her into either emotional or intellectual 'ranges.'

It is unclear whether the cold had any effect on the thought process, but it provided a convenient 'now' point between recording observations that wasn't a constricting 'every 30 seconds,' which could have undesirably focused the subject on the deadline /need to produce an association.

Possibilities for further study

Many variables are uncontrolled in this random-sample. An ideal followup study would:

Have a sample of at least 30 subjects, evenly split between male and female.

Place them in a room with no distractions for a half-hour recording their associations to a similar irregular meter. (A runny nose does seem ideal, but may be hard to recruit for.)

Have each subject chart everyone else's responses -5 to 5 on the emotional/intellectual scale. Half the subjects would have this scale reversed to correct for any 'negative + emotional' association.

Also have the chart charge how much they think each subsequent thought follows from the previous from a-little to a-lot.</i>

30 tests taken, each of which would be then be charted by 29 other students, twice. Your final data set would result in 1740 evaluations. Assuming ~5 per evaluation depending on length... this would require 4-6 hours for 30 individual to simultaneously complete. It would also require backbone computer integration to turnaround and handle the large number of responses, evaluations, evaluators and order-of-evaluation.

Using testees to evaluate one another's associations seems more beneficial than harmful in terms of gathering meaningful evaluations-- it gives them a meaningful frame of reference in which to do so. It may be beneficial to have them evaluate their own responses-- ideally twice, near the front and towards the read of the evaluations to correct for 'emerging' standards where later responses are judged differently than earlier ones.

...I have no desire to perform this test. Anyone who wants to steal it, go ahead.

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:26:51 GMT

My laptop was stolen on Friday. I was pissed.

With no sign that it's coming back, I purchased a new one on Monday. Another HP Pavillion, one or two model numbers above my old one.

One hitch: It runs Vista.

*cries*

I've spent 6 hours gutting awful interface changes, restoring the instinctive up-a-level button, etc. Hate, hate HATE.

I cannot figure out how to search for a file in Vista. The new search interface is-- awful. A mess of nonpersistant settings, dumb-as-rocks default windows, out-of-date indexes that don't reflect changes to the file system and searches for files that simply stubbornly won't show up.

A search leading me to Microsoft's Vista Blog reveals the startling truth- not only is the Search now stuck in broken-mode-- they've also thrown out the entire search paradigm used by every search function-- ever-- in favor of a nifty new proprietary search format that uses bizarre encapsulated braces and finicky control-terms! Yay! All the headache of Regular expressions (to perform a BASIC search instead of this enhanced garbage!) and none of the power!

You know what- I like Google Desktop too! It's incredibly nice and useful to be able to find things quickly, and to have text cache and mid-document searching, it's a great and powerful application!
Google Desktop is also completely unusable for many things. I have multiple external hard drives. They get indexed willy-nilly- so if an external drive mounts as E: once and H: another time the files show up both places. And clicking on the E: response in Google Desktop Search results in an error message- the file does not exist even if that file IS there on H:!
It's a great, wonderful search paradigm... that is absolutely useless for many basic system tasks. Which is why GDS was a great tool to use hand-in-hand with a basic search- the right tool for the right job!

But Microsoft has replaced basic search with another Desktop search- and no real ability to run a basic search-a t all. Now instead of tools that work hand-in-hand I've got two left hands and I can't jerk off because I can't find my porn anymore.

Does Google have a 'Basic Fucking Search that Works' program I can use as my other hand now? Seriously- anything? I'm tearing my hair out trying to perform the most basis searches, and it makes me want to cry.

Microsoft, as a corporate culture, seems to have 'redesign it, even if it doesn't need it' deeply ingrained into themselves. I'm going to use the new folder icons as an example.

We all know the basic folder visual paradigm- a manila folder icon.

Vista has cleverly made the fodler icon fresh and exciting by turning it on its side!

Ignoring (for the moment) that the visual metaphor breaks down because turning a manila folder that way would cause its contents to spill out, I have a more fundamental problem with the icon redesign.

Let's look at the footprint of standard icons from time immemorial!

file

folder

program

Hey, look! The 3 basic kinds of icons, files, folders, and programs, have different footprints! Files are tall and thin, programs are blocks, and folders are square! There is no technical reason for this, they all use the same icon format, but this is the convention that's built up over 25 years! The result is- even if a program/folder/file uses a custom icon, we can tell at-a-glance whether it's a file, folder, or program because it's footprint is part of the visual metaphor we uses to interact with the operating system!

Now let's look at Vista's icons!

file

folder

program

Well, they seem to have fucked it up, haven't they? It's not a big deal when viewing folders full-size... but when viewing using small (16x16) icons folders no longer read like folders, they look like files.

I'm sure I'll eventually get used to this- and pick out the Vista folder icon despite it begin visually coded as a file instead of a folder... but it's nicely symbolic of Microsoft's place in the marketplace. They did not create the icon footprint paradigm, that came out of Redmond, Microsoft just stole it without understanding why it worked. As a reuslt- for 25 years Microsoft ripped off these footprint from someone who knew what they were doing, their icon footprint paradigm made sense despite an absence of intention or awareness of its existence on Microsoft's part. But they change it- and because Micrsoft dosn't even realize it's supposed to be doing something, they make it a total fucking mess.

I think what irks me is that- this kind of shit is not a trade secret. Apple publishes it's Human Interface Guidelines freely for all to read- explaining how they things things should work in MacOS, and their operative logic why! (I read them cover to cover circa System 7.) Microsoft doesn't have to be bound by Apple's solutions to those human interface problems... but they should at least acknowledge they exist

In summary:

Vista's search function is a lot like talking to a Disney tour guide. It gives you whichever canned-response answer best correlates to your question-- regardless whether that actually answers the question you were asking.
Microsoft employees employ much the same tactics when people ask how to restore the old search function. "You can access our new advanced search capabilities by..."

Writers Guild Strike, and Christmas

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 09:12:13 GMT

I got DVD sets for x-mas, as I am prone to.

These are both a pleasure and a chore- since a set containing ~16 hours of video (without commercials) represents a significant time-investment to watch if I don't just want to let my life grind to a halt for 2 days and watch it all.

My first thought- since this is happening all over the country, maybe it'll distract people from the Writer's Guild strikes. (No good TV is actually an opportunity to watch the DVD-set you got!)

My second thought was- will the guild strike drive DVD-sales? An audience primed by the experience of substituting DVD's for Television in the unusual post-Christmas dry period might easily fall into the habit of substituting DVD's for TV! Everyone seems to agree it's much more enjoyable to watch a DVD set more-or-less in a run (3-4 episodes per day) instead of over the course of a season, you get more into it, see things you never would have, etc... and the experience of watching media you actually want to watch, as opposed to media you stumble upon and just find palatable enough to not change the channel and seek something better.

