Tobias 's Queen Mary

Has anyone written a treatise on the (male) homoeroticism of Arrested Development? Once the show gets going, it has gay-sexy-jokey streaming from no fewer than three characters. At first you're like, "Boy, this show sure does like to wink at teh gay", but then you see that this humor is textured entirely differently for each of the three; it's not (entirely) the "ha ha good thing we're not gay" stuff that any guy-oriented sitcom can sledgehammer around for a cheap laugh. The writers put a lot of thought into making it nuanced. (And funny enough that I laugh like an ape.)

I'm starting to suspect that Gob was supposed to be openly bisexual, and that it just never come up as an overt statement during in-show conversation. (Then again I'm only midway through season 2.)

Zipcar UI: Ouch.

Ouch. Zipcar has changed their interface and made it into crap.

Time was, the main reservation page was a set of parallel timelines, one for each car near you, with their reserved and unreserved times clearly blocked out. If there was an unreserved stretch that suited you, you clicked on it. Bing! Done.

Now you have to blindly enter pickup and return times first, with no other information, and then are told whether or not any cars meet your criteria. It's gone from picking things off a shelf to fishing. What were they thinking?!

Dude, I don't always know ahead of time when I want to take the car out! You tell me! Sometimes I plan my activities around when cars are avaialable, man. Gawrd.

After reading the FAQ, I see that you can apparently fake it by entering a days-long block of time in the first screen, getting some results, and then setting an option to show cars that conflict with your fake-requested time (probably all of them). This gives you some old-fashioned timelines, which then you can fine-tune down to what you really want. I hate that I have to do that now.

Yes, I am become one of those whiney bitches who has an aneurism upon a favorite website changing their look. I think I'm justified here, though.

Volity presentation at MIT, April 10

I will be giving a technical presentation about Volity to the Tuesday, April 10 meeting of the Boston Perl Mongers. The meeting runs from 7 to 9 at MIT E51-376, and it's open to the public, so you should totally come if you're in town and want to see me jabber about Volity from a hackerly standpoint. I would love to see some familiar faces in the audience!

Due to the venue, the talk will have a Perlish bent, but as it intends to introduce the Volity concept in its entirety it should prove interesting to any game hacker. Part of my goal here is to create a presentation that I can modularize for other types of audiences as appropriate - if it goes over well (and I think it will) this will be something I'll want to take to conferences.

A typical Boston.pm meeting has two presentations, and I don't know whether mine will be first or second. Yes, this conflicts with at least one local social event, but that is not in my control. Sorry!