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It's been roughly 3 months since my last entry, so I figured it's time for another update...

My wife and I have spent a lot of time over the last few months reading everything about non-monogamy that we could get our hands on. It's been pretty great actually because prior to that, we hadn't really read the same books before. I had earlier done a review of 'Opening Up', and that book really only scratched the surface of the whole poly thing. I have since read 'More Than Two', 'The Polyamorists Next Door' (which focuses more on poly with kids), and have recently started 'The Ethical Slut'.

These books go into much more detail on the actual workings of a poly relationship. Things like time management, being poly with kids, and dealing with stigma. It's been great to read the books, and then discuss them with my wife to see where we stand.

While both my wife and I have been addicted to learning all about poly, we still have no practical experience. It's all just theory at this point in time. We really just want something to happen.

I've been continuing my online search for women, with abysmal results. I've been trying to improve my look, with some success, but its had a negligible difference as far as the dating scene is concerned. It's honestly been very, very depressing for me, as mentioned in my previous journal entry. I've spent many, many hours viewing profiles and trying to think of good messages to send. 80% of them don't even respond, and 19% do respond but it doesn't go anywhere. I acknowledge that I am looking for a very, very specific person and so the odds are already stacked against me, but it's really hard not to take it personally.

Some days are worse than others (of course) and on the bad days when I'm moping around the house, my wife has been amazingly supportive and tries to pick me up. Without her, I would be dangerously depressed. I could go into a rant about online dating and the imbalance of power between the sexes, but I'll save that for another day.

I'm really all about equality in a relationship, and as such, my wife has the exact same liberties that I do. I would never have one set of rules for me, and another set of rules for her - she is also free to pursue extra relationships, and it's something that I would like to see her do. Thankfully for my sanity, she is not interested in pursuing on her own right now. She wants to see how things go with me first. If she was actively looking, I think it would pretty hard to see men lined up around the block while I get nothing but crickets. As I read more about polyamory, I realize that this is a pretty common problem for men.

In other news, my wife has had her IUD taken out and we have been doing natural birth control planning for the last couple months. Talking about a Baby or Poly has basically been the focus of our life for the last year. Lots, and lots of talk and theory, but nothing real yet, which is frustrating us both. We are both just really anxious for something to happen, and when it does, I'll post it here.

-- Snow

So, I've been feeling the urge on doing another livestream this weekend, and was debating what game to stream. I've had an urge to play Dwarf Fortress as of late, which also allows for good interaction with those in the community due to nickname and assigning roles; and perhaps keep playing the same fort over a series of streams. The tentative time of this livestream would be 12-6PM EST, on my Twitch channel. I'd be up for fielding questions from the community, talking about gaming and tech in general, basically the insanity of April Fools, only a more reasonable block of time.

I think I got all the kinks out of my recording setup, so I should be more reasonably be able to edit and post the stream (for those who missed the previous post, my recording of the 24 hour livestream was corrupted due to stupidity and user error). I'd be interested in suggests of what biome to play in, as well as names for the initial dwarves (6 remaining, excluding the one I claim for myself).

In other news, I've continued my Let's Play of NetHack, with Part 2 posting on Wednesday. Part 3 was supposed to go live on Friday, but got released a day early by mistake.

As promised, I've started a Let's Play series going into the details of NetHack as I once again quest for the Amulet of Yender through the Mines of Menace. For those who've never ascended, or just wish to understand the game better, I'm going into detail on much of the mechanics behind the game such as wand identification, price IDing, curse testing, and so forth. Hopefully with my guidance, you too can one day ascend into a demi-god. I'll try and update the series Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays, but I may miss a day if life gets too hectic.

All my content, unless otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons ShareLike-Attribution license, and encoding in a WebM container with the VP8 and Ogg Vorbis codecs. I'll be uploading the raw WebM files once I have a suitable host to do so.

Introduction to NetHack
  - In which the interface, goals of the game, and dungeon layout are explained.

Let's Play Nethack #1
  - In which we start off as a Dwarvish Valkerie, get our first artifact, and run into trouble.

per previous journal i set up a simple channel relay feed to enable status messages for ncommander's nethack stream, but since there has been a little bit of talk about other games (including dungeon crawl stone soup) i turned the feed code into something more generic so that other feeds could be added easily. now there's feeds for the rodney bot from #nethack (freenode) to #nethack (soylent), as well as feeds for a couple of bots from ##crawl (freenode) to #crawl (soylent). the code to dispatch messages containing keywords has also been made generic, so that if ncommander plays again his deaths can be easily dispatched to #soylent for our amusement :p
code for this feature can be found here: https://github.com/crutchy-/exec-irc-bot/blob/master/scripts/activity.php#L86-L115

