Mark Damon Hughes blogs about tech and everything else
It's super rare to hear a new-to-me band (duo) that just plays good rock 'n roll/rockabilly, and their video/stage act is astounding, like David Byrne all over again:
Albums:
Band info:
I just fixed a bug and re-uploaded these. They're little scripts that sit in a bookmark, like on your favorites bar, and do something useful to the web page. Monochrome Dark & Light change the page style; View Source puts source and plain text in boxes you can easily view and copy-paste from.
My teenage years IRL were difficult; I grew up in a time and place where to be a nerd was as bad as being a fag, you'd get beaten or murdered for that by the inbred hillbilly apes. Happily, there were local BBS's full of other nerds, COMER (cbbs? Terrible people, but it had dnd, a fairly complex D&D command-line game), Elvin Forest (Apple ][ board, nicer social group), Three Roses Inn (WWIV, Wil's board was our game hangout), a few others, and eventually my own, The Dungeon (first on Atari 800 running software I don't recall, later on Atari ST running STarnet) and later in Spokane I ran The Caves of Steel (Fnordadel on Atari ST/MiNT UNIX-like).
I still hit up telnet-based boards sometimes, I just tried lmorchard's Decafbad and did some turns in LORD, and I'll check back on that; I don't think he has Trade Wars, which was my game of choice, and the source of my old nickname Kamikaze. I've tinkered with reviving The Dungeon on MysticBBS and that may work out, but hosting's difficult. A better thing might be to make a web-based BBS, which is pretty trivial, but then it's not really a "board" anymore, you know?
So I watched the BBS Documentary again, it's been… 14 years?
The early days part of this, the culture of sharing and flame-warring, ah, the good old days. I had very little contact with/interest in FIDOnet and their horrible internal politics, I was on WWIVnet and Cit-net, both of which were much more chill. I loathed then and still loathe the cracker/h4xx0r parasites, totally useless wastes of skin. The ANSI art scene kiddies were wankers, but at least they made something. My bias then as now: I program, and I write, and those are what I respected back most.
But I find I'm still angry about SEA vs PKWare. SEA released public domain ARC software with source but no spec for the format, and then sued Phil Katz for using that source to make a better product, and later to make ZIP with a shared format everyone could use… Thom's sad he got some hate mail in among his giant corporate paychecks, oh no. Phil was so fucked up by it he drank himself to death. Fuck you, Thom, there is no justice in the world that you're alive and Phil's not.
But I can't read all the tweets in Safari, because the "moments" feature doesn't work: "403 Forbidden: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it." Reloading it in Chrome worked. Neither of them has me blocked.
As @ashleyfeinberg wrote: “press him for a clear, unambiguous example of nearly anything, and Dorsey shuts down.” That is not unfair characterization IMHO. Third, I will thread in questions from audience, but to keep this non chaotic, let’s stay in one reply thread. #KaraJack
—Kara Swisher
I grade you all an F on this and that's being kind. I'm not trying to be a jackass, but it's been a very slow roll by all of you in tech to pay attention to this. Why do you think that is? I think it is because many of the people who made Twitter never ever felt unsafe. #karajack
Got it. But do you think the fact that you all could not conceive of what it is to feel unsafe (women, POC, LGBTQ, other marginalized people) could be one of the issues? (new topic soon) #karajack
—Kara Swisher
Yeah, it's Chinatown, Jake. #KaraJack
—Kara Swisher
I would've quoted Jack, but he literally said nothing of substance in the entire thread, only "we tried". Tried and failed, Jack.
What a catastrophe, a giant horrible threshing machine of hate with a doofus asleep at the wheel.
The right solution is to shut Twitter down and switch to federated systems. Fediverse routinely "blocks" instances which allow abusers; those instances can remain their own little world, but not interact with the rest of us. And users can block or mute people and domains based on their own needs. I recently muted mastodon.social, the "flagship" instance, because it has many abusers and little moderation. The Federated timeline I see now is so much nicer without m.s. If I want to see what Eugen or their local timeline is doing, I still have an m.s account I can check in with, but I don't bother unless someone refers to current drama and I feel up to reading drama.
We finally get an update notice, this is apparently not the one that'll remove Miyu, but if you want to get her, you should get in soon. And this will be the banner you'll want to do as many 10-pulls as you can on, because it's full of healers:
I'm actually pretty good on healers now, but I'll pull once anyway in hopes of upgrading Pom.
They say "bug fixes", but this has been one of the most bug-free launches of anything I've seen; even for other games that had a year or two in JP before global launch, those are usually buggy as shit. There's a few weird clipping issues with the paper-doll design, but that's "works as intended".
Finally got out of the beach (I only need 3 more shells for another sword, but I'll get by; maybe do one walk up and back a day) and onto the Riftbreaker, and levelling up my RP-team (Aldo, Cyrus, Amy, Riica) in Another Dungeon on the side; I have 8 class books, only 1 of which is a character I have (and I don't need to level them yet).
