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So, given the success of the livestream, I'm discussing with the staff doing future livestreams to sit back, discuss things with the community and such. We're thinking about once a month, and perhaps doing a multiplayer game that everyone can join in on (I'm thiking either Civilization or Europa Univeralis IV).

However, given my own experiences doing it, I'm going to try my hand at doing a Let's Play. Given its where we started, I thought it would be most appropriate to start with a series based on NetHack, and am working on recording an introduction video which will go over the basis of the game, and help prevent the series from being too repeative (I'll only upload runs which have a decent chance of ascending; generally ones that make it to Mine's End and finish Sokoban, maybe a bit further).

I'll post the intro video and my first episode hopefully this week. I'll probably upload them to YouTube and provide raw files. I'm encoding my raw videos in VP8+Ogg Vorbis in a WebM container, and will be licensing my content under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Once I figure out a place to upload large WebM files, I'll also provide the edited source files for anyone who is YouTube allergic. I'll probably enable monetization on my account and let YouTube place ads in my video, to hopefully get a little money out of it. Beside NetHack, I may feature other games on Linux and open source gaming in general.

NOTE: This is a personal project and not related to SN directly. Unless something is on the main page, assume this is non-SN related, and I'm just writing about it here (since this is the closest thing I have to a blog)

Today I lapsed in my local front of the ’War On Open Tabs (And Also Windows)’ (or ‘Woot(Aaw)’ for short) and from looking closer at ChipWhisperer-Lite detouring to EEVBlog and on to ESD (ElectroStatic Discharge) issues and Bill Beaty who tricked me into clicking onwards to ‘Vulture Central’ (The Register) where I ended up picking through the bones of the recent news of “Lost White City of the Monkey God Found After 500 Years” in which I came across a reference to a work of Lovecraft written 94 years ago which I didn't remember reading.

However it turned out I had read it under a different name, and on that same Wikipedia page once again yet another venerated authority was quoted slagging off HPL accusing him of being a “racist” or supremacist or anything else non-imaginative even though HPL had plainly explained what he was writing about or in response to (which was unimaginative shitty white village dramas).

At which point I wanted to congratulate E. F. Bleiler for picking through a dead man's brain in order to arouse himself and revel in the sticky glory of it. HPL would surely appreciate the combined or better yet unified necrophiliac morbidity and righteous “holy” bigoted megalomania of Bleiler's actions.

(And where else to offer my sarcastic approval than on my very own journal? Did I piss on his grave? I apologize but in my defense I can't be blamed for not noticing it on account of the latrine placed at the same spot by so many of his peers).

But yes for a while already E. F. Bleiler has been just as dead and if there's anything left after a few generations of macro and microfaunal procreation any maggots can continue his gruesome trade on his own brain :)

Now please excuse me as I make a few bookmarks for perusal in the eternity of time I do not have (and correct an index in an actual book) and close twenty or so tabs… the war must go on.

…and now I can't help but wonder what the world would be like if there was a Mr. and/or Mrs. Crowley-Lovecraft out there, and yes it has to be a double-barreled surname ;)

P.S. Happy Easter!

This is just a place to hang some UTF-8 character regression tests.

Finally got the first set of code committed to rehash to allow use of IPv6 properly (dev.sn.org has had a AAAA record for ages, but IPv6 address handling has been hosed since day 1, that's why we don't publish one for production). Just need to add some UI tags so admins can see if a ipid/subid is IPv4 or IPv6, and we're more or less set here.

I'm surprised that this hasn't been addressed by the academic communities. Someone with a degree in English or linguistics or something like that should have though of this decades ago.

This word (actually more than one word) has various spellings, and I've probably used all of them at one time or another. The word is email, or eMail, or e-mail, or some other variation. They're all wrong.

It's a contraction of "electronic mail" and as such should be spelled e'mail. The same with e'books and other e'words.

So why hasn't someone with a PhD in English pointed this out to me? I have no formal collegiate training in this field. It's a mystery to me.