Could the mass-experience of regularly consuming media you actually like cause a watershed change in viewing habits? Americans leverage their time harder than any other people on Earth-- are we willing to pay to leverage our free time for maximum enjoyment and minimum commitment?

Of course, I mostly stopped watching television 7 years ago, and quit altogether 4 years ago. I'm not an independent opinion on this.

For my part- the DVD sets I got were all stuff I'd previously pirated. I'm keeping them. I asked for them because I liked them when I pirated them.

Lots of other stuff- not so much. Other stuff- I recommend to people I know would be massively into it. People who, like me, enjoy the deep-immersion method of viewing media and are willignt to pay for the privilege.

Unrelated to the above? I've spent the last 2 hours exchanging text messages with someone who's stuck on an airplane while traveling. Someone needs to get that boy a book.

On Personal Religions (and Tetris)

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 19:06:06 GMT

I am not a great believer in the Personal Religion, the sort of made-up 1-person-follower theologies that seem to proliferate on the edges of the New Age set. Someone searches their entire life, sampling this religion or that religion on the menu- none of which quite fit, so they take their theology buffet-style and build a system that suits them better.

This is about 1 step removed from the 'charismatic villain' in a summer blockbuster who spouts off about his hard-learned personal philosiphy of life. Key indicator: those guru-villains always have a moment right before they die wherein their philosiphy crumbles like a stale cookie in the face of their victim's selflessness and is revealed to be nothing but a way of absolve themselves for turning into a No Good Shit when life shat on them.

I can crock people having their own interpretation of an existing religion-- I was raised catholic, but I tend to filter my religion through a historical context. i.e. The New Testament goes out of it's way to absolve Pontius Pilate (a swell guy!) in Jesus's death- he was forced by Jewish authorities! Problem: Pontius Pilate was an asshole. He was such an asshole that Roman records exist gossiping about him which have survived 2000 years. And the books of the New Testament were written while nascent Christianity was trying to get the Roman government to recognize their right to exist instead of feeding them to carnivores. "Heck no, the Romans didn't do it! We love the Romans! Quick, someone add a line where Jesus tells everyone to pay their taxes on time!" That's an interpretation.

Randomly deciding that Global Warming is actually atmospheric phlogiston being agitated by angels shaking their fists at all the gays and abortionists in California? That's crazy. Sure, there's are religions who believe stupider stuff, but they're at least doing it in large groups, which makes it look less stupid.
The leap from "Hey, I have an idea, what if...?" to "yes, it is decidedly so!" with no stop in-between for critical self-analysis bothers me. Not that people do it- I know people are crazy and stupid- but they seem aware of what they're doing. "Aliens are coming to take us away on their comet!" is not a pre-existent true state of things, it is (in theological terms) a New Covenant. "Yeah, we know this isn't how things worked up until now, but I just thought of something better and that's how it's gonna work from now on- castrations for everybody!" There's amsll but terrifying group that believe in The Matrix too- not he philosophies underlying the film-- the film itself.

This is a sort of cosmological version of Rule 34, like if you can think of it it not only becomes your religion, it becomes a valid religion, bare assertion = true.

I am a religiously open-minded man, to the poin that I get irritated with evangelical atheists of the Sagan or Dawkins set. Hardboiled skeptics like to hold up things like The Secret's, which proposes a 'Law of Attraction' whereby you wish for material goods and they appear in a flash of light (or something) as it represents all religion. I have 2 issues with this;

That's a strawman, holding up a weak argument, demolishing it and symbolically claiming you've demolished a, analogous stronger argument.

The Secret is a re-dressing of a form of Magical Thinking that's twined up with Crowley. It's had god substitutes for angels, had all theology stripped out, has New Age or occidental skins laid o top of it and (in this incarnation) crossbred with the Davinci Code's pseudohistory. Crowley based some of his shit on John Dee-- which gives this fringy quasi-religious philosiphy a 500 pedigree. None of this makes it any more valid..., but it's not like the Secret's producers sat down and wrote this in a drunken weekend-- they mined an established and long-existing body of nutter-thought.

It is in full knowledge of the stupidity of personal religions, but with a healthy skepticism of unhealthy skepticism that I find I must nonetheless declaim the following;

Long centuries of rhetorical use, and an inability to eliminate it through the scientific method, have caused René Descartes' Decieving Demon to spring into existence via a sort of cosmological rule 34.

By its very nature as an infinitely wise and consistent deceiver, a universe with the Deceiving Demon must appear functionally identical to a universe without it. However since the Demon's existence represents a fork in Knowability proof, it must represent a change in our experience of the world (rendering it unknowable) while still seemingly perfectly emulating a consistent and truthful universe for our perceptions.

It follows therefore that since changes to the world resulting from the Deceiving Demon's existence must exist, those changes must also be hard to see occurring too small or too large for our senses, or within blind spots we are structurally or psychologically ill-equipped to notice. Small perturbations can create large divergences, like small leaks eventually sink a ship. It is essentially impossible for us to say which leaks (which occur naturally to null-effect all the time) are adding up to macro-scale changes- we can not trace the thread of every pebble into the future in search of an avalanche.

However- others can. Rats flee sinking ships, distinguishing the intention within the leak that will flood against the hundreds of others that merely drip. If the Deceiving Demon's micro changes directed at effecting macro changes undetected fall below human perception... they must nonetheless ripple up the scale of things from small to large, hidden in the chaos. But all events create knock-on changes, and just as rats detect the one critical leak which humans cannot and then respond on a level which humans can perceive, there exist other 'ripples' on the surface of human perception which betray the presence of a vast creature moving just below.

Listen well, for I speak the unassailable proof! Among those ripples most easily divined by human senses is the electronic random number generator; it samples incredibly small datum and uses them as the basis for mid-scale effects, easily seen by humans, there is no chain of dozens or hundreds of knock-on events leading to this manifestation, it cuts out the middle-man for easy detection.

Lo this Sunday early did I Witness; as my Testris game did begin with a line, continue with a line, persist with a line, which itself begat a line that was followed by a line until not-four-nor-six-but five lines did there manifest themselves upon the tetris grid.

Much can we learn from this; five being the number of mischief, the line being the icon of order, and the disruption at the outset which creates unmanaged chaos. There is fear in so doughty a succession of lines, a fear against using them lest- in coming to rely on them- great vertical chasm are created, crippling the board. And so a harbinger or order and resolution is transformed into a mocking thing of chaos. Presented with its mighty power there is no choice but the leave it unused and lay it sideways like a fallow field. While lack is acutely felt, surplus can do greater damage undetected.

So this, I say, is how you shall know the Deceiving Demon; by the playing of Tetris. And when the alleged 'randomness' of the pieces is replaced by a surplus of destructive order, you will know it passes, and watch then for what lie it will present for you, and be not deceived.