Dumb rich party girl Sophie Nelisse (of The Book Thief) with a new inheritance goes to Morocco with new bodyguard Noomi Rapace (from the good Dragon Tattoo movies), shit goes bad, and bodyguard has to keep her alive and try to figure out who's behind it. None of which is particularly new or interesting by itself, but the movie pulls out a few good moves.
The fights are good close-up struggles, a little jump-cut-heavy instead of the long tracking shots I prefer. The fortress kasbah is interesting, security system's not complete movie bullshit but visual enough to follow on screen.
I think they wanted to make another Man on Fire, but Creasy is a far more complex character than Sam, and there's more plot and bonding in that film; this isn't slow, but there's nowhere near enough plot, and it just kinda trails off at the ending.
★★★½☆ which is what Netflix originals seem to get for the most part.
"We're still flyin'. It's enough."
The Joseon period (14th-19th C) of Korea's their formative period, but a big blind spot for most Westerners. I know a fair amount about the ancient Mediterranean thru fall of Rome, and the Dark Ages thru Charlemagne; some Japanese and Chinese history because of chanbara and kung fu movies and books like Outlaws of the Water Margin; some American history, but not so much the Texas School Board approved bullshit; only the most cursory details outside those time/space bubbles. Even tho it's right on the border, and like Japan was heavily influenced by China, Korea's isolation and outright weirdness keeps it in the dark. What I've managed to learn is: They tried very hard to be strict Confucians, they recorded everything (seems like half their upper class existed to spy on the other half), and they treated women and lower classes like animal property, worse than China or Japan which were hardly egalitarian.
What I'm learning from this show is: A) Their architecture's so Chinese the Chinese look like they're the bad copies, B) They have fantastic hats and rather nice machete swords, and C) Their aristocracy are shit at covering up zombie outbreaks.
The Crown Prince tries to find out if his sick father is alive or dead, in the hands of a wicked, pregnant stepmother half his age. Yeah, this is gonna end well. Happily, he has a fat but competent Sancho Panza sidekick and sets off on an epic quest.
Hanyang, where they start, is the equivalent of Seoul today; Dongnae's a southern port. The show explains none of this, be ready to read a lot of wiki pages to get at least some geography and fact-checking.
The peasantry might as well be Dennis the Shrubber from Monty Python & the Holy Grail, they're charmingly filthy and stinky.
The dead here are like Chinese jiangshi mixed with Return of the Living Dead zombies and a bit of 28 Days Later rage-infected. They're bestial, awkward, and stupid, but not slow or incapable of cunning.
And there's a lot of Evil Dead comedy in the fighting and zombie-eye camera in some scenes. The little zombie children are adoraterrible.
As in any good zombie story, the living are the worse threat.
This is a very gameable series. It's just like my old Dungeons & Zombies campaign, with wandering knights/fools with swords fighting undead or trying to find shelter every night.
★★★★★
And I'll be here a while, killing crabs, bananas (third joke monster, after Plum Goblins and the spongmonkey-looking dudes at the Ogre sword fight), and blue "dragons" (barely even wyverns). The Last Island gear is 20 points better than anything else I've unlocked, it drops a ton of gold, and my gear situation was critical; the 4 pieces I've got so far are a game-changer, but I need 12! I'll probably just get 8 and I can move on, back row can suck it. The entire beach is a single short corridor with no turns, so I'm running back and forth forever. Oh kill me now.
Also, you wash up here with Aldo alone; so keep him sorta levelled up if you don't want to die a lot. I got off the beach with <100 HP and no MP, and had previously eaten my food.
When I escape this beach, I can spend more time in the industrial and spacey areas I just finished for story, and do more hard dungeons, and then back to the main story. So there's nice cool darkness at the end of this too-bright grind tunnel I'm in now.
The best part about AnotherEden as a mobage is it isn't Stamina-limited. The worst part is the battery life basically restricts you to 2 hours of game and then it's back on a charger, so you may as well have had Stamina.
There's several sidequests now where I've greatly disagreed with the linear plot, I desperately miss Elder Scrolls Online's branching quests with consequences. Just have to sit back and let the idiots fuck things up, then collect mats, then finish the quest. "How could I have known this would fuck things up?!" Creepy farmer man is creepy and I'd kill him and use his body as fertilizer in a tabletop RPG. I've commented before that morality enforced by a scoring mechanism is not ethical: This is exactly that case in point, I have to help this guy because the system says I'm rewarded for doing so and there's no choices, even though ethically it's utterly wrong.
You get better hard/very hard dungeon rewards from high light or dark ratings. But there's no way to draw plot characters from the Dream, so you can't increase their light/dark ratings the usual way. Instead, JP site says grinding these dungeons with a plot char in party sometimes adds (slight spoilers):
I did a fourth 10-pull, and completely filled my C-team with ★★★★ Lingli and Denny, both excellent hitters, and a ★★★☆ Ciel which is disappointing since there's a ★★★★ and will be upgraded to ★★★★★ this year, if global follows JP release order; that's too much book grinding to upgrade. And a couple dumb ★★★ robots, which are kinda cool; I'd like to build an all-robot party, even if everyone but Riica sucks. I have another 1000 Chronos but I'm saving them now for special event banners.
