No last chance before the wastes

Hardcore

2012-01-25T11:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I spent most of the slacking-off time doing data collection and data entry work.

Today was slow, so I started to learn Python (between translating an official statement that No, we won't be trying to build a nuke using this particular thermometer, and explaining to our Western colleagues that they really shouldn't blame the db admin for their failing to upload 75Mb over sat).

All for a single puzzle in an adventure game.

This is not to say that people should put puzzles requiring higher education and/or days of study in their games, but that people should try to make games that would make the player WANT to put in such work.

Alchemy, Mafia, Feudalism and Copyright

2012-01-22T08:33:00.000-08:00

My mom was born in a backwater place with an unpronounceable name which I will from now on call Georgetown, because that's what the toponym means. Recently, the reintroduction of feudalism through federal law made people buy land like crazy (reminder: even with the government giving away land to other countries, we're still the largest country in the world, territorially speaking) and build houses on it like crazy (because unused housing land may be confiscated), which in turn created the demand for cheaper (meaning locally produced) modern building materials. Georgetown was especially friendly to ecology-destroying businesses, so it experienced a tremendous economic boom (its neighbors dwindling to obscurity with their furniture and toxic chemicals businesses). 20 years ago, my parents were considered filthy rich for owning a (kinda shitty, but we weren't complaining back then) car. Today, there are bloody traffic jams, and my parents' new car, a Honda CR-V (which cost them all their life savings), isn't particularly good by local standards.

The alchemists' village is halfway between Georgetown and the capital. There's a German glazing plant and not much else. The local crafts traditions have existed since forever and were made a national resource of strategic importance by the decree of the first Romanov tsar (we're talking 450 years ago here). People made alchemical clayware, tableware, pipes, ovens, goddamn bricks and generally behaved as if the clay would never run out.

....surprise, surprise....

The craft survives on imported Ukrainian (shit) and German (awesome) clay. Stupid tourists can't tell the difference (they also can't tell the difference between a spray-on picture of a dick and Ms. Artamonova's exquisite azure-and-gold ornamentation), and since more affluent collectors never visit the place, resellers mark up the price to high heavens, buy out the handmade preciousness and have attempted to put some restrictions on its sale to private people.

And some time ago, the mafia decided to COPYRIGHT THE CRAFT. And they nearly succeeded.

Under the pretense of "preserving the craft", they copyrighted the toponym, copyrighted PAINTING THINGS BLUE and forced the craftsmen out of the firm by not paying them and not heating the factory during winter. They tried to ban people from making stuff in private while being employed at the firm by claiming that every design they invented while being employed is copyrighted by the mafia. They tried to cut off the supply of tools and materials and then claimed people started stealing them from the factory (not a single supposed thief has been caught or acknowledged the alleged theft). They took away the folk craft status from other manufacturers which hit them with an insane tax burden. That sort of shit eventually led to the protesters' star craftsman dying of a stroke at the age of 49. In the autumn, I found their shop closed with no indication of when, or whether, it will be reopened.

The good news is that since then the former chief accountant of the factory spearheaded the effort to get things to quasi-normal. Half a year ago, the shopkeeper at her shop "couldn't comment", yesterday at my wondering aloud whether to buy the incomplete coffee set (awesome sets don't sell in local shops because hardly anyone visiting the place can fork over the money for a complete set) she volunteered, "Why don't you preorder?"

What could I say other than "SIGN ME UP"?

The full set in azure and gold, made from awesome German clay with the late master craftsman's molds, named simply "Morning #3", is going to cost me all the money I was saving toward nothing in particular since paying off my loan (the declared goal was buying a new PC, but turns out the place I now live at is at risk of BURNING TO THE GROUND if something more power-consuming than a Soviet-era clothes-iron is plugged in when the fridge is in the active phase).

And when my dad decided to tell me off, I countered with, "Well, YOU lost the heirloom coffee set to a greasy fuck, so I'm going to buy a new heirloom that my future kids could lose to future greasy fucks! Hooray for family traditions!"

...

Meanwhile, the crystal factory in another town, to the east of Georgetown and its furniture-and-chemicals neighbors, has been bankrupted, resold and is to be "renovated" to produce - what else? - building materials. Fuck. Traditional down scarves have been successfully copyrighted and are now sold for $400-something. However, metal trays painted with awesome ethereal flower motifs - another folk craft - only cost $30 apiece, which won't buy a doodle from an attention whore at deviantart. The mafia hadn't gotten to them. Yet.

National embezzlement month

2012-01-22T05:19:00.000-08:00

Today's Windows Update showed me when I last did something useful and/or creative:

Oct 22, 2011.

It's been three months. That's like a prison sentence. I could have punched some fucktard in the face on Oct 22, or ogled some unsuspecting women on cam, or protested something that's worth protesting, and got out today.

However, of all the infinite possibilities, I happened to protest a stupid and wasteful government contract by singlehandedly doing $30000's (contractor's estimate) worth of work in 7 days' (and 2 nights') time, without the perspective of getting paid.

It seems I will get paid for that, however (my usual rate of $7/hour, capped at 8 hours/day, ignoring overtime). But the contract for the work that I have already done is still going through. I'd rather not get paid but stick it to the man, especially considering that I have met the man in question, and he's an asshole hipster fuck (WHO SELLS PIRATED IBM SOFTWARE, HELLO THERE TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN*).

*No, I'm not writing to IBM, because they'll just pass it down to the regional department, who are proven to be CORRUPT FUCKS.

Anyway: If I get paid, I'll use the money to buy a very special 6-person coffee set. Windows Update is being annoying, so why this coffee set is special will have to wait until after I reboot the PC.

In before cockbag

2012-01-13T12:36:00.000-08:00

So I pirated an indie game.

The devs claim the PC version is DRM free - yeah, right. Let's look at the options.

Steam can go fuck itself right away.

Gamersgate:
Q: Can I download the game on my office PC and install it on my home PC which does not have an internet connection?
A: No, you cannot. Internet connection is required to install games.

Origin's regional settings tell me to fuck off - the game is not just "unavailable" but plain unfindable in my country. (And since the Heroes 6 thing I don't mess with regional settings.) These racist bastards don't even allow me to change the language. Plus Origin is not DRM-free anyway.

Green Man Gaming is a lending site. So, DRM - I don't even bother to look for the FAQ.

Gamefly and Onlive are cloud bullshit. Fuck the (public) cloud. Also, I'm on a GPRS connection via a tethered phone. I can wardrive (or, more precisely, warwalk) for a faster connection, but at all times when I can technically play, I'm on a 64 kbps GRPS at best.

Yes, I realize maintaining a store is a pain in the ass. But listen here people.

Large companies have bought out the competition since forever. They have bought out and CLOSED the competition since forever. Payment providers can (and do) organize blockades. Search engines and social networks can (and do) rank-0 content. Private companies can ban things for any reason at all, because they are private and free to do as they want.

There's an indie game about criminals written by a former cop. A gaming magazine covered it, ranting about how morally wrong it is to make a game about racism / sexism / whatever and gave it 0 points first time in the magazine's history. This, while other games covered in the issue concerned:
- fantasy genocide XTREEM
- medieval genocide of the bullshit variety (countries in Europe actually fought international flower wars and murderized their own minorities, say, for wearing yellow boots and tight pants)
- right wing fappery
- Microsoft Flight Simulator (~~this one's okay~~ should have been banned for teaching terrorists to fly planes)
- a stupid railroad action-RPG murderfest
- a good railroad action-RPG murderfest
- a Portal wannabe (this one's supposedly okay too)
- right wing fappery Mk II.

I can't express how much I am not a fan of the bastard who made that HIGHLY CONTROVERSHUL game. But there's no way people can say with a straight face that a game that poses a question whether you have the right to kill objectively bad guys and gals is somehow morally repulsive while a game that poses no question as to whether you should kill random faceless dudes for phat lewts and XPs (you totally should!) is TEH BEST GAEM OF THE DECADE (there's one in every issue, of course).

"Provocative to nutjobs" is an excuse to ban things that works any day of the week. I mean, UN recently said (concerning terrorist attacks) that being provocative and explodey is the victims' own damn fault. While public establishments can be subjected to various penalties for being discriminative fucks, corporations do not face this restriction. If Apple can ban an app for having a browser which you can use to browse the Internet and find some classic literary pron, who's to guarantee they wouldn't ban a game with, say, an online scoreboard which another player might conceivably use to post an ascii cock?

And this is why I choose things that do not have the shadow of the slimy corporate overseer trailing them. I don't hand out change in the streets - because, while the beggars are obviously in need of financial help (I mean - even if the various ailments and troubles they list are fake, begging in the subway is a sure indicator that the person is in trouble), I won't support the "industry". Same reason I'm not buying goods made by child slaves even though some of the money the exploiters receive from the sales goes to feed the child slaves.

Okay then, it's my right to follow "stupid self-imposed restrictions", but why pirate?

1. Since I'm not buying the DRMed game anyway, the world is objectively better for me having access to one more piece of culture.
2. It will probably be featured in some sort of bundle where I can properly pay for it before I get to play it (as it happened with Trine, and for the record, I paid $50)
3. I bought the soundtrack, although it's also on TPB.

On another note, these past four months I've been busy fighting software piracy. People have threatened to demote me, sue me, and hinted at the perspective of being found in an unlikely place with one hole too many. I'd have won if not for the rightsholder's betrayal. But this is a long story, and I really want to sleep now.

Obligatory New Year post

2011-12-31T21:15:00.000-08:00

2011 thanks go to:
me,
me,
Savings Bank of the Russian Federation for the loan that lasted me a year,
the guy who gave me a job,
another guy for my new PC,
yet another guy who told me I was wrong on the forums (I wasn't, but thank you anyway for the conversation),
the three people who hired goons to harass me (for considering me sufficiently dangerous to hire goons - a strong contender for best compliment ever),
and the young lady who said she didn't hate me, no matter what adults told us both.

Thank you, and happy 2012 (except the goons and those who hired them - fuck all of you and go die in a fire instead).

Fucking shit.

2011-11-01T10:16:00.000-07:00

The shitlickers from a year and a half past have found out about my job difficulties from a person whom I asked for help with employment. And they came to gloat. Fuck.

Not sure if fired

2011-10-28T04:47:00.000-07:00

I am fined and fired, but no one has told me yet. I have to perform basic duties, but most rights necessary to perform them are withdrawn.
Oh, and Internet is supposedly blocked.
I am posting this from work, of course, via their network.
Professionals, my ass.

Department of redundancy and Schroedinger's twist

2011-10-25T13:02:00.000-07:00

I'm ~~reading~~ listening to Vol. 6 of The book that taught me the most important life lesson. The cover blurb spoils the plot (yes, there is something to spoil) from cover to cover (good job, editor), and of course the voice artist had to have the blurb precede the actual text (good job, editor #2).

Not that the format hasn't already spoiled a lot - the book is a pretentious pseudo-documentary, meaning it fails to qualify as a decent pseudo-documentary, going all Dickens about the characters' plans and feelings for pages and pages, but it has citations. Like, "excerpt from M's journal", "N's field notes", "page from a neutron bomb manual". Not a single source is secretly false (what an opportunity, so tragically wasted!), which would be enough to kill the suspense deader than dead, except a substantial number of them are goofs. Sure, there's an appendix in which a character comments on his friend's post-war research - but there's no guarantee that either of them survived until the very last page (and even then the ending and yet another appendix clearly state that such commentary could never exist).

What annoys me the most - especially in an audiobook version - are constant recaps and as-you-knows. Okay, I know omnivore fantasy is aimed at teenagers, and all teenagers have ADHD, but seriously, maaaaan. Given the relative subtlety of several plot points (it took me 12 years to realize who arranged the murder of the main character - what a fucking slowpoke!), I suspect it was an editorial decision.

What I see in today's local market is "book projects", meaning series outsourced to various (invariably shitty) authors set in a shared universe. One can seriously read a book per month - the pinnacle of omnivore literature. Don't let your readership grow up. Now an auteur's series can't be assembly-line-produced. And in ages past, when your 4th book went to print, the 1st could very well be impossible to find. Thus, recaps. There's a term in linguistics - language superfluity index? something like that - which means, roughly, "this is how many mistakes/typos I can make and still be understood". It used to be the same with books. In fact, I feel my experience was richer for reading books out of order, making guesses, reconstructing missing fragments of the plot.

Ebooks are going to kill that trend. I do not know how well sales correlate to initial investment or the unnecessarity thereof, but the very real fact that the initial investment is now only a matter of money - and it makes money for the rightsholders, not for used-book-stores - means that there's no editorial pressure to increase superfluity (except good old page count bloat).

That is good.

Schroedinger's twist is NOT GOOD.

Reading (unlike watching the movie where if your audience are guessing means they're bored) takes a damn long time. Trying to guess what happens next is an important aspect of the experience of reading. And while it can take one solitary Russian fan who tags school desks with a self-invented letter combination in a stupid hope to find fellow fans 12 years of doing various things to realize who wanted the main character dead (apparently remembering what happened two pages ago was too much of a mental effort), people on the internets will post a fuckton of theories in a matter of minutes. And in a week the mass of theories will coalesce into several valid theories, one of which will be true, and at least two will be way better than what the author planned.

But the author is old-fashioned and jealous; no one can uncover his clever ruses! no one can know his characters better than he does!

And so he cheats. He pulls a surprise twist out of his ass, a twist that no one has foreseen by design. It's like that sharpshooting cartoon, only the arrow has actually hit bullseye and the author is trying to whitewash the target and paint the bullseye elsewhere. Thus making the process of reading meaningless.

But it was meaningless, wasn't it? It's an unwritten fictional story, not a documentary.

WRONG.

FUCK SUCH AUTHORS. FUCK THEM WITH FULL FORCE.

Untrolled

2011-10-25T12:03:00.000-07:00

There was an announcement in the window of a bar:

Halloween party
Customers in witch costumes receive 1 cocktail FREE!

with a picture of a sexy witch.

Customers. Too bad I'm not a guy. I'd put on a witch costume, crash the party and demand the free booze.

I bought a pen pouch. Now I need a pouch for the pen pouch.

Tightrope walker

2011-10-21T17:17:00.000-07:00

In a weird balancing-out way, the shittier life becomes, the crazier my plans for the future get.

What did I dream of in 2007?
Nothing. I was a university dropout, I worked at an outsourced call center, I had unlimited Internet access and was eagerly learning stuff about the world. It'll be good if the next client isn't that annoying, I need to make a turn and can't think clearly when I'm citing legalese to a suspicious prospective loan applicant. I wish today's lunchtime is fairly quiet so I can go to McDonalds and eat like a boss. I wish the overseer gets distracted so I can steal pineapple juice from the fridge. I wish there's money in the ATM.

Fast forward to 2011:
ZOMG I'M SO AWESOME I HAVE THIS AWESOME IDEA I'M GONNA WRITE TEH BESTEST BOOK EVAR AND GET SO FUCKING FAMOUS OH AND I NEED TO WRITE A GAME BASED ON MY FAV BOOK, THE WRITER WOULD ENDORSE IT AND FANGIRLS WILL LINE UP FOR APPRECIATION

The shittier the present, the shinier the future. They say stars are visible from the bottom of the mineshaft.

I actually started concept work on that game and made arrangements to procure printed source material for more convenient research. I'm also telling people all about it so that I don't get obviously depressed - not giving those fuckards a cause for gloating. I'd rather have people hate and envy me for fake vanity and overconfidence than despise for all-too-real general suckitude.

Questionnaire

2011-10-19T00:54:00.000-07:00

Someone on GOG.com posted this questionnaire with the declared intent of getting to know the other posters more. A rational poster pointed out the obvious inherent failure of such an undertaking, which is why I set out to prove him wrong.

Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament: Arcanum
Pop or Rock: Nerdcore
Love or Sex: Videogames
Multiplayer or Singleplayer: Progress Quest
Beatles or Stones: Wings
Artificiality or Naturalness: Fractals
Blonde or Brunette: Purples
Day or Night: Midmorning, which is now, and that's what matters
Comedy or Drama: Documentary with a laugh track
Fantasy or Science fiction: Pliocene Exile
Forever or Never: Sometimes
Jeanne d'Arc à Domrémy (Chapu) or Sappho (Pradier): The Spirit of Ecstasy
FPS or RPG: TBS
Keats or Yeats: O'Shaughnessy
Easy or Hard: Nightmare
Checkers or Chess: Backgammon
Pasta or Pizza: Noodles
GOG or Magog: TPB
The Hobbit or The Silmarillion: Death Gate
Fellini or Godard: Kitano
Red Roses or White Lilies: Yellow Buttercups
Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse: Gyro Gearloose
Autumn or Spring: Winter
Cats or Dogs: Potted plants
Aphrodite or Athena or Hera: Spenta Mainyu

taking a third option since 1986

Easily distracted by shiny objects

2011-10-18T15:02:00.000-07:00

Heroes 6 review

1. Shiny
2. Awesome
3. Slower than molasses
4. Seriously, are all mainstream games the same?
5. Achievements. Fuck achievements. Are all mainstream games so boring that playing them has to offer rewards above and beyond, you know, actually playing the damn game? This is simply an affront to... ooh, shiny...

In the clouds

2011-10-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

"Uhm sir, can I attend the cloud computing conference?"
"Sure. Anything notable about it?"
"The food is good."

I wonder what crazy profits the resellers manage to extract from our technologically backwards market that they can throw this sort of parties. The boss/employee division of the attendees was very clear: in the grand hall of Hotel Radisson, suits talked about how future-oriented cloud computing is for six hours straight. Technical demos for people who can actually tell Chrome from Facebook were held in smaller halls. At the end of the conference, in exchange for giving away our companies' customer profiles, we were given usb drives shaped like blue clouds, which I consider an epic design WIN. "Here's your private cloud to store data - see what we did there?"

The junior employees, including me, could have holes punched in their attendance tickets (technically, everyone could, but the bosses did not bother), one hole per a company's display, indicating that we have visited that particular display, to eventually take part in a lottery upon the conclusion of the conference. Of course, no one bothered to told us until it was (supposedly) too late. Not intending to give up, I ran around the display area where a sympathetic presenter punched the required number of holes in my ticket (thanks, nameless dude), gathered a couple slowpokes who were also told it was too late and crashed the lottery. I haven't won anything, though.

Like every marketing dumbfuck under the sun, the organizers were overconcerned with section attendance. Apparently, five years into this conference business and the idea that people would go to whatever demo had the most fun name (corporate talk sounds the same) and then get stuck watching subsequent demos because the timetable went all askew hasn't occurred to them yet. The ushers, whose job was to count attenders, fucked up the procedure, tumbling to the fact that they are supposed to check in people who stay for the next demo a second time only by the end of the day. When this obsessive end-of-the-day checking led to them attempting to check me in twice during a single demo, I told them to fuck off (politely). The ushers lost their shit - thet must have thought it inconceivable that someone would refuse to be checked and were hovering over me for three minutes. In the "sell your data for a usb drive" survey, I wrote in "mind the timetable and use RFIDs" as tips for the organizers.

(Yes, I sympathize with ushers and custserv and cashiers and telemarketers and advertizing mascots - but only if they do their job well.)

The food was excellent, as I knew it would be. The banquet was held in the picture gallery, which is an actual gallery overlooking the first floor hall (lined by smallish cafes, not booked by the conference organizers). Hotel visitors strolled the hall, sat in the cafes and sipped coffee from small cups - the people who were able to pay (or have their company pay) for a visit to Moscow and a stay at the luxury hotel, the people who probably brought home each month more than I did in a year. And, standing on the gallery, having dined on every delicacy the hotel had to offer, with a glass of liquid awesome in hand, I pronounced my verdict on them.

"Losers."

Nothing to declare

2011-10-14T09:08:00.000-07:00

The British facial lie detection has made Russian TV news. Internet atricles on the topic are at least a month old. Excellent reaction times, TV. When Skeptical Inquirer wrote the UK has dealt away with homeopathy in public medical care, I thought it to be a decisive victory for Reason which more or less made up for the failure of street cams.
Yeah, fat chance.

The grand invention is nothing more, nothing less than the good old FLIR cam (FLIR Systems is based in Oregon, so the "inventors" can't even take credit for the part of the "system" that actually works) of the sort that our own authorities were bribed by the local suppliers to install FUCKING EVERYWHERE during the swin flu scare (the panic subsided and almost nothing came out of the deal, except I got to play with a thermal visor).

The basic detection principle is, of course, the good old "he's calm when he says what he's called but gets nervous when we ask if he rapes children - LIAR!!! RAPIST!!!". Dammit people... lie detection exists and it's done by fMRI because zones of the brain that make up things are not the zones that recall things. That's something that can be detected. Every method designed to detect whether the person is nervous or not is made of fail and stupid.

