Author: mdhughes

Judgement Day Wednesday Music

Those who shout the loudest impose their will
Upholding laws that serve the few
Declaring peace while the sirens sing
In the name of progress, the name of madness
Drum beats faster, crowd shouts louder
And chaos replaces order

I want justice for the voice that can't be heard
Vindication for every suffering and hurt
Let retribution hold dominion over earth
Because Judgement Day's not coming
Judgement Day's not coming soon enough
—VNV Nation, "Nemesis"

Tildeverse

The Tildeverse is a bunch of shared UNIX or UNIX-like servers (in reality, all the ones I know of are Linux, which <sigh>), with individual user accounts, or "tildes" after the way you refer to a home directory in a URL or UNIX command line: ~name.

Anyone can sign up for one of these, tilde.town got back to me in a couple days over the holiday and I expect they're faster during reasonable times.

So over the holiday I made a simple little web page, then wrote some ASCII-art (and Emoji-art) games in Javascript, and now I've written an operator's manual for a fictional computer, the TTMS-76 (Tilde Town Microcomputer System '76). I'm thinking about making some 3D renders of it, patriotic colors to match the American Bicentennial in 1976. I'll probably mirror all this on mysticdungeon.club when I work out what I'm doing with that.

There's a bunch of little command-line utilities on tilde, like alpine for local mail, feels for blogging from text editor, botany for watering a plant, poem to get a random poem, chat for a friendly local-system IRC; there's also a public IRC on Tildeverse (but