I Am Completely Serious

There’s a big treefull of them just outside. They wake me up in the morning, and I’d rather they refrained. I have an alarm clock.

These are like twice as big as the Ohio ones, too. One of them zoomed right by my arm when I was coming up the stairs yesterday. I thought it was a bird.

I’ve been messing with the Maya PLE on and off the past month or so, and I’m most of the way through the tutorials that come with it. It actually doesn’t strike me as difficult, exactly – it’s just that it requires memorization. There are so many options, it’s hard to remember how to get to the one you want. Some things are named really opaquely, but after you’ve figured out what they do and how they relate to all the other similarly-sounding things, it’s hard to think of anything else they could be named. This is not something it would be easy to go back to after a long break.

According to Fretful-sensei, the name “Kinoshita Sakura” (“under the cherry tree” when written in Western order) does not sound overly cutesy to a Japanese person, nor do “Akino Matsuri” (“fall festival”) or “Hino Matsuri” (sounds similar to “Hina Matsuri,” aka, the Doll Festival; on its own sounds like “fire festival” or “sun festival,” which may or may not exist someplace). I’m not sure whether to believe her, as she sometimes seems a little less in touch with Japanese culture than some of the other teachers – maybe it’s just she’s older and has kids, so she doesn’t have much free time?

Last week I was trying to figure out why the kanji 「漢」, which means “China/Chinese,” and is usually pronounced “kan,” was being furigana-ed in a manga as “otoko” (「オトコ」) which means “man.” I’d googled this and found a lot of Japanese websites doing the same thing, but couldn’t find an explanation of the practice. Fretful-sensei stared at this in bewilderment and could offer no explanation. Later I asked another teacher, who explained immediately that writing “otoko” with the “kan” kanji meant basically “macho man” (with about the same level of associated irony), and most people knew it.

Fretful-sensei also gets surprised by the existence of some Japanese food items – this week she was astonished by nattou candy, which several mentally unbalanced people in my class have apparently voluntarily eaten. I wasn’t particularly surprised by this, as I’ve accidentally purchased sweetened nattou-flavored soymilk, deceptively sold right alongside the chocolate and banana-flavored soymilk.

My brain still hasn’t caught up with the thing about me now living five minutes from the 100 yen store.

I can just go buy a colander! For 100 yen! (105 incl. tax.)

I’ve just done some Kingdom of Loathing math. Theoretically, if I were to liquefy all my items, I would have 380,597,379 meat. A Mr. Accessory, which presently has a market value of about 4,500,000 meat, costs $10.

So, I have about $840 in video game assets, if there was any way to cash them in.

(A lot of that’s in the form of Items-of-the-Month – the only things I’m missing since June ’06 are the Travoltan trousers and the yuletide troll chrysalis.)

My main meat-bot script is actually pretty short – it’s only 670 lines, though it spans eight files. Because I use good practice and keep my MMO bots highly modular, you see. I also have about fifteen other, secondary bot-scripts for use in specialized situations, though several of them I think I’ve only ever used once.

The breakfast of people-whose-brains-have-short-circuited-from-the-heat.

I was going to go to Book-Off today, but it’s 97° degrees out and I can’t move.

It gets hot, so I lose my appetite, so I lose weight too quickly, so I’m sore everywhere, so I can’t get to sleep.

Going to read manga in Japanese until verb conjugations knock me out.

Hey, wait a second. Vague spoilers: Continue reading “Sudden pre-sleep Avatar finale thought”

I am the sort of person who is capable of unironically enjoying something called “Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok.” It is about how the Norse god Loki did something bad and got banished from Asgard to modern-day Japan, in the form of a seven-year-old-boy, ordered to dispel the demons of darkness from human hearts, which he is to accomplish by opening a detective agency.

This premise was selected by means of throwing darts at someone’s manga collection.

It probably doesn’t count as liveblogging if 1) I’m watching it several days after it aired because I haven’t had time yet, and 2) I’m not actually blogging live because I wanted to sit on the bed, and so had to unplug the ethernet cable.

Continue reading “Avatar Finale”

In the middle of my dream about the Demon Kadon and her fight against the Evil Pope, as well as her interpersonal conflicts with fellow protagonists Princess Leddain and Templar Hagen, there was an interlude in which I went into the grocery store to get hot chocolate mix. Because I was nearly out. Reaching the appropriate aisle, I upon further consideration of the matter decided to buy straight cocoa powder instead, as I already had a large thing of sugar with which I wasn’t doing anything else, and because the cocoa would additionally be useful for making pudding.

This resolved, I went to check out, and the dream went back to Kadon and the pope. Except that now Zuko and Azula were there, as well as one of the evil women from Tactics (the one who spilled tea on her leg) and some monsters from Barbara Hambly’s Windrose Chronicles.

I suddenly remembered all this when I went to make hot chocolate just now, and realized that, in matters relating to groceries, the dream was exactly right on all counts. I will follow its advice after class tomorrow.

Catch up already, internet!

Spoilers:

Continue reading “Avatar 3.16-3.17 (“Are you kidding me?! I wouldn’t have cast it any other way!”)”