No rest for the feet

2011-10-11T05:46:00.000-07:00

"A dumb head gives no rest for the feet," a Russian saying goes.

Dear Ubisoft CustServ employees! I sympathize with your plight. Thank you for swift support. Thank you for risking your employment and posting pointers on the forums (I understand you'd probably be fired if you posted clear directions on getting help, as per every large company's policy).

And the genius who had the awesome idea of automatically generating a generic randomized player name for every customer's email address not yet present in the database can burn in hell forever while answering support tickets about Battletoads
(so can anyone whose action's primary result is a brand-new typical support issue).

(In fact, if "any manager whose action's primary result is a brand-new typical support issue gets the cost of the total man-hours needed to resolve the issue taken out of his salary" was an universal policy, life would be much, much better.)

(Yes, this was a typical support issue, it's called "Username SHOP!" Although it would've been even better if they used the customer's credit card number instead - no, that wouldn't have caused me any monetary damage because my card had been blocked immediately after purchase on suspicions of fraudulent activity, aka "who the fuck buys games at 5am?" - the answer is "I do, I really want preorder goodies".)

(General whining about my undying hate for nobles and noble lineages in fantasy adventure will follow if I can get Heroes 6 to run on my currently broken PC.)

Bottled water redux

2011-10-07T02:01:00.000-07:00

Today, another of those office fucks went "haha, us renting this office is illegal because we have no access to drinking water".
"Uhm, when you visited the WC, you must have noticed it also has sinks," I said. Or do you crap your pants instead? That certainly explains the smell, I didn't say.
"It's not fit for drinking!"
"It is."
"Then why are YOU drinking from the cooler?"
"I drink tea. Which requires hot water. And I'm not allowed to have a teapot in my cubicle according to power grid specs."
"HYPOCRITE!!!1!! THERE'S A TEAPOT IN THE CAFE ON THE FIRST FLOOR! WHY DON'T YOU USE THAT YOU LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE!!! WHY EVEN BUY THE COOLERS IF WE HAVE A TEAPOT!!!???"
I drink tea so as not to feel hungry, and going to the cafeteria involves smelling delicious delicious food whether I want it or not. Also because I like tea and work long hours, and the cafe closes at 5 pm. And because my boss will reach boiling point faster than the teapot and fire me for slacking off as he does with smokers, I didn't say.

Seriously now, there are three reasons for the watercoolers.

First, we aren't really allowed teapots at the workplace; the one on the first floor is in fact on the fucking first floor, and it's one teapot per 100+ employees, do the math.

Second, any purchase is an opportunity to steal money which shouldn't be passed up.

And third, it's the same reason rescuers perform first aid on a corpse: social considerations. People who believe in horoscopes and other such shit can quietly whine about salary decreases, but they will REVOLT if someone suggests they drink tap water.

Being poor is expensive

2011-10-06T10:47:00.000-07:00

Haha, one of my two banks just increased my credit card limit for my "enthusiastic use of the credit card". The other bank does not do automatic increases but offered me a $35000 pre-approved car loan. Currently, I am waiting until rollback to go to the dentist.

(I think I might have explained this phenomenon already, but whatever. Poor people tend to not have credit cards at all or use them for cash withdrawals at insane rates. Being educated, and having worked at a bank, and having purchased a lot of awesome stuff from abroad with cards, I am immensely fond of them and I know how to use them. So I pay with a card for almost everything, and I ask friends whether they need something bought so they could pay me in cash, and in the end when the automated credit scoring system is set up to consider a person's actual income - there's a lot of tax evades in Russia, and banks provide accordingly - to be 250% of his card expenditures, in my case it's more like 50%.)

I have been reading on representing underprivileged people in fiction when it occurred to me that the two characters who have it the worst in my still-unwritten book belong to minorities, and the fact that I'm thinking whether having a dark-skinned main character who's basically Superman "makes up for it" means that, while I'm not automatically in the wrong, some considerations are in order. While at that, I stumbled on Scalzi's post on poverty.

I drink tea at work to stave off hunger so as not to waste money on cafeteria. A visit to Subway (the restaurant) is a memorable occasion. Good thing I happen to like tea.

Some people at work and random acquaintances avoid me because I don't go to the cafeteria / order pizza. They expected me to accompany them / chip in, you see - and when I wouldn't, they accused me of disrupting the spirit of the community and spoiling everyone's mood. Fuckers.

On occasions, I had to withdraw small amounts of cash from the credit card only to immediately deposit it back to pay the monthly payment. Small amounts, mind you. Then, one time, I got $1000+ in cash, gleefully deposited them to my debit account and by mistake made the final transfer in the wrong direction, withdrawing $1000+ from the card (I had intended to pay off the debt). The withdrawal didn't go through until the following day, but I couldn't have it cancelled. The bank tellers, although obliged to accept all claims from the customers, bullshit or not, told me to fuck off, and when I wouldn't, tried to feed me a chargeback claim form - that could get me fined for submitting a chargeback claim for an authorized charge. Oh, and those very same guys had once told me to fuck off because the accountant's seal wasn't enough - apparently they wanted me to borrow the ministry's official seal from whenever it's stored to stamp a fucking tax form.

Once I had to buy a printer. I chose the cheapest shop that worked long hours, a long way from my work/dorm, and got assaulted when I got there. When I recovered, the shop was still open (it only closed for 30 minutes per day for cleaning). However, when I got out carrying the heavy and unwieldy printer, the subway (public transportation in this case) had closed down for the night. I considered waiting until morning but decided not to - I really needed to put the printer to good work as soon as possible. I hailed a car and offered $20 for the ride, only to find out I had already spent the cash I had planned to pay with. The printer in the trunk served as impromptu collateral as I asked to be brought over to the ATM so I could withdraw these $20. Of course I ended up wasting more money than I would have if I had just gone to the nearest store.

"I'm sick and tired of this job," I say. "I pay off my debts and quit like whoa." And the fuckhead replies with what he thinks sounds like "Do it faggot" in reply to what he thinks sounds like an emo extortion attempt, "Why don't you quit right now? The bank and the company are two different things you know. A debt to one does not legally force you to work in another." I wonder whether I should interpret it as a retarded (not knowing how banks work) or a sexist ("a woman will always find a way to pay her bills, if you know what I mean") comment.

Too soon?

2011-10-05T23:05:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs may have been the king of hipsters, but he didn't deserve to die from cancer. No one deserves to die from cancer except people who oppose medical research*.

There is no time limit after which laughing at death becomes acceptable or tasteful - it always should be acceptable, and I haven't got a clue about the whole concept of good taste. I just don't find Jobs' death lulzworthy.

He was an inventor, which is awesome, and an excellent public speaker, which is worthy of respect; he profited off stupid fashion trends and corrupt governments; therein there is nothing contemptible.

*And on another note, poetic justice is funny because it is rare and therefore unexpected and remarkable; there is no better proof for the nonexistence of god.

And not a fuck was given

2011-10-04T08:16:00.000-07:00

My boss ordered an asshole (note: my friend informed me she considered the word "cocksucker", when applied to awful people, to be homophobic, so I will abstain from using it and similar words on this blog) to compile a list of sites I visited (not surprising, one reason I don't browse porn at work) and comment on them (the boss couldn't be assed to check each site for unlawful content).

Now, I'm not saying it should have disobeyed. But during the enlightenment process as the asshole discovered for itself the non-facebook side of the Internet and hoped for the next site to please please be porn so it could get me fired, wasn't there five seconds to spare to warn me about the imminent doom?

So, am I going to change my browsing habits? Fuck no. I'm not remorseful, I'm not afraid. Did I expect my boss to eventually take a look? Sure. The asshole, however, is another matter entirely. Preference noted.

Audio preview

2011-09-30T04:09:00.000-07:00

There were three, ahem, items of pop culture that influenced me greatly when I was growing up. Every story I write or outline is in some way ~~a rip-off~~ inspired by at least one of these. Apart from being incomplete in my perception of them (that is, I started reading/watching from the middle and was forced to quit before the end), they don't have a lot in common.

One is a critically acclaimed BBC series, recognized as "the best thing BBC ever made" in 2005. It's called Quatermass and the Pit, and you should watch it because it's awesome. Here's in fact the exact quote:

"Quatermass and the Pit is simply the first finest thing the BBC ever made. It justifies licence fees to this day." --BBC, 2005

(Assholes. No it doesn't justify license fees, screw British spelling while we're at that, it justifies knighting Nigel Kneale - he died in 2006, too bad - releasing the movie under C-zero and including it into school curriculum.)

Another is The Saga of Pliocene Exile, which is quite good as a sci-fi series, though no pinnacle of literary achievement. It does right almost every aspect of fantasy/sci-fi that Star Wars did wrong (commercial success is not a factor I consider here) and as such is a sci-fi book recommendation.

The third series is just bad, so bad I don't mention it by name in exalted company as something I ever liked. However, my kiddie brain had filtered out anti-humanist shit, and the resulting shard of a storyline (I didn't get my hands on the first and last volumes until much, much later) has forever lodged itself in my eye.

When I finally did get hold of the book-end volumes, the nostalgia factor worked in the book's favor - but it wasn't the only one.

I read the series off a screen, at my own pace. I could read over and over the shinyawesome bits, voice-act the dialogue in my head (I'm horrible at images, even more horrible in translating them to paper, but good at imaginary voice-acting - Mom would probably say I should thank music school) - but more importantly, I could skim the shit.

And now I'm listening to the audio version, and it hurts. Going over the choice bits takes effort (extracting the player from my pocket and pressing the Pause button), there's no speeding up the stupid, and the repeated phrases make my teeth ache. Every time I hear "the dead outnumber the living", I want to climb a street lighting pole and sing a lullaby to the moon. Every time the author's voice, relaying the main character's thoughts, makes a comparison that takes a dump on the character's cultural background, I want to eat a live electric eel and wash it down with absinthe.

The point is:
Fiction books are not required to be easily convertible to audiobooks. There can be visual gags, homographs, polysemes, neat formatting tricks, page references, appendixes and footnotes, Julian-May-style typesetter's-nightmare vignettes, song texts that the reader has to put to music under his own power, maps and charts and coded messages for the characters and the reader to decipher. But everything that sounds FUCKING RETARDED has to be MERCILESSLY AXED.

Plan B

2011-09-30T03:31:00.000-07:00

It's very fucking important that the same stuff is not repeated twice in the book, or a movie, or a game. Say, the characters are planning a heist. If it should go just as planned, don't let the audience see the planning stage, or I'll come to your house and eat your cat.

If you do show the laying of plans, make everything either go off the rails and to hell in a handbasket, or have the characters make an entirely new plan on the spot, mixing and matching environmental elements on which the original was based, with the reader/viewer "getting references" to the previous half-hour all the time and patting himself on the back for being ohsoclever.

Note:
It also applies to metafiction ("it" being the general rule of not repeating things and the cat-eating threat). If the reader is supposed to figure something out, don't dare to set up a revelation scene. Either leave it unsaid or treat it as something obvious from now on.

There, I fixed it!

2011-09-29T08:42:00.000-07:00

This post is about 5 months old.

Having broken four screwdrivers, I went to the nearby shop to buy a new video card.

I know places to buy awesome tea and high-tech kitchenware and NATO uniform and fenced gold watches and contraband animals and legit official-looking lapel pins and masquerade costumes and, of course, computer hardware.

But a screwdriver made of something harder than plasticine? Sorry, but these are not sold in our fine city. Ask around, maybe someone inherited one.

Since I did some software upgrades on the PC, I was experiencing weird sporadic crashes and blamed them on a memory leak. Today something rattled on startup, so I decided to open the case and look for the rattling thing and fix the front panel while I'm at that.

Haha, the cooling fan on the video card had died. I broke a screwdriver trying to unscrew it, walked to the store to get a repair kit, broke the three fitting screwdrivers it contained, then said fuck all and ran back to the store (it was closing time) for a new card.

Here I'd have like to say that I slid under the closing door of the shop, fedora and all, accompanied by oohs and ahs from the fairer sex, but no.
"Hi, I need a new card."
"Haha, broke yours, did you?"
"No, broke all the screwdrivers."
"Lol, sucks to be you anyway."

Mail fail

2011-09-29T08:28:00.000-07:00

Our firm is planning to teach a couple of people to work with Lotus, so my boss requested prices in an email to a "personal manager" (a glorified secretary).

The manager read the email and forwarded it to the marketing/financial director.

This is what he wrote in reply:

Hey
Never mind the certs. Why do they need certification anyway and it's too long a wait. Also why would the company need to educate workers who'd just get the cert and resign like whoa. Give them a pretty slideshow so they'll shut up for good.

How many people will be studying, two? Say 5 days for studying and one day to prepare the slideshow. 16.5k ($550) per day makes $3300, the max we can squeeze out of them without them having to involve competition.
Signed,
[Name]
[Contacts]

Obviously, the manager then forwarded the reply back to us. Today, an official "option 1: market prices and certs, option 2: get fucked" has been faxed to their financial department, because it's not fair that their technical department (who are currently enjoying my "7 days is SLIGHTLY longer than 4 hours, get the system fixed by yesterday or we'll sue your balls off" letter) has all the fun.

Out of love

2011-09-29T04:12:00.000-07:00

I thought myself to not be very picky when it comes to other people's interests. I'm a /b/tard after all. I'm absolutely okay with people who are into other freaky shit (which makes me vomit). Anything that doesn't infringe people's rights (and a number of things that do, such as tubgirling a teenager forum into oblivion) is fine by me.

The meta-message is clear enough: of course I was wrong.

Stupidity
Play the lottery if you want to, I'm personally not a fan but some people love the thrill. I spend upwards of $100 per visit to a local tea shop because I like talking to the ladies there. It's all in the experience. Treating the lottery as a sound investment strategy is a no-no.

Intellectual dishonesty
People are allowed to be factually wrong or draw different extrapolations from known facts (or "facts"). If someone thinks, for example, that porn is demeaning to women and people who watch it are indirectly contribute to the overall sexist atmosphere in society, they are within their right to think so. If they call for a ban on porn and putting porn-watchers on a sex offender list based on some shit "research" they read somewhere, well that's unfortunate. But if they do the above while having a hard drive full of porn ("It's not mine! my pc must have been hacked!"), it's plain inexcusable.
On a related note, making exceptions for me, or indeed anyone else, is still fundamentally fucked up and selfish.
"Gays and lesbians are corrupting our youth and should be shot!"
"I'm a lesbian."
"Oh, but you know you're special! You know I care for you!.. Everyone else should be still shot, though."

Favor economy
...is a load of shit however you look at it. If someone does something good for such a weirdo, they would be loath to bring up the benefactor's future perceived fuck-ups. Eventually, the load of unresolved future fuck-ups grows too big, with each individual fuck-up transforming from sneezing in public to full-scale genocide.

Low self-esteem
...is a variant on favor economy when your continued presence is presumably a favor they will never ever ever ever be able to repay. Hence you should GTFO, because they're feeling uncomfortable in your exalted presence.

Fate and/or blaming the victim
A certain young lady's life is fucked up. Is it because her mom performed black magic and failed to follow the proper rites? Is it because the lady herself doesn't think positively? Certainly her having been raped as a kid while her alcoholic mom was having yet another binge doesn't count for anything.
(Note: I'm not speaking in a roundabout way about myself.)

Fandom
Fuck ~~fans~~ fandom members.

Holy shit it's 2011!

2011-09-29T01:52:00.001-07:00

"So, you turned 25. How does it feel?"

"You know, each time a significant date rolls around, I think about the average life expectancy and how much I have left to do what's not yet done, which is everything. And each time I make up a bullshit excuse, such as 'kids have to develop their cognitive functions properly, whoever expects something epic from them?' and 'adolescence totally doesn't count too' and 'I didn't have proper internet access back then, how do you expect me to accomplish anything without having access to the bulk of world culture?' In order, you know, to fudge the scales. My grandma got terminally ill at 50. I'm 25. Extrapolating the total accomplishments of the past 25 years, which is nothing, gives a very predictable and unsatisfying result. So I make excuses for the extrapolation to sound less valid, and then I realize I have already used those very same excuses, and they are as full of shit now as they were then."

When I was choosing a University department and a corresponding major, I visited a couple of lectures and presentations. Upon leaving one such lecture, my dad pointed out a razorwire fence and said,

"See this fence? Cybernetics is like launching an attack. You write a program and it does something new and you get a medal. Security is like sitting behind that fence. You sit there and time passes and when someone breaks through, you are blamed. But if no one does, no medals for you."

Maintaining the status quo takes effort, but I'm not altruistic enough to think of the benefit to society, and from a self-focused viewpoint I might as well not exist. People with stupid, shallow and obvious goals have it better. My dad, upon hearing of the death of this or that no longer famous person, would loudly exclaim, "Whoa he lived to 95! GREAT JOB DUDE!" Is my grandma a loser then?

However, as a direct consequence of the recent events, I now have more money overall, meaning more money to throw at excuses. And I got $500 for, ahem, services rendered (bureaucracy ftw). The most logically sound way to use the $500 was to cancel out a portion of the credit card debt, so I bought a new laptop instead.

Counting calories

2011-09-29T01:22:00.000-07:00

A year ago, the heating bill linearly correlated to the amount of calories the heating company had provided. Meaning they made their convoluted calculations with arcane indexes and adjustments and skulked the streets with heat detectors in hand and were trying to establish fines for people who don't install heat-saving windows - but the bulk of the profits came from heating the residential apartments up as much as possible, no matter the actual temperature and the comforts of the people.

And no, we don't have any way to regulate the temperature in a particular apartment short of opening windows to vent the excess, which we did. Nice heat-saving here. (I can only imagine how much fun people with heat-saving windows had. The one in my dorm is very much not heat-saving and can be heard whistling and singing when it's quiet - which is regrettably not often.)

This year, the heating bill is flat-rate. So the heating company does not have an incentive to burn extra calories. In fact, the less they burn, the more money they get to keep. You see where it's going.

Oh, and those who complain get shot or hit by cars.

Black Sea Blues

2011-07-15T11:03:00.000-07:00

My vacation started today at 6:30 pm, and tomorrow I'm going to Black Sea. Like that.

Also: I'm dyeing my hair purple, because it's awesome, and because I have a vacation.

The farthest I've been from the city is 200 km away, my parents' dacha, but it really doesn't count. Then, there was that school trip to a monastery when I finished school, with only the finals/entrance exams to go through.

We had been warned to put on skirts and babushka-style headdresses. Naturally, I wouldn't be having any of that crap.

My mom first allowed and bought me pants when I was nine. It was awesome, and I was awesome. Popular girls went frothing with rage over my newfound self-esteem*. Mom also had my hair cut at slightly higher than shoulder-length (I had worn a braid to school before that).

*One fugly but popular bitch decided to turn my life into shit by telling her mom various anecdotes about me, peppered with enough truth to horrify my mom when the two inevitably met. She stopped when her mom found out that no, the teachers didn't constantly collect money for managerial needs, from my mom.

So I went to the monastery wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap. Now, in church women are supposed to wear headdresses and men are supposed to be bareheaded, so this setup was lulz waiting to happen. Especially with my (female) teacher trying to make a proper woman out of me by means of discussions on gender roles that she only thought she won when I backed away, not wanting to out myself.

"REMOVE YOUR HAT IMMEDIATELY YOUNG MAN, HAVE YOU NO SHAME!?"
Lol @ random churchgoer.
"SHE'S A GIRL, HAVE YOU NO EYES YOU IDIOT!?"
Lol @ teacher. Priceless.

Now, I still think people who visually resemble human males look ridiculous in dresses. But I'm also happy for them. I hope they feel awesome. I still remember how great it was to put on pants for the first time. Purple hair will be an even awesomer upgrade.

Of course, I'll have to dye it back to natural when the vacation ends (is hair dye available in muddy brown?)

Typical

2011-07-02T14:22:00.000-07:00

More people want me dead. Why am I not surprised?
Maybe I should stop buying cooking pots.

(Yes. I buy a cooking pot, and three days later someone steals or destroys my stuff and tries to frame me for attempted murder. Okay, it has happened twice, too soon to identify a trend, but for some reason I'm not exactly eager to test the hypothesis. Also, July 1 is June 18 according to the old calendar. Very funny, Fate. I bet you're laughing your ass off.)

Ignorance

2011-06-24T09:50:00.000-07:00

I stole an absolutely beautiful laptop from the office, just carried it out in a large flowery lady's bag. Stupid security only checks laptop bags, haha.

The hard drive of said laptop is encrypted via PGP, and so I cannot gain access to it. In fact, no one can, including the owner, the reason being me and my new immediate boss were tasked with its encryption, and life proceeded as usual. That is, we fucked it up. We should have known better than allow it to hibernate in the middle of an encryption.

I have never understood the need to protect personal data on a portable device. Living in Russia, I am more worried about people attempting to get the data they want from me by attaching electrodes to my balls. And I don't have balls to begin with.

