MemeMachineGo!

If you're still reading this after the years of neglect, bless your heart. I'm moving my personal blogging over to zedlopez.com where I will neglect it less, at least for the short term. Eventually I'll copy over my posts from mememachinego, but I'll leave everything here intact.

I've installed the latest Ubuntu, 12.04 on a couple of machines, in my usual fashion -- with the alternate install CD, I set up whole disk encryption and install a command-line system, adding the rest of my desired environment on top of that.

And on boot, I'm left with a blinking cursor on a blank screen. I assume things work if you've installed Plymouth.

It's easy enough to fix once you understand the problem -- edit /etc/default/grub to remove "quiet splash" from the default boot options and update-grub.

The acclaimed 1893: A World's Fair Mystery interactive fiction game has been available for years on a $20 CD, but for the next 5 days is available for download as part of Bundle-in-a-box's Adventure Bundle along with several graphic adventure games for the ludicrously low price of pay what you want so long as it's over $1.19 (which amount continues to drop.)

But all of the games are Windows-only, so this would still be of limited interest to everyone else, but superhero Jimmy Maher, the Digital Antiquarian, has arranged with the author to provide the TADS game file to anyone offering proof they bought it. Yay!

I just finished a rebate application, a process expressly designed to promote disqualifying errors.

I don't think I've ever worked so hard for $10.

I just finished a rebate application, a process expressly designed to promote disqualifying errors.

I don't think I've ever worked so hard for $10.

If you're near a Target that still has it, the iRiver Story HD e-reader is being dumped for $50. At that rate, I sprung for it -- there have been rare occasions when both Pocahontas and I have wanted to use my Nook, and it'll give me some more comfort level with rooting and hacking my Nook.

Early impressions -- the text quality is noticeably better than my Nook (the Nook Wifi a.k.a. Nook Classic). There's less glare in bright light. Page turns are faster. It's substantially lighter, but also flimsy feeling, like the smallest lateral force would snap it. Then again, the Nook has a glass screen and the iRiver doesn't, and between that and its lightness, my guess is that the iRiver's more likely to survive falls.

What I like least is its Google Books-centric-ness. It repeatedly asks me if I want to turn off airplane mode to sync with Google Books. (No, I don't. That would be why you stay in airplane mode.)

But for $50 I still think it's a pretty good deal.

Now if only I had more time right now for reading...

Ken Hite's RPG review column, Out of the Box, has a habit of disappearing from its various venues. But thanks to the wonders of the Wayback Machine, all of this Hite-ian goodness can be yours:

Gamers Realm 2001-06-29 to 2003-07-18
Gaming Report 2003-07-21 to 2006-08-03
Indie Press Revolution 2008-09-08 to 2010-03-10 (not all on one page -- you'll have to browse a bit)

Every so often, people go on about how Cthulhu isn't all that, given that he was defeated by being rammed by a steamboat.

But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler could not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where--God in heaven!--the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.

But what's our only source for this? The journal of a freighter's sole survivor, who describes his shipmates having gone mad before dying, at the same time (unbeknownst to him) artists and sensitives were having disturbing dreams all around the world.

R'lyeh never rose. Johansen and his shipmates never encountered Cthulhu.

They were just above R'lyeh while Cthulhu stirred in his slumber. Already disturbed by having been attacked by the Alert, losing the Emma, and having killed the crew of the Alert, the proximity was enough to cause the waking visions that inspired several of them to step out onto a R'lyeh that wasn't there, that caused Johansen to imagine a Cthulhu that could be shattered by a steamboat. By whatever combination of mental fortitude and good luck, Johansen had a vision that didn't inspire him to bring about his own death, and he wasn't wholly shattered by the event.

The stars just weren't right. When they are, a steamboat's not going to help us.

When a red panda and a pumpkin go to war the only winner is youtube.

What's cuter than two baby raccoons in a hammock? Seven baby raccoons in a hammock.

Thor the Mighty Avenger, collected in two volumes, is a purely fun retelling of Thor's arrival in the early days of the Marvel Universe.

Thor's original origin had him as a Captain Marvel analog -- Don Blake, a surgeon, stumbles upon a magic walking-stick that transforms him into Thor (while itself transforming into Thor's hammer.) As the series progressed, and he interacted with Asgard, this began to seem even goofier -- how could they accept this ordinary human as Thor?

A later writer did an admirable job of retconning this. Don Blake wasn't an ordinary human. Odin had magically transformed Thor into Don Blake, along with false memories and a false history, in order to teach Thor a lesson in humility. The walking-stick hadn't been sitting there for centuries for anyone to find; it had always been Odin's intent that Blake would come to it.

Thor: the Mighty Avenger retains a little bit of that retcon, but ditches Don Blake entirely. Thor is on Earth, confused and not understanding why or how he got here. As the series progresses, he learns from other Asgardians that Odin has sent him to Earth to learn humility after he committed some terrible transgression, but they won't tell him what it was. Odin has forbidden it to be mentioned, and threatened to curse anyone who did.

And I'm sad that we'll never know what, either, because the book was cancelled after 8 issues. It's just the sort of comics reconstruction I'd like to see more of.

The bad news: we found it after surplus sold it for $165.

A man was murdered in Berkeley Sunday night. He'd called 911 to report a trespasser; police declined to respond because they were busy waiting for an Occupy Oakland group marching from Oakland toward Berkeley.

The Occupiers would ultimately engage in dangerous activities like eating pizza in front of a UC Berkeley building.

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

Continue reading "How to Destroy the Earth" »

The Automatic Detective by Lee Martinez is a hard-boiled detective story set in a city that's the pulp SF world of tomorrow, with a large dose of superhero comic-book sensibility on top. Our hero is a huge battle android who was central to a mad scientist villain's scheme for world domination until he developed free will and turned on his creator. So his citizenship is probationary, and he has to walk a fine line lest he be reclassified as an object without rights.

The book is sheer fun. If I have one complaint, it's that it starts with the conceit that it's a hard-boiled detective story set in this world, but concludes as a superhero action story; I'd have liked to see the hard-boiled finale.

Shortly after my last post, the server on which MemeMachineGo runs went kaput. My gracious host very quickly rectified this, but then I was very slow to re-install the Perl modules that MMG's Movable Type installation depends on.

So, resuming now, any neglect of my blog isn't technical in nature.

"Moneyball." Boring. A few good moments, some crisp dialogue, but Brad Pitt's character was the only one developed worth a damn. It's the only time I've seen Philip Seymour Hoffman uninteresting, which says much more about how little his character had to do in his 3 minutes or so of screen time than it does about Hoffman.

"The Social Network." This made me feel bad for Mark Zuckerberg, or as bad as I'm likely to feel for a billionaire in his twenties who's overseeing running roughshod over the privacy of hundreds of millions of people. I read The Accidental Billionaires afterwards, the book on which it's nominally based. Very little of the movie's portrayal of Zuckerberg could be found there, and the book itself has been accused of displaying an anti-Zuckerberg bias. Sorkin has stated in interviews his priority on a compelling story over the facts, and he succeeded by that metric. It was a good story. But I figure if you're making a movie about events just 7 years old, all of whose players are living, it'd be good form to pay a little attention to an honest portrayal. Or not to make it.

"Charlie Wilson's War." (Shortly after seeing it, I managed to misremember the title as "Charlie Parker's War." But Clint Eastwood already made that movie.) Moviegoing happiness is a scene between Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman scripted by Sorkin and directed by Mike Nichols. I've always felt pretty neutral about Hanks, but he was great here.