Month: July 2018

You'll Never Get Me Up in One of Those

I reference this comic regularly and nobody knows what I mean, and now all of you can know what I mean:

You'll never get me up in one of those
(from OMNI 1980-08)

It's so hit and miss. Sometimes there's an article or story that still blows me away. Flip flip flip past the junk. Most of the OMNI articles are rubbish, UFOs, James Lovelock's Gaia nonsense, psionics, cryptozoology, etc. I mean, I love that they serialized Stephen King's Firestarter, but it is a nonsense story about magic mental powers. And the other story in in this issue is a man finds a sarcophagus of the fictional character "Jesus", but melted because a magic sky fairy used energy beams to take him away or some such. Fuck that nonsense.

The archive.org scan is shit, so the pictorials (the Dune pictorial was hugely influential on me, long before I read the books) are hard to view, but I can search for them by title if I want a hi-res copy. The Internet's often bullshit, too, but you can always search for the good stuff, and there'd be more if people weren't such jackasses about old content.

'80s Movie Bundles on iTunes

Just saw iTunes has a bunch of $19.99 bundles. Not all the films are my thing, but the rest fill out a library well, might be worth the few extra bucks over just the "good" movies.

Last one with Angel Heart, Ran, and Manhunter (the good Red Dragon movie) at the artsy end, and fucking Kickboxer and Earth Girls are Easy at the trash end, whiplash. First Blood is not what the uneducated think of as "Rambo", it's a shithead-sheriff vs. PTSD Vietnam vet story.

  • Iconic Films of the '80s
    • Naked Gun
    • Airplane!
    • Footloose
    • Urban Cowboy
    • Clue
    • Pretty in Pink
    • Some Kind of Wonderful
    • Terms of Endearment
    • Crocodile Dundee
    • Ferris Bueller's Day Off
  • Best of the '80s
    • Big
    • Raising Arizona
    • Wall Street
    • Romancing the Stone
    • Big Trouble in Little China
    • 9 to 5
    • Commando
    • Working Girl
    • The Fly
    • The Man From Snowy River
  • Classic '80s Collection
    • Karate Kid
    • Steel Magnolias
    • Gandhi
    • Ghostbusters
    • The Natural
    • Stripes
    • Tootsie
    • The Blue Lagoon
    • Fright Night
    • School Daze
  • 10 Iconic Films of the '80s
    • Endless Love
    • Manhunter
    • Dirty Dancing
    • Earth Girls are Easy
    • Evil Dead 2
    • Drugstore Cowboy
    • Angel Heart
    • Kickboxer
    • Rambo: First Blood
    • Ran

'80s All Sunday Every Sunday Music

Oh look time has reversed itself and we are now back in the '80s! Forget about 2018, that's some dystopian Blade Runner bullshit, we'll all be long dead from nuclear war before that happens! Time to hit the mall to chat up hot chicks with big hair, and buy that new Van Halen album. Then later go see Real Genius and The Goonies, in theatre.

Sleep and dream is all I crave
I travel far across the Milky Way
'Til we meet again some other day
Where silence speaks as loud as words
And the Earth returns to what it was before

Reverse Chronology

A design note you don't notice until you do, and then it'll annoy you forever:

Timelines in chat are usually forward-chronological (oldest at top, newest at bottom). Slack, for instance. And Slack correctly puts reply trees in forward-chron order as well, same as the conversation, but then maliciously doesn't scroll the view to the bottom, or remember where you read last. Typically incompetent but well-meaning for Slack.

Timelines in blogs and microblogs are usually reverse-chronological (newest at top, oldest at bottom). This blog, or Mastodon, or Micro.blog, for instance. I have comments set in the correct order here, but many blogs default to forward-chron when showing comments; it's unreasonable to put comments above the post, but I could see that making sense for "open threads". Mastodon's standard UI and the Amaroq iPhone client both do forward-chron. Icro iPhone app for Micro.blog correctly does reverse-chron, but Manton's Mac and iPhone apps both do forward-chron.

Why does this matter? A conversation is a filtered subset of all posts. It should flow in the same order as the overall feed. If it doesn't, you get whiplash, and avoid looking at conversations. Every time you open these wrong-way conversations, you have to scroll scroll down to the part you care about: New replies.

Maybe we should just make all microblogs read like chat, forward-chron everywhere. But out of habit and experience with chat systems, I frame forward-chron as ephemeral nonsense.

And now you'll be annoyed every time you see old posts at the top of an upside-down conversation view, just like I am.

What I'm Watching: Pi

One of my favorite movies, mainly for that Clint Mansell, Orbital, Autechre, Gus Gus, etc. soundtrack. Really should just set up a CRT and VCR, find the videotape, and play it on loop like I did when I was younger (along with Hardware, The Crow, and the Tim Burton Batman movie; don't judge me, I judge myself).

"Life isn't just mathematics, Max."

What I'm Reading: Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells

Murderbot returns, looking for its origin story and some peace and quiet to watch stupid TV shows in. Along the way, it meets a transport with excess time/intelligence on its… well, no hands… and some dumb kid researchers who need security, and has to pass as something it can't even make eye contact with.

"Yes, the giant transport bot is going to help the construct SecUnit pretend to be human. This will go well."

As I was hoping for, there's more background, several mall-like stations are explored even if Murderbot can't do a lot of social interaction. Several nice fights and "how stupid can Humans be?" bits.

Short and SUPER breezy, but exactly what I want more of.

★★★★★

Shin Megami Tensei Liberation Dx2

Sweet, a new SMT game (not a Persona game, which are OK but not really my thing)! You are literally using your mobile phone to run a game where you use a mobile phone to run a game which lets you fight real (in the game?) demons that can only be seen with a mobile phone. … Look, man, I just play it I don't do sanity.

Like the classic SMT games, you start with Pixie and go out and recruit more demons by talking to them before fighting. Then you merge them together in blasphemous rituals to make more powerful demons.

Sadly there's no grid-by-grid dungeon crawl, just the usual mobage missions with a series of fights, and some story visual-novel stuff.

[UPDATE]: There is a dungeon crawl, you just have to unlock it after the first chapter of the story missions! The first one is very small, but I presume they'll get bigger and more complex. So it's a real SMT game after all!

I mostly like the style of this, and there seems to be hundreds of demons to summon and create. The music varies from rather good JPop to some of the most boring elevator music loops ever invented to drive humans to Black Friday rampages.

The one negative is the "Megakin" tour guide/"Pro Youtube Personality"/most annoying NPC in a game since Navi and Tingle from Zelda games. Holy shit I hate this guy, and I hate being forced to tap on buttons to fulfil a "tutorial". Just let me play and make my own mistakes, SEGA. The gun-crazed chick NPC partner is insane but amusing; who or what do you get if you're a female avatar?

My friend ID is EG93SHUH (Home screen, ? icon, Search tab)

100 Days of Programmer Burnout

This is a fantastic way to make someone hate computers and programming, and take up a life of farming and/or sex work so they never have to see a computer again. (Which, sometimes doesn't seem such a bad idea, anyone want an aging gigolo in between potato plantings?)

When I was trying to do the Advent of Code, I couldn't do half the days because life got in the way. 100 days would be homicide-inducing, not habit-forming.

Here's my challenge: Program when you feel like it, when you have some problem amenable to computational solution. Take the weekend off; or if it's not your day job, only program on the weekends. Spend as many minutes or hours as it takes. For the love of fuck, do not commit to a Microsoft® Github® log, what is wrong with these people?!