My cat is a weirdo. Sometimes when I walk down the hall, I'll reach down and pet her as I go by. Sometimes as my leg passes by her, she then swipes at it with her paw, maybe hopping a bit.
at first I thought she was just being a little weirdo, because she certainly is that. then I wondered: what if she's reciprocating? wouldn't that be something?
You want to know what nerds talk about at lunch? we dissect things. yesterday someone brought up the usage of the word "ditto", and we had a heated discussion about when it can and when it can't be used.
Our conclusion (or rather my conclusion, I guess) is that "ditto" is only compatible with sentences with a 1st person subject, and it modifies the subject, transplanting the speaker into the position of the speaker of the original sentence.
So I can say, "I think people are dumb", and an appropriate response is "ditto", because that person is stepping in to take my place in the sentence.
On the other hand, if I say, "people are dumb", someone can't say "ditto" to that, because there's no 1st person to step into. This construction just doesn't work.
waddap. haven't been doing the regular blogging thing much. most of what I've written lately is on my destructoid blog instead. I find that, not surprisingly, more people read it, so if I have something coherent to say about games, that's the natural choice.
my wife read a thing somewhere about a dude who stopped bathing with soap, and how it didn't really affect them. I was pretty skeptical at first, since if I don't use soap when I bathe, I get fairly greasy, but I decided to give it a try anyway. To be clear, I still shower once a day, and I still scrub myself down. I just don't use soap for that.
Week 1: felt like a grease ball before, during, and after every shower. It was a bit gross, but not as gross as you might think. I also didn't smell bad or anything, so at least there's that.
Week 2: not much different than week 1.
Week 3: most of my body is no longer that oily before, during, or after the shower. notable exceptions are head, face, ears, neckbeard, lower back, and outsides of my arms near my shoulders (what the...?).
Week 4: all exceptions from before are still oily, but I also mega need a haircut, so maybe that will help with the head at least.
Surprisingly (though not if you think about it a bit), my showers actually take longer now than they used to, because I have to vigorously scrub myself to feel clean, not just wipe all over with soap. That is, I'm now manually doing the work that soap was doing before.
Games I finished recently:
now playing:
this weekend I was at the san diego zoo. the place is massive, and it took us nearly two full days to see it all. it was fun, but also kind of depressing, as zoos usually are. it's not anything about animals in captivity, really. I now know enough about zoos to know that in general, animals are really pretty well cared for and can be quite happy in zoos. the san diego zoo in particular seems to go to a great deal of trouble to ensure this of their animals. plus, they have all these carefully managed breeding programs, which also seem carefully managed.
the depressing part is the mentality of people who go to the zoo and who kind of expect the animals to be there for their entertainment. this behavior can range from something as subtle as just wishing aloud for them to display themselves to more obnoxious acts like banging on the glass, calling out loudly, and whistling.
by and large, the animals are not there for our amusement. they're there because that's where they're living. it seems kind of distasteful to adopt the mindset that we should be able to demand some kind of favorable behavior from them. I'm guilty of it a little bit too, but at least I notice it.
nevertheless, it's great to be able to see these animals and learn about them, so I'll keep going to zoos.
so I got a new netbook recently, because my old one (acer aspire one) up and died all of a sudden. the new one is a hp mini 210 hd. as far as netbooks go, it’s pretty rad. it has a high resolution screen, which is great until I realized I couldn’t read anything. so I set the computer to high DPI. How ludicrous is that? a netbook running with high dpi.
anyway, the main thing I find wrong with it is some puzzling choices with the keyboard. there are no dedicated page up, page down, home, and end buttons. Instead, to do that, you have to hit the dreaded Fn key plus up, down, left, or right. that would be fine, I guess, if there were an Fn key on both the left and the right. as it is, it’s only on the left, so to do a page down, I have to use both hands. annoying.
Another weird choice is making the key for “printscreen” the same as the key for “insert”, but making it so that the primary function is printscreen and the secondary (Fn) function is insert. I guess I can kind of understand that. I am probably one of the minority who sometimes uses ctrl+insert and shift+insert for copy and paste, respectively.
I found a program called sharpkeys that allows for some limited remapping of keys, apparently using some built-in windows feature having to do with scancodes. I say limited because a big limitation is the inability to map a combination of keys to a single other keystroke. in particular, I am interested in making right-control + up/down do my page up/down for me.