another feature that was briefly mentioned in my last journal has been developed further to enable limited two way communication between someone in a soylent irc channel and someone in a freenode irc channel.
to send a message to a channel on the freenode irc network (that an exec minion resides in with forwarding enabled) an authorized user on the soylent irc network in a channel with exec can type "#freenode_channel > message" and the message will be relayed. if you're in the freenode landing channel on the soylent irc network (#freenode) you'll be able to see any replies pop up in there, but it can easily get hidden amongst all the traffic from other channels, so to enable a 10 minute automated relay to a different soylent irc channel, type "#freenode_channel > freenode_nick, message" and for the next 10 minutes anything that freenode_nick says in #freenode_channel will be relayed to the originating soylent channel. only messages prefixed with "#freenode_channel >" will be relayed from soylent to freenode so soylentils can still talk without anyone on freenode hearing, but using the prefix on the soylent end (not required on freenode end) enables two-way communication. the relay lasts for 10 minutes, but can be easily renewed as many times as you want by typing another message (on soylent) in the form "#freenode_channel > freenode_nick, message". if you want to see a list of currently active relays, type ".relays" and it will list freenode_nick, freenode_channel, soylent channel and time remaining (in minutes). use of this feature is limited to a list of nickserv accounts.
code for this feature can be found here: https://github.com/crutchy-/exec-irc-bot/blob/master/scripts/activity.php#L133-L213

re-enabled the ~submit alias so that instead of just pasting a link to irc, you can also (with smallest amount of additional effort) share it with SN users not on irc. syntax is really simple: ~submit %url%
just submits the description or og:description meta tag content along with the link, so makes for a pretty lame submission but its better than nothing at all (editors can always reject it if it sucks too much)

during NCommander's NetHack thing i tweaked the freenode relay script to output messages by the Rodney irc bot in the freenode #nethack channel to our #soylent channel when NCommander died in the game. also made it so that anything Rodney said was output to our local #nethack channel so that NetHack fans can see what's going on without connecting to freenode directly.

developed some macro functionality to enable authorized irc users to shorten otherwise long exec commands into shorter equivalents. came in handy for simplifying control of the freenode relay bot.
also made a compound macro (using exec's internal_macro lib function) to make it easy to talk through the relay bot from the SN irc channels to freenode channels.

we get a bit of spam occasionally in the wiki, and chromas is diligently blanking it out (despite not having authority to delete articles) as a means of spam control. a script has been developed to make it a little easier for him (and a couple of others in a list of authorized nickserv accounts). a spam page in the wiki can now be cleared with ".spamctl %page title%"

http://sylnt.us/exec
http://sylnt.us/execsrc

broke out ircd work into a separate github repo. currently working on ability to connect multiple times to a network with the same nick. idea is that if there are a few servers on the network you could connect to each of them, and then if one disconnects you can still use the other (redundant) connections. authentication of subsequent connections to the same nick is done using a connection id appended to the username field (username sent out doesn't include the connection id though).
the server is at a point where i can connect to it with hexchat a couple of times (server spits out a connection id on first connect, and i just paste that to the end of the username in second connection). i can then join a channel from either connection, which automatically joins for the other connection (weird to watch). then i can chat and the chat appears on both connections. its pretty funky to play with.
if the project goes anywhere (unlikely) it might be ideal to have a client that handles the redundant connections for you automatically rather than having to establish separate connections manually and have each one take up room in the server list. netsplits could be a thing of the past.
prolly will try to make it ts6 and rfc compatible, but still early stages.

https://github.com/crutchy-/ircd

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)

NCommander decided, with almost no notice whatsoever, to stream playing Nethack over Twitch for 24 hours. I missed the first few hours, but watched pretty much the entire stream once I knew it was on. Now, I have absolutely no idea what's happening in Nethack - I can't read the interface, I've never played it before, if NC hadn't been commentating on the action the whole time, I would have been completely baffled. And yet, NC appears to be a complete natural as a Twitch streamer. His reactions to events in game, his explanations of the various mechanics he was dealing with, they were the perfect accompaniment and brought more than enough understanding of the drama unfolding in front of us.

I say us, he managed to attract 320 viewers to his channel over the 24 hour period he played for. And he didn't just play Nethack - he moved on through Minecraft, Papers Please, Super Meat Boy, back to Nethack, then even a quick round of Textris to cap things off. Along the way, we've seen some stuff you don't typically see on Twitch - the Nano text editor, web page updates and eMacs being installed through apt were all included in the footage. We got to hear the admin team chatting and shooting the sh*t amongst themselves. We've cracked endless horse puns. I even played an improvised drinking game.

Soylentnews really is a community. It's made of people with similar interests who can have a great time together, even from half the world away from each other, and as I listen to NC finally breaking out in yawns, I realise that a lot of people involved would be more than happy to do stuff like this many more times in the future. It may be time to sleep now, we're just calling the end now, but the footage will be edited and I hope I can do it justice. It's 4am here - I may not be quite as tired as our fearless leader, but I'm glad I've made it this far.

Well done NC - good night dude!

Soylent green... i like the colour, but yeah it is hard on the eyes.

Happy April 1 people eating, everyone! :)

Irritable Duncan "Trust-me-I-know-what-I'm doing" Syndrome reckons that, when he and the rest of the Conservative Party are re-elected in this May's General Election, he'll make £12 billion (US$17.8 billion) of welfare cuts but he won't tell us before the election what these cuts will be, Allegedly, it's "Not relevant."

There aren't that many poor, sick, disabled and needy left un-kicked, but it's highly amusing that thousands of people in one of the world's most highly-developed countries are having to resort to food banks.

Goodness only knows how much worse it will get if the loony right UKIP get some seats. Anyone but an imbecile can see that they'd vote with the Conservatives on many issues or even form a coalition.

So hurry up and vote Tory to keep the hopeless, sneering socialists down.

God save the Queen etc.

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!