A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Deletionpedia is a machine-generated website, built entirely from Wikipedia articles that have been deleted. It itself is not a wiki, even though it copies Wikipedia's page layout. The result is somewhat fantastic.

Its current featured article is this exhaustive list of all the weapons found in the tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000, complete with what appears to be meticulously fan-made illustrations, many with labeled parts and exploded views. Someone put a hell of a lot of work into this. While I can see why the WP hivemind would give it the boot (WP is famously tolerant of nerdwank, but still has its limits), I'm oddly relieved to know that it's preserved elsewhere.

And there will be a lot of pages like this guy's, a short biography of "a British-based Starship captain, commentator on society and volunteer ticket collector on a steam railway". Or the sad tale of List of Films with Monkeys in Them, which was cut down before it could even grow past three items.

The list of magical things goes on, preserved forever. I am glad this exists.

DDR Supernova is nice. I was originally resistant to the notion of completing special obstacle courses in order to unlock songs, but they are clever and encourage you to explore the various song-tweaking options that have been in the games since the beginning but which I've never bothered messing with. These mostly involve ways to change how the arrows move and appear, such as reversing the flow of arrows, or making them appear only halfway up the screen, or having them move at unpredictable speeds. It's sort of a DDR scavenger hunt, and I like it.

I can do 7-footers comfortably and some 8-footers with exertion and luck. This may be my plateau.

Also, today I bought a song on iTunes because I heard it in a DDR game, which is a first for me. It is "Jerk It Out" by Caesars. Which makes me think of someone trying with violent motions to get the last bit of caesar salad dressing from the bottle, but in fact if you listen to the iTMS sample you will hear the chunkly filtered organ riff that I found highly catchy and happy and worth a dollar. Very fun to stomp arrows in time to, as well.

Have gotten into an exercise routine lately where I spend about an hour playing DDR and then doing some push-ups and other floor exercises. Though the results have been fast - I'm definitely building up strength, able to do a few more reps every day - I'm sure my form is terrible. I looked at WP's page on push-ups, which have a totally boss animated GIF of a guy doing push-ups forever, but its caption (doubtless provided by a later contributor) criticizes his bad form. Uh, and now I look at the page and the picture's gone.

This video is the number-one googley hit for "how to do push-ups". It is not how I have been doing them. I like the suggestions for making it easier, and easier again, for newbs. I remember doing the easiest kind, with bent knees, when I went to "special gym" in grade school. But today, my shoulders hurt at the bone level after doing whatever horrible thing I was doing that was apparently not push-ups, so maybe I'll try this chest-to-the-floor way tomorrow.

Today's Wikipedia featured article is about fighting in hockey and I read the whole thing. I found it fascinating because I grew up in a hockey-loving house (by virtue of my brother Peter being in it) and watched and enjoyed countless Bruins games on television, and then went on to a hockey college and couldn't help but follow all our boys' (and, separately but lesserly, ladies') exploits there, and still I had no concept at all until now of NHL teams having unofficial "enforcer" players who protect the smaller players, punish perceived transgressions, and generally only fight with other enforcers. This is apparently a tradition far older than I.

I haven't followed or even thought much about hockey in years, and now it all seems rather bizarre for the reason the article states, that there's no other professional team sport in the western world that tolerates and even encourages on-field pugilistics like North American hockey. When I was a kid it seemed as natural as anything but now it strikes me as the output of unregulated testosterone poisoning, and simply distasteful. The purposeful and oddly abstract tackles and collisions in American football is just as physical but a hundred times more nuanced. (As is the checking and such in hockey, sure.)

(Subject line is what the arcade machine "Lethal Enforcers" would say when you put a quarter in and then started a one-player game, and otherwise has nothing to do with anything.)

This is the Youtube thing I was talking about. It is not the related-videos postroll that they've been doing for years, and which at least three people seem to think I was referring to.

Regarding the Fahrenheit article: one of the weenies kept reverting my changes and making comments like "Bradbury wrote the book; he knows what it's about". My crankiness about this is quelled by the fact that one of the people whose text I first changed has taken my side in the talk page, and did a reasonable job striking a happy medium in the article.

If I cared more I'd go find references to Bradbury's earlier, conflicting comments and add them to the article's head, which currently implies that he's always held the interpretation he does now. But generally when I find myself getting angry with a non-core project like this it's time to walk away.

(Ha har Slashdot-style subject line.)

Speaking of procrastination, I mean Wikipedia, here's an edit I made a couple of weeks ago to the French and Indian War article. As noted, I appreciated the vandal's creativity, which went above and beyond the usual vandal behavior of replacing the entire article with "LOL PENUS" or whatever, but still.

What's extra-great is that the modified text lived in the article for about two hours, managing to survive several (probably bot-driven) reverts, including the removal of another WP user's rather reasonable commentary on the matter.

OK, I accidentally read some Wikipedia articles and now I'm terrified. They had pictures and everything it was horrible. I really want to set up an appointment ASAP with someone for a checkup. I've got credit.

Any local recommendations? I literally have no doctor or plan or nuthin. I'm a free agent.

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Hmm, a nice little project I can do today is look into buying health insurance for myself, too. I quite honestly have no idea about any of this stuff.

Edit leahleaf and jadelennox slid some URLs at me, and I contacted these folks. I hope to get myself nice n set up by Jan 1. I feel better already.

Today's Wikipedia article of the day is about the number 0.999... and its equality to 1. I did not know this!! What a fine thing to think about.

I had two dreams this morning.

First was a good dream. I was simply a passenger on a big jet, and enjoyed a few flights. All were smooth and relaxing, despite my nervousness about such things. Towards the end of the dream the pilot got fancy and performed backwards and even sideways take-offs and in all cases the experience was like riding a vast, flawless glass ramp into the sky.

Then I dreamed that I was home and Dick Cheney (who, for some reason, had a syrupy Southern accent) called me on the phone to gloat about how I had failed to detect his scheme and he was now free to carry on. I had no idea what he was talking about, but felt terrible about it, sure that if he was taking the trouble to call me then I must have been tasked with the mission to stop Dick Cheney and simply missed the memo. I asked him what he would do now, and he chuckled and said that I didn't need to know.

Apparently what tipped him off was that he had, from afar, noticed me reading some false Wikipedia pages that he had planted to entrap and confuse his pursuers. These were two pages on webcomics that my dreaming self had, in fact looked up prior to the phone call. The pages were bizarre: one looked as if someone had simply moved the discussion page onto the content page, and the other featured only a bland publicity photograph of a senatorial-looking black woman and some text about her, as well as a simple map of U.S. with the larger states labeled in blue MS Comic Sans. Through traffic analysis Cheney saw me spend time wondering at those pages, and then move on to something else; from this, he concluded that I was on his trail, but then got thrown off, just as he had intended.

WP's article about fuck is a thing of beauty.

"Fucking fucker's fucking fucked, fuck!" ("It is broken, with additional emphasis on dismay.")

For a G-rated bonus article, see also buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.