Now, loss of the physical device, and loss of personal, irreplaceable data - that hurts. So it's good I backed up the contents of the laptop before encryption for the benefit of the owner.

I didn't think to make a backup a year ago for my own benefit, too busy being beaten up. However, the fat whore who led the beating and organized my subsequent harassment by the police was too reliant on me in all matters technical that it didn't know a hard drive, even an external one, had a trashbin, and what went into the trashbin stayed on the hard drive.

Here's to ignorance. *gulp gulp gulp*

Three treasures of the Elven Queen

2011-06-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

I was surprised at how bad I was at reading maps. The place was situated halfway between the station and my old office. I suck at navigating actual streets, too, and thus at 7 pm I was standing in an unfamiliar courtyard trying to make some sense of the map printout.

From a third floor window, a half naked guy (actually, he might have been fully naked for all I know) looked out.
"Looking for something, girl?"
"The Blur!" I shouted.
"Next door!" he replied.
I ran out to the street, forgetting to thank him. My thanklessness occupied my thoughts until the Blur's bouncer barred my way.
"First time here?"
"Uhm, yes."
"These are the rules." He launched into a trained declamation I was too surprised to follow. There were some rules for sitting... don't sit at reserved tables? Don't put your feet on chairs? No idea. "Don't go beyond the gate. If you need a smoke or a phone chat outside, ask permission to leave." That probably meant that if I were to leave without prior warning, they would not let me in for free.
"Okay."
"Anything forbidden in this bag of yours?"
"Uhm, no." Except maybe the camera, but I'm not telling.
"Food, drinks, alcohol? Weapons, knives, guns? Show your ID, please. Explosives, flammable liquids?"
I fumbled in my backpack for an ID. Looked like I had forgotten it somewhere. I thought whether the magnetic passcard with someone's ugly fat pigface - I refuse to acknowledge it as a photo of me - would do in a pinch.
"Don't worry, they haven't started yet... you want the 7 pm show, right?"
"Yes." Arrgh, where is that damn ID? I bought a new backpack specifically for the ease of locating contents (and to wear a tail, but nevermind), and I still fail.
"Sorry, but these are the rules. You know, one guy was actually thankful. He couldn't find his ID and remembered that he had left it at a shop."
"Uh-huh."
"Weapons, explosives? Flammables?"
"No."
"No alcohol?"
"First, alcohol is flammable, second, I don't drink anyway."
"They you don't actually need an ID. ID is for drinking at the bar. Let me put a mark on your hand, so the barman would know not to pour you any."
The mark he drew with a ballpoint pen (I thought he'd use a special marker or something, haha) resembled a double dagger. Or a cross of the type that orthodox christians mark graves with.
"250 roubles, you know."
FUCK FUCK FUCK THE MONEY IS IN THE ID OK I STILL HAVE A CARD NOW WHERE WAS THE NEAREST ATM AND OH WHAT'S THIS?
(It was the ID, of course.)
And then the Elven Queen started singing. I stuffed the change into my backpack and ran down the stairs.
...
She was very beautiful, as I knew she would be, and her moods were ephemeral and infectious.
"And here are the hemp charms that I weave while laughing or while crying."
I couldn't tell the laughing bracelets from the crying ones, but I still picked three - one with three purple rhomboids, another with a huge silvery glass bead (the room was too dark to tell its color - it turned out to be silvery-purple, awesome), and a third one with red wooden beads.
...
"Any special requests?"
"The chopping block, encore!" That was me.
"Sorry, no encores, we're almost out of time."
She sang the final song, about world peace and the abolition of borders. Which would be awesome, even though I make my living guarding one. Then I approached her.
"Here's another special request, then. Could you put those on me?" I gave her the charms.
"Fine," she said.
She chose the silvery-beaded charm, wound it around my hand and tied a knot.
"This one you can use to track your star in the skies. No matter what clouds clog and smother the sky, you will always see your star."
Then she put the red bracelet on my hand, one nightshade bead among rowanberries. She didn't say anything. I guessed that was a crying bracelet.
"And the last one is the most special of all. When the War starts, you will turn these beads into silver bullets, and no one will be able to stand against you."

"Thank you." I bowed to her. "Here's a gift in return, then."
I gave her the 5000 rouble note (180 bucks as of this writing). She regarded it with curiosity. I thought that, being from western realms beyond waterfalls, the Elven Queen might not know what a 5000 rouble note looks like.
"It's liquid," I said. "Real. Exactly a year ago, this sort of tithe saved my life. And I don't play to die any time soon."
She looked at me with sadness.
"Previously, I would have never accepted it. But we face dire times, and so I accept. Thank you."

I would have explained my profit idea to her. That some stuff, especially books and music, you are supposed first to buy and then find out whether you enjoy it or not. So you run the risk of buying crap, but you also can find a real gem and extract several orders of magnitude more joy than the price would suggest. Since I pirate stuff, unbought crap translates into money, the money that I, in the interest of fairness and progress, should pay to people from whom I have extracted profit. But there wasn't enough time, so I bowed and left.

FACT ALERT: Everything in this post is 100% fact.

Weirdos

2011-06-12T06:36:00.000-07:00

"HEY MISS! THERE'S A FOX'S TAIL ON YOU!!!"
"uhm why yeah"
"I USED TO BE A HUNTER USED TO SHOOT THEM FOXES!"
"..."
"IS IT A REAL FOX'S TAIL? AND DON'T YOU DARE TO LIE!"
"i dunno really"
"WELL LOOKS LIKE IT'S OH MY YOU'RE PRETTY"
"uhm kthx?"
"NOW YOU GO AHEAD"
And so I did.

Now, I know that tails on backpacks provoke the rage of peta-tards (petards?) - more rage than a polar fox coat, "because the coat at least keeps the wearer warm, and a decorative tail is an atrocity", and small kids can't keep their hands off people's tails on public transport. This is what I expected. I sure didn't expect encountering a unique weirdo inside of two weeks wearing a tail.

Motherfucking rosebud

2011-05-07T09:44:00.000-07:00

It happens to the best of us: you're explaining your groundbreaking theory or clever plan and find a fatal flaw. OMG what to do what to do what to do? Do I admit the error and embarrass myself? Do I continue on, undaunted, to save face now in exchange for a reputation of an idiot/dishonest fuck later?

Well, if I'm on the Internet, I just say "disregard that, I suck cocks" (or "sorry, I derped" in a kid-friendly environment) and strikethrough the stupid (so that people who might read the thread later won't be puzzled by others rebutting the arguments I seem to never have made and won't jump and the chance to bash me without proceeding further down the thread where I have already admitted my poor math skills and love of cocks).

But that's me: I'm stubborn and obnoxious, so people naturally seek faults in my arguments. Sometimes, things like these creep into a work of art that's really good, and it slips by people until someone points it out. And then you can't unsee it, and the goggles of suspended disbelief do nothing.

One of the most famous examples is Citizen Kane's rosebud. People will tell you no one heard him say the word, others will correct that no, in fact the butler did it, and someone else will pipe in saying that if he did, he must have been a really weird dude, so it looks like he actually wasn't around and lied to be interviewed but by some mysterious coincidence got it right, so yeah. One huge clusterfuck of a plot point that could have been sharp and clean.

Rosebud is an old meme, though; what pissed me off recently was that clever little book entitled Wise Man's Fear, the sequel to Name of the Wind. The attempt to list what I hate about the book had me exhaust my supply of swear words, which just goes to show how good the book is. The ending, however, had me wondering if anyone, including the author, had read the book before the presses started rolling.

In short: the books are about a talented but poor minority teenage orphan trying to become a wizard and to avenge the murder of his parents by the world's big bad. Uh-huh. To those ends, he studies at the world's most prominent (and perhaps only) wizard school, and it just happens that the douchebag teacher has made headmaster and was out to get our hero. (The characters in the framing story are awesome, but almost all they do is sit at the table and talk/listen, most characters in the main story are 2d 4-color cardboard cutouts, but it's where the action is - wtf? Anyway, the douchebag teacher is one such cutout.)

Luckily, the hero got a rich nobleman to sponsor his studies, no matter how high the tuition was. So this is what he did: he struck a sekrit deal with the treasurer to charge the noble a fuckton, with shares of the fuckton going to the hero and the treasurer.

And why not, you might think? Indeed, this is what government officials have done from time immemorial: take a fuckton from the coffers, make the project look complete (this would be done by actually completing the project on a budget and pocketing the difference if the official is sorta decent and by splitting the fuckton between people in the know and bullshitting all the way otherwise) and spend the rest on hookers and blow. So if the hero's tuition is set to, say, 100 fantasybucks, the treasurer can send a request for $500, of which $100 goes to the school and $400 is split between the conspirators.

But noooooooo. The hero's cunning plan involves not preparing, like, at all, getting drunk, throwing up on the floor in the exam room and flipping off the exalted personages (at least, that's what I remember - my memory is a bit hazy). He gets slapped with a tuition of 50 fantasybucks per term (which is a lot), the treasurer withdraws this exact amount, $50, from the lord's assets, pockets some of the money and hands out the hero's share to him, with the rest going to the school.

Uhm, WHAT? Shouldn't the school get the whole $50, since this was the rate they set?

And yes, the author makes an actual plot point out of it, with the merry band of friends (the hero and his stack of primary-colored cardboard cutouts) celebrate the apparent stupidity of the douche headmaster that benefited them so much.

Hey, whoever edited the book! I have a great investment plan to offer you! First, you wiretransfer me all your money...

Best served cold

2011-05-06T11:30:00.000-07:00

Last week, my friend's son killed his sister's Sim (a character in the Sims 3 game) by accidentally overwriting the save file (though with these kids one never knows whether it was truly accidental).

Today, he finds his hard drive reformatted and labeled "cockbag".

Awesome.

(Well, I would have felt sorry for the guy if he hadn't backed up his stuff, but I know he does. The sister knows this, too, although she probably wishes he hadn't. I also understand that a game represents effort on part of the gamer and losing the game state/progress/highscores actually sucks. I just can't force myself to care about Sims. I mean, they're Sims! totally unlike WoW characters, who are people... yeah, right...)

I burst out laughing. And, since the girl wisely didn't gloat, he actually suspects me. I don't know what's more funny, the act of avenging a dead Sim or the idea of an adult reformatting a hard drive and labeling it "cockbag".

(For the record, I didn't do it.)

On the shape of the world

2011-05-05T06:00:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: no research has been done whatsoever.

Trends in "dragon-fantasy" that annoy me the most, in no particular order, part 1.

1. A contemporary person from Earth travels to a fantasy world.

Done and redone, good only for subversions. Obvious appeal for the escapist consumer makes people repeat this over and over. Fukken sigh. Sigh x2 if this is done to teach an important life lesson to a misbehaving kid: the tendency of misbehaving kids to have awesome adventures only encourages misbehaving, and the opposite - embarrassing adventures - slip into TAKE THAT territory all too easily. "Lie too often and people stop believing you" is a good life lesson. "Lie too often and you will have a bucket of piss randomly dumped on your head" is a take that to children from a talentless hack who has never been a child.

2. It's really Earth in the future!!!

A hilarious attempt at redeeming the fantasy geek by upgrading fantasy to something more respectable (and trying to cash in on yet another rise of soft sci-fi). Annoying when you're reading period fiction and this crops up in each and every book. Nowadays it does not add to appeal, so it would have been okay if not for the stupid moralizing shit that authors often try to pull to justify the transformation from socially awesome democratic future Earth to socially backwards feudal fantasy future Earth. Ooh, Earth became TOO AWESOME, so it HAD to be supernaturally balanced out by degrading to shoveling mud once again.

3. It's really Earth in the past!!!

While "future" is often offensive due to the authors shitting on technological progress, "past" qualifies as such by shitting on the sciences of history and archaeology. Building on known facts is awesome and educative. Mangling facts isn't. Plus, some try to market it as actual history. I wish someone slapped the latter with a class action lawsuit.

4. It's really Earth in the present!!!

The current trend, an as-of-yet unexhausted goldmine. Technology has given it a big thumbs-up in the form of a framework for alternate reality games and augmented reality apps. Until some legislation passes that will prevent Apple/Google/whoever from raping my privacy, I am personally out, but I welcome the development of such projects.

Passive entertainment of the sort, however, annoys the fuck out of me. Why? If your work touches on the real world in any way, the real world had better be awesome. Reality enhancement actually makes it more awesome in a very tangible way. Passive entertainment set in the present tends to cast us as boring mundanes, which is not offensive if and only if the genre is horror. And then extras can die left and right and you as a vampire ninja sorcerer can gleefully murder them, or callously disregard them, or force yourself to callously disregard them because they stand no chance in a horror setup. You don't say "The Earth actually looks like this, science sucks, teachers are liars." You say "It would really suck for the humanity if the Earth looked like this. So let's look at stuff that people would still accomplish in this imaginary world in the face of adversity."

Note that, unlike the Afterlife setup below, this setup has no positive counterpart. Speshulness is a force against equality, therefore a world with speshul characters that is indistinguishable from ours at a glance is worse than ours by definition.

5. "You are here!" *arrow*

Multiverse schemes of every sort with Earth marked on the map and (fantasy) action taking place elsewhere. Thus authors try to lend an air of legitimacy to their top-down fantasy worlds and lay the groundwork for fans fantasizing about #1 above. And you know what? That "air of legitimacy" smells bad. Quantum mechanics in fiction has been thoroughly ruined by destiny-manipulating cults ("if you think about it really hard, quantum entanglement will actualize the alternate universe where it happened, also, buy my book"). Still, bad science is a step above pretentious surrealism. Literally:

6. Pretentious surrealism.

One of the two most common surreal origin setups is, of course, the world of the dead, which by itself is not bad unless (1)it's a twist in a contemporary work and/or (2)the author does heavy-handed moralizing. Humanity on the whole is mystical, not rational. What happens after death is THE selling point of most cults, from the most popular and ancient to fringe one-day get-rich-quick schemes. People really care about that stuff, and any suggestion that, no, in fact, THIS happens after death, is a moral stance from which actual real-life behavioral norms can be derived. Therefore, it is extremely important that the work closely follows the inoffensive Earth-in-the-present setup, namely, "It would really suck/rule if the afterlife looked like this!"

The other most common surreal origin setup is "It was all a dream", which sends the message "Haha pwnd!!! You cared about the characters!!! Gotcha!!!", a.k.a. FUCK YOU CONSUMER. One way to make this work is to solidify the dream world into an alternate dimension, or, in fact, any of the above visited through dreams. The other is to actually make the characters not worth caring about while keeping the story engaging and the overall message positive (the latter being a requirement for any work of fiction), which looks like an impossible task except it has been done at least once, in 1999.

Scaling is also seen on occasions, where characters are either epic-scale gods (who nonetheless think and act like humans, which is both illogical and anti-humanistic) or bacteria duking it out in a drop of water (why should I care, again?)

Surreal settings work well in abstract videogames, or videogames with weird mechanics. Surreal origin glued onto a traditional story - humanoid characters with humanoid interests acting on those interests - is pretentious shit. Okay, this is a jab at a particular author, but consider this. A collaborator wanted to write in an obsidian bauble, and the author corrected: "The world was painted. Therefore it has no geological eras, no volcanoes and no obsidian." Um, what? So no obsidian, but sapphires and emeralds aplenty, earthly flora and fauna, plains and mountains, coal and iron, fusion and fission-synthesized chemical elements... really, if you want your world to be painted, or sung, or seen in flashes by a dying Hitler, by all means DO IT. But NO PRETENTIOUS SHIT THAT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.

Planotypes

2011-05-02T10:47:00.000-07:00

That's the word I use: "stereotype" is a misnomer if there was one. The *real* world is 3D, in a sense. Dumb prejudices are deficient in comparison to reality: they are by no means its perfect images, nor are they what a particular person can see from their point of view with two eyes. These are sights seen by a person who's one-eyed, blind, and with a head up their ass.

Thus, "planotype".

That being said, what pissed me off this fine morning was "What a fucking Jew" said about a greedy person.

Next time drunkenness is discussed, I'll try this:
"Ewww, he was so drunk he didn't look human. Not even 'drunk like a swine' - beyond that. Drunk like a Russian."

Then I'll make a run for it.

Me so clever

2011-05-01T08:57:00.000-07:00

(follow-up)

I got invited to a party, except no one thought to inform me one of my MORTAL ENEMIES will be there. But clever me conveniently forgot to wear a jacket and retreated to the apartment to fetch it. And now clever me is sitting inside playing solitaire.

Me does not go around disrupting people's parties with my whining. Me so clever.

I fucking hate solitaire.

...anyone?

2011-05-01T02:41:00.000-07:00

Last summer, I was kicked out of my apartment, and my pay was halved. Before that, I had enjoyed the carefree life of a gainfully employed university dropout, throwing monies left and right, donating just to see a person's reaction, buying merch, piling up merch in my room until there wasn't any floor left to walk on, and some boxes had spilled into the hall so I had had to squeeze myself through the door.

Now I no longer have these luxuries. I have to either cook for myself or eat at a diner, I have to compensate the owners of the apartment I live in for taking up space, and my pay was halved - which means disposable income fell like... idunno, something very heavy and very sleek (I'm bad at similes). It's about a tenth of what I used to have. Maybe less. I got a loan. I got another loan, to pay back the first one. I'm juggling the balance on my credit cards like mad. Last month, I misclicked while at it, which cost me $100. My (e-diagnosed, but I know it's a real problem when it prevents me from PLAYING GAMES) ADHD got worse. I broke up with my girlfriend. I quit writing. I quit assisting various people on their projects (sorry, guys).

The only project I didn't quit took up all my available time (and a bit more than all my available money - that's why I'm up to my neck in debt). Sure, I started out as a troll, there's even a post about it. But I got better.

Yesterday I forced myself to set up DosBox to play Death Gate. (I still haven't gotten around to it.) The books the game is based on were my favorite when I was a kid. I remember starting reading with Vol.2 - the story in the first four volumes of the heptalogy was sort of episodic and the lack of Vol.1 didn't hamper understanding for the 12-year-old me (all this "character development" business just went over my head).

What shocked me, however, was the ending of Vol.2, where four of the main characters of the episode were paired off in marriage in mixed-race pairs (I mean actual fantasy race, not real-life skin color). I took it for a very sad ending: a marriage that was incapable of producing children seemed to be more fit for a tragedy.

I got better, too. I love children, but I have an active dislike for people who think children is the best - or, indeed, only - or, indeed (x2), a means of self-realization. Fuck no. Children are their own people, not a parent's ecksbawcks achievements.

So, I'm lazy, uncreative, disorganized, bad with people, etc. - what to do? OH WOW I KNOW, AWESOME! (Want in on the secret? Why would you? But hey, read on.)

Now, whatever I want to say, somewhere, someone has said it better. And since it happens that I know exactly where to locate the awesomesauce (TGDMB, where else?), I'll just quote Kaelik:

Honestly, the thing you have to understand is how people think about winning.
There are lots of different versions of winning.
There's "One person wins, everyone else is a loser," or "One person wins, but the person who was closest to preventing them is second."
There's "Last person alive is winner, second last person is second, etc."
There's "If I'm a key player in the alliance of the Winner, such that Frank would never have beaten K without my help, no matter how pathetic I am or how quickly I end up dying, I win by proxy through Frank."

This. Winning by proxy, whether in a game or in life, is a pretty cool alternative to losing. I'm not winning as hard as I could have two years ago, and I'm pretty much maxed out at this point - I can't earn more monies, I can't find more time for volunteering, etc. But it keeps me afloat, and that's what matters.

It got pretty bad when a trio of fucks accused me of breaking a friend's printer by installing Heroes 2 - seriously, the so-called computer experts couldn't tell the difference between a WinXP system directory with drivers and a game installation on fucking Drive E (it also contained Arcanum played through most of Tarant and three failed installations of Age of Wonders, but I'm mostly pissed about Heroes 2 due to having lost an awesometastic record that took me, what, a hundred restarts? Two hundred? You get the picture. My friend's daughter was watching me so I couldn't just switch to Solitaire or pr0n pix or whatever - but not video, watching a 1-minute video is too much commitment. And browser bookmarks. I'll never get those bookmarks back.)

So, last December, as I was delivering merch, it occurred to me that these fucks would be getting credits and having their supposed awesomeness proclaimed from stage, as they always do. I wasn't really having credits in mind when I volunteered: my lulz, my love, my gratitude - these were my reasons. But that time, credits were important. Thus, I realized I wouldn't be attending any subsequent performances - except the one in honor of my friend's birthday. (Beef or no beef, birthdays matter. Plus, I had that awesome idea, "one sockpuppet - one gift". I had to get another loan.) I quit the fan club, too, because fuck those fucks.

Could it get worse? YOU BET!