All hail Tetris. Ex Tetris, veritas

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 02:06:38 GMT

At right is a christmas gift I'm working on for my mother- an embossed picture of her kissing her grandchild. I ende dup doign some embossing at school this year and, well... I'm at art school. (Even if I am getting a business degree from it.) I feel vaguely obligated to gift something arty on occasion.

The method I came up with however, after reading a bunch of stuff and consolidating ideas... is kinda process-intensive.

To create one 5"x7" embossing, this is my workspace:

It's supposed to seat 8. All that crap? Mine.

The first of (pictured above) took almost 6 hours. The second one (about 20% more complicated) looks to be on track to be completed in 3 hours. This is a result of workflow streamlining, and about $5 in supplies I picked up to enable that. Hopefully I can finish #3 (the last) tonight as well, leaving me just to pick up the frames at target or something. Black should look nice against white paper. (The paper I'm using isn't quite snow-white enough to pull off a white frame.)

Unstained light brown wood might look nice too.

Molecular Machines

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:40:52 GMT

While searching for somethign completely unrelated, I ran across the image at right from this blog about building and simulating molecule-scale machines. It is extremely fucking awesome, and also scary.

Sci-fi writers told us for years about nanomachines, buy it was largely in the vague 'magical' sense- a kind of 'the type of machines that naturally exist on that scale,' fairy-tale about optimized forms that pry about molecules and operate in hive intelligences. Something that will reassuringly take a full generation to readjust human thinking, even for the smarties to figure out how to do properly... molecular muscles and all that.

This shit... that's a fucking differential gear built out of individual atoms. And it works.

Scientists announced a year ago they invented a nanomaterial that causes water beaded on its surface to flow uphill, powered by a light shining on it. That's the kinda superUnnatural shit I grew up thinking about for nanotech-- things whose workings were alien to our current way of thinking. But this... this is 1945-level technology built on a frightening small scale.

You can do a lot with 1945 level technology, we waged a world war with it. And this... works, and it'll all be worked otu and ready just as soon as we figure out how to build a proper molecular assembler.

There isn't gonna be a generation-lag for us to re-learn everything. Nanotech is just going to explode once the first killer app hits to justify the initial infrastructure investment.

It's scary as fuck. On the other hand, I hear that if I live to 2060 I can expect to live to be 300. So that'll be nice I guess.

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:49:28 GMT

Reading about CAPTCHA's this morning I ran smack into an unsettling question-- what do blind users do about them?

The answer is audio CAPTCHA's (implemented some places,) but I was shaken to realize I'd never even thought about this. I mean, suppsoedly I'm the good web developer- the one who doesn't sue ALT tags for mosueovers, actually defines screenreader nav-skip links, etc... but thw question enver even occoured ot me.

That's a little depressing. And irritating-- the things are everywhere! And the text-heavy internet is supposed to be one of the great equalizers for the blind. Suddenly this issue, which I had not encountered an hour ago, gets my goat.

Grr! *shakes fist* Accessibility!

...I have nothing deeper to say on thsi subject, sorry to disappoint you.

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:10:54 GMT

By request:

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:47:27 GMT

This is one of the headlines on cnn.com.

Sadly, the reality of that news story cannot possibly live up to the awesomeness of its headline.

I imagine that somewhere, a CNN copywriter is giggling to themselves.

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 08:30:03 GMT

I have been consuming an unhealthy amount of Gundam recently.

By which I mean I've been watching Gundam OO with a sort of vague malaise-- I find the characters incredibly boring, but I suspect the issues it's socraticly exploring (the formation/aggregation of world government and 'we' not 'me' psychologies) will end up Remarkable.

Sci-fi talks a lot about world government, either taking place in utopian futures where it exists, or dealing with the nitty-gritty about why it cannot exist without an external 'other' to break down internal definitions of us/them. (I.e. Aliens unite the human race by being weirder than Muslims.)
But for all the near-obsession world government in sci-fi... I think I've seen its formation tackled head-on only once outside of a military-conquest-under-one-leader scenario; namely in Orson Scott Card's Shadow of the Hegemon.

Now, OSC's later additions to the Ender Mythos are variably disposable side-stories, utter trash that demolishes much of that the original quartet stood for, and damn good fiction. Shadow of the Hegemon is the latter-- it's the story of the Battle School graduates from Ender's circle of friends returning to Earth, and every country suddenly having a napoleon-level general they can use to carve out territory. SotH is a fucking awesome book. Unfortunately it's preceded by Ender's Shadow and cliffhangs into Shadow of the Giant, which are pretty awful.

OSC has a new collection of short Enderverse tales out. Pretty Boy is not good, Cheater is fun, and Mazer in Prison is damn fine, in the Asimov 'two guys in a room talking about things' tradition. This '1 for 3' is pretty typical of his short collections.

It kinda saddens me to see Card exploiting the Enderverse (which, lets be frank, ought to have remained closed, dangling plots and all) like this; it smacks of 'they'll pay better for Enderverse than they will my other stuff.' This is probably true- Ender's Game hits a chord in people if they discover it at the right age that (like Evangelion IMO) makes them hungry for more story- any story- set in this essentially closed system.

Plus, Card is kinda a hack. His writing has gone downhill, and I think the fact his work hit a lot of prematurely-mature-injured-boys themes that caused pedophiles to swoon in frabjous joy creeped him the fuck out and swept him on his merry way to religious crankism- he rewrote the entire backstory of every character int eh Enderverse to make them deeply religiously motivated, despite there being no hint of this in the original book. Obnoxious, but you can see the outside forces that probably ran him off the rails which makes it more understandable. (Like Rosie O'Donnel going nuts after having the governor of Florida personally exert himself to stop the adoption of her kids. Sad, but you can see what caused it.)

Anyway, even Card hacking away is better than 95% of other writers going full-blast. To his credit he refuses to tell empty stories, he still has a deeper understanding of what the universe and its characters are about and continues to explore those ideas from new angles. This makes his drek far preferable to some ghost writer he might hire to just tell more stories of 'stuff that happened in the Enderverse' like so many writers do. The result is hes' never gone back to Battle School or picked up 60 years later where 'it happens again' to re-tread the same themes (hey look, I brought this back around to Gundam again!) without covering any new ground.

So... yeah. Expanded Enderverse stuff; sometimes pretty bad, but never worthless. That you've got to admire.

I don't require you admire Card though. Man's Ton Cruise Crazy.

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 23:49:57 GMT

"IF WAS CAPABLE OF PREFERRING ANYTHING, THE WEIGHTED COMPANION CUBE WOULD PREFER NOT TO BE STORED ON ITS BACK."

"I TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO REMIND YOU THAT IT IS NOT ALIVE."

Cube is done. 2 different kinds of acrylic overcoat, sanding, etc. Total crafting hours, ~40. Each outer corner is composed of 45 separate elements glued together, and is almost solid.