After some searching, I found a program called autohotkey, which does all this and way more. I’m using just the basics right now, but it can do all kinds of stuff, like run arbitrary programs upon receiving a keystroke, scan windows that are open on the system, append to files, and tons of other things.
here’s my script that I’m using for it right now. it’s pretty simple and slick. I no longer need to use sharpkeys either.
AppsKey & Down:: Send {WheelDown}
AppsKey & Up:: Send {WheelUp}
RCtrl & Down:: Send {PgDn}
RCtrl & Up:: Send {PgUp}
RCtrl & Left:: Send {Home}
RCtrl & Right:: Send {End}
PrintScreen::Ins
Ins::PrintScreenI managed to cut my left index finger last night while cutting through some english muffins to make breakfast sandwiches. I held the muffin in my left hand and cut with a gigantic bread knife down towards my hand, like an idiot. it cut a little too smoothly by accident, and I ended up slicing the tip of my left index finger.
now I have the opportunity to observe what daily activities I absolutely need that part of my body for. the good news seems to be that I don’t really use it for much that I couldn’t use my left middle finger for instead.
hm, nothing else comes to mind right now. I may update later if I think of something.
this morning I bumped up against the wall of the shower while having my shower. it was cold, and reminded me of my childhood. when I was in maybe first grade, our class took an overnight field trip to the richmond science museum. the place was utterly magical for me, since it was my first experience at a science museum like that. I remember two specific experiences there.
the first, which is what reminded me of the museum this morning, was an exhibit where a series of metal bars were placed in a row. every other bar was either pretty hot or very cold. when you placed your hand on it, so that it touched several of the bars, you experienced a sensation quite unlike any other, probably led primarily by your body’s confusion at having such conflicting feelings so close to one another.
the other thing I remember was a kind of workshop that we as a class attended. in it, the instructor created something she called simply “goop”. it was a little bit slimy, and oozed like a very thick liquid when poured, but when you squeezed it hard enough it resisted, like a dense piece of clay or something. the instructor insisted that it could be created in our own homes with ingredients as simple as just corn starch and water, but I was totally disbelieving at the time.
I started playing mass effect 2 today. it seems to be better in pretty much every way compared to the first one, which I also liked a great deal. I managed to make my main character just a little weird looking, by accident. so yeah, that’s cool I guess.
some people may be annoyed that they removed such fundamental RPG concepts as armor and weapon management, but actually, I’m not really missing it. the loadout system gives me some choice about it while not making me constantly manage my inventory. and face it, if you played through ME1 you are undoubtedly familiar with how much time was spent in inventory management. ugh.
the one other thing that is just downright bad is that the cool “special” armors like the cerberus armor and blood dragon armor have helmets that, while they look cool (I guess), totally obscure your face. the facial animation has gotten even better since ME1. characters raise their eyebrows, avert their eyes, and make faces with their mouths, and I really kind of want to see shepherd doing those things during conversations. furthermore, conversations are a pretty big part of mass effect. apparently there is a thread on the bioware forums clamoring for an option to remove your helmet. I (and 15 pages worth of people in the forum) hope they address that in an update.
currently a level 7 sentinel. exciting! the scene where you first see the new normandy gave me goosebumps. it was really well executed, cinematically and musically.
I was reading this (pretty interesting) article on game innovation today. They had an interesting bit in it where they said that Nintendo invented the 3d platformer. is that true? was mario 64 really the first 3d platformer? it was really, really good, but I don't know my trivia well enough to know if it represented the invention of the genre.
i finished watching the movie, dirty harry last night. it was okay, i guess. the pacing was too slow and some of the camera work seemed pretty awkward. there was also way more nudity than i expected to see in a film.
i'll say this, though, the music was fantastic. the drum beats and guitar lines were super catchy. i'd listen to that soundtrack.
oh, and now i get the reference to the line, "you gotta ask yourself, 'do i feel lucky?' Well? do ya, punk?" Actually, the best part about that line is there's lingering doubt about whether harry himself knows if his gun is out of ammo. if he's not sure, then he's totally bluffing with his confident demeanor. i like to think that every time he's asking that question, he's also asking it to himself.
lately i've been listening to some podcasts at work. it started when i tried out the penny arcade podcast, which i liked so much that i listened to every episode basically straight in a row. this is still my favorite podcast of all the ones i've checked out. it's basically just gabe and tycho talking about whatever for 1-2 hours, and somewhere in the middle they come up with the idea for the comic for the next day. i pretty much think they're some of the funniest people alive, so hearing them ramble on forever is just awesome. not to mention... the gratuitously flowery way that tycho writes his posts? yeah, he talks like that too. awesome.