So, some creative minds thought to conduct an audience vote. Vote for the best volunteer. Yes, really. Which, apparently, wasn't anonymized. Nothing so simple as saying "thank you" from stage - like they have always done for other folks. No, me - and two other volunteers, the only two other fans I can sort of relate to - had to be signed up, without our knowledge, for a "Best fan" vote.

Want to thank the volunteers? Fucking say so.
Want to RANK the volunteers? You know, that's a pretty shitty thing to do. I am helping as much as I can - and more than I should, from a sustainability standpoint. Some people are rich, some are poor, some are creative, some are not, some are parent-tethered kids, some are busy adults. Okay, do you really want to rank the fuck of the volunteers? DO IT YOURSELF! TAKE SOME FUCKING RESPONSIBILITY! Fucking take center stage and say, "Okay, we have this awesomely charming lady who's done this and this to promote us and organized this and promoted this, and an artist, and a designer, and a community manager - thanks guys! Oh, and we have this fugly annoying fuck who donates monies - we'd be happy if you died in a fire and stopped being a nuisance, but thanks for the monies."

Did I mention that we weren't informed? Else, I now dream, I'd probably have done something in the way of pre-election propaganda. (I *dream* - what would have probably happened would've been just me being too shocked to cry and fleeing the place.) I'd say the above. And I'd say how I fucking hate the audience. And I'd say how every one who's thinking about voting something else rather than "all three", despite what I have just said, is a repulsive piece of slug shit (I hate slugs). Because, dear audience, dear fag hags and Mary Tzu fappers and other intellectually dishonest and aesthetically challenged vomit*, THE MATTER OF WHO HELPED THE GROUP THE MOST IS NOT FOR YOU TO DECIDE. ALSO, FUCK YOU. AND GO SUCK A BARREL OF COCKS. (Except you, awesomely charming lady. You're awesome. And charming. Please add me to your list of friends. I'm totally not a stalker. Honest.)

*(No, I'm not saying that the music is bad. I'm saying that the audience is predominantly composed of intellectually dishonest and aesthetically challenged vomit who, like a broken clock, happen to like good music twice a day. I told you I'm bad at similes.)

Too bad I lost the vote, hard. Now people might say I am only pissed because I lost. But you know what - the awesomely charming lady (HEY THERE AWESOMELY CHARMING LADY, YOU'RE AWESOME!), she won. She's angry and disappointed, too. WHAT A FUCKING COINCIDENCE. But, apparently, there wasn't a problem with the idea. It's just I'm the whiny thankless bitch. They want to make it full-scale too, with people nominating their friends and stuff.

...anyone?

Psychology today

2011-04-24T12:35:00.000-07:00

...shitshitshitshitshit

I used to have gender identity problems. Stuck in a homophobic atmosphere, without any supportive person or media outlet, I couldn't think of myself as a horrible person for reasons of self-preservation. So I decided I was just "born wrong", the wrong biological sex: "I'm no filthy homo, I just don't have the right equipment due to nature's cruel joke". It took several years of surfing the Internet for me to accept there's nothing wrong with my equipment. At all.

And now a person who's well aware of the issues (and of me having been fired on psychologists' advice for not telling the group how much I "enjoyed" a 6-hour pseudoscience demonstration, and of my views on pseudoscience) decides to "test me for gender". Without my knowledge or permission, of course, based on the most stupid stereotypes, e.g. "females have lower self-esteem and want to minimize risk". My ass! If I had lower self-esteem, I would have finished the work I'd been given, not delay the completion until the last two hours (as if I can finish it in two hours) and put my employment on the line.

"Lol it was a joke, I know the test is bullshit." That's great. I know you know that, and I know you know I know you know. But you should have fucking also know better than to try this shit on me, as I know better than, idunno, to tell holocaust jokes to holocaust survivors. While the jokes might be funny and the listeners might even appreciate them and *not* get offended (people are strange like that), the sole fact that a person *risks* being perceived as offensive and chooses to disregard the risk classifies the person as an insensitive cockbag.

Lesson learned, though. It is as follows:
If someone with a sly expression on their face tells you to put out a burning match, don't blow on it and don't shake it. Instead, either put it out by pinching it with fingers (to impress the ladies, if any are present) or throw it away and tell the person to fuck themself.

Serious business

2011-04-22T13:42:00.000-07:00

"From W.B. Yeats," I read while compiling the list of songs for the collection. "Won't the publisher cry copyright infringement?"
The director looks at me as if I'm drunk. "Yeats's dead."
I start to reply, but she interrupts me, "Although, you know, good thinking. Change it to Red Fox."
"Will do."
"Yeats is DEAD!" says the singer from the adjoining room.
"I know," replies the director, "but they might not!"

We're having an mp3 song collection published, and I'm busy with the paperwork. Some of the music and lyrics is in the public domain, other authors had given their express permission to use their lyrics without any compensation whatsoever. But having them to sign the publisher's permission form is a logistical nightmare, especially a week before release. So we don't do that.

"Now, Bertran de Born's Farewell..." I go further down the list.
"And Amaury's song, and Chancellor Rolin," recites the director.
"I'm also a chancellor, I will sign for Rolin," says the singer.
"I will sign for Lucifer," I say, referring to Song of Lucifer of course.
"Don't forget Dead Jellyfish Tango?"
"They're DEAD!"
"But what if the copyright hasn't expired?"

Seriously, it's comforting to know that no one would make big bucks by stealing the songs (we don't bother with piracy prevention). We actually want to have unauthorized commercial users, if any, fined. But the preventive measures (the aforementioned legal forms) are more inconvenient than full-body scanners, and the preemptive flat fine - the data storage tax, collected by the most hated fuck in the country from sales of everything digital under the assumption that "if it stores data, it will be used for piracy" - is plain robbery (the money does not go to the infringed parties, it goes to the fat fuck whose vomit people wouldn't pirate if you paid them). Copyright hasn't benefited us yet, but it has already been - and will be - a waste of time and money.

"Pirate Blues!"
"That's a good one."

Appropriate punishment

2011-04-22T04:08:00.000-07:00

I happen to hate people littering on the streets. And while I'm shamefully selective about people who I would mess with - the attempt to reduce selectiveness by attending gym has ended with me sick (again), embarrassed, and insulted* - when someone does look "messable", they get the whole deal and then some.

I was walking** to work this morning, sick*** as usual and pretty annoyed about it, when a chick walking in front of me threw out an empty box of hipster bubble gum. I picked up the box, caught up with the chick and handed it back to her. She looked mildly annoyed as she said nothing and threw it out again.

By that time we had arrived at the bus stop and she stood in line waiting to board the bus. I inspected the trash bin (of course it was cemented in so I couldn't empty it out over her head; if it hadn't been, it wouldn't be there anymore) and found a lone plastic milkshake bottle and some cigarette butts. So I took the bottle and hit the chick on the head, gently.

"You fracked retard, you!" exclaimed the chick. (Yes, she said the Russian equivalent of "fracked", I'm not self-censoring or anything.) I walked away. No one cared.

So... will she stop littering? Probably not. But in the near future, each time she does (or each time she drinks milkshake for that matter), she'll recall this undoubtedly pleasant occurrence.

-----
*I nearly fell unc, people attempted to call my registered place of residence and I said nothing good would ever come of it because I had been kicked out. Then an elderly woman I had always treated with respect said the current residents were undoubtedly in the right. Waitwhatwhy? Does she think only murderers and rapists fall unc in the gym?

-----
**Too cheap to take the bus. Bus fare is $35/month or a buck per trip, which I need four of in a single day. Plus two subway rides (which I can't save on).

-----
***Basically, I have a choice of two rooms to cough and faint in: one is $40/day and the other is free.

DISREGARD THAT I SUCK COCKS

2011-04-20T10:54:00.000-07:00

Lol, the irony: It happens that despite my utter lack of caution in separating spam subscriptions and financial matters in email, this email address got leaked not through account registration but through payment. Donation, even.

So if there are any contemptible messages appearing, it's totally not me.

On a related note, now that the two real-life superheroes are e-famous, there are probably thousands upon thousands of people willing to order pizza and strippers to their houses. Only they're also willing to pay for the orders. Then again, maybe not. Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.

Priorities

2011-01-19T11:25:00.000-08:00

"Oh lookie! Pretty little CEIAs! Oh, too bad our stuff didn't ring. I wanted to find out how these are set up."

"Oh, a cam! Here! Here we are! Come on, wave hi to the cam!"

"See, those CEIAs have elliptical columns. They are designed to make the screened people more comfortable. People react better to columns than to rectangular plates."
"I'm thinking you wouldn't have a problem either way. You'd go through an X-ray scan without thinking twice."
"X-ray scan? Where!?"

"Miss, don't lean too close to the exhibits! You'll trigger the alarm!"
"Alarm? Ah, I see! Infrared detectors! How ingenious!"
"Don't you touch the detector either!"

"Listen, did you come to look at jewelry or to annoy security officers?"

And this is why visiting an exhibition in the company of a security geek is a bad idea.

Christmas Eve Fortunetelling

2011-01-08T05:20:00.000-08:00

"Now, a broken tooth, what does it mean?"
"Ow dear... a death in the family, most likely."
"Wrong. It means a visit to a dentist. Ouch."

Ouch, indeed.

I got Money and Meetings moderately burned by a floating candle, and then "Fate favors you" and "Triumph awaits you" from a fortune book. The teenage girl got Love up in flames, and the guest from Peters got Road.

Also, there was fortunetelling with tangerines. Make a wish, take a tangerine from a pile and see if it will come true or not depending on its deliciousness.

"I want to get published this year" - fuck no
"I want to actually work with computers this year" - yes
"I want a game I support to win a game design contest" - maybe
"I want to finally cross the border of the region, pretty pretty please" - yes
"I want to get the recognition I deserve for good stuff that I do" - this one came up ugly but sweet, there's sense in that
"I want to last this summer without meds and feel fine" - yes
"I want to set up an inkjet printer so that it prints the covers for Shadow on the Wall the correct shade of gray and not the night blue / khaki green / kiddie surprise that I've been getting since last spring, kthx" - a resounding yes

...and...

"I WANT THIS TANGERINE TO TASTE AWFUL, ALSO, FUCK YOU, FATE" - the most delicious one of the evening.

As of now, the Master of Fate (tremble, mortals!) is cold, hungry and missing a tooth. So I took meds, fired up the rice cooker and made an appointment with the dentist, because if Triumph awaits me and I await it instead of doing stuff, we aren't going to meet anytime soon.

Ink is more precious than blood

2011-01-01T13:12:00.000-08:00

Trust nary a soul, nor rumor, nor paper -
Death notices lie; I am still going strong.
My work is not done, my spirit won't waver,
All is quiet on the invisible front.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained

2010-10-08T13:43:00.000-07:00

So I put off suing the fucks for my share of the apartment because there was no immediate need and bam, it cropped up again. That is, I'm homeless again (and have been for some time as of now), and paying off immediate debts has left me with 30 bucks out of a $1800 quarterly payment.

Actually, so much crazy shit is happening that random acquaintances are worrying about me going an hero, so I'm half flattered and half pissed (I'm not a whiny loser, thank you very much).

Stage I

2010-08-19T13:47:00.000-07:00

Twelve years ago at my school there was a festival of social sciences. It turned out to be one of those meaningful milestones with consequences stretching far and wide, another luck vs. goodwill conundrum.

But it's not that story. This story is about an essay contest where children had to play lawmaker and suggest a set of reforms to improve the situation in Russia.

I wrote,

Stage I
Paint over the window at the girls' loo (right wing, first floor).

That is - start improving yourself before trying to change others.

I still think I should have won.

It took them four years to paint over the damn window.

Working hours

2010-08-19T13:06:00.000-07:00

I gathered my papers and went to the bank, only to find out the loan lady's workday was already over. "Come tomorrow, 9 am to 6 pm," the teller said.

"But," I objected, "I am working 9 to 6! I mean, I have to have a day job to qualify for a loan in the first place! No fees is good and all, but do you expect me to lose $70 on taking a day off to apply and then another $70 to sign papers and get the money?"

She suggested I ask nicely and maybe, just maybe, the loan expert would stay for a couple of minutes more.

Not having illusions about their customer service, I asked my boss nicely instead and went during lunch. There wasn't a queue, the loan expert was very competent (a welcome change: loan experts tend to get power drunk and pretend they are bankers) and she offered me a pre-approved $4000 credit card, which means I stand a good chance of having my substantially less impressive loan approved.

Which is to say, if there shall be some semblance of order in the country, Stage II of the reforms has to introduce obligatory shifts for anything public service.

Non-reciprocity update

2010-08-19T00:43:00.000-07:00

We're in pretty dire financial straits, and I finally decided not to mooch off my friend, took what remained of the money which she had loaned me and bought some food for the communal fridge. Okay, granted, the choice of food was kinda selfish (rice, macaroni, soy sauce, chili sauce, strained tomatoes, dates for the sweet lentil stew, yoghurt), though I'm not to blame because every time I ask her what she would prefer, she says "Don't you dare to buy anything, you crazy woman". Usually, this leads to me buying random delicacies; this time I stocked up on things I eat and things that make the things I eat sorta edible, top priority to things the kids don't like.

I had posted a notice on the fridge, "The magic card is out of power until Sep. Please treat the fridge & cupboard contents responsibly or there'll be like NOTHING AT ALL to eat. Starmaker." It helped like a cocktail umbrella in a thunderstorm: diet bread is gone, blackcurrant syrup is nearly gone, and even the newly bought dates are vanishing one by one.

This is why today I was busy filling in the loan application form. Let's see... name, surname, current address (I lied on that one), phone, email... monthly income. This I don't know because our accounting is all crazy (I get between $1000 and $2000 in weird portions), and an examination of bank statements followed by some calc action was in order. I started with the most recent one. Eww, broken ASCII table.

--------------
DEPOSIT: | herp
WITHDRAWAL: | derp
DEPOSIT: | derp
ACCOUNT BALANCE: | 16959.00+
WAITWHAT: | O.o
--------------

It turns out I've been paid on Aug 6, a day after I took out every last kopeika to pay for electricity repairs and security.

Disclaimer: I know life doesn't actually work like that. I know observer-related effects work for quantum stuff only and the windfall of $500+ doesn't qualify as such. But I've also been taught to disregard common mode graphs and close the damn valve if the mass-spectrometer is screaming bloody murder because there just might be a jar of mayonnaise in the chamber.

So I hereby pledge to spend all of 16959.00 to support various creative projects around the world IF banker cat approves my loan. Non-reciprocity for the win.

Fire and Ice

2010-08-18T04:40:00.000-07:00

One of these days marks the anniversary of me starting to write a book. I had never suspected it would be that difficult. That damn book, especially when I began working on it full-time, had sucked all light and life from other things I did. Rewrite that. Edit this. Merge v1.56 and v0.2. Breaking news! section IV is now outdated and in need of a speedy rewrite. BAM! company policy has changed, develop new assessment criteria and edit them in accordingly. The hierarchy doesn't make sense, rewrite!.. oh wait it totally does, roll back. This way of designating legal basis looked good in the first, 30-page draft; not so in a 120-page version: REFORMAT!

I have 2 TB of ripped movies and a sizable box of unripped ones. I haven't watched even one in a year: the damn book won't allow me to commit two uninterrupted hours to something that is not work or basic needs. The incessant nagging left clips as the only sort of entertainment I could enjoy: F5ing a *chan thread, short posts on game design (no number-crunching or in-depth strategy, though), articles on Cracked, webcomics.

(The most in-your-face example of clip mentality is usually advertising on TV and Youtube clips on the net, but I don't have a TV and even Youtube is too much of a commitment: if a clip runs for, say, three minutes, that's three actual hardcoded minutes off, and I can't afford that. A forum thread is as long as my reading skills make it - it'll be a breeze, really, aren't my reading skills awesome?

That led to lapsing, and more nagging, and more lapsing, until I just forced myself to sit down and watch half the first season of Avatar (I felt too sick to work anyway) to screw my brains back in.

And now I'm finally getting it (the book, not the show) finished. This feels awesome. I expected to be done by or during last weekend but discovered the absence of a couple of early drafts (I didn't have Freemind to keep track of my stuff back then).

Oh, and the title refers to recurring typos in the law I'm studying: "incenerator" and "refregirator".

Based on a true story

2010-08-18T03:30:00.000-07:00

Blogging is fun. Did I complain about people being overly concerned with lives of pop stars and such? "Based on a true story" is more often than not a codeword for boring; but somehow it adds appeal. I heard that Putin's wife was seen with a really ugly haircut, now go discuss it. Leave me alone.

Noooooo they won't. And they won't ask collectively or ask once and disseminate it in the customary office fashion; each one hears something Wonderful! something Exciting! Brilliant! Fantastic! and comes running to hear the full of it. Now I actually understand why rape victims won't go to the police; each instance of telling the "story" puts me out of order for the rest of the day and it doesn't have so horrible an end. I'm fine, I don't need to "talk about it", what's putting a strain on me is your disbelief demanding I put on a good show or you'll decide I'm lying because no one should be talking calmly about shit as fucked up as this. And *then* you advise me to calm down. Catch-22, my ass.

Go watch a slasher film, people, and scream "there's no exit upstairs, you dumbfuck" all you want. Go take a car ride together, argue about the finer points of the art of driving and have a nice little quarrel followed by a nice little car crash, but please stop asking how I could be so lost and stupid and confused so as not to switch on the dictation machine.

The answer: it was five feet across the room from me, and if I had been able to reach it, the whore would have stolen it and, not having been able to figure out the controls and the status lights (you never know when that creepy little box might be recording), smashed it to pieces. So there would be no point in trying even if I had the chance (which I didn't). It's like meeting a murderer in casual circumstances and saying you recognized him and will be reporting him to the police some time next week at your leisure.

Also, if anyone asks why I hadn't phoned the police, I'll rip their head off.

Some of them try to "be helpful", which is just as bad, because I'm supposed to "be thankful" in return, although I am long since tired of explaining I can't fight a no-holds-barred harassment war (THIS is why I'm in hiding, folks) and I don't need you planting the idea I might be "inconveniencing" my friend. Yes, I am. I know that, but she's awesome and honest about that and I love her and that matter is resolved by me cashing in to offset the inconvenience.

Note: it seems my "tightass workaholic prude" reputation the 'dumpsters have been disseminating has earned me points with the upper management. Good job, ladies.

The faint of heart

2010-08-12T06:50:00.000-07:00

So I promised I wouldn't whine more. Fat chance.

...Not counting my face, which tends to look like a cow's shithole, I look really awesome if I were to strike a pose in front of a mirror. Of course, as intonation matters in speech, grace matters in physical attractiveness, and since I have none of that, tough luck.

I don't have a lot of female acquaintances, and I don't discuss domestic stuff with them. Despite that, I've heard a lot of complaints about extra weight. People worry about that too much, in contrast to how little they worry about their overall health. "Oh, fire and damnation, I can't find my waist!"

Today, I had a look at my feet and couldn't find my ankles. The prominent bones that ruined more than one pair of shoes and used to clack together whenever I was running are now completely covered by fugly bloated flesh. I have felt some numbness in my feet for the last few weeks, as if the toes were going offline, but I never really bothered to actually have a good look. What is this I don't even...

Except I do. It means my heart sucks cock.

I'm planning to be 24 in September.

To get the whining out of the system, I'm also out of money, I have to wrap up and hand in my book by yesterday, there are crazy people who want me beaten/committed/sued and tell even the most casual of my acquaintances their elderly grandmothers are in danger of being murdered and raped by yours truly in the hopes that whoever of them my landlord is will believe them and kick me out (fat chance, but it sucks that acquaintances thrice removed are harassed out of the blue on account of me), and I have to get my ass to a judge some time in the future to sue the house back.

And now my slippers, which used to be two sizes larger than my feet (bought them for the pretty flowers depicted) six weeks ago, are getting increasingly uncomfortable.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

I see London, I see France

2010-08-06T13:18:00.000-07:00

an extended reply to [comment]

There's a short story (I forget by whom, but the writer must be famous to be translated) about a guy who was obsessed with Carthage and wanted to prove the ancients didn't sacrifice children to Moloch, so he invented a time machine that could be used to watch the past, finding out in the process that research of the time machine was for some reason suppressed by the government. Turned out the machine would never show anything so temporally-remote, but it could be easily used to spy on neighbors. As the dude realizes he definitely doesn't want a panopticon, he reveals that he'd taken "precautions" against info suppression and there's no way to stop the advent of the new order. As I read the ending I thought, "So, what's the problem? Why is he so upset? Everything turned out for the better!"

Now, knowing people's thoughts (as opposed to the benevolent panopticon's remote viewing function) wouldn't be nice, probably. I doubt it would make us miserable, but I also doubt there would be individual "us" left. Learning the exact thoughts of others would obliterate identity, which means the model of absence ("X is good, because if it weren't for X, I'd have to Y, but now I can Z, and I prefer Z to Y") stops working with a runtime error.