In his 1951 short story The Fun They Had, Isaac Asimov has a boy who finds something really weird in the attic -- a printed book. In this future, all reading was done on screens.

When e'books* like the Nook and Kindle came out, there were always women sitting outside the building on break on a nice spring day reading their Nooks and Kindles. It looked like the future to me, Asimov's story come true. I prefer printed books, but thought that it was because I'm old, and was thirty before I read anything but TV and movie credits on a screen.

And then I started writing books. My youngest daughter Patty is going to school at Cincinnati University (as a proud dad I have to add that she's Phi Beta Kappa and working full time! I'm not just proud, I'm in awe of her) and when she came home on break and I handed her a hardbound copy of Nobots she said "My dad wrote a book! And it's a REAL book!"

So somehow, even young people like Patty value printed books over e'books.

My audience is mostly nerds, since few non-nerds know of me or my writing, so I figured that the free e'book would far surpass sales of the printed books. Instead, few people are downloading the e'books. More download the PDFs, and more people buy the printed books than PDFs and ebooks combined.

Most people just read the HTML online, maybe that's a testament to my m4d sk1llz at HTML (yeah, right).

Five years ago I was convinced ink was on the way out, but there's a book that was printed long before the first computer was turned on that says "the news of my death has been greatly exaggerated".

* I'll write a short story about the weird spelling shortly.

Squished an annoying bug in rehash that prevented formkeys working due to changes in how mod_perl works, I dunno worse, the abuse of the MP1 API, or the hack I had to code to emulate the old behavior; here's the comment I left about it:

                # UNBELIEVE HACKINESS AHEAD
                #
                # Ok, under MP1, it was possible to use param as a "semi-persistant" scratchpad
                # that is, to save a new element in the hashref, and get it back by future calls
                #
                # This worked because the older APR methods allowed you to store into the HASREF.
                # even though this behavior was wrong, and bad according to MP documentation. MP2
                # now removed the STORE method from the APR tables so any attempt to write to them
                # goes BANG.
                #
                # Since we can't do that now, we're going to have to fake it. On our first call to
                # getCurrentForm, we'll copy the param tables to a hashref, then shove it into the
                # apache2 pnotes, and then retrieve it on demand.
                #
                # This is a fucking hack, but I can't think of a better way than to refactor a TON of
                # perl, and perl is not a language that makes it easy to refactor ...

Title says it all really but I found it surprising that there wasn't much noticeable difference. It started out foggy but the fog had mostly risen to 100% low cloud cover at local eclipse maximum (88.8%) yet if I didn't know and someone told me there was an 88.8% eclipse at that moment I wouldn't have believed them at all. The level of light felt unexceptionally normal. It was more noticeable a while after the local maximum was over as it started to get a little bit brighter but for all purposes it was just like a normal variation caused by weather, no weird shadows, not even any streetlights turning themselves on.

It was so unnoticeable I double-checked the time of the event and my clock. I guess my eyes almost entirely compensated for the small and ever so gradual change. Right now it's not even supposed to be entirely over yet but meh :)

I slept through the last eclipse so maybe this is all completely normal, the lack of difference that is; me sleeping right through “events” is very normal :D

Currently deep in working on getting the first rehash (MP2 slashcode) release put together. lithium got rebuilt and is now on the MP2 release. Since this upgrade is disruptive anyone, we decided to go full-in and put in a migration to MySQL cluster as well; which will require some code changes for Search, but otherwise was mostly a drop in upgrade.

I don't spend much money, and I seldom give any to online people. But - yeah, I'm aware that Soylent is in need of money. Then I saw it - an UNOBTAINIUM KEY CHAIN!! I'll be the first kid on my block to acquire unobtainium! I'll save my pennies and nickles, and discretely order a few more of these over the next months - and I can then build my UNOBTAINIUM BOMB!

Ooooh, I haven't been this excited since I ordered that little battery powered submarine when I was six or seven years old!