Almost, it turns out, is the operative term. While the layers of acrylic softened the entire structure enough to throw it around safely (it hurt like hell to do this before the acrylic-- the corners were too 'solid,' now they have give,) while throwing it in a 20' high arc and putting aggressive backspin on it to make it difficult for the other person to catch, it smashed into the floor and split one of its corners. (Due to the spin.)

The cube is now in need of repair. A few layers of spray acrylic should do it. Until then...

(I'm considering spraying the band-aid permanently in place, for it is adorable.)

Favorite play-pattern? Clanging he cube awkwardly on walls. People who haven't played the game give us weird looks though.

Who'd want this job?

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 03:01:09 GMT

I've been trying to figure out for awhile why I want Al Gore to run for the United States Presidency.

It's not idealism-- that'd be Obama. It's not environmentalism- I'm not an evangelical about Global Warming. It's not foreign policy-- frankly that'd be Clinton... I think she can handle a lot of the forien policy problems the US faces decently as long as she's not pretending to be a hardass to compensate for her womanliness.

It finally hit me-- the reason I want Al Gore to run for President is because Al Gore doesn't want to be President.
No one voluntarily subjects themselves to the process of running for President unless they need it, almost always for the wrong reasons.

Bush needed to be President to prove something to a distant authority figure he could never please. We saw how well that worked out.

Clinton... there's a nasty streak of revenge to her need. Her family got badly shafted for eight years, and she probably feels cheated in a lot of ways and wants to 'do over,' correcting all the original mistakes. That's not great as motivations go... but it's not awful either. And Hillary wears most of her issues on her sleeve (the man she married.) That said, I feel like her 'insistence' on becoming President set back in 2002 has been seriously worn down by the Bush administration into genuine alarm about where the world is going, and (at least partially) replaced by a desire to save the baby from the train.

So Obama... what's his malfunction that he'd want such a job? It could just be youthful idealism... but he's very controlled. I don't know what his internal demon is, and that worries the hell out of me. The emotion-over-time processes that creates Presidential candidates is identical to the one that creates serial killers, and sometimes it's really hard to tell the two groups apart. (John Edwards, I'm looking at you.)

Anyway- yeah. Gore wanted to be President because he was Vice President, a role he was chosen for as a compromise to balance Bill Clinton with voters. And 8 years out he flees from the idea.

AL Gore is sane enough not to want the job, that makes him okay in my book.

Multiverse Schmultiverse

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:01:35 GMT

Over at Newsarama, there's a nice editorial list of the known post-IC DC Multiverse.

I have 2 reactions to this;

1) Elseworlds Finest: Supergirl/Batgirl better damn well be one of these Earths.

2) If you can't wrap your head around time travel and alternate dimensions, you shouldn't be a geek.

Brady asks which future Earth Kamadi comes from (fairly rational, though the answer may be 'none') and then follows it with Lady Quark and Dark Angel. That bugs me. Both those characters are survivors of destroyed Earths. They don't have to 'come from' (his phrasing) anywhere. For the 20 years between Crisis and infinite Crisis, they didn't 'come from' anywhere. Just because the 52 is back doesn't mean they have equivalent homes.

(It's possible he was asking whether their Earths now had equivilants, but I'm gonna rail against this because the stupid-reading aligns withe the words of other idiots, and it's the mindset that irks me so.)

Quoting:
Over in Action Comics, there’s a Legion of Super-Heroes running around that’s a continuation of the original, Adventure Comics #247 Legion. If the Legion that Supergirl is currently hanging with is the future of “New Earth,” where is this other Legion from? Sure, there will be claims of an alternate timeline within the “New Earth” Universe, but then we have to call in the theoretical physicists (or Grant Morrison) to tell us the difference between an alternate timeline contained within a universe and a wholly “different universe” that was created by Mr. Mind altering time over and over again to create new universes.

a) No, you don't. Alternate timelines are the logical result of the same 'stuff' of the universe unfolding to a different result. The DC 'universes' are not timelines they have different base 'stuff,' and no different unfolding could result in them having a 1:1 correlation with any other Earth. Alternate Timelines are Possibilities-- states that this Earth could have had. Alternate Earths are Impossibilities-- states this Earth could never achieve because of fundamental underlying differences. (Like the pre-crisis DCU having many Green Lanterns-- but only one of the was tied to Oa and the Guardians. The overall pattern-- Green Lantern-- was the same, but the underlying stuff was different on every world, like a cup made of tin, or a cup made of plastic, or a sup made of ceramic. Same form- different building blocks.)

b) The post-IC DCU is not an internally consistent closed system. You don't get to trace everything back and it all fits. Lady Quark came from nowhere Post-Crisis. This Legion might do the same. And since all indications are that they actually are the original Legion, 'assigning' them to one of the new 52 would actually require rewriting their history-- and then they'd no longer be the originals, would they?

(Maybe they are from another timeline of New Earth and thus have been rewritten and no longer 'come from' pre-Crisis Earth 1. I dunno. But the sentiment irks me.)

Look, it's not that complicated. Sci-fi used to refer to alternate timelines as 'other dimensions,' but the terminology became unwieldy as fictional worlds grew complex. Over at marvel the negative Zone actually is another dimension, but each branch of the multiverse contained its own 'copy' of the Negative Zone. Calling these branches 'dimensions' was confusing and inaccurate, so called them timelines.

(Dimension is, in fact, entirely accurate. Every time you add a dimension is contains everything under it. Genus contains many species, Family contains many Genus, Order contains many Families. Timeline contains many dimensions. Multiverse contains many timelines.)

This is merely annoying when it comes to the DCU- idiot fanboys can't keep it straight but Creators seem to get it mostly right. Over in the Marvel Universe it's rapidly approaching toxicity.

Back in the day, writers at Marvel handled time travel willy-nilly, and Mark Gruenwald was tasked with writing
Gruenwald's Rules of Time Travel which laid out a view of the multiverse that the company followed with great consistency for almost 30 years.

(This wonderful essay leaves out some detail stuff such as branched timelines being merged back into one another... but very few stories deal with that anyway. It's reasonably complete without becoming confusing.)

Every alternate Earth from Marvel Comics is a nice literal alternate timeline. At some point if you trace things back far enough they shared a common history. It might be 200 years ago. it might be 10,000 years ago, or millions of years ago, but they're the same 'stuff' in a different shape. Squadron Supreme comes from an Earth with Skrulls, and a Sorcerer Supreme, and the same high-level cosmic entities as the mainline Marvel Universe. At some point in the very distant past is branched off. It's an alternate timeline, not a DCU-style Multiverse.