A WordPress plugin that works up to at least 2.5.1 that does threaded comments and email notifications, and seems to work fine so far. (The templates it includes are pretty bad, though – I had to put together my own.) If this had gone up a few days later, I’d suspect that the guy timed it to coincide with LiveJournal’s most recent episode of cleverness.

(I still haven’t found anything that mimics friends-lock functionality perfectly. It would probably have to combine OpenIDs and something like this.)

In short:

It’s not possible to either transfer or cancel a domain registered this way without making your personal information public. Yahoo’s description of the service is dishonest about this.

At length:

Continue reading “Why Yahoo Private Domain Registration Is Not Private”

Avatar isn’t going up on iTunes as it airs! What’s the point of these “season pass” things if I just end up on BitTorrent anyway?!

I’m pretty sure today’s the hottest day of the year so far. I spent the last two hours of it walking heat-dazedly around town, trying to find a single frigging store that carried plumbing snakes and/or Zip-Its. At the fifth place (it would have been the sixth if the koi store had been open), I finally gave up and said to a clerk, “Sorry, I don’t know what this is called in Japanese, but I’m looking for the tool you use to clean out the bathtub drain?”

Because I’m a filthy hippie and didn’t want to use corrosive chemicals that will poison the water table, I made sure to say “tool,” and did the universal gesture for “plumbing snake,” which I had just then made up and which is very expressive. He showed me directly to the Corrosive Chemicals Aisle, and pointed out one that he felt was particularly nicely corrosive.

So I don’t think civilians are allowed to have plumbing snakes and Zip-Its here? Corrosive chemicals are fine, though. Damnit, Japan, and you’re usually really good about this stuff.

Almost immediately afterwards, I discovered that the same store carried Dr. Bronner’s.

I’ve talked about nice things enough! This time, I’m going to make fun of somebody’s house.

Click the picture to zoom in and read the text. It is hilarious.

* It is a “Luxury Lodge,” with ad copy visually calculated to make one think of a ski lodge – the little bare-wood structure at the top of a sharp slope that the signs are in, the snowy picture (there’s no snow in the actual sim). And it has “privacy windows,” and you can also get a “vacation lodge” version of the house. So far we are doing a pretty good job here of invoking the Western stock symbols of wealth and privilege, but can we take it further?

* We can! We can call something “exclusive.” “Owners Group: An Exclusive Group for Arc Owners.” This group is only for people with big ridiculous houses.

* It’s called “The Arc.” This is my new favorite marketing thing ever. It conveys moral superiority, legitimacy conferred by authority, escape or sanctuary from a teeming rabble and/or hostile world, a sense of vast size and weight, and wood. It’s so perfect.

Continue reading “Second Life Adventures Number Whatever: Pretend Houses and the Performance of Class”

WordPress doesn’t delete comments you mark as spam – they remain in the database to help train the spam catcher. If you accidentally mark a real comment as spam (or, perchance, a whole page of them), and you have access to phpMyAdmin, you can get it back pretty easily.

Standard disclaimers: This is for WordPress 2.5.1 – I don’t know if the database is organized in exactly this way in all previous versions, or whether they’re going to change it in later versions. Don’t do anything big with this without backing up your database, and don’t do it at all if the idea of messing around with MySQL by yourself scares you. I suspect there are plugins that’ll help you with comment recovery out there – go look for one if you’re worried you’ll mess something up. (But back up your database anyway. No, seriously. There’s a plugin for that.)

Continue reading “How to Retrieve WordPress Comments Accidentally Marked As Spam”

I took someone else’s perfectly respectable-looking theme and covered it with pictures of Sechs. I think I’m now incapable of identifying my website as my own if it doesn’t have a grumpy Sechs picture on it. Oliver Sacks will write a case study on this phenomenon.

This will be short because, though DB Bailey’s stuff is incredibly awesome, I don’t know that the vocabulary yet exists to allow me to explain why. There is no critical lexicon for 3D environmental design! Someone make one so I can use it! This is too hard!

When you’re working in CG, it’s obviously possible to do a lot of stuff you can’t in real life. You can make stuff turn into something else when you look at it from a certain angle, or turn invisible when you go around it. You can make invisible walls, and visible walls you can go through. The thing is that, in the twenty years or so that 3D video games have been common, we’ve gotten used to these things happening. They’re called “bugs.” When we see them, we are not impressed.

Sometimes we should be impressed!

Continue reading “Second Life Adventures 4: DB Bailey’s Blinker Hall”

Blogs about WordPress themes whose own themes are broken.

(If anyone knows a good fluid-width two-column theme with a really robust options page, preferably one that plays nice with OpenID comments, tell me. The latest update pretty much broke all my customization, and I’m too lazy to fix it.)

The woman who lives across the street carries two huge kitchen garbage bags out in front of the house and props one up against the fence. She takes a pair of scissors out of her pocket and begins carefully pruning her bushes back, putting the remnants into the bag. It is going to pour any second.

If I were a Hemulen, I would knock on people’s windows and wake them up when I see they’ve forgotten to bring their laundry in.

It rains all the time here, but today’s only the fourth or fifth time I’ve heard thunder. I didn’t see any lightning.

(The term officially starts today, but class doesn’t start until Friday. I wish they’d send an email or put that on the website.)