Also, absolute knowledge is impossible, chicken-and-egg style, and potential absolute knowledge is very likely to be destructive: someone is bound to find out how to blow up the world with a salad fork and a duck and then proceed to do exactly that for the lulz.

Beneath notice

2010-08-06T05:10:00.000-07:00

With the advent of HTML5 anonymity will take yet another step back. I for one don't mind. Technology requires surrendering personal info; sites have tracked IPs since forever, Google Analytics is always there for you with personalized ads; the humble javascript, required for proper operation by certain sites, opens a way to keep track of browser fingerprints, and the new big personalization hit - GPS - again brings more convenience than evil; there's just no sense to block it if you're part of the crowd.

The key to survival is the premise of Shadowrun (a franchise currently abused by evil and incompetent management): don't be a high-priority target. Shadowrun is a series of games and books (and game books and everything in between) about cyber-crime that rings surprisingly true to modern life which I think should be required reading for every over-romantic would-be challenger to THE SYSTEM. Shadowrun hackers (runners) are not awesomely invulnerable superheroes who fight the system, they are quite content to be part of the system, having a good life beneath notice of their targets (except when a raid is in progress). That makes sense: If you're a corporation and your files are stolen or replaced with garbage, there's no sense to have revenge on the agents. A person might get unreasonably offended, not a multinational corp.

I recall an old joke, a collection of humorous personal safety rules under a heading, "Every other citizen has to know the following:", concluded by, "If you follow the above rules, the criminals will rob your neighbor!"; and another old joke, "I do not have to outrun the bear, I have to outrun you". This is how it works. Only people that are inherently schadenfreude-friendly (lolcows) are systematically singled out for abuse.

A couple months ago, some Twitter users threw a hissy fit when it was revealed their messages (which they post on an openly accessible website) would be forever archived. So what? The System does not give a flying fuck about a single person. Trends, on the other hand, are delicious. Ozymandias of Watchmen had to sit in front of a screen wall, watching TV reports, second-hand-picked information. We have it better. We can see what the world really looks like, to the extent that l33t web skills of finding g-lined sites allow us.

Once, an acquaintance polled his readers on their most sincere wish for all of humanity. I replied, "absolute end of anonymity". That would be civilization-changing. No rich bastards enjoying subsidies. No bigoted closet cases.

Until then, we have partial anonymity (as in "partial pressure"): a number of online identities for one person. What's better, the current system is as good as it can be, honesty and stuff not required: voluntary revelations, weighted by man-hour, are enough. Don't want to vote by your online activity how you really feel? By all means, don't. Posting a lot? Good, your vote counts for more because of this, a reward for being an active participant. Have you encouraged a couple thousand people to rig an online poll? Your organizational skills and online expertise justify these extra votes. Meritocracy in action. Spamming people's websites and mailboxes? Enjoy a helping of negative publicity.

Is this awesome (yes/yes)? It's just the basic precautions that are necessary. No forced consumer alignment, no forced social alignment so that interested parties won't be able to match patterns. And staying beneath notice.

Pinnacle of entertainment

2010-08-06T04:44:00.000-07:00

Interest = immediacy*traction.

Immediacy: Current events trump old memes. A continuing story by itself attracts more fans than one that is ended. (But people want to know that it will end, at one point. Cause and effect is of as much importance as pattern recognition, pointlessness is no fun.)

Traction: fantasy trumps reality. The fantastic has more traction up until the point on the quality axis where its lowering quality breaks the user's suspension of propriety: "I have spent how many hours reading this piece of crap? I suck. Time to watch news."

Entertainment, as opposed to SERIOUS BUSINESS, has been long looked down upon, considered inappropriate for a respectable person to engage in. What now qualifies as high fantasy, on the other hand, was serious business through antiquity and middle ages: even though educated ancient Greeks did not believe in Zeus, the cult had an important administrative role.

It took Enlightenment to come around for high fantasy fiction and entertainment to finally connect, since a certain level of knowledge was required to recognize fiction for what it is and a certain level of blindness (bigotry, intolerance) was required to condemn others' belief as fiction while holding tight to one's own delusions.

When I was a kid, I was encouraged to read books, no matter the content (my parents were unaware of fantasy and didn't have anything that might be kid-inappropriate without also being kid-boring). Thus, is was a revelation that the eponymous character in Walter Scott's Waverley was regarded as an airhead for reading the very same books that are now considered classics, literary baggage of an educated person, something that "everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read".

And as generations roll by, new releases become classics (while a lot more pieces, not always but often crap, fade into obscurity) and the advertising associated with the classic status: Time 100 list, induction into the movie archive, assigned reading, whatever - while simultaneously losing on immediacy.

The Internet has revealed trends. Not only I have discovered some veritable treasure troves of awesome by slacking off at Amazon; by watching trends, the content providers come to know what people want and provide accordingly.

Some fear this will generate more bland pop art for general users to the detriment of real art. NO WAI. Pieces that are aimed at riding the trend wave to earn more phat cash had better not exist at all. What will happen - what is happening is that cash cows are being milked by big-budget projects and niches are occupied by independent releases. The Internet helps producers and consumers find each other, and this is good. This is fucking awesome. Now we can have the opinion of millions in a day's time. Instant cult classics - and much more. NOW*AWESOME = the pinnacle of entertainment.

Then, there are complaints about independent art en masse not being good enough to the extent that it is hard for an actually talented performer to rise above the slush. Oh really? Work some more on publicity. Have fans do some aggressive-but-in-good-taste advertising. Almost everyone would prefer performing at a stadium or a concert hall or wherever else posh enough to satiate one's pride, but even a turn-left-at-the-trashbin club still beats humming a tune to yourself because there's no other way to perform it.

Entertainment is now held in substantially higher regard than at any point in the past. However, it is still not advisable to mention one's interest in video games in a curriculum vitae (that particular prejudice can be explained by inertia), and fantasy takes a backseat to "things that might have happened, except they didn't". But things will change. Where trends point, money follows, and money is serious business.

Forest fires

2010-08-06T00:30:00.000-07:00

What the title says. The hottest summer in centuries. Forests all around the city burn, the smoke is so thick I can't see the house across the yard. Actually, fuck that house; the more problematic fact is that I can't breathe properly and my head aches like never before. The kids cough and sneeze.

In the communal village, fire inspectors make rounds bugging homeowners, and for a good reason: a district (15 houses) burned down. Since I'm not there, the chairman takes the heat for me and is consequently not pleased. I had to visit and assure them I'd clean everything up by Saturday (I won't).

Worst thing ever: swarms of flies. Normally, rat cages should be cleaned once a month or so; in this heat, it has to be done once a week. So I'm back to cleaning. Honestly, I do not have anything better to do: no head for mental work, no way to sleep.

Typical

2010-07-25T23:02:00.000-07:00

Why the fuck it always happens like that?

I was sick for four days straight. I had trouble breathing and swallowing and would have had trouble speaking if there had been someone to speak to.

Suspecting an infection I go to a doctor. The clinic official, naturally, suspects me of faking it for some retarded reason (like to slack off). She is mildly surprised that I ask to see a specialist instead of a generalist (who signs sick-leaves) but attributes that to customer stupidity. While she's filling in my visitor's form, still on the fence whether I'm faking an emergency to jump queue or not, I mention I'm on vacation. This is enough to get her to believe me.

Then I raid the drugstore, and the bill clocks in at HOW MUCH AGAIN FUCK I'M BROKE. I get home, take one (1) pill and BAM! I'm well. Awesomesauce.

I'm thinking they should just sell individual pills at the clinic, like they do with injections in pay-all-you-can establishments. Even the eat-ASAP-after-unpacking stuff would go fast: it's the doctor's after all, sick people arrive all the time.

I managed to catch Malice this morning. The girl had found herself a hiding place that I couldn't locate somewhere in the room. I switched off the light, went out the room, waited, went in and tried to catch her as she was socializing, failed (she hid) and repeated the whole procedure. Eventually, I decided to go to sleep and get her first time in the morning when she wouldn't have the obvious cue "light = ~~danger~~ well-meaning assistant ratcatcher". Succeeded on the first try. Go me.

Kthxbai

2010-07-25T14:58:00.000-07:00

I wrote the following in the public section of my former friend's Facebook page. "Former" because he seems to have forgotten me, or pretends to have forgotten - really, if I accidentally met myself and talked for more than a minute, I'd wipe that memory and murder every witness. Anyway, here's the message.

This is going to be quite long and probably sort of creepy, depending on how you feel about random semi-anonymous messages.

Today, I subscribed to Skeptic Inquirer. Quite ironic, since I know for a fact magic works. It works because of non-reciprocity. I debated this matter with a voodoo priestess, and she was sure it's balderdash. Not really surprising - have you ever seen a voodoo priestess being right in the workings of magic?

It's hammered into our heads from early childhood: friends have to help each other. And a corollary, thusly: if you're not helping, you're not a true friend. And yet another thing: wasting valuable resources on random strangers is not a reasonable thing to do "in our sad world full of crooks and liars".

Bal-der-dash.

When the atmosphere is oversaturated with awesomeness, a minor disturbance makes it condense into magic. Man-made wonders - helping random strangers (indie performers, poor single mothers, down-on-money programmers, weird chicks who read dated fantasy books in gloomy school halls) translate into actual, cause-and-effect and probability-defying stuff. Lost letters are miraculously found, helpful and interesting people are randomly made acquaintance to, lotteries are won, bureaucracy makes way for reason, officials are looking another way when it's really important, and someone stumbles on an old friend's profile page just in time to write congratulations.

CONGRATULATIONS!

(I'll have some wine to honor the occasion. Not beer; beer is a dwarf's drink, and I'm not a dwarf. See what I did there?)

Incidentally, I'm not writing in English to look snobbish. I'm doing it to demonstrate I've been putting your awesome gift to good use these eleven-something (WHAT!?) years. And that it means no less to me than supernatural assistance: lots of things are bought for money, and a good chunk of them on ebay, but a new world, being priceless, can only be gifted. I can never thank you enough.

I hope your life was even more awesome than mine - who's the real magician after all? And I wish it to become yet more awesome. All the best to [REDACTED] and you, there's no one more deserving of happiness.

~kthx,
Zara Shashina
(yes, this is a character in Quest for Glory I, did I ever have an original nickname?)

Assistant ratcatcher

2010-07-25T12:20:00.000-07:00

Warhammer Fantasy Battles is a tabletop wargame in which you can command armies of fantastic creatures led by demigods. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is a tabletop roleplaying game, supposedly for the fans of the original wargame, where in a biggest bait-and-switch in the history of gaming players start as peasants or assistant ratcatchers. As a simulation of of life in a quasi-medieval world full of evil magic, the game delivers: it's unfair (like life itself) and either really boring or really short.

So that's it for the reference. Today, I spent an hour catching one (1) rat.

I have no idea why people for whom black plague is no olnger a threat still consider rats scary. They aren't - neither decorative (domesticated) nor wild ones. Wild rats are jumpy and LIGHTNING FAST; they have a keen understanding of the concepts of Inside and Outside, which means they can create a hole in the cage in order to escape, eating through plastic and wood, but they aren't going to ruin the furnishings of the cage in the process. Also, they SCREAM when caught.

It seems that wild rats take better care of themselves. A rat's tail serves, among other things, to regulate body temperature. If it's dirty, a sunstroke can happen; this is why I have to clean their tails with chloride hexidine; as I did it, I noticed wild rats' tails were almost clean while I had to use a new pad for every decorative.

Today's two male wild rats were relatively calm, but the third guy, appropriately named Chaos, twisted his body in an improbable way as I was placing him back into the cage and made a run for sweet freedom.

I tried to catch him for more than an hour. Rats are social creatures, so at first he hanged around his buddies, just out of reach. Finally, I managed to grab him, he repeated the very same maneuver near the hatch (fool me once...), scampered away to the floor and challenged me to a long positional war, which involved me using a mop, broken cages and pieces of cardboard to trap him, while he hid behind furniture and other heavy stuff to wear me out. Finally, I drove him into a cage, covered the exit with cardboard and - to avoid unnecessary risk - pushed the cage's bottom through the cardboard. As I was opening the hatch yet again, I wished life had a save-load button. Chaos SCREAMED and jumped into the opening, and by the time he found out he was back in his old home, I had secured the hatch with a clip.

As I was typing this, I glanced at the rat room. Just my luck: a rat was peeking through the doorway. I checked the cages: a female rat, appropriately named Malice (if the lady had named her rats something innocuous like Fluffy, it'd have saved me a lot of trouble), was missing from a cage. Every hatch was closed, and the cage lacked holes (wouldn't I know, I cleaned it today).

I still have no idea how she could have escaped. After Chaos, she's the second hardest to catch. It seems I wouldn't be getting any sleep this night.

Initiative

2010-07-22T01:50:00.000-07:00

It is easier to proclaim than to disagree. Simple logic tell s us that by trashing something you are, in a way, insulting fans of that particular something. Thus, freedom of speech in a social context is really a question of who gets the word first.

Memes spread. Once it is stated that Article One is crap, any fan of Article One will think twice about revealing their preferences, risking unpopularity and ridicule. once someone asserts their preference for Article One, however, dissing it will transform from expressing a personal opinion to a targeted insult.

So if I seem overly judgmental and opinionated, this is why. Last week, a friend's wife asked whether I have read Twilight. I said no (true; I became aware of it via Encyclopedia Dramatica and it didn't take me long to realize the book is not my cup of tea - or, indeed not a cup of tea at all but a canister of sweet sugary syrup that's enough to give anyone the memetic diabeetus), thinking I'd get away easily. Instead, I had to endure a two-hour rant, desperately trying not to fall asleep out of politeness.

"Oh, have you read Twilight?" Bummer. Not again. I decided to launch a counterattack.

"OF COURSE I HAVE! That is one awesome book, don't you agree? You know, the author is getting unfairly criticized, but I think she's just marvelous!"

The victim nods. I continue.

"It's hard to write about nonhumans and make them sympathetic characters - writers tend to portray them either as totally alien or totally human. But she manages to walk this line just fine! I mean, you can't help but fall in love with the characters!"

The victim is sure she's found a fellow fan. I escalate the crazy - I haven't read either book, so I don't have much to work with.

"Of course, part of the charm is due to existing mythos - shadowy, spiritual, mysterious, totally kick-ass in battle. Too bad the author is now busy with other projects, but I so hope she writes a fourth book!"

She manages to get in a "me too". I light the fuse.

"It's so nice to meet a fellow fan of Christie!"

Bam!

"...Christie? Who's that?" the fangirl is momentarily lost.

"Why, Christie Golden, the author of Twilight!"

"But..."

"I got a signed copy on ebay, for real! Also, they should make Starcraft action figures. I love Zeratul, he's so cuuuuuute and huggable! I always play protoss, though I probably don't do them much honor since I suck even against the AI. Oh, here's my bus, it was nice to chat, seeya!"

AC/DC

2010-07-22T01:27:00.000-07:00

Last New Year Eve, I went to a concert, and it is because of that little indulgence that I now have a place to live with running water and Internet access.

Anyway, it being a costume party, I went as Glum Buster (had to order a custom-made hat and cloak and buy a wig). As I was adjusting the wig by a mirror in the public part of the privies, a cleaner guy, not older than 25 years, noticed me and said,

"Youth these days, listening to all kinds of crap. Do you even know what AC/DC is?"

"Why, I do!" I replied. "AC: wall outlet. DC: car cigarette lighter. And you ignoramus will always be stuck cleaning johns."

Will hurt a fly

2010-07-22T01:01:00.000-07:00

Summer is hell. I suspect when I get to actual Hell for liking Nestle chocolates, I'll welcome a change of scenery. And it's not even the heat (which I sort of got used to - not feeling any better, but I stopped paying attention to it). It's flies.

How to hurt flies

1. Shoes, newspapers, etc
Advantages: hurts.
Disadvantages: works only on firm, level, non-fragile surfaces.

2. Sticky tape
Advantages: passive.
Disadvantages: sticky, looks unappealing, gets rid of a percentage of the fuckers - others are still flying.

3. Poison spray
Advantages: works on tricky surfaces (glass, cloth, corners).
Disadvantages: hard to aim, doesn't work on the first try, poisonous for humans and pets (big reveal here).

4. Electric fly swatter
Advantages: UBER-AWESOME!!!1!0!!
Disadvantages: seeing as it's advertized alongside a microwave washing machine, probably a scam.

5. Fumigation
Advantages: passive.
Disadvantages: doesn't work, like, at all. These are not mosquitoes.

6. Vacuum cleaner
Advantages: nice, clean.
Disadvantages: works badly, the fuckers fly away, return after the device is switched off. Again, these are not mosquitoes. Also, I don't have one.

7. Fan
Advantages: double-purpose.
Disadvantages: scares flies away, doesn't actually kill them.

Solution: sponge!
Get a sponge, preferably an old one that no one's using. Moisturize it. Put some soap upon it. Hunt flies. Once they're wet, soapy and helpless, squash them or wash them down the drain before they get better.
Advantages: works on a variety of surfaces, including glass, ceramics, corners and home appliances.
Disadvantages: none!

Disconnected!

2010-07-20T06:54:00.000-07:00

The ADSL internet connection I was using went down without a warning. I tried to check the provider's website: inaccessible. Maybe the landline was disconnected? I couldn't check it, because the phone was missing from its base, lost somewhere in the apartment, its batteries out of power. The phone, old and semi-broken, lost power in an hour off the base.

A complex system (like an apartment) has many components, and when one malfunctions, others can take a heavier load. Ignore one waring too many and you have a system failure. This felt like it. I phoned one contact: inaccessible. A second one: phone number changed, great.

We still had the DOCSYS connection. It was down due to nonpayment (it going down made me switch to ADSL), of course, but I can just visit their website for free, phone client services, find out the account number, pay and it'll be up! Awesome!

I plugged in the cable. No connection... oh yes, IP settings. These had to be typed in manually. I had them recorded somewhere but lost that tiny strip of paper. Little chance to find it in the apartment, especially after I failed to locate the phone. Finding a strip of paper with the root password for my site (twenty characters!) was a lucky exception... oh certainly! I reached for the password paper. The necessary numbers were written on the reverse.

IP... subnet mask... gateway... DNS. Bummer. I didn't think to record DNS settings, because Google's 8.8.8.8 used to work just fine. I briefly entertained the idea of searching my laptop for the LOL DONGS comic to see if it provided any instructions on how to isolate a locally stored IP of a previously visited site - and discarded it as too time-consuming. A better option would be to go to town and look around for some ads. If I can pay for and activate the account, they'll tell me the settings.

Before that, I phoned custserv of a cell phone distribution branch.
"Hi. I made a payment using your payment system and it didn't go through, could you please tell me AKADO (the provider)'s client support number?"
"Okay, let's check your payment. Please tell me the code on your receipt." Bummer.
"Well... you see... I must have misplaced it... could you tell me how to phone their custserv?"
"Your receipt serves as proof of payment. Locate it, then call us again. Do you have any questions?"
"No." Fuckity fuckity fuck.

I went outside and stopped at the bank. "Is there an ATM around here?"
"Why, yes. Look around the corner." The lady followed me around the corner, where a huge, happy, bright-orange letters on the ATM's display said,
OUT OF ORDER

"Oh," said the lady. "That sucks. Now you'll have to go all the way to Printers." There's another bank office at Highway street 9.

And so I went to Printers Station, looking around for AKADO's ads, where at the other end of Highway street I might get some cash and ask for the custserv phone number at any "connectivity saloon" that surrounded Printers.

There was a long snaking queue at the ATM, which meant it worked. I waited in the heat that was stewing me alive. At last... three people... two... one...

"OH NO, NOT AGAIN! My card's stuck!"

I edged closer. A woman was complaining to her husband. "See, it got stuck again. Can't they fix the damn thing!? It ain't responding!"

The display read, "Enter PIN."

"Uhm, why don't you enter the PIN?" I suggested and turned away from the ATM out of basic politeness.

"It ain't working, that's why! The darn thing has swallowed my card!" She fumed some more and left for the bank, to drag an unfortunate cashier out to look at the modern marvel. Her husband looked at me guiltily.

"Could you do anything?" he said. The ATM was still asking for the lady's PIN.

"Why yes! Can't hurt anyway" I said and pressed CANCEL. The ATM started beeping as it ejected the plastic. The dude stared at it in wonder. I snatched the card and explained my rudeness, "NOW it could have gotten stuck." The dude took it away and I finally got the chance to have some quality time with the ATM.

Balance: $3.

Fuuuuuuuuck.

I continued on to the station.