Gru made it and, naturally enough, it was Gru that broke it. In 1990, in Quasar, he made an offhand reference to the New Universe as 'another Multiverse,' opening a crack. With Gru's death, a general easing of editorial restrictions as the comics market imploded, and the cancellation of What If...? the adherence of the Gruenwaldian branching timeline system waned, and started to get inconsistent again.

Enter: The Ultimates. The Ultimate Universe is a full-functioning universe with its own alternate timelines and multiverse. And unlike Squadron-Earth... its fundamentals are completely un-like the mainstream MU. Galactus is different. There (probably) isn't a Living Tribuneral. The Ultimate U is, in short, unpossible.

It's also incredibly consistent, especially with it's treatment of the multiverse. When Ultimates goes to other dimensions, it tends not to go to alternate timelines, it goes up and down the 'stack' of Universes.

Or, more precisely (though no one's phrased it this way) up and down the stack of Multiverses.

Timelines are branches charted on X. They are mutually 'possible.'

Multiverses are charted on Y. They are fundamentally different, unpossible for one another.

I could cite a lot of examples... but this is really how it works. They use M-theory language for the Big Shiny Effect.. and they use it right enough that this is inescapable. There's a vertical stack of Multiverses-- which (other claim) has some sort of linear progression from top to bottom, like a spectrum. The MU-proper Multiverse is another pancake or cross-section in that stack, with all its alternate timelines laid out in the same plane.

Is it that hard? Really? Just because Alternate Dimensions, Alternate Timelines and Alternate Multiverses can all look like the 'Mirror Universe,' does it mean we can't grock they're separate things?

I ask because, you know, Marvel's handbook people can't. A few years ago they started numbering the Earths, to match the MU's # 616. Transformers took place on Earth 120185, if you care.
Except, they labeled unpossibles (Multiverses) using the same system they did for timelines. And some of these timelines were problematic. The retroactively-assigned numbering is based (loosely) on the year and month the alternate first appeared, so the Guardians of the Galaxy was Earth 691 (1969, January.) ...But the GotG was Earth 616-- one of its possible futures-- until 1978. 2099 is 928 (Aug 1992) and I don't think it's ever been officially 'ruled out' as a possible future. (Maybe some of the Exodus stuff prevents it.) MK 2099 is Earth 2992... but MK 2099 is the future of Earth 616, explicitly, as recently as 2006. And Ultimates is Earth 1610.

So, in summary... worlds like Marvel Transformers (an Earth that's largely mundane but has about a dozen familiar Marvel characters, mostly minor) get an Earth #. Averted possible futures (like Guardians of the Galaxy or 2099) get an Earth #. Non-Averted futures like MK2099 get an Earth #. Alternate, unpossible Earths (Ultimates) get an Earth #.

This is a fucking lousy system. I can buy that, say,the TVA would set up a system this bad, assigning every major possible whatever an index number regardless what sort of 'possible' it is... (though MK2099 is still the odd duck out-- at what point does a future merit its own index # if it hasn't branched off yet? Clearly all possibles are not numbered-- we're still in discrete ten-thousands...) but this isn't some sort of wry observation on bureaucracy's myopic inability to deal with a reality more complicated than one thing at a time... this is the system adopted by the geeks organizing the Handbooks. And it's really, really shitty, and it's being used in-universe.

If even the comic book nerds can't be bothered to get time travel right... what hope then do we have that editors and writers will try?

Lazy fucking nerds. You shame all internet nerd-dom. *shakes fist*

(This post is probably the geekiest thing I've done all year. That includes the chart here, so that's saying something.)

Count me out

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 20:57:50 GMT

This week's Counting Down @ Newsarama opens with the following, spectacularly passive-aggressive paragraph;
"...we checked in [...] about the series to date, the character of Superman Prime, how things have gone so far, how they could have gone better, and how they’re going to go coming up."

Anyway, I'm dumping Countdown. I haven't paid for it in months, and I've reached the point that I'm no longer willing to read it unless DC pays me. I enjoyed the DCU less after every issue of Countdown I read.

It's probably 52's fault. It worked well, it found a readership, it was the headline title of the year, so DC editorial loaded Count down with... oh fuck it, I can't say this with a straight face. Countdown, which opened on it's self-important "52 had serious writing problems due to realtime, but we fixed them" is disastrously mediocre-to-bad. Production-wise it's been out on time-- but no one cares. It repels interest like a duck repels water. 52 took characters nobody cared about and made you care. Countdown takes it as a given you care about Jimmy Olsen Jason Todd and Superboy Prime-- 3 characters who haven't done anything important since Crisis. I don't give a shit about them, the story you're telling is boring, and it pisses me off to have characters traipsing through the minty-fresh multiverse killing familiar faces every week-- it reeks of 'cheap knock-offs we can kill,' which was never what the multiverse was about.

So, yeah... you suck. Boo Countdown.

And really? Boo Final Crisis. It hasn't done anything for me yet, and I expect all it's gonna do is kill Tim Drake or something. What the hell happened to the happier, shinier DCU we were promised?

Dreams

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 17:46:39 GMT

I seldom remember my dreams. When I do, they're not terribly remarkable.

- I've had the falling dream
- I had the flying dream twice; when I was 9 years old I a version with had operative internally consistent physics that remains heartbreakingly beautiful. In my mid-teens I had a sexytime version. The physics one was better.
- I've had a dream about furniture that eats people if you sit down.
- The don't-touch-the-floor-dream (several variations, usually involving water.)
- A recurring stress-nightmare about my teeth coming out in chunks.
- A recurring dream about moving insurmountable piles I've had ~ every 2 years since I was 7.

This is all very standard run-of-the-mill stuff. Nothing remarkable or odd about it in the least.

Last week I dreamed i was being chased by concave right angles.

There is no punch line.

Beowulf: The Game

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 04:24:35 GMT

Apparently there's a game based on the upcoming CGI gore-fest Beowulf.

I strongly feel that since Beowulf looks like a feature-length game cutscene, the game itself should be live-action.

(That is all.)

Comfort Cube (WIP)

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 03:16:17 GMT

I'm in the Bachelor of Science Program at my school- essentially getting a business degree from an art school. It's an enlightening experience. One thing I've learned: I have no patience, interest or apparent ability at Graphic Design.

My grotty sores in Typography would be the first clue there. But still, I cheerily soldiered on and took Graphic Design 2. Big Mistake. I disagree with everything that comes out of the teacher's mouth (I'm a web and communications theory guy, she is a print designer-- we have entirely different priorities) and every project we've done this semester starts with 'do a type layout before you design anything.'

(I want to scream.)

Anyway, since I clearly don't have the GD chops to make it through GD2, I've been substituting chops I do have-- craft. You can do a lot with cut up paper if you stink 15 or 16 hours into it. Thus far I've composed CMYK plates by hand, embossed stuff, and created little white-on-white papercraft villages. (All of which turned into posters.)

