disobey.com

I've so much to do and write about. Poo.

I've mentioned before how much I like Xenosaga, and with a one week reprieve in my secret project (that really isn't so secret anymore), I found time to finish it, coming in at about 48 hours of gaming. I've still got a few hours left (mostly stat building, buying the last AGWS, fiddling with XenoCard, improving my save data for the next game), but Xenosaga is, without a doubt, #1 on my list of best games for any platform, ever. The ending was awesome (I cried, I laughed, I felt incredibly relieved). Talk about fanboy gushing, but lord in heaven, I loved this friggin' game.

When you were in school, the teacher always had a funny mnemonic for the less-than (<) and greater-than (>) signs. One of my teachers did the "alligator" thing - the smaller alligator always eats the bigger alligator. I've also heard of the opposite: the bigger number always "shoots" the smaller one. I always had great difficulty remembering the mnemonics (meta-mnemonics, anyone?), and how exactly they worked. (Similar to other concepts that require, but shouldn't, my forethought: reading an analog clock, knowing the order of the months and alphabets, remembering holidays, how old I am, etc.)

About a year ago, I finally figured it out. It wasn't about alligators or righteous gunmen, it was all about encoding: less-than was literally <, or the start of an element, and greater-than >, the end of an element. It was so simple, so blantantly obvious, it borders on the power of an epiphany.

What interests me most, though, is hearing what mnemonic teachers are using nowadays. With kids always knowing more about computers than older folk, are HTML and similar markups prevalent enough to make this a more palatable comparison? Any one got kids?

They can take my electricity away, just leave me my amphetadesk. --FishPants

Whilst Morbus "Triffid-Boy" Iff is too busy with work to notice the rest of the world, I thought I'd commandeer DNN for a bit. I've just released the wypy Python wiki, which, at just 23 lines of code, may be the world's smallest wiki. Check out the shortest wiki contest, and the wypy source code.

"That's the ugliest python code I think I've ever seen!"—A. Mathews

I'm sure that Morbus will be thrilled to find out about this since a) he won't realise for weeks, and by then he'll be too drunk to care, and b) if he's not going to update DNN, who is?

Dave Winer, who labeled me a monster for purportedly wishing him dead, wishes not one, not two, but three deaths (as a last resort, though: choices, choices!):

How dorky is an application used by three people that hits one of my sites 10K times a day? Sometimes I wish the kids would just grow up. Or if that's not possible, at least leave home. Or if that's not possible, die.

UPDATE: Winer replies: "I thought you took death wishes as art, self-expression."

I'm participating in a community experiment over at MovieLens, and the first question was to recommend a little known movie to the group. I couldn't resist selecting a list from my personal collection of horror films. Note, "little-known" in this case, is to horror film buffs:

• Abominable Dr. Phibes, The
• Anguish (Zelda Rubenstein++)
• Biozombie (Japanese zomedy)
• Bloodletting (coming to DVD in Aug/received screener)
• C.H.U.D. (not little-known, but good)
• Cannibal! The Musical (south park creators)
• Day of the Triffids, The (not horror/little-known, childhood fave)
• Dead Hate the Living, The
• Dog Soldiers (not little-known, but good)
• Godmonster of Indian Flats (AHAHAHAHAHAHA)
• Humanoids from the Deep (Corman fare)
• It's Alive! Trilogy (Cohen flicks)
• Premutos: Lord of the Dead (most... deaths... ever!)
• Series 7: The Contenders (not horror, but cynicism)
• Squirm (childood fave)
• Stage Fright (not little-known, but good)
• Syngenor (AHAHAHAhAHAHAHA)
• Unmasked, Part 25 (uhhh...)
• Wicker Man, The (not little-known, but good)

From #disobey:

<Morbus> anything i can help with?
* Morbus says with bated breath.
<Morbus> baited breath.
<Morbus> jesus.
<xxxxx> bated
<Morbus> is it? i thought it was.
<xxxxx> means held
<Morbus> just looked weird on paper.
<Morbus> or whatever this is.
<xxxxx> baited would be eating cheese to catch mice
<Morbus> or running tuna on your balls so your cat will lick you.
<xxxxx> um, yeah
<Morbus> don't look at me like that
<Morbus> it wasn't my idea. it was the cat's.

From Gamegrene.com:

I have to say I'm a lazy GM. I don't have the time or the energy to prepare a vast amount of background, labyrinthine plots, or hundreds of stats for monsters. So I spend an awful lot of time winging it during a game. My plots may be complex, and the background detailed, but this has little to do with the preparation I put in; mostly they are player lead adventures, and so I rely upon them for a lot of the inspiration and development of the game. (ozzie) Read more from this post.

Shoulda been at 75% last Friday. Was only at 66% Now at 70%. Poop.