Once you get connected, there are ads everywhere and poor college kids are bugging you on behalf of the providers to "pretty please try our services, they're better and you'll get Princess Leia in a DeLorean as a bonus". But if you actually need a service... "I fuck strangers for free! Call 555-1234!" was the only ad I saw. Here's proof /b/ doesn't make assholes out of people.

The managers at the cell stores (or "connectivity saloons") were increasingly unhelpful. I recorded custserv numbers for the automated payment machines to fish for the custserv number. And then, in an office of my former employer, I found the Grail - a payment machine which listed support phone numbers for every service they relayed payments to. I recorded AKADO's and walked out. The street roared with trucks and seller announcements and music from a pirate store. I walked away, found a quiet playground (minus kids) and settled on a swing.

"Oh hi, could you please tell me our account number?"
"Your landline number please."
"Errrr... can we do home address instead?"
"Okay fine."
I provided the address and the name.
"Incorrect," said the custserv guy. "Can you check block number?"
"Block one. I'm pretty sure the address is correct." I wasn't so sure yesterday, when people from an internet store were to bring in huge bags of popped corn for pets. I had taken a walk around the building to check the address, didn't find it, but corn arrived, thus, it was absolutely correct.
"Then, the client's name. It is a man's name."
Bummer. The man was my friend's husband, and she did leave me her cell phone when my own got left behind, so technically I could locate it, search the phonebook and phone the guy and he might just be shocked enough to reply - but really, I wasn't that desperate. I have no desire to fish around for personal info.

"Okay. Since the cable is already in, can we create another account?"
They said NO, only the owner of the apartment can subscribe to their services.

Just to feel good, I called my old provider - those guys didn't have a stick up their asses. What they required was a customer's word of honor that the owner didn't mind. Unfortunately, their network, available almost everywhere in the city, didn't reach across the river.

I returned to the saloon. The senior manager, sensing a customer, glided up to me.
"Can I have this modem and pay by plastic?"
"Why, of course!"
"May I see the plans?.. Oh, good. Can I choose this one and pay by plastic?"
"Yes, certainly, you can." There was a peculiar note in her voice, suggesting I was slightly retarded, but she was willing to put up with it. I know this note too well, I worked for custserv.

Aaaaaand to spite her, it took half an hour to magick up the electronic payment system.
"Is there absolutely no chance you can pay by cash?"
"No, sorry," I said, injecting Seem this is why I asked into my voice.
"Aren't you in a hurry?"
"Not at all."

I got the device, went home, picking up bags of food at a local shop which accepts plastic, fired up the PC and heard strange musical sounds outside the window.

Rain.

Finally.

Le Déluge

2010-07-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

No one - except, perhaps, George Lucas - knows why the Star Wars movies are numbered 4, 5 and 6. No one knows why the Wachowski brothers, despite the success of The Matrix, never made a sequel or two. Sadly, we never see more of Light after he marries Misa and becomes President of the Earth. The King's Quest series could have been continued past the seventh installment if Sierra hadn't kicked the bucket. For the same reason, Quest for Glory ends on a downer as the extradimensional horror is stopped but both of the hero's love interests die. In contrast, Death Knights of Krynn magnificently wraps up the story as the heroes rid their land of evil immortal knight and ride into the sunset with santa sacks full of treasure.

Ruined franchises get talked about a lot: a franchise is a cash cow rented out, and if you borrow one, you are supposed to take care of it. If it gets sick due to neglect, it means less milk for all future owners. Perhaps the current executive creator is a moron who doesn't understand the most immediate result of feeding the cow cyanide. Perhaps he's just eager to butcher the poor cow to realize his nerd dream and doesn't care what happens next. And in some cases, what happens is indeed The Flood: the owners wipe the slate clean, assisted by the fans who are lining up with their cash and plastic, eager to purchase the next installment which hopefully won't suck as much.

If the story is not a franchise, it can just die, prematurely or on time - some stories are meant to have an ending, and it's not a big deal if a couple of people in the audience choose not to remember what happens after a certain plot point.

I don't like finished stories. I am primarily a roleplayer, and once the world is saved and the final curtain falls, rarely is something left for new heroes to do. Film actors are as good are their last role; worlds have the theme (and power level) set by the latest adventure. On the other hand, story ruination is so prevalent that I catch myself thinking, "It's good that [something] ended before it turned to crap." If a beloved character dies, I think, "Oh, good! He didn't have enough time to become a douche." And in case the story gets interrupted, plot hooks left dangling - perfect on both counts - I want more. Humans are never satisfied, a fact that has this unremarkable consequence called Progress.

Stories receive bonus points for being able to happen "now", whenever "now" is in storytime. Cause and effect make the world go round, interactivity is icing on the cake. Stories set in past have a predetermined or contradictory future and are thus meaningless; stories set in the future can be made meaningless at any moment - and, indeed, many have suffered this ignoble downmarking since the release.

I've been taught to respect authority. I think it was my literature teacher who inadvertently cured me of this: by making us memorize writers' biographies, she made me aware of what dicks the writers actually were, and by skimming through collections of reviews (reading classic reviews of classic books earned points with her) I stumbled upon Pisarev's bashing of Eugene Onegin. Yahtzee doesn't hold a candle to this epic-level snarky reviewer.

The idea that the original creators are not the final authority, that the audience has some say due to spending resources such as time and money and emotional commitment, is not very new - legend says Doyle had to resurrect Sherlock Holmes due to readers' pressure. The Internet gave it room to grow. Fan cuts, fan remakes, bonus levels and addons - let the executives bitch, let Disney expend copyright for a thousand years more. Basic game design principles have changed; the most important now is "Don't fuck with the customer base". The Internet wouldn't unite workers in a grand proletariat revolution sparked by the gold farmers, as Cory Doctorow hopes. It will unite customers, starting with entertainment and spreading to everything from there, including the job market. And there will be rainbows after the flood, and a covenant that states, THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT.

Crazytown Edition

2010-07-18T13:46:00.000-07:00

I finished the reimagining of King's Quest II and oh god WHY EVERYTHING IS YELLOW and my hat turned into a pomegranate and ran away and CTHULHU PLEASE STOP EATING CUCUMBERS YOU'LL GET INDIGESTION AGAIN and there are cats and bats and F-117 jets flying in my new teacup.

What I'm saying is that the 2002 remake takes the original's plot and rides with it and the brakes on the crazy-train fail and it's no stops till batshitville. The infamous My Immortal is more faithful to its source material.

The game is really, really strange. It hops from slapstick to existential drama to high adventure and back again with every click of the mouse. When the ferryman of the dead arrives on his boat, you have a reason to feel ELATED. The devs have MEANT it that way. Like, "Oh dude, just about time, where've you been?"

It has everything. Surreal landscapes, several epic standoffs, plot twists enough for a thousand Gordian knots, A Christmas Carol redone with KQ characters and motherfucking Satan, unsierralike shenanigans with points and a mock bad ending complete with a mindfuck song.

(I have a complaint to lodge. Why doesn't Disenchant work on werewolves? Too easy? Use the solution you used underwater: the player disenchants one, the others rip him to pieces, restore/restart etc).

Anyway, what prevents me from writing a full analysis is that (1) there's too much crazy, I need to replay the game and write everything down and (2) I haven't played the original because of the parser and I don't want to look like a dick when I bitch about "yet another implementation of the perpetually high devs" and it's actually in the original. That will take some time, because the solutions for the original are of the nonspoilerific "West. South. Take candle. Eat cake" variety - I see that a lot has changed, but I have no way to know what it was and how insane it was in the first place.

The game is absolutely worth playing. The devs did a splendid job, and they got King Graham's character right, but aside from it, the game has nothing in common with the rest of the series. More like A Christmas Carol + Dark Tower + L'Étranger. But it is awesome - I mean, they got Josh Mandel to voice Graham, how else could have they pulled it off?

Ol' Rump's name, clarified

2010-07-18T12:20:00.000-07:00

an extended reply to [comment]

From what I gather, the 1984 original accepts both variants. The 1990 version and the 2001 point-and-click fan remake (which this post is about) accept only Roberta's spelling. Also, the name itself wasn't enough: 1984 needed it to be spelt backwards while 1990 and 2001 required the ALPHABET to be flipped backwards, and there was no indication that any spelling of the name was somewhat relevant.

At least in Dark Queen of Krynn (a game I hate with a passion) they make an indication that the unflipped password is the right direction to think in... but then they ruin it by having an NPC explain say "just type it backwards" in plain text... another reason to hate DQK!

To be fair, both this and the troll bridge offered alternate solutions. The troll bridge's was "pay the damn toll" and it cost points, which was something I couldn't accept. In Sierra quests, not gaining points for a suboptimal solution says "okay, passable", losing means a probable dead-end.

(Speaking of breaking game design rules: LucasArts quests had no dead-ends, and it was rule-breaking at the time of release; now it's the norm).

Of course, the remake offers two modes, hardcore (faithful to the original) and fair (without any dead-ends and lacking a couple of lethal traps that the devs thought unfair, like pushing a rock from the "wrong" side and getting squashed by it without any indication which side was "right"). I played the fair one, but still, losing points just didn't sit well. Like, "If you're planning to buy your way through the puzzles, why even play?"

Also, King's Quest II: Crazytown Edition (2002) has a puzzle where the player has to guess tales by their plot summaries - and that was about the only puzzle in the whole game where metaknowledge was relevant. This time I knew all five of them (Cinderella, Three Little Pigs, Little Bo Peep, Ol' Rump and his unpronounceable name, Romeo and Juliet); they used Roberta's spelling again, though it was strictly point and click and didn't impact the difficulty.

Source material

2010-07-17T01:34:00.000-07:00

I finished the modern remake of King's Quest I the other day.

The devs eliminated the parser, replacing it with a point-and-click interface, remade the visuals based on original designs, wrote new music and created a voice track. The puzzles were supposedly kept unchanged, and for all the presentational improvements it is clear the game is *old* (though if I didn't know better I'd have guessed 1990 as the year of initial release, not 1984 - that's what "revolutionary" means).

The game is short if you know what to do - and if you don't it's rather empty. Not much to see and not much to click on. The notion of time tax (time spent doing unfun things like levelling and wandering in empty rooms) as something to avoid would develop years later and Quest for Glory would emerge with a groundbreaking solution.

Fairytale-inspired puzzles draw upon player metaknowledge of the in-game world (#4 on this list), a trait that distinguishes the game from those focused on abstract puzzles, exploration, real-life "physics" and in-world logic.

King's Quest I is all about source material familiarity, and at times it felt unfair and annoying. Specifically, the game accepts only the American spelling of "Rumplestiltskin", one that neither me nor the built-in Firefox spellchecker (I am typing this in a browser window) are familiar with (yes, it recognizes the German "Rumpelstiltskin").

Second, how should I know an ordinary goat can defeat a troll? "Learn your fairy tales," the game says. Wat. No, seriously, wat. It's not that trolls are naturally afraid of, or vulnerable to, goats, you see. It's that the goat (not an ensorcelled prince or anything, a la Little Brother Ivanushka) really hates the troll and easily defeats him. Well excuse me here, Roberta, I hate that fucker even more, he's blocking my way! How come a small farm animal can succeed where the best knight in the kingdom fails?

Yeah, I'm not familiar with the source material. On the plus side, the material I am familiar with taught me how to resurrect a person who's been cut into pieces. Here's how:

1. Collect all the pieces.

I am imagining an old chest in a dungeon which a player character searches and produces a rectangular chunk of spongy human flesh*: Congratulations! You've found the fourth piece of King Ronard's body! Thirteen more to go!

* That's how I visualized brutal dismemberment when I was four. I kid you not, fairy tales were recommended reading for preschoolers - with parental guidance, because preschoolers weren't supposed to be able to read. Fun for the whole family! I enjoyed them on my own, though - I hadn't been weaned off baby milk when Mom taught me to read inscriptions on the cartons**. Fairy tales followed soon.

** Oh, and there were small glass jars of delicious meat souffle, also for kids. Their tin lids read, "Unfit for consumption in case of absence of a popping sound on opening". Later, I threw around an idea to tattoo the words on one's belly so that a lucky coroner would have a lol.

On a vaguely related note, I also imagined brains to be two smallish lumps of porcelain-like material located inside the skull near the temples, because that's what ached during a headache.

2. Wash each piece in vodka.

3. Assemble them in the correct order, make sure that no body part is missing.

4. Sprinkle the result with beer.

That's it! Good like new! I dare a hypothetical reader to actually put that into a fairytale fantasy adventure.

Having posted these valuable instructions, I'm off to play the remake of King's Quest II.

Puzzle types in adventure games

2010-07-17T01:06:00.000-07:00

1. Abstract puzzles are checkpoints where you are made to solve math problems, translate encoded messages by frequency analysis, sort knights from knaves, repeat musical sequences and play built-in minigames. Such a puzzle is fully divorced from the game, its mechanics and plot, and is of the sort you can easily pose to a person in real life.

2. Exploration means recording the information the game provides and supplying it where necessary: remember the name of a fairy king mentioned in passing by a madman, translate words spoken in a foreign language with a previously supplied translation key, draw a map of the game world to find unexplored rooms, try every dialogue option and every item to discover lucky coincidences and unexpected allies. Exploration puzzles are solved by diligence and a good memory.

3. Real-life "physics" requires players to plan their mundane actions ahead, thus forcing a deeper involvement in the game world than exploration alone could provide. Use rubber gloves to mess with the engine, remember to lock the door on your way out, put a bullet in the gun before shooting, oil the hinges to open doors unnoticed.

4. Source material familiarity is invoked whenever a game borrows from a well-knows source or parodies it. Play a tune to access the wall behind the cartoonish living flowers ("wall-flowers" - I was immensely proud of my knowledge of English when I easily solved this one). Realize that a cake baked by a prisoner's relatives holds equipment to assist an escape attempt.

5. In-world logic puzzles define the actual plot and move the story forward. These require the player to be familiar with the overarching plot and make educated guesses on what is preferable to do next. Put a tracking chip into a museum relic you suspect is going to be "borrowed" to follow the criminals. Realize that you don't have to take the dangerous route over water and chase the villains on land instead by using a minimum of actions (a map helps to plot the route). Notice that a reasonably modern city park copies an ancient temple's layout. Play on your enemies' lack of trust for you and each other to avoid being used as a guinea pig in a fatal experiment.

Essential

2010-07-16T15:11:00.000-07:00

Shrinks might exalt ordinary people as unique snowflakes and cynics might say everyone is replaceable. They're wrong.

Leo Tolstoy, or so I've been taught in school, supported the cynic side of the argument, laughing at Pierre's naive attempt to kill Napoleon. "Napoleons are a dime a dozen," Tolstoy said. "If not this particular man, history would raise someone else. This is why you can't prevent Nazism by traveling back in time and killing Hitler, so don't try."

History - factual history - is self-justifying. What happened, happened. In a context isolated from alternate history fantasy, what ifs are meaningless. Really Tolstoy, good job betting on the dice that have been rolled and are lying in plain sight and raking in the winnings.

Instead, granddaddy Leo, consider this: Right now, there are people who are actively making the world better. Not my world, the world. Between the two attractors of butterfly effect and steady state, life is a huge and fancy nonlinear iteration. A fractal. While for each jailed gangster another will claim his turf and for each incompetent worker another, even more incompetent, will take his place, others - inventors, trailblazers, creative geniuses, one-of-a-kind scientists - are irreplaceable. If one were to die, life would get objectively worse.

On an unrelated note, I have complained about following lives of celebrities who don't give two shits about their followers. Fantastic trumps usual, active trumps passive, thus, I watch movies and check up on friends.

The thing is, there are people whose lives I am gladly following on the Internet, and there are people whose blogs I have to force myself to read. There's no other difference: I like them equally well, and the percentage of unlikable commenters is roughly the same, and their lives and their jobs and their free time are equally interesting, and their writing skills are passable (I have a rather high standard of "passability" and no distinction beyond it). There's just something lacking and if I know what I'll be damned (or, alternatively, a popular blogger).

I'm pretty sure that despite the existence of Awesome in pure and undiluted form, it can't be distilled, only spontaneously created: golden nuggets in the sand, or a huge perfect diamond. Like superconducting "pies" in a pottery kiln, or cold fusion in an electrolytic bath, but real.

Color of magic

2010-07-16T12:20:00.000-07:00

Go and gamble away half a kingdom and a nuclear bomb
Take a blunt ax and murder your buddy out in the streets
Cause you know that a quarter doesn't cut it and sounds plain dumb
You are doing just fine, you can go on vacation, vacation, vacation!

I haven't had a proper vacation for three years - okay, in April-May of 2009 I played WoW for a month straight, thirteen to fourteen hours a day, but I'm not sure this qualifies.

What it not good is that I have this three-year itch of doing something - anything - at home with my own hands. Cooking is right out. No felting: I left behind my collection of unspun wool (never used) and I'd rather try to get it back than buy more of the same. Cross-stitching, same story: all the stuff is in the vipers' nest. Photography, no: I suspect the vipers stole my charger and I have to either raid the nest with a pepper spray and a taser or buy another one. Ship modelling, no: tools, parts and assembly instructions all need rescuing.

To not look like a dirty moocher I really am, I made essential stuff top priority: clothes, medicine, hygiene supplies, home appliances. It seems "essential" means "unfun".

Suddenly, a taser sounds like a good investment.

My phone ran out of magic today. Now I'm on the same plan as everybody else, not on the all-inclusive free unlimited plan which I suspect was the result of a weird bug.

...

"Gimme the phone number!" the evil woman shouted. "Friends won't be able to call me! You whore, you want to leave me without friends, don't you!?"

"First," I said levelly, "the number's not yours, just ask the carrier. Second..."

I glanced at the lady. They had spoken before, and by lying about me the viper inadvertently told the truth about herself. The lady knew what would follow and hid the smile in her eyes.

"Second, I've had it for a year. Wanna know something? No one phoned in and asked for you. You have no friends."

That leaves writing. I can type well, but I can't plan on a computer, not even in Freemind or Onenote.

So I bought a pen and found out it had purple ink. The color of magic.

Big deal? Why yes, it is. For the preceding month, I've been obligatorily thankful and vaguely content with the awesome rescuing me from the shitpile, and now I am genuinely happy with the inconsequential purchase of a purple pen.

The magic is back.

Pure of heart

2010-07-14T13:00:00.000-07:00

Serves me right for planning ahead. Turns out analog audio wasn't set up correctly and I spent three hours warring with it. Result: success.

Once upon a time, my mom decided to cure my gaming addiction by disassembling the computer. As she was really scared of it (more than I am scared of gas ovens), she could barely force herself to disconnect a single cable. As I switched it on, mom warned me that she had disconnected a cable; I climbed under the table, checked the vital devices, found nothing missing and turned on the PC. It worked. The mysterious act of disconnection remained a mystery until I launched a game: there was no sound. I lol'd. Bad me. Since that time, I always have problems setting up the sound at every machine I touch.

Of course, recurring problems with sound might have a reason founded in reality: programmers just don't care about the sound as much as they care about graphics. If you were to buy a brand new computer and the display wouldn't work, that's a task for the custserv: the customer is not guaranteed to have a functioning replacement. On the other hand, sound is not a crucial part of the interface (except when it is, e.g. special needs) and programmers are much less responsible. What's to worry about, just read the forums and download a fix, will you?

Note: trying to download a LAN fix is fun for the whole family. "Keyboard not found, press F1 to enter setup" indeed.

I am absolutely certain audio drivers work by magic, and I know quite a number of people who share this opinion. Audio is set up by shooing the bug demons away with singing, dancing, drumming, and cursing. Bug demons can't stand excessive cursing, the pussies.

Oh, and they don't harass the pure of heart, like my acquaintance, another hippie and the chief editor of a prominent hardware review site.

That guy wrote a book which I bought and promised to review. Part 1, written in the second person, annoyed me to no end with typos and lack of editing, and the plot I classified as sweet saccharine bullshit. It concerned a young woman who ran away from home and got lucky to be taken in by a bunch of music geeks.

Totally unrealistic.

Sun, Wind and Fire

2010-07-14T09:24:00.000-07:00

"Omg there's a fire in the warehouse next to us and because I'm a geek it doesn't occur to me to get off the Internet and maybe go home." True story. My head ached most of the day for no reason, a sign that something will happen to retroactively justify it. BAM! fire.

The Soviets didn't plan for crappy renovators fucking with the factory layout, so only one firefighter lorry could water the building at any given moment while at least ten of them arrived and now blocked every nearby side-street. The warehouse was home to (probably illegal) guest workers who were very reluctant to evacuate. A short fat bald guy, presumably the owner, was running around the firefighters, telling them something. A 'fighter rose on a retractable ladder and started pouring water on the roof and at a smallish attic window; the stream of water broke the window open and smoke intensified.

Then we got permission to leave our own building, and so I did.