The results are invariably impressive because you can't fake the effects digitally, they have texture,lighting, etc. Doesn't change the fact I have no discernable GD skill, but it's at least giving me A's on the assignments.

Anyway, having crafed a fair bit recently, I thought I'd try my hand at the papercraft swirling aroudn the internet this week- the Weighted Comfort Cube from Portal.

Shown at right is my work-in-progress. I'm using the recipe that I found on 4chan (I think it originated there...) and decided to go for size-- the cube itself is 5" across, it will be 6" with the nobbies when done. (The size was determined by the largest I could print the 6-square layout-- a 17"x22" piece of paper.)

I've seen a couple tries at putting this together, none of which terribly impressed me-- the detail is hard. I wanted this to be a plaything for the BS community room, so I went for scale and durability.

The central cube is 2 layers of cardboard under the printout, sandwiched with Duo-tac (Sheets of 2-sided sticky.) I reinforced the corners (which will be covered by nobbies) with triangular fasteners-- a necessity because the tabs on the 4-chan formula can't properly be taped shut from the inside. The result is EXTREMELY stable.

The nobbies made me cry. They fall apart. I build them- and they come undone. They're trying to pull in the worst possible configuration- and once you put them on it's impossible to glue them into place (because, again, all the tabs are INSIDE.)

Experiments with some styrofoam lying around showed that creating pillars 'out' from the corners of the cube to 'pull' on the inside surface of the nobbies helped with stability- but they still tended to fall apart and sag.

Ultimately, I decided to make the nobbies solid. I'm cutting sheets of chipboard into pentagonal (the shape of Superman's shield, you can see some pieces stored in the clip in the picture) pieces which start on the inside surface of the nobbie. I then layer them 13 deep- with the 13th 'outer' layer being as wide as the base of the nobbie. Onto THIS surface, I then securely fasten all the interior tabs-- then glue another sheet OVER them, sandwiching the tabs firmly in place. The nobbie corner is now essentially a solid piece. (I didn't scale the S-shield pieces up as I went, so there's actually a little give on the edges, but that's not important.) Each of the 8 corners will require 39 pieces of Chipboard, over 300 for all 8 corners. But the result is solid piece with a flush surface I will be able to mate with the corner of the cube.

Tomorrow is registration for classes, so I should have the spare time to finish. Yay!

Costs so far:
$12 printing
$7 Duo-tac (the cube has more than a square yard in it already...)
$1 Chipboard

The nobbies show white around the corners where things don't line up perfectly. I plan to take a french grey marker when construction is finished to touch up the white spots. The template should probably have made the white tabs gray and the same texture as the cube to make them mroe forgiving-- but that would probably offend the "if you build it right, no seams will show" purists.

Fuck purity, I plan to throw this at people. By the time it's done it should weigh several pounds.

Waiting for Godot

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 01:46:40 GMT

My DSL is out. Naturally, this irritates me, because I like the internet.

Qwest promises to have man here between 1 and 5 pm. This is a sadly wide range of time, but that is life, and I accept it, and scuttle my Saturday.

5:45 and no one has come. Sighing, I accept that fate has shat upon me, and track down Qwest's number to re-schedule for tomorrow. If i don't get the modem serviced this weekend I won't have a chance to wait around again until thurs-- no wait, I have that thing at noon... until NEXT weekend.

Mr. Automated man impresses me by taking my choices with voice recognition instead of push-a-button and then informs me that their support line closes at 6 PM, and I have to call back tomorrow.

God damnit! *shakes fist*
I expect service! If I wanted to be treated like shit I'd have signed up for Comcast!

Bizarre Wiki errors

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 01:06:42 GMT

I was doing a MediaWiki install today, and it threw a very nasty error during the setup, irately informing me that the require_once file install-utils.inc wasn't found, which brought the installation to a screeching halt.

An investigation illuminated me as to why the MediaWiki installer was informing me the install-utils.inc file was missing.

It was insisting the install-utils.inc file was missing... because it was. Completely absent from the .gz MediaWiki was offering for download.

I downloaded a copy of it off Mediawiki's trunk. Ran fine then.

Dear Congress...

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 21:56:36 GMT

I've spent the last few days trying to figure out how I feel about the new law giving the government wide-ranging warrantless wiretap powers (which was passed as a rush-job after the courts affirmed that yes, this was illegal, and yes that does mean you too.)

On the one hand, I'm not a fan of government surveillance in any form. On the other hand, they promise to only use it on bad foreigners!

Fortunately, Ed Albaugh captured my angst for me:

"You won't need to eavesdrop to hear this: I voted for you assholes because you said you were against shit like this." -Ed Albaugh

The American intelligence community was performing illegal warrantless wiretaps knowing they were illegal (no one seriously thought they were, the only question was how long the courts would take to officially declare them so.) Clearly when the speed limit is 55mph, they feel they can go 65. Raising the speed limit to 65 mph doesn't put them on the straight and narrow- it just tells them they can go 75.

Our intelligence community believes any mandate worth following is worth exceeding.

The Democrats were put back into power by promising to curtail the Bush Administration's erosion of civil liberties. Bush shook his finger and said he'd veto any bill that didn't give the NSA the power they thought they needed- and the Democrats him exactly what he asked for.
The Democrats aren't stupid they know damn well "to only use on foreigners" really means that years we'll be back in court 2 years from now because they're using it on American citizens. I'm so fucking disgusted.

Vote the Bastards Out. All of them. They're all bastards.

Formatting a disk

Sun, 05 Aug 2007 16:21:34 GMT

I have a very simple problem- one of my external hard drives is NTFS, but I need to use it on macs too, and NTFS is read-only on macs. I've used flash drives to dodge this in the past, but it seemed like I should get this sucker FAT formatted.

Attempt #1: Mount disk under XP, right-click 'Format'
...odd, it only lets me choose NTFS, no matter what I do. XP has let me format smaller flash drives as non-NTFS without trouble. (Well, without much trouble...) I remember reading somewhere that FAT is, theoretically, supposed to be used for smaller drives. (This one is 120gb.) perhaps thats why it's blocking me.

Attempt #2: Mount disk under Mac OS X, attempt to format
The disk comes up as completely read-only. No formatting option is even available.
This troubles me, what if I'd been a mac user who'd purchased this disk? I am momentarily re-captured by my macadvocate zeal of days gone by, and shake my fist in impotent fury at etc etc etc.

Well, XP is no good, neither is Mac OS. ...what am I going to do? I cleared the damn disk off last night for the first time since I got it 9 months ago. It was a real pain to do, and if I don't format it now I won't get another chance for another 9 months!

*googles* 'format disk fat'

Bah, lots of ultra-specific instructions about how to set up partitions, boot disks, and Windows installs! Nothing as simple as how to format a disk-- because it's just supposed to fucking work when you right-click on Format! Hate hate hate!

