You're just jealous

Came in dead last in four games straight of Gang of Four (online, twice with queue involved). Boy that makes me irritable. I had a chance of taking the last game, and the guy in the deadhole position handed me 100,000 points. Hate hate hate. Am made madder by the fact that one of the earlier games involved another fuckwit who fled the table before I could defeat him honestly and improve my score (by taking from his). Instead it was just toilet toilet toilet for me and my ELO.

O the world does indeed cry out for Volity. But that's another post.

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I'm going to slake my anger by sneering at Don Hertzfeldt from a great distance. I might end up seeing his new thing at a film festival this week, and quite honestly I think his material and techniques are very clever. It's just his whole attitude oh my god, his entire "I'm a real animator" shtick, using the soapbox that his talent and timing earned him to self-congratulatorily pooh-pooh digital tools, dismissing their output as somehow lesser than what he is doing.

He's like the smug and successful inverse of Mike Jittlov, or something.

Actually I'd be less mad if he were less famous. The truth is I will probably see his thing at two different festivals this week, if I go to both, for such is his wunderkind-clout. But I have been Flash animations at least as clever as this. But no, his medium is half his message, and it irritates me to no end that people actually dig that. Fie, fie upon all of you.

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Over in doonesbury, Alex is pondering signing up for the Army, and people are caterwauling about the possibility of her being sent to Iraq (though she hasn't signed anything yet). It reminds me of something I've been wondering lately: what's the makeup of the current American forces serving there? From following the news, I have gotten the impression that the USMC has the largest presence there by far. It seems to me that "soldier" and "marine" are used interchangably in news reports (all too often about something terrible happening to one or more of them).

Unless the stories are actually being quite precise, and "soldier" in .mil context specifically means "an active member of the Army, not to be confused with a marine, a sailor, or an airman". Which I'd be fascinated to learn was true, being something I hadn't considered until just now.

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Attacked by Thugs! is a great story of a hacker jumped (unsuccessfully) by some inept crooks in his native Poland, and then his subsequent adventures roaring around the city with a vanful of trigger-happy, all-caps-speaking police. Found by way of xach.

If you are ever, ever in Warsaw, I highly recommend you flag down a passing cop car and tell them you've been assaulted. You will meet with a kind of unconditional acceptance and emotional support that I didn't know could be found outside one's immediate family. The police will also go apeshit and run around with guns and screaming sirens in a way that very few families do, and for the police it's perfectly legal. I was lucky enough to flag down an entire van full of Warsaw's finest, and they immediately shouted for me to climb in and tell them which way to go. No invasive questions about who I was, no skepticism of any kind, not even questions about what had happened - just an instant desire to kick hooligan ass.

Seen in an error message

Available drivers: DBM, ExampleP, File, Proxy, Sponge.

Some day I will use that line in a game, where you are the boss of a gaggle of colorful characters with goofy handles, and must choose the wheel-man for your next caper.

I just love the idea of someone calling himself "ExampleP". The others have at least some sort of intrinsic cool to them, like characters from The Matrix but that one just misses the point entirely, somehow. Even "Sponge" is cooler.

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I am reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition which has finally come out in paperback, and enjoying it far more than I thought I would. I knew something about it because some of my friends described being annoyed at it describing for me what annoyed them. I nodded sympathetically and silently thought hmm that sounds kinda cool. And lo it is. If you're into that sort of thing.

It reads entirely differently from every other Gibson I have slogged through, which is to say: it is not boring. I think that real-life technology has actually caught up with him, so now he gets to write about real things while putting as much love into this yes-actually techno-wonderland setting as he ever has into any of his SF novels. Setting is the reason I read SF, and this novel makes me happy in the same way even though it's not really SF.

(I like it enough to forgive Gibson things like the fact that he sometimes flubs the most minute details about what URLs look like or how browser history menus work. I recall how he once asked his own fans, via his weblog, how to make a hypertext link, which showed that Mr. Neuromancer not only didn't know rudimentary HTML, but also had no confidence using Google. Or maybe it just showed his supreme laziness, which I can actually vaguely admire. (Anyway, I can't imagine how many responses he got to that. Can you imagine all the kids fighting for bragging rights over teaching Bill Gibson how to make an <a> tag?!))

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Crucial hair news: I have found that when my hair gets long enough to comb, I can instead just assault it with a blow dryer. This generally makes my hair look less blandly puffy and more aggressively gorgonic, a couple of steps more Heat Miser-y than usual. I like this effect.

No combs ever.

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I like the WP article on Gary Kasparov, and didn't know that he recently announced his retirement from serious competitive chess. If I'm reading it correctly, he basically retired because he ran out of new titles to win, and was just taking home the same honors year after year. In one way it's big of him to step aside and let someone else win for a change, but the way it's phrased makes him sound more petulant than that. (Which may be accurate; I recall his embarrassing crankiness when computers have beat him.)

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I haven't written about my iPod Shuffle since the half-complaints I noted the day after I bought it. The truth is that I really like it, now; I consider it worth every penny. It still sometimes gets into a weird state where I have to cycle its power before it works again. This also makes it lose its place in its playlist, forcing me to hit the fast-foward button a bunch of times if I want to get back to the spot I was before. Annoying, but it only happens when I leave in on idle for a long time... maybe it's from accidental in-pocket button-mashing in the interim. There is a button-lock feature but it's a pain to use (hold down the play button for 5 secs to toggle) so I don't bother. But really, I like it a lot.

It seems to have some favorite songs of its own. My iTunes library is presently 12 times the size of the Shuffle's storage capacity, but I swear that Radiohead's Paranoid Android has gotten itself on there during the last four or five random loads. This evening it started just as I was heading home from the Harvard campus. I estimate that the distance up Mass Ave between Harvard and the street I cross to go to my house is around 1.3 PAUs.

• Questions for you
  • Could you stop the noise?
    • Trying to get some rest
    • Unborn chicken voices in head
  • Why don't you remember my name?
    • I guess he does
    • Off with his head, man
  • What's that?
    • Things I may be
      • Paranoid
    • Things I am not
      • An android
    • Things I sound like
      • The Talking Moose
• Things that will be first against the wall when I am king
  • You
    • Ambition makes you look pretty ugly
    • Kicking squealing gucci little piggy
  • Your opinions (inconsequential)
• Origin of rain
  • From a great height
  • From a great heeeiiiiii
  • Eeeeiiiieeiiii
• Things that will rain down
  • "That's it sir, you're leaving"
  • Crackle of pigskin
  • Dust and screaming
  • Yuppies networking
  • Panic
  • Vomit
• Things God loves
  • His children
  • Yeah