I bought some cat/weasel food, got home and found out the kitchen lacks an essential ingredient for garlic sandwiches I planned to eat tonight: garlic. I had half a bottle of beer, got very drunk and decided to either cook the sandwiches in a gas oven (I'm normally afraid of gas ovens due to a childhood accident) or play an adventure game.

Why not both?

Update: I lit a chopstick on fire and used it to light the oven. Ingenuity, my ass.

So, game of the now: King's Quest I VGA remake, by AGD Interactive.

Exception

2010-07-12T11:40:00.000-07:00

"Omg there's a fire in my room and because I'm a geek it doesn't occur to me to log off IRC and put it out" is an old and tired meme, and its age and tiredness is one reason why when a bunch of rats escaped from cages I got up and caught them before posting this.

40 rats, a cat, a weasel, a hamster and a raven.

Honestly, I never understood the purpose of keeping animals. Fun at first, they become a chore and later a source of grief. While a dog can be a useful and trusted companion for a prolonged period of time, most other animals are purely decorative. Rats in particular live for two years. One died in my care; I wrapped the body in a cloth and put it into the fridge, to be buried when the lady returns home.

On the other hand, animals that grow fast can be bred easily, children inheriting their parents' traits, life going on.

"Who's pretty? Why, you are!.. She's not allowed to breed, not healthy enough. Don't ever buy rats in a zoo or from an uncertified breeder. These money-grabbing bastards would have a son mate with a mother, and who knows what flaws it will lead to and what pain the poor creatures will be subjected to. Operating on a rat costs more than $200, you know, people just don't have this kind of money to spare.

"Don't buy animals to 'save' them. To the unscrupulous supplier, that only sends a signal: they're selling well, time to make more. By giving them your money, you're just perpetuating the cycle of animal abuse.

"These are going to die in two years, tops. Caring for the lot is hard work. I plan to keep ten or so. You know how I ended up with forty? Zoos stock them to be sold as food for snakes, and I just fell sorry for them and bought more and more until I ran out of room.

She looks me in the eyes, making sure I understood the valuable life lesson. "Don't try to save everyone. It's no use, trust me."

I nod in fake agreement, sitting on the sofa in her apartment, clothed in her guest dress and wearing her towel around my head, happy to be an exception.

Customer service

2010-07-12T11:22:00.000-07:00

So what do you know, the custserv guys (those of the ink supply support line) are being unhelpful cockbags. "Hey missy, you should have studied the subject and followed some goddamn instructions instead of bitching." What valuable advice.

Thing is, I can buy an uninterrupted ink supply assembly kit three times as cheap. It'll take me a day to get it up and running. I can construct my own system from scratch using medical equipment bought real cheap through a back exit at any wholesale med store ten times as cheap. It'll take five days, and my day clocks in at about $70 after taxes - not economical at all unless I enjoyed fucking around with awkward bottle holders and wasting valuable ink. This is why they have me as their customer, this is why they can charge me twenty times the production price: I want plug and play and I want some custserv in case the former fails like it did. What I don't want is six mutually contradicting sets of instructions and a bunch of cockbags online.

Unfortunately, the sales model favors cockbags. The price is substantial so as not to say fuck it and get a replacement, but not high enough to waste time and money on launching a one-man crusade against the company to the detriment of everything else. And the primary way they provide custserv - on an open internet forum - invites the lucky no-lives to watch for not-so-lucky n00bs and lol at their expense.

I mean, laughing at someone stuck with a malfunctioning device beats going out with a girl any day of the week, doesn't it?

Credentials II

2010-07-10T08:58:00.000-07:00

I'm likely to get transferred to the IT department. The IT guys started saying hi instead of worrying about cooties. Also, I got interviewed by their boss.

"So you majored in nuclear physics."
"Particle physics."
"Whatever. Do you, uhm, know anything at all about networks?"
"Enough to hack ours," I didn't say.

Thicker than water

2010-07-10T08:48:00.000-07:00

The devil no longer drafts contracts in blood on human skin. He prints them with Epson ink on Lomond paper.

I'm done setting up the printer. The end result is surprisingly good (nothing burned down or exploded) -- not even an exaggeration: the only CRT monitor we have here shoots lightning across the screen when the power is turned on, and the laptop overheats. In the absence of samples or a dependable reference point I took some Saturated Dreamers screenshots and adjusted the printer settings to maximize prettiness.

Also, the water-soluble black ink cartridge leaks. The insurance department insists that the reason is incorrect installation and the problem is mostly cosmetic. They're wrong: there's an actual honest-to-god atmosphere in the cartridge preventing Bernoulli's from supplying it with ink. I know a leak when I see one, having worked for a year checking tubes with helium and plasma and liquid awesomeness. Unfortunately, these credentials are made suspect by me failing to locate the open/close button.

Status update

2010-07-09T14:15:00.000-07:00

I got a new printer and tried to install an ink feeder. Turns out the feeder does not work with my printer (the printer demands having the hood always closed, which is impossible without drilling an unauthorized hole in the pretty device. And even if it did fit, the black water-soluble ink tube leaks.

To add insult to injury, Lifehacker, a blog I gave up on long ago, posted an easy method to watch Hulu. Should have bought a TV monitor instead.

Non-reciprocity

2010-07-08T13:14:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I used to watch R-rated action movies and softcore pr0n, and read original folk fairytales (Soviet teachers attest: dismemberment is totally for kids). I also read through all of Young Pioneer's Library.

The latter stories differed from everything else so that even the pre-teenage me, interested only in bashing baddies, noticed. The most important topic the books addressed was non-reciprocity.

Prince Ivan saves a mouse (or rather, does not kill a mouse for the lulz), and the grateful mouse saves him in return.

Young Pioneer Eugenie helps a random stranger, and the community decides she's a good person, and another Young Pioneer lends her a helping hand because she's a good person.

That halo of good reputation, unlike a bank account balance, was said to never expire. Do good deeds and people will like you more. Help an old lady across the street and a pretty girl will date you. It wasn't like a business reputation, where you attain the status of dependable partner and customers flock to make mutually profitable deals. Non-reciprocity was key.

"Here, take at least $200," she said.
"NO WAI. Look, I didn't buy the device for you. I bought it for the lulz, and because I had some unused card balance which I couldn't just flush abroad, and because you said no single person could ever afford it and I smelled me a challenge. So yeah, for the lulz. You don't owe me anything."

Two weeks later, at 2100 hours, I left the police station, unquestioned. I had a passport, a wallet with the local equivalent of $7, a spool of nylon thread I planned to patch up my boots with, and a cell phone with just enough money to make one call no more than a minute in length.

"Hello! Hello, do you hear me?"
"Huh... who's that?" There was static and the thunder of a subway carriage, all around her. She could hardly hear my feeble whining.
"Me! Number fifteen! I'VE OUTTA MONEY, CALL ME BACK! CALL BACK! HEAR!?"

People stared. I couldn't care less. The neighbor chick had stood nearby for a minute watched me being strangled and bitten - I had seen her feet in fluffy purple shoes - then left, unconcerned.

They are entertainers, performers, businesspeople. They sign CDs and postcards for genius and fucktard alike. No amount of pre-paid money could have ever bought me their help. now the Scene People seek me out and wish me good luck and apologize for misunderstandings. I have earned the halo of a good person by being ultimately selfish, doing things and wasting money for the lulz. It just happened that my lulz were accidentally profitable for someone else - crazy, but in a good way, the argument I had on a message board for reasons of personal pride was with a known retard, my unembellished questionnaire showed what an "honest, open and friendly" person I am (although it had been written to troll the interviewer).

The slimes did not know this. They did not know I was fixing the PC for fun or that I donated money out of weird shopaholism. They thought I was practicing the Young Pioneer type of non-reciprocity, working towards a goody goody halo, and they took offense.

They think donating blood to the wounded is retarded - you'd better have a drink to honor the souls of the dead, but playing videogames while others need help is selfish; donating is the same as buying whores, but being liked for free is the same as being a whore; frugality is good, but why are you content and happy while others have private castles and yachts? Why don't you envy them? Envy, I said! Envy, you stupid good-for-nothing loser!

I refuse. I just want my necklace back, and a replacement cup. I have friends, and the slimes have potential funeral attendees.

I've always thought it strange to measure the quality of life by longevity, not by fun, and friends by funeral attendance, not by shared experiences. Now I know better. They are not hardcore pragmatists closely following the ultimate cynic Odin's advice in Havamal. They're losers trying to max out their score total, and if there's anything that I learned by playing indie games, it's that the score doesn't mean shit when it's on a headstone.

Weaponized

2010-07-08T12:27:00.000-07:00

The trouble started when I let a friend live in my tumbledown village house, or perhaps when I fixed another friend's computer, having fought Sality, tricked Photoshop, and made peace between NOD32 antivirus and Comodo firewall. Later, the village guy fixed my house and brought me food and medicine, and it's that particular computer I use to post this.

What a fantastic coincidence.

Non-reciprocity was the thing that got me into trouble. When the tenants caught whiff of me doing stuff for free, they pronounced me retarded and decided to steal my room and village house (To keep things in perspective: the house and the 0.14 acres of land on which it stands cost $10,000; the 56 square ft. room costs $300,000 - and falling, since a five-storey garage is being constructed between the house and the picturesque river with the leisure-vessel river port on the opposite bank.) People get murdered for less every single day.

They didn't want me murdered. They offered me a choice between Option One (a false report to the police, the courthouse and, as they gently put it, "fat lesbos fingerbanging you in jail all year long") and Option Two (a nice comfortable room in the madhouse where I can rest and relax for however long I like and be perfectly happy). Naturally, I chose the third option and ran the fuck away. They didn't expect this. They believe in fairness, parity and market prices. According to their calculations, I had nowhere to go. The house should have been ruined by now, and a fixed computer wouldn't buy a night's sleep.

"True friends should help each other," they said. "Do your friends help you?"

Fuck yeah they do. Not because they should, they're just being awesome.

"What would they say if they learned you attack children with knives and beat disabled ladies bloody?"

They learned the answer the hard way. You just don't pull a fast one on a celebrated journalist. I don't like random strangers to know about my troubles, but I'd rather be pitied for bad luck than reviled for a retarded whore's bullshit lie.

I know my memetics. People are reluctant to change their opinion. They'd rather be wrong forever than admit having been wrong.

Don't lie to a celebrated journalist. Don't piss off a rock star. Don't be a greedy fuck.

The tale grows in the telling. One day, the whore would tire of entertaining herself by punching unremarkable masochists in the nuts* and decide to make it big on the Scene. And the Scene is waiting, with spotlights and rotten tomatoes at the ready.

*I have all her dox, including chatlogs. My friend's son asked me why I use the Windows trashbin instead of speedy deletion to nowhere. This is why, kid. People who never attempted to fix their PC themselves do not know a portable hard drive, unlike a thumb drive, has a trashbin. This is why.

Check or credit

2010-07-07T14:33:00.000-07:00

I'm living on borrowed time, in a borrowed apartment, on borrowed money. The deadline for the report at work passed almost six months ago, and still I am procrastinating. People do stuff for me free of charge for now, hoping I'll pay them back. The clothes I currently wear - a long free-flowing blue dress and shoes decorated with flowers - are not my own.

One day I'll run out of tricks. The card company will come after me, I'll get kicked out of the apartment, I'll lose the job, and my body will have its revenge for not feeding it properly. I'll have to pay the bills, all at once.

But not now, and this is important. Not now. Now I can make a donation (better late than never!) and pay for webhosting. I care about the needs and wants of the future me even less than I care about the wants and needs of others. To hell with food; Future Me will get a prepaid hosting plan, and she better enjoy it.

Lost and forgotten

2010-07-07T12:34:00.000-07:00

I lost a metric fuckton of stuff, both physical and metaphorical, during the past month. Fortunately, most of what I lost I do not remember having. Sure, I lost my awesome Czech crystal necklace, and a lamp, and a music player to drown out others' music on public transport, and a GODDAMN CODE FOR MY CREDIT CARD, and an ability to watch World Cup (go Spain!). And, of course, that fucking whore broke my cup - I'm getting a replacement come vacation, but that's about all.

My hippie friend, the one who goes everywhere for a quarter, praised this quality of his and recommended I emphasize that approach to property.

You know how people say the past is always getting brighter as bad stuff is forgotten? So it does. but it's not always advisable to look back. All this good stuff is bright because you no longer have it, and might never have again. Looking back means getting mired in depressive shit.

Of course, if I forget the awesome and remember the mundane and the shitty, I don't expect my disposition to improve. And living without past at all has been the basis of a multitude of stories showing all the possible drawbacks. A couple of these are actually good, but the more important fact is that most of them are right. Not having memories sucks.

Now, I see how, instead of gradual brightening, instant make-your-own just-add-water past might work in a sci-fi setting. Whoever says that without failures we can't have meaningful victories is the same whiner who'd object to eternal life and free food. Learning from one's mistakes will get thrown out of the window, so an alternative will have to be implemented. Probably in the form of a select number of morally strong people who will know the physical truth and bear its weight. Like LeGuin's Omelas, only less majick - it's impossible to make a moral judgment where "it's magic, I ain't gotta explain shit" is at work. Less torturing children, more conscious choice for the common good.

And then someone gets bored and decides to raise the curtain for the lulz, and I have an idea for a book. The preliminary drafts sit somewhere in my 80-liter backpack. Everything I have fits into that backpack.

Shattered

2010-07-02T10:49:00.000-07:00

As I walk along the street lined with office buildings, I am reflected in the half-open windows. (When air conditioning hardly saves from the heat, opening windows is not exactly helpful, but go tell that to the office workers. I bet none of them is a physicist.) My body looks lengthened and ugly in the windowpanes; I am stretched on the rack of summer, to suffer the heat and the long walk Home carrying a box full of useless trinkets, to suffer double because I won't be able to shower off the sweat and the dirt: my hand is bandaged and I got a shot to prevent tetanus. No showering.

That fucking whore broke my cup of awesomeness, broke my heart (cups correspond to hearts in Tarot, not that I ever cared) not in a romantic (blech) but in a very visceral and bloody sense. Speaking of blood, I got my grandmother's last will dirty. The folder it's in lies on top of the 15-pound devilish box which I carry with both hands. I feel the cut tissue come apart and together again as I adjust to the weight. They say one's own burden is never heavy. Fucking liars, "they".

My head aches terribly. I haven't got hit on it this time, but booooy does it ache. The cure is in the bottle in my backpack, a bittersweet honey elixir. The contents have spilled, and everything inside - webcam, power cords, deodorant, a collection of plastic cards and a hairbrush - is covered with honey. I don't think the magic elixir will ever cure my headache from now on. A splendid collection of teas I recovered yesterday won't help, either.

The devilish box is a package I got from an RPG shop by post. Yesterday I asked them to redirect my stuff to Home or just save it for me. They said, no, we don't do that, fuck off. Today, I barged in with smudges of blood and honey on my hands, face and clothes, and lo and behold, the solution was found. And to think I used to bring them a box of chocolates whenever there was a fucktard in the queue, to lighten their day. Fuck, if only they'd agreed yesterday. Why does the price have to be paid in blood and humiliation?

Grief is not pretty, but it's attractive (happiness is attractive and pretty). People stare, then turn away, ashamed of themselves. I have been approached by random guys only three times in my life: when I went to the concert a year ago (article forthcoming), radiant and hopeful, and today. (And once a greasy fuck decided to solicit an underage me for sex, I kicked him in the nuts and ran away.) I gave my real email for the lulz, but he won't write, of course: it's the emotion that's attractive, not the person.

I arrived home, cleaned the backpack (I'll need it tomorrow) and drank a nondescript cup of shitty tea. But first, I asked my very best friend - the one I wrote a love letter to on April 1st - to get me another cup.

A quarter gets you anywhere

2010-07-01T15:51:00.000-07:00

So I got kicked out of the apartment, and let me tell you, living alone blows. Hard. To help me save money, my hippie/punk/whatever friend took me through a crash course in frugal living: which shops give a five-finger discount, where to find clothing to last a season, how to buy a suspiciously cheap Swiss gold-plated watch, how to save on public transport (give the guard a quarter, he said: a quarter gets you anywhere) and where to eat.

Now, I don't shoplift, I'm too scared to bribe cops, I have more than enough clothes and watches, but that last tip was really helpful. Because cooking for one person blows. So each day I go to the nearest Italian diner for two slices of Margarita.

Restaurant management tends to hire "ethnic-looking" workers. Of course, no sane Italian or Japanese would work in a cheap diner for $500/month, thus, sushi is served by Vietnamese, Yakut, or Buryat people, and those from the former southern Soviet republics play the roles of Italians (just the right skin tone, you see). While the practice is sorta good - labor laws are retarded, discrimination against the "wrong sort" of foreigners is really severe, thus, working in a diner beats shoveling shit any day of the week - it is still incredibly racist. (Btw: the local branch of McDonalds hires people who fit the most narrow definition of "white".)

I ordered three delicious-looking pizza slices (let's celebrate the glorious holiday of "One week till official payday" with something that isn't Margarita) and the worker lady put them into the oven to heat up.

"So, what are these called?" I asked, quite innocently. The lady (her badge read, "Galia", a common Russian name) looked at me with a very strange expression (sad? tired? annoyed? offended?), "This one is three bux, and this pair is two and a half per slice."

...ohhhh bummer. She thought that I, being a racist fuck, got into my head she was overcharging me for pizza. That sounds crazy, but racist fucks and retards happen (and these two types correlate nicely); I used to work at a mortgage bank, and lots of people asked whether the bank is going to crash (it did eventually). WHY DO YOU CARE IT'S US GIVING YOU MONEY DON'T BE STUPID SHUT UP AND TAKE IT DAMMIT.

I smiled my best smile (which was probably a stupid grin, but it's the thought that counts), "No, I just want to learn the name of the dish so I'd know what to ask for next time - these look real delicious".

She smiled back, radiant, shining, and that was awesome. (I also found out the most delicious pizza EVAR bears the very imaginative and highly descriptive title "Tomato and Cheese", which is why none of you 1.7 people reading this would be able to find out what ambrosia tastes like.)

I looked at her badge again and remembered the pink-haired girl from Subnormality (a waiter who was forced to dye her hair brown and [SPOILER ALERT] magically got her splendid pink mane back as soon as she quit). After sitting at a table so as not to offend the lady, I studied the receipt. It read,"[surname] Umayganat".

The management stole her name. The "equal-opportunity" bastards are not adverse to hiring pretty Dagestani ladies as long as they can kick them out when convenient ("Sick, you say? Healthcare - what healthcare? You're not fit to work with food anymore, get out"), ban tips and steal names.

Also, the management considers customers to be racist retards unable to find Dagestan on a map. But then again, they're probably right.

No time like the present

2010-04-01T12:56:00.000-07:00

Huh. That took longer than expected. I imagine I managed to piss off a lot of people during my absence. That pile of bills isn't getting any smaller, and I have yet to see a post-promotion salary increase in effect.

So it's April 1st, and snow is mostly gone. Good, because I hate snow in spring. Especially snow that has been shat in. This year, there hasn't been a spring at all: profit. Cold spells and warm winds come and go and people put on all sorts of clothes, practical and impractical and outright ricockulous, but seasons are defined by footwear. Once there is no sludge to wade through and no snow to make more of it, summer begins.

And I wrote a love letter - something as close to a love letter as I can write, anyway. No time like today! A unique opportunity! Only once a year! Fuck Valentine! April 1st is THE day for love confessions because there's nothing more stupid than a love confession.

Also, lol of the day:

1: "Hey, you know our guild priest?"
2: "Your brother? What about him?"
1: "He's really a girl, and her name is Helen."
2: "WAT"
1: "APRIL FOOL! Her name is actually Irene."

Business cards cont'd

2010-02-16T10:25:00.000-08:00

It's been what, half a year?

"You gain 100XP! Congratulations, you have attained the rank of Engineer!"

The bad: I'm not getting another promotion, ever, for two reasons.

First, the next step is Head of Workgroup, and while I'm currently the senior employee in my workgroup, it's only because of the weird managing practices that made me the only person in the workgroup. It's a very high leap to the top, and there's no way I'm making it in the next ten years.

The second reason is more complicated. There's a group of chicks sponsored by the head of document management. They have completed a basic document management course as a group and are friends as a result of this mutually endured ordeal. One of these chicks works in our department, and while I'm getting promoted for knowing shit about computers and looking ~~unattractive~~ fugly, she's continually getting reprimanded for ~~whoring around~~ expressing her femininity. As the only junior workers, we naturally compete for usefulness, and I'm winning. And she hates me. And her friends secondhand-hate me. And the other workers in their respective departments, um, thirdhand-hate me. Which SUCKS.

Anyway, I'm going to need new business cards. And a new photo with a shopped-on suit.

Decisive Vote

2010-02-09T12:22:00.000-08:00

A group of people are working toward a common goal. Then, bam!, one of them dies. Assuming the death doesn't get exploited to the hilt (it will), the dead person can suddenly gain a lot more power and authority than he had in life.