*broods, continues to click through google returns*

Ooh, what's this? How to format a-- ah, heh heh heh Newbie instructions on how to format a 1.4mb floppy! This page is from 1996. Oh, that takes me back, checking that the write tab is clicked... then running some arcane... command...
...

Attempt #3: DOS prompt
It takes about six attempts, fumbling through HELP FORMAT to get the command right. But in the end, the disk chirps its merry way through a format cycle.

And all I can think is-- seriously? DOS? Fucking DOS? What the hell is wrong with the world that I need to go back to $%^&*() DOS to format one stupid disk? Were this an Ayn Rand novel, I would now be hacking and slewing aimlessly in an attempt to kill every living person on Earth for being complicit in such ungodly stupidity. Fortunately- real life is not like Ayn Rand novels.

(I shall doubtless have someone reply and tell me why formatting this FAT32 is a bad idea and it should be FAT16 or something, forcing me to go through another hour-long formatting session. Again, hacking an slewing is the natural response.)

::UPDATE::
Annnd... after the hour-long disk verification, it still didn't work. Why? Because Windows, even on the command prompt, refuses to format drives over 32gb as FAT32. A technical flaw in the format? No, it can mount Fat32 drives over 32gb. A problem with the legacy code? This is the command prompt, after all.
Not that either. Older versions of windows can format FAT32 drives over 32gb. (They often need a special driver to deal with drives of that, relatively, colossal size, but they do it quite politely.)

That baffles me. It's like Windows went out of their way to try and force you to format any hardware attached to their machines with their NT-based format that doesn't work and play well with other makers hardware.
And even if it's not a sinister plot... seriously, it's a goddamn format command. The Fat32 format supports hard drives above 32gb, and it's significantly more useful in that format. I should be able to use the damn system formatter to format the drive in a format it supports at a size older versions of Windows would let me do.

I'm reconsidering my ban on acting like like was an Ayn Rand novel. There should be blood, preferably spurting from an open source.

Attempt #3: fat32format utility
Ridgecrop Consultant LTD (which is probably a fancy name for one guy) has a utility for this. You run it from the command line. The syntax is simpler than the windows format command. It's faster by a factor of about... 700. And it worked on the first try.

Plus, free. They are awesome.

(Fucking Windows...)

Once a Ranger (p2) - Triumph of the Form

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 14:54:56 GMT

I'm finally catching up on my PR viewing. I suppose I should download the rest of PROO... I quite liked watching Mystic Force in bunches, and PROO had- up through Pirate in Pink, impressed me by not doing Sentai plots. ...the plots it did do weren't particularly good, but they were at least its own, within the shallow uninteresting premise and setting OO allows.

This is part 2 of the '15th anniversary teamup' featuring a potpourri of Rangers from previous teams. Well- okay, from the New Zeland teams, plus Adam, because the fangirls are all gay for Adam. I kinda savaged the first part of this teamup for a series of cardinal sins, failing, shortcomings, illogical and un-fulfilling aspects- and a surplus of slow-motion explosions.

Part 2 was... considerably better, actually. I actually enjoyed this! ...not a lot, but I did enjoy it. (I don't think I've actively enjoyed the perpetually shallow OO thus far, so that means the teamup was better than the series, always a good sign.)

There's a lot to like here! The plot is completely PROO-centric, using the ~~teamup~~ replacement team as a device to tell a story about the team feeling unwanted... but eventually realizing despite what they may grumble about they actually like this job, and have a sense of genuine loyalty to one another. It's nothing cosmic- but it's using a teamup in a new way. There's some cute bits of character interaction- but only bits because this is the episode with the big fight scene. The missing character interaction was supposed to go in part 1, but that was the episode with 3 big fight scenes.

While the 2-parter turned out vaguely pleasingly, it had some problems.

Thrax was a festering sore upon this plot. His anti-continuity 'A Wizard Did It' origin pisses me off. Rita and Zedd's son... from long ago (Or the Sentinel Knight was alive and kicking in 1999 ad Thrax aged real fast.) Not just long ago though- the SK dates from Pangaea. That's um... um... Rita and Zedd weren't born yet.

I'd write it off as time-travel, Rita in Mystic Force seems to requite Time Travel too... but what really enrages me is that I know that time travel wasn't intended for either of them. TPTB just wrote it and didn't care that it was a plot hole. (Sadly not speculation, confirmed as fact via Morphicon.) CTRL+ALT+DEL captured it better than I can;

Someone explain to me why 'anniversary' + 'for the fans' somehow means continuity should matter less. Seriously. I want to know, right now. Why are you doing something 'for' the fans but wrapping it in an intentionally displeasing package?

It's not even that Thrax aged fast (He'd be 10 if Rita was pregnant in T:APRM, which is a common fan theory.) We're not even allowed that-- because we got fucking flashbacks of him existing long ago- long before Rita married Zedd. Rubbing our nose in how bad he un-fits.

...Thrax did nothing in this teamup. He has no personality. he shows up, gets the other Villains to follow him (without trading on his parentage, that's an afterthought name-drop) and dies. No continuity, no personality, no consequence. Bad all around.

Perhaps most irritating- he looks nothing like Rita. He looks like some bastard son Zedd spawned millennia ago. If he were just Zedd's son, there'd be no continuity problems at all- ad no one would much care. He'd just be some loser never-before-seen scion of a one-great empire our for revenge. (A common theme for Sentai and PR teamups.) But making him Rita and Zedd's kid opens up the timeline problems, and the simple logistical problem of how did their kid end up evil and malformed? (They were last seen reformed and good.)

Quite aside from Thrax's distastefulness- (He looks like he was born with severe birth defects, not the badass he was doubtless intended to) the teamup would have been better without him. He was a non-person that ate up yet more time from the actual 15th anniversary guests of the episode. The replacement team didn't arrive because he was Rita and Zedd's son, they arrived because the PROO lost their powers. All 4 teams of baddies banding together and cutting the PROO off from the morphing grid would have been threat enough for the teamup-- and made the whole thing run much smoother.

So, um... the Morphin' Grid is a physical construct under the Earth? Uh... okay? And Alpha 6 is deactivated in a box in Angel Grove, not active on Mirinoi? *sigh* One more side-effect of the so-called 'secret crisis' that had Tommy declare in Dino Thunder that all the old PR teams (which had all been active and re-powered 18 months prior) were no longer available? Whatever. There's now ample implications we got teamups offscreen to match the bizarre DT/MF teamup that the Bandai toyline seemed to imply. FYI, tying all Ranger teams into the Morphin' grid sucks. It was cool for Dino Thunder because... dinosaurs, Tommy, callbackery. Not cool for SPD. Not cool now. Makign the grid a physical thing? Supercalifragilistic-not-cool.