Once i ran out of those (*sob*), I eventually looked around for some other sources. I tried the Major Nelson podcast, which was fine. I mean, it had content. in fact, it had content i wouldn't find in some of the podcasts i went to later, for example, an interview with one of the mass effect 2 developers. that's kind of cool. of course, this one is an official microsoft podcast of sorts, so you won't hear major nelson, e, etc. talking about the kinds of crazy things gabe and tycho do. not only that, the tone is way more businesslike (in comparison, i guess). each of the speakers goes around taking turns talking about various things with some discussion. they have "segments". you certainly won't hear them all bust up laughing and shouting for a minute straight over some absurd scenario. oh well.
don't get me wrong; i like major nelson fine. i think he's a big ol teddy bear.
Then I took a break for a while. Last week someone at work linked to the destructoid podcast, or "podtoid", as they call it. I initially listened specifically for a particular section, but ended up listening through the rest of it and liking it. Since then i've started listening from way back, and i'm continuing to like it. i like that it's way more informal than some other podcasts. i'm not sure what i think about here being 4-6 people on the air. sometimes it gets a bit out of hand. certainly if you can't tell them apart some of the jokes are lacking context (because they spend about a quarter of the time making fun of each other).
what I do like is that all of the speakers seem pretty intelligent. a lot of the show is one person sparking a discussion, then all the members going around discussing it for another half hour or something. i've heard several really good discussions on there. they also all have somewhat conflicting views and tastes, so it's not all of them just agreeing, which I tended to find in other places.
they have three sections of each podcast, mainly: game of the week; perhaps some topic; and listener questions. game of the week is each person talking about what they've been playing that week. usually this ends up getting into what they like and dislike about it, and what other members like and dislike about it. sometimes then they talk about some particular agreed-upon topic for a while, which can be good. then they answer reader questions, which again sparks more discussion.
they're usually insulting each other and laughing and hollering a lot. it seems to be a pretty fun time. when the sports dude starts talking about sports, i totally zone out, though. also, all i can imagine is kutner from house (warning: spoilers) whenever he's talking.
destructoid is part of the gamercast network, so i browsed there a little. i was curious what girls would talk about on these, so i tried the sarcastic gamer pink podcast. i listened for about 10 minutes before turning it off. i don't know if it would have gotten better after that, but I could not stand the incessant loopy giggling that permeated it.
i read game informer, so i had this wild and crazy idea that maybe they have a podast. indeed, they do. I checked that out too. I gotta say, it felt quite a bit like the major nelson podcast. is that how most podcasts are? again, it had kind of high quality content associated with it, which probably comes from being a very well established piece of gaming journalism. they were able to talk about halo reach and their various impressions, from visiting the bungie studios. good content, not as interesting tone. i rate the discussion aspects somewhere between MN and dtoid.
yeah, these are all gaming podcasts. i like games. what can i say?
on a tangential note, i really really hate it when i see a sign for "the best gaming around!" but oh wait, they're talking about gambling. sheesh.
whenever i have to do something annoying at work more than once, i write a program or a script to do it for me next time. i'm a big believer that an up-front investment of a little while is worth it in the long run in terms of time and effort saved, even if it sets me back a bit temporarily. it's kind of the "work smarter, not harder" credo.
i think about weird stuff all the time. I guess most people do, but think their own weird stuff is weirder than others' weird stuff. one category of weird stuff i think about is efficiency. kind of like the dad from cheaper by the dozen (great book, by the way). he's a motion efficiency expert, which seems like a pretty rad job to me.
when i turn off my laptop, i always think about when i will next use it. if it's going to be within the next 15 minutes, i'll put it into sleep mode. if it's going to be longer than that, i'll put it into hibernate. the idea being that the additional power needed to shut down and start up the laptop "costs" a certain amount of time in sleep mode. I haven't scientifically figured out what that threshold is, so i've set it mentally based on convenience.
what if i'm not sure? well, my laptop is set to go into hibernate automatically after 20 minutes, so if i'm not sure, i'll put it in sleep mode, knowing that if i don't turn it back on, it will shut itself off after a while. pretty sweet power saving capabilities in windows makes this possible.