"He'd have wanted it this way."

"We cannot let his sacrifice go in vain."

Um... why? Of course there can be an unspoken social security contract such as "take care of my children if I get killed" but what does it have to do with the grand goal in question? If anything, the opinion the deceased used to voice while alive should matter less because that opinion was based on outdated info.

Seriously, this is almost as bad as organized religion.

Pliocene Exile Continued

2010-02-02T13:57:00.000-08:00

Things that are good about Pliocene Exile:

1. Feminism in general. Women in the book are used as baby factories, and this is portrayed as bad in a completely rational way, without screaming and frothing at the mouth.

2. The character of Felice Landry in particular. Faced with a literally and figuratively inhuman regime, she's the only main character who actively protests. And the others hate her for that: "Sure it's convenient when someone brings slavers, rapists and murderers to justice, but actually doing this is cruel and uncivil in the extreme."

Such an attitude is also portrayed as bad, a welcome change from the retarded "psychological" films where a cop or a soldier whines like a retarded emo when asked, "Have you ever killed anyone?" Felice is bright, energetic, willful, strong, determined - too bad her name is an intentional misnomer.

3. Applied skills. The main characters are first-class professionals in their chosen fields of expertise, and these skills do help them to survive in the Pliocene. Which brings me to the following: if the education a person got cannot be applied in everyday life, it ain't worth shit. Every single subject should be taught with an emphasis on common applications, because every single subject has common applications. Someone who doesn't know how neon lights work will never build a tokamak.

4. Characters are not retarded. You know when the group is crossing a bridge that someone's going to fall off it, and indeed someone does, but no one whines how scared and afraid of heights/water/purplz/giant frog they are.

Things that are not good about Pliocene Exile:

1. Emphasis on nationality. You'd think that in the era of globalization where there are aliens walking the Earth and humans flying in space there'd be less of a distinction between human races. Not so. Perhaps as a means of preserving cultural diversity, a national theme is assigned to each colony world. The characters are very nation-conscious as a result, which is a bad trait and, given what we observe now on real-life Earth, totally unrealistic, what with cultural diffusion, wiggers, weeaboos, fake Native Americans and other weird folks.

2. Emphasis on religion. Religion has adapted but it didn't cease existing in the face of recent discoveries and the humanity's horizons expanding; in the book, bullshit superstitions are actually virtuous, and this is actively bad.

Monopoly on goodness

2010-01-21T12:51:00.000-08:00

I was quite surprised to find out there are people who believe in the infallibility of the law - not the law enforcement, although the world is strange and I reckon that someone, somewhere, does indeed worship the local attorney (after all, why a single person (who is not me) should hold monopoly on infallibility?) - but law itself. The letter.

So when I ask, "Why do you disapprove of piracy?" the reply is, "Because it's in the fucking Civil Codex! Do you not respect the Codices, you baby-raeping, kitten-strangling bitch?"

And it boils down to the usual fundie argument formalized by Dostoevsky: "Without god, everything is permitted". And that argument is offensive, since it monopolizes goodness. Whatever good exists in you is ascribed to the worshiper's god of which you may happen to not be a follower, and the bad sides are your own mortal fail. the Letter of Law cult posits that it's only Law that holds everyone - everyone! - from raping and pillaging from here to the South Pole and back. That's some solid faith in humanity right there.

Which is kind of ironic, since the blog is about me being largely disappointed in humanity (and the title reflects that). But if I were that disappointed, I'd have shot my brain out (except I don't own a gun, so alternatives would have been looked into).

Law is meant to be observed. It is meant to be reliable, thus, it can't be changed on a whim. Thus, law closely follows social changes at best and lags far behind at worst - but it's never more progressive than society itself, because it's enforced by the high and mighty and is only changed when no longer profitable, that is, "when the roasted rooster pecks them in the ass". Starring Technology, civil Campaigns and Revolution as the Rooster. Coming to a cinema near you.

Esperanto

2010-01-21T11:25:00.000-08:00

Practice is the best teacher. One of my physics professors used to say, "You'll understand this when you take the credit test". And we did.

Of course, discovering things costs more resources and the price is not always reasonable. Cutting people up at random is not widely practiced, and it's good. The LHC is built to certain specifications: one can't just take a heap of scrap metal, weld everything together and call it a day.

Esperanto, as many other artificial languages, was created as a tool to facilitate international communication and international friendship. It's primarily a geek thing, and a geek thing it'll remain - which is sort fo sad, because Esperanto is perfect for learning other languages.

The main difficulty in learning a second language is to understand how speech works. Teaching robots to walk was a challenge, yet most people do it without a problem. In Russia, a second language is mostly taught to young kids, so teachers are instructed to ignore important stuff such as the basics of linguistics and are forced to learn the language in a most unimaginative way. Adults are considered to be too busy to delve into the intricacies of linguistics (what's this?) and the methods stay unchanged.

Which is sad, and sort of contradicts what I wrote in the previous paragraph, but it really doesn't. Rote memorization doesn't even begin encouraging original thinking. For me, the breakthrough came when I started learning Spanish (a third language) - "Hey, this looks familiar..."

So there must be a way to present the basics of language structure in a clear an concise manner, without the stupid, the boring and the difficult, without endless rote memorization, Phoenician grammar and irregular verbs. It turns out there is in fact one, and it's called Esperanto.

Esperanto is a toy language as it should be. While a toy oven gives a kid less cake for the same effort and is thus useless, it's much easier to grasp the basics of Esperanto than those of any other language. And the effort is not sunk: while a failed cake represents a monetary loss, XP points spent on learning Esperanto count toward everything from Abanyom to Zway. And that's awesome.

Is there a plot hole in your story?

2010-01-19T14:43:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Julian May's Pliocene Exile. I greatly admire her storytelling and plot-weaving skills, so there was a good chance I'd learn a lot about starting stories in an engaging fashion by reading The Many-Colored Land (which is the first part of the brilliant Saga).

The premise of the whole story is this: In the 22th century, when humanity is rigidly organized and doped with mind probes for the greater good, those who are not exactly happy have the option of travelling through the one-way portal to the Lower Pliocene. The exiles are well-educated and financially successful. Their troubles, while quite serious for the society described in the book, would be dismissed as whiny emo shit in today's world of earthquakes and lack of blank paper, and rightfully so.

Julian May is awesome at conveying emotions. Do you see a problem with it?

I sure do. For a good part of the book, the reader has to read about whiny misfits being bored in their (anti-)utopia. This existential boredom goes for sixty fucking pages. Sure, some bits were quite good. When the exiles are descending into a cellar containing the time portal, the point of view gracefully slides from one to another. Richard wearing a Flying Dutchman costume was a nice touch (he ends up dead in a craft eternally orbiting the Earth, or so I recall).

Seriously, what the fuck? Isn't it clear that reading about boredom is boring as fuck no matter whether the writer has succeeded or not? I researched publishing stuff: the publishers usually ask for three sample chapters and a plot outline. The Many-Colored Land wouldn't have made it past an intern in these modern times. Now, I'm not saying the book is bad, but it's written in a strange way with a resource tax: read sixty boring pages and get rewarded with awesomeness.

Also: the plot hole. See, it turns out Pliocene is inhabited by aliens who're using the time portal as a source of slaves and other good stuff. Due to the aliens' psionic prowess, the quite docile humans welcome their new elf overlords.

It is explained in detail how the portal works: you turn it on, whatever was in there goes 6 million years back in time. No time passes from the travelling object's perspective. The Pliocene is coterminous with modern Earth, so stuff sent a week later would appear a week later in the past, and the portal stays in the past for exactly as long as the machine is active in the present. In the moment that correlates to the moment the machine is switched off, whatever was in the portal area goes to the present and time catches up with the content. The kicker: it's possible to film the arrival and play it back in slo-mo, so you could see how, say, a perfectly healthy prehistorical animal disintegrates into fine dust.

The counselor who operates the machine prides himself on there not being any accidents of the sort when humans were transported. The initial researcher, one Guderian for those keeping score at home, lamented not being able to send recording devices into the past - they don't survive the return trip.

So where's that plot hole?

If something ages "instantly" or, rather, at the speed of light, it seems to be impossible to observe the process of decomposition, even in slo-mo. But I'll go with it. What the colonists should have done is dump some weird shit onto the portal area. The operator would be surprised and would want to investigate - what was that? An accident? And then, the colonists could write some sort of message and have it ported to the present, and the alert operator could read it in slo-mo.

Presumably, when there's a steady trickle of exiles and one could set up this sort of communication, the portal is already controlled by the aliens. This explains the lack of warnings and cries for help. But why aren't there any requests for awesome stuff? Seriously, with perfectly compliant humans the aliens should get to choose their Christmas presents for themselves. And every day is Christmas.

Paperwork in hell

2010-01-19T14:30:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, we had no money to mail the documents, so it was eventually decided to fax them, to hell with secrecy considerations.

It turned out that our esteemed colleagues on the other end of the wire had no paper (and no money to buy some).

The whole mess turned out to be advantageous as it served as an excuse to be late with the report I had to have completed today. I wrote 44 pages in a single sitting. Too bad most of it concerned scales and weights, not empire-building and ancient war machines.

R for retarded

2010-01-18T10:51:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about blood and violence - the tags on media.

I'm all for making little kids to watch Care Bears. I was first made aware of the programme on April 1st when the mods in the WotC chat (WizOs, ther were called) made an announcement that our roleplay was getting too violent and they have taken appropriate measures to guarantee a comfortable gaming environment, complete with clouds and stuff.

I've also read some advice on buying toys. Beyond the obvious "slutty dolls are evil incarnate", it has been said that toy animals should closely resemble real animals, have natural-colored fur and more-or-less realistic proportions so the child would learn about the world.

Why, then, "If you hit people, they feel pain" is a bad lesson to teach?

Seriously. Cartoon violence teaches kids that if you punch an elderly woman, she will chase you across he street, crash into a vending machine and you'll get some free candy out of the occasion. Very, very informative.

The puritans, of course, are always eager to remove even traces of violence from children's programmes. I've seen what it leads to, trust me. I've lived in what remained of the Soviet Union. It had tons of parent-approved, kids-oriented stuff - books, cartoons, songs. And I've heard hundreds of parodies with less-than-family-friendly lyrics. The kicker: most of these were decades old. Traditional. Passed from older kids to the younger in schools and summer camps. The official, Soviet-promoted kiddie culture was popular not by itself but as rich soil for memes.

It's a small step from nice and sweet to "diabeeeetus".

When kids are showered with unconditional love of their parents, it's Care Bear time. When they are beginning to interact with other kids, conflict is unavoidable. So let teh entertainment grow up a bit. Let kids learn about the nature of conflict and its consequences.

Now, people might say, "Kids want to be entertained and will thusly make an effort to extract fun from the drama by associating themselves with the villain, not the victim."

The solution: Humiliate the villain. It's easy if your heroes are well-written and even easier if they're not. Thus, the little Hitler in question will get a nice healthy shit-bath through his cartoonish avatar and learn a thing or two (probably). Thus, everyone will be happy - except those unfortunates who share a name with your villain. Screw these suckers.

The daily WTF

2010-01-18T10:40:00.000-08:00

I found a leaflet from late last year in my bag. I recall accepting it from a woman at the subway station after seeing a menorah depicted on it, so I decided to read it later and gain some insight into the Jewish culture.

Now imagine my surprise when the leaflet turned out to be Christian propaganda.

It's retarded, but also a good sign. It means that the Christian population has saturated the masses to the point that there are hardly any former atheist converts, and they have to proselytize among adherents of other religions.

On an unrelated note, we had to forward a classified message today. We couldn't fax it (because it was classified) and couldn't mail it because we are too cheap to pay a postage fee. Fan-fucking-tastic.

Rumpelstiltskin redux

2010-01-18T10:28:00.000-08:00

I bet my job on being able to complete 1/4th of a project in a single day. Tomorrow is that day.

Also, I wrote to tech support for my e-reader and they told me to send them the file I was having trouble with. Sort of obvious in retrospect. I'd have gladly done that, except the file's origin is... suspicious, to say the least. Thus, two family-friendly lessons: (1) do not bite more that you can swallow and (2) do not pirate shit, it will fuck up the rights you'd be entitled to otherwise.

After tomorrow's work is done, I'll be busy feeding all sort of badly formatted crap to my reader hoping that it will screw it up. Just my usual luck.

Suit yourself

2010-01-17T12:18:00.000-08:00

As a government official, I had to have a photo of me taken for an ID card. One small problem: I had to be wearing a suit in the photo and I didn't own one. Now, me not owning a suit doesn't cause a problem at the workplace, since I spend my days tucked in a corner under the watchful eye of my three bosses.

The photo submission deadline was approaching, and I had neither a suit nor the money to buy one on short notice. So I had one shooped for $5. The shooper got carried away and also got rid of that characteristic mad scientist look, apparently thinking its presence undesirable in an official document. Which is to say, the end result does not resemble myself at all.

But who cares? The ladies who do not know a good shooper "prettify" themselves to have a picture taken and also end up looking like total strangers. Works fine for them.

Which brings me to the movie stars. They're not good-looking. At all. There's no reason to select them on the basis of resembling their characters, since this is also easily CGIed. Talent is now a myth. Hayden Christensen (I had to look the name up) is not bad - it's just it's impossible to be good with such a trainwreck of a script. Case in point: even Harrison Ford couldn't save That-Indy-movie-that-never-happened (case in point 2: the best Indy story is Fate of Atlantis, which doesn't have Ford in it - not to say that it wouldn't be enhanced by his presence). People are attracted to - and paying for - familiar labels. Which is not bad and not good, but something to keep in mind.

The bucket

2010-01-17T11:56:00.000-08:00

Aegwynn kicked it. Ding-dong, the witch is dead. I did a barrel roll to honor the occasion.

For those who are not aware, Aegwynn is a long-established character in Warcraft and World of Warcraft, a self-righteous, annoying bitch, bossy and whiny at the same time, who blackmailed that nice monk guy for the lulz.

There's a comic series, written by some random dudes and chicks and published by DC. The plot is as canon as WoW plots get and is pre-approved by Chris Metzen. The new characters introduced by the writers kick substantially more ass and die easily, canon characters are bland and uninspiring but have IDDQD and IDKFA always on. So yeah, the Aegwynn frag is chalked up to Metzen himself.

Anyway, I'm so happy because WoW is a shared universe where people actually play, so WoW lore, while an incomprehensible mess as a whole, is more or less well-established at close range. People might not agree on what was the deal with Ashbringer, but there exists in fact a pocket universe of common ground where everyone agreed on a single version. WoW canon is not subject to third-party interpretations. So, ding dong.

No undead in Ancient Greece

2010-01-13T12:50:00.000-08:00

Plot point #2 that pisses me off about Wrath of the Lich King: the Argent Tournament in general and Tirion Fordring's douchebaggery in particular.

Background on that stuff.

The Argent Dawn is the interracial and interfactional organization dedicated to fighting Cosmic Evil across the board. Sounds nice so far. They are actively promoting tolerance and friendship and do not display much douchebaggery beyond what is expected of quest givers.

The Argent Crusade is the AD's Northrend-based branch, titled to compensate for the Burning Crusade (demons) and the Scarlet Crusade (the racist humans). These are led by Tirion Fordring, the guy who stole Alexandros Mograine's sword from his son. Given that Darion Mograine is a whiny emo and Tirion seems to be the classic example of Lawful Stupid, I'd let it slide if not for the following.

The Argent Tournament. A tournament that takes place at the grounds on the northern shore of Northrend in the vicinity of Icecrown. Players are supposed to eagerly slaughter monsters that are already captured and each other.

There was a grand event back in Original, 60-level WoW when the Gates of Ahn-Qiraj were being opened. People were running errands collecting shit to equip an army. Prior to the update that introduced the Tournament, people were running around building that fucking sports facility.

I'm cool with sports. Sports is better than war. In Ancient Greece, all wars used to be put on hold when the Olympic Games were in progress.

Obviously, there never was an undead uprising in Ancient Greece.

World of Warcraft has daily quests. I hate daily quests. They are seriously a job, only you don't get paid and there are no days off. WoW tries hard to maintain an illusion of player input: quests take the player to far-off places so that he wouldn't stumble on the quest monsters that he had put down, and a complex system of phases (that our ~~pirate~~ private server admins can never get right) serves to change the scenery to fit each player's perception of the world.

Unlike standard quests, dailies represent ongoing troubles that the world faces. Some of them by necessity disrupt the suspension of disbelief (like, say, you have to kill the same dungeon bosses over and over). While we might presume that the player is supposed to have saved the world at lower levels repeatedly and, say, the evil wizard in the tower in Darkshore is dead story-wise (even though he's there if you go to look), dailies are outstanding problems that need to be tackled. Daily.

While the players were gathering supplies to build the fucking circus, all the seal-people on the island in a minute of casual flight from the tournament ground got murdered. Green recruits of that very same Crusade are being eaten alive in Zul'Drak. Several people die each day when trying to feed a large yeti that fucker Fordring wants you to kill in the circus for the lulz (or he wants it to kill you). The bitch who gives you the quest sounds so cheerful. I wish that yeti had dismembered her and decorated the Stormwind bank with her entrails.

Sure, there are more stupid and callous things to do in WoW: going fishing to the enemy capital on a bet or murdering adoptive parents of orphans before their eyes. But while this slapstick, seemingly cocaine-fueled comedy is part of the game, it's not part of the plot. This Tournament shit is.

Bottom line: Tirion Fordring is a dirty fuck who should be tried as a war criminal.

What did I miss?

2010-01-13T12:33:00.000-08:00

Plot point #1 that pisses me off about Wrath of the Lich King: Muradin Bronzebeard being alive (spoiler warning).

Imagine: year 1945. World War Two came to a close. Hiroshima and Nagasaki got bombed. The Nuremberg Trials are beginning. Nikitchenko starts the first hearing. Then, the door opens and a guy with a pointy moustache comes in.

"Hey guise, what did I miss, lol?" says His Imperial and Royal Highness Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.

Lol, indeed.

Shop smart!

2010-01-13T12:15:00.000-08:00

I ran out and food and had to go to the store, which sucked x2 since I also ran out of money. The local ATM was broken (just my luck) and the bank predictably closed for the holidays, so I had to walk to the other side of the river to the only store around with reasonable prices that accepts plastic cards.

I was walking around carrying eight cartons of acidophyline (like crack, only good for you) in my arms like a baby, tomatoes in the pocket of my coat and a sausage sticking out of my bag. Customers stared at me.

"Wouldn't it be more convenient to get a shopping cart?" a passing lady said.

"No way," I replied. "First, I'll have to drag this stuff all the way back across the river (for the record, it was 5 F outside), no cart involved, which won't be easy if I'm not able to carry it around the store in the first place, and second, the less I buy, the less I have to pay."

She walked away, amazed.

Old New Year

2010-01-13T11:46:00.000-08:00

Happy Old New Year.

I'm serious. Russia used to follow the Julian calendar prior to the revolution, and the Old New Year celebration survived through the Soviet years. Actual New Year is celebrated much more widely, of course, but I imagine some fundies (who are naturally opposed to the Soviet reform and the Papist calendar) choose to celebrate today. Also, Dec 31 and Jan 1 are still fasting time. Sucks to be them.

People say the way you meet the New Year is the way you spend it. I was broke, hungry and late by half an hour - a promising start.

I made two resolutions: to go outside every day and to finish Revival. I broke the first one on Jan 2, and that's only because I stayed at friends' place for the night and had to go back home on Jan 1, else I'd broken it earlier. And I slept through the vacation, having only written up two character bios and one domain profile (out of 50 unique characters, ~20 stock characters and 25 high-level domains that I need).

I hate working 9 to 6. The most I got out of my life was two winters past when I ~~stood~~ sat watch over the phone line and learned how the world works, thirteen hours a day, seven days a week. Now I'm lucky if I catch a glimpse of the world after work. Which sucks balls. I'm tired every waking second and tired in my sleep. I hoped for little and got even less.

So the New Year doesn't bring change. That weird celebration for retrogrades, fundies and alcoholics is my celebration, too.

Exclusive

2009-12-22T09:55:00.000-08:00

Just the other day, I predicted an end for collectability* and the resident dorks tried to laugh me off the forum. Well look at that, Universal Fighting System and Kingdom Hearts CCGs are shutting down, while the Living Card Game format is still going strong and in fact better than the publisher expected. And I swear I'm not a FFG insider.

*Collectability, as I've been told on the other, awesome forum, implies a secondary market. Something widely available does not qualify.

Bottom line: I'm right. "Exclusive" is a failed idea, and "exclusive" for a subjective reason fails even more. Longer post upcoming. Now, back to playtesting Saturated Dreamers.