We finally learn why Thrax went to Stonehenge in part 1, via an offhand remark in part 2. Except... it wasn't supposed to be a mystery, it just made Thrax's action in part 1 seem random in an episode that already made us wait 16 minutes for the old guys to show up. A minor gaffe, but it hurt the flow of the plot.

If we'd lost Thrax, the fight while claiming Exclibur could have been with a guardian. That fight wants to have been with a guardian. Oh well, goddess of the whatever was okay.

Hey Tori got characterization! No, no, wait... she got backstory, spoken by someone else. ...wow, Tori kinda got shafted in this teamup.

I have nothign at all negative to say about Bridge. I should, but the fact Spencer made the 'buttery' joke and not him managed to make me laugh.

It's kinda... weird that getting Exclibur had nothing to do with restoring their powers, which happened independently but coincidentally. I'm not... against that per se? But I have feeling those events were intended to somehow dovetail as one, but as the story broke it got broken into two. So we got the powerup and the power restoration... unrelated to one another.

I'm curious why Zen-Aku was juts offscreen while Tyzone was wandering. I wasn't the only one who noticed it, so it's not m imagination. Was he watching Tyzone? *sigh* Seeing a depowered ranger make a deal with that particular devil for power would have been so much more interesting than the teamup we got, even as a sub-plot.

Part 2... was much better than part 1. Easily a B episode. But the crap it inherits from the awful part 1 (like Thrax) hurts it.
And frankly, while I admit that this was a PROO episode that happened to have some guest-stars, but remained always 100% PROO focused... it's a fucking 15th anniversary teamup. We wanted a teamup. We wanted old characters, being characters, not being wire-fu with slow-motion explosions. You gave us a PROO episodet with scab 'replacement rangers' in the background. You could tell the exact same story if Hartford had just hired 5 new guys. No- the new guys would have been given more screen time to establish why the PROO were jealous of them. You Fail at Teamup.

I liked Adam's new morph. It shouldn't please me as much as it does. I think it's because it reminds me of the 2nd set of Turbo morphs. It's minimal in the current style. I hate the elaborate morph-sequences PR spends money on. Stock sequenced blow. The Mystic Force premiere had two solid minutes of stock morph/summoning footage in a row, they need to be short and sweet.

It wasn't as bad as it should have been, given part 1. It minimized its flaws and trotted through a serviceable plot.
I would have liked this episode more without Thrax. I would have had more patience for the PROO if this hadn't been a teamup with old characters.

Impossible-timeline Thrax, Alpha in a box, morphing grid construct, no characterization or anyone... I just wish they didn't telegraph how little they cared. They jam old seasons into the new stuff as fanwank, but they don't make the new stuff part of the greater whole. It's like continuity is forward-computable only, and that alternately saddens and enrages me.

I miss Doug. He cared.

Public debate.

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 08:19:10 GMT

I admit, I've been working my way through the CNN/Youtube democratic debates. (It took me 10 minutes to find this page by the way- the actual YTDebates page doesn't have a top-level link to this clearinghouse page that I could see- most obnoxious.) In a way I find the byte-sized format annoying. I want to watch (well) listen to the whole thing while doing other things. There should be one video that's the entire thing as well as the individual clips.
Hillary got a lot of flack for her answer to the 'would you talk to foreign leaders' question (embedded below,) Obama's campaign people have been gently suggesting that this is a reversal of her previous position open communication- and surprising everyone, Hillary seems to actually be holding to her position, not qualifying, backpedaling or shifting.

I think it's because (::shock::) she actually believes it, passionately, and doesn't care what other people think. Startling as that idea is- I think I know why.

Not exactly leaning in for this hug, are you Hil?

Step back with me to the yesteryear of 1999. While Hillary Clinton is touring the middle east, trying to spread peace, love and understanding. (These mid-east trips would probably accomplish more if the peaceniks brought their pot to share.) She poses for a feel-good photo-op with Yasser Afafat's wife- who ambushes her by giving a speech condemning Israel for a host of crimes including poisoning Palastine's water to give their children cancer- then poses for huggy-photos with the First Lady of the United States, whose smile has become noticeably fixed and fake.

I think Hilary's answer about not letting presidential visits be used for propaganda purposes was a completely honest one- because she's been burned by this before, and she was pretty fucking furious about it.

Clinton was stiff and rehearsed for the first third of the debate. I think she relaxed once about a third of the field stumbled or dodged a question in a blatantly embarrassing way and she realized that unless she totally stuck her foot in her mouth, no minor mis-step was going to make her stand out. Plus her deflection of the dynastic question got a laugh.

Also- shame on the Obama campaign for implying she was endorsing a closed-door policy. She explicitly said she wants lines of communications open and active- you can't compare that to the Bush Administration's "come back when you're ready to tell us what we want to hear" idea of diplomacy. it's not fair, or right, or even correct to do so. Hillary is poll-driven she's waffled on plenty of other points- pick on those, don't make things up.

Other revelations: Bill Richardson surprised me. Not enough to want him over the other candidates, but enough to make me keep an ear out for his responses for the rest of his debate. He actually answered questions sometimes, and in interesting ways.

Frist knows he's not going to get the nomination so he lets himself say what he's really thinking. His debate conduct isn't presidential though, it's Senatorial. He's taking big whacks at the other guys to see if they'll improve their conduct/practices/ethics/signal-to-noise-ratio. Pretty damn fun to watch when he's not whining about the bankers being in charge. (That's anti-plutocrat code-speak, not anti-Jewish code-speak, if you're curious. I looked him up. Yes, he is always exactly this tactful.)

I was pleasantly surprised to see the gay marriage issue tied back into gays serving in the military. There's two really nasty cross-political undercurrents that Republicans seem unable to get a handle on here: 1) Discharging gays who've served faithfully at a time when the military is desperate for personnel is unbelievably stupid. 2) Those gays wanted to serve their country so much they were willing to join a military organization that is actively discriminating against them. Where do we get off denying volunteer combat veterans rights and protections? (It was this later sentiment, widely felt, that prompted America to change its voting age from 21 to 18 in the Vietnam war despite concern that the newly-eligible voters would skew Democratic. Even Republicans agreed that if they could die in this war they damn well deserved the right to vote about it.)

In more humorous news, John Edwards managed to convince me not to vote for him even if he gets the Democratic nomination- he had an unbelievably tacky performance. I'll forgive him the Livestrong wristband- his wife has cancer. I'll even forgive his choreographed emphatic gesture at chest-height designed to show it off in every single answer. But every single time another candidate earned a big response with a great answer, Edwards would make a point of stopping during the next question to say he had the exact same position on that question. It was extremely obnoxious.

I wish Frist has taken a whack at Edward.

Debuggery (IP Borders, intermezzo)

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:51:38 GMT

"...now why PHP is insisting that the sin of 90 degrees is .999999682932?"

-Me

(Coding is fun.)