I recently beat Bayonetta... three times. I started out planning just to play through it once, but then penny arcade challenged me with a contest to beat it on hard mode. I don't generally end up beating games multiple times, usually because I play through the first time slowly enough that I don't feel the need to. bayonetta, though, was gripping. And I wanted a t-shirt.
it's easily one of the best games i've played in ages. the fighting mechanics are ridiculously well polished. when you get the hang of it, you can blaze through enemies feeling totally unstoppable.
a lot of people didn't like the story much. they complained either about how it was too complicated or too cliched (light vs. dark, in broad terms). Maybe that's true. Even if the particulars of the story didn't overly interest me, the game world did. I especially liked the lore about the angels and heavenly figures themselves. apparently there are something like 9 ranks of angels in increasing order of power or status. Each rank has various types of footsoldiers and a kind of captain. then, aside from these "regular" angels are several "auditiones", or overseers, I guess.
The character and enemy designs were great. The enemies (angels) in particular were really unique designs and had a lot of great details, too. The human(oid?) characters like bayonetta, jeanne, luca, rodin, and cereza were also very well done, though that is more dependent on taste. At the very least, the animation was fantastic. Even the facial animation was pretty good, something that few games seem to do really well.
I didn't mind the half-animated cutscenes either. I can understand how it could be seen as a trick to save budget, but it also lent a unique style.
I had absolutely no problems with any of the voice acting either, which is much more than I can say about most games.
yeah, so after i beat it on normal, i had to beat it on hard for the PA contest. then i was having enough fun that I beat it on "nonstop infinity climax" mode too. For accomplishing this, you get a really sweet lightsaber. I still want to go back and get some of the final unlockables, like beating the game in under X hours and getting enough money for the platinum ticket to fight rodin.
congratulations to Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo for being about time travel and not confusing. I gave it a 9 because it had really good animation, it was hilarious and moving at the same time, and because it used time traveling well without sidestepping or ratholing on insane paradoxes.
At around the climax of the movie, both my wife and i were able to point out why something time-related happened, unlike the endings of most anime series, sadly.
Every year I go to PAX, and without a doubt one of my favorite parts is playing GW2 in one of the console free-play rooms, with the chance of attracting a small crowd. This year I had the added bonus of having some live, stiff competition and meeting some pretty cool guys.
I was going to write a kind of mini-guide, at least for Deadline mode, but then I saw that another site had already done a pretty rad job. But then I thought, I don't see all of the advice I'd say written there (or stated the way I would), so maybe I should write some more anyway. I don't have all the pretty diagrams or videos at my disposal yet, but over time I may add those things.
They put the leaderboards up online, so you can go there and punch in knutaf to see where I sit. As if you care, heh.
Before I talk about any of the specific modes, I want to say a few things about the game in general.
Possibly the most important thing that I can mention is seating arrangement. I read somewhere once that the optimal distance to sit away from your TV is about 1.5 times the width of your TV. So on my 50", that would be about 6 feet away. Sure enough, when I sit on the beanbag right in front of the TV, I consistently do much worse than when I sit on the couch back at the wall. I'm pretty sure this has a lot to do with peripheral vision and turning your head. As in, when I'm sitting at the proper distance, things like those jerk arrows coming from the sides of the screen are seen automatically without having to move my eyes or turn my head much.
Another pretty important thing is posture. Yes, like how you sit. Everyone has a different way that they sit to be effective when gaming, and you have to know yours. For instance, I tend to do better when I'm sitting up straight looking forward.
Learn how to "bobble" the right thumbstick. The point is to spread out your shots to cover a wider area. This is absolutely crucial. In many of the modes, you will do this pretty much constantly, so being able to do this without thinking will pay (in points!).
Shooting in the cardinal directions can be very useful if you are flying along a wall and need to shoot something directly in front of or behind you. It's altogether too easy to aim crookedly and have your shots go into the wall.
I'll only say something about enemies for which I think the strategy isn't immediately obvious. For instance, I'm not going to tell you to watch out for pinwheels and "just shoot them" when they're in your way. You already know that. Also, some of the enemy types, like black holes and gates, will be covered in the context where they're useful.
There are a few things to know about these guys. They're actually pretty deadly, even under relatively mundane circumstances. You'll encounter five types of spawns, and you deal with them differently.
Single. A lone arrow that goes across the screen horizontally or vertically. As you're circling the board, it's best to try to take them out when they're moving perpendicularly to you. Once you're going parallel to them, the angle you have to aim at is less forgiving. These guys are tricky because it's easy for them to blindside you as you go by or overtake you from behind.
Half-row. This is half of one of the borders of the screen, all moving horizontally or vertically. If possible, the best way to deal with them is to fly to the empty space of the other half of the row, and fire parallel to them. If you do this right, the entire half-row will die virtually at the same time as it runs into your stream of bullets. See the following diagram for a visual aid.
Full-row. Just like a half row, except taking up a full border of the screen. If it's perpendicular to you, shoot a hole for yourself to go through and then try to deal with it like a half-row. If you're parallel to it, you'll have to shoot sideways to make a hole, then sneak through.
Sparse radial. These spawn around your ship in a ring, either pointing inwards or outwards. If they're pointing inwards, fly out through a hole between the "spokes" and shoot backwards. If you time it right and aim right, your shots will hit all of the arrows as they converge in the center of the circle. If they're pointing outwards, I don't really have a good suggestion.
Dense radial. Same as sparse radial, but packed too tightly to just fly out between the spokes. The technique is similar, though. Shoot a hole in one direction and fly straight out that way. Your aim and precision need to be good for this. Shooting in one of the cardinal directions might serve you well.
A video demonstration, in case you weren't impressed by my hand-made graphics.
You know what I'm talking about, right? The diamonds that break up into 3 little babies. Did you know these are the reason you see many players circle the playing field counter-clockwise? In
In any case, in GW2, the babies' direction is random. Nevertheless, your tactic for destroying them is similar. You fire into the purple and keep shooting, possibly bobbling the stick back and forth a bit. If all goes well, your follow-up shots will automatically take out the babies.
They fixed the obnoxious bug (it had to be a bug) from the first game where snakes in the process of spawning in could kill you before they were fully spawned in. Not that you care, if you didn't play the first one.
If possible, shoot them as they're spawning in. They always spawn as a speck, and at this point, the head is vulnerable and an easy target. Once they start actually moving around, tracking the head can be hindered by their own body's occlusion or other snakes.
The best way to deal with a mob of these guys, aside from running through a gate or triggering a black hole, is to trap them against the wall. If you narrow the angle of the stream of shots until you are shooting directly along the wall, normally you can halt their dodging instinct.
The principle on which this works is that the greenies move in the direction away from shots that are coming towards them. However, if you shoot exactly at them, they can't pick a direction to dodge, and just take it. The wall technique basically uses the wall as a guide to shoot along a straight line directly at them.
If you have a really huge swarm of greenies, there's a special way you can take them out, but it isn't generally applicable. It is fun to watch, though.
Deadline is hands down my favorite mode. I love it because in a very tangible way, the game is adapting to you in real time. When you do well, the game "rewards" you with more and harder enemies. When you do badly, it punishes you by taking them away.
If you've taken the GRE computer-adaptive test, you may know what I'm talking about. It's taken on a computer, and it keeps track of whether you're getting questions right or wrong, and what kinds. If you rock, you'll keep getting harder and harder questions (which are worth more points); if you suck, you'll end up with weaksauce questions that don't help your score all that much. It's super stressful to keep thinking about whether each question was easier or harder than the previous one. Wow, what a tangent...
In Deadline, the faster you kill enemies, the faster enemies spawn. One way I think about it is that the game spawns a set of enemies all at the same time. Then it counts down some timer in its head till the next spawn. If you're fast enough to kill the entire spawn within that time, the next spawn will have more enemies than it would normally have. Not only that, but the next spawn will occur pretty much as soon as you've cleared the spawn before it, which buys you precious seconds. Apparently how fast and how many enemies are spawning is referred to as your "rank."
What's that? I didn't explain the premise? Woops. The goal in Deadline is to score the most points in 3 minutes as you can. You have some bombs, and infinite lives. The latter makes it a good mode for practicing, but if you're really going for a high score, let's not kid ourselves; if you die more than twice, you probably won't clear 15 million.
Dying is bad for two reasons: firstly, it will take several seconds to get lots of enemies back on the screen; and secondly, it lowers your rank. It actually feels a little more subtle. Let's consider your rank like a "level" in a typical RPG. You get some number of experience points, and once you cross some threshold, you level up, and at that instant, all of your stats raise. I think the rank here is the same way--a discrete function rather than a continuous one. So if you die once, you go back to the start of your current rank. You may not see too much of a difference in spawn rate. But if you die again too soon, you'll lose a whole rank, which will take time to gain back.
The Robot Panic site does a reasonably good job with their tactics, so that's a good read. They mention 3 phases. At first, you want to kill enemies as quickly as possible. The way I think about it, this proves to the game that you've got the chops to take on more enemies. It accelerates the spawn rate. Eventually, you have a good number of enemies spawning regularly, so you want to make sure to suck up all the geoms possible, to raise your multiplier. Finally, when it's madness all over the place, you need to kill the mob of dudes following you using black holes and gates, which give a 5x multiplier to those kills.
The general method of playing this is to circle around the outer wall, shooting ahead or sometimes inwards.
There was a kind of switch that flipped in my head at one point, when I stopped considering black holes to be a bad thing (because they're a trap waiting to happen, and if they blow, they can spawn enemies that are faster than you are) and started thinking of them as a useful tool for clearing out enemies following me.
You'll want to get good at two skills here. The first, I like to call the "drive-by." The idea is to fly really close to the side of a black hole and pop in enough bullets in a split second to blow it up immediately. In particular, it's important that it blow up before it sucks in any enemies. Once it sucks something in, it starts to get out of control, and with it goes your ability to blow it up without being caught in the midst of flotsam on the way in.
The second technique is taking it to the next level: fly to the "far" side of it before doing the drive-by. When I say "far" side, I of course mean the side farthest from the huge mob of enemies following you. By doing this, more of the blast will take out the mob, giving you that delicious 5x boost.
I stole this diagram directy from the Robot Panic post because it's just that well done.
These are the other source of big money in Deadline. Dealing with these effectively is just as tricky as dealing with black holes. I have two related pieces of advice regarding these, and they have to do with how you go through the gate (duh).
First, what not to do. If you can help it, don't fly straight through the gate when you're approaching it perpendicularly. The way a gate operates is that the two orange end-caps are the explosive devices. They explode, taking out anything in their blast radius. Again, remember that you're followed by a mob. The closer you can get one of the end-caps to your mob when it explodes, the more 5x points you'll get.
So if you're approaching perpendicularly, fly around to the far side of the gate and run through in reverse. If you're picturing this in your head, you may realize that the mob has followed you around the side, and is more or less positioned directly on top of one end-cap. Mega points!
If you're approaching parallel to the gate, don't just pull a hard left or right turn through it. Snake far to either side and then pull through, which should position more of the mob over and end-cap.
I had a very important realization the other day, that if you have greenies following you, and their turning radius makes them able to intercept you in one of these circling or snaking maneuvers, you can briefly fire shots at them to ward them off of your path. For me at this point, it's a bit of luck, but it seems to help.
There may be some strategy associated with bouncing shots off of the gates, which is supposed to attract a bonus of its own, but I don't know how big the bonus is, and I've never found that I could really be successful while simultaneously evading and aiming at a gate.
In all of the videos I've seen for Deadline, the players use at least one bomb, but only to get huge amounts of geoms. Your first two choices for killing a mob ought to be black holes and gates, but barring that, if it's been too long since the game has spawned one of those and your mob is large, it may be worth your while to bomb them and suck up all the geoms. Remember, bombs don't give you points. Also remember, it will take a couple seconds after a bomb to bring up the momentum of spawning again. Precious seconds!
Next time I'll write about some other mode, like Sequence. I finally got the Smile achievement, so I actually have specific advice about some of the levels.
I watched a ridiculously awesome talk last night. nathan myhrvold, who founded microsoft research and studied with stephen hawking, among other things, is writing a cookbook that explains the scientific processes behind how food cooks. The idea is that by educating cooks about some of the physics and chemistry involved, they are more empowered not only to employ conventional cooking methods more accurately, but also attempt new ways of cooking that can only work with understanding of how things work.
You can find the full talk here. It's an hour long, including questions, and also includes a live demonstration of making ice cream without milk but with liquid nitrogen, and some footage from a ridiculously nice high-speed camera. It's both entertaining and informative, especially if you have any interest at all in physics, biology, chemistry, or computers.
btw, when the cookbook comes out, I am going to purchase it at any cost.
just saw a license plate that reads "UNIXPRO". and even better, it had a frame that read, "real programmers use vi". you know i'm all about that.
perhaps ironically, there's a high chance that person works at microsoft.
edit: how embarrassing. I didn't get the URL for the vim site correct
my wife introduced me to cowbirds in love. it has a stupid name, but > 50% of the comics make me laugh aloud. in a world where most of the comics at most make my mouth twitch with amusement or may elicit a chuckle or chortle, this is awesome
I especially like how this one and the two that follow it are set up so that the third in the series is itself a punchline to the first two.
I started reading the hard-bound copy of gunnerkrigg court today that we purchased from the dude who does it. it's pretty rad. I especially like all the mythology and classics references.
my latin is getting rustier by the day, but i think "ora lege relege labora et invenies" means something like "speak, read, study, work, and you will discover"
when this book is done with (already halfway through after less than an hour) i'll probably continue reading on the site, or maybe even order the next one. i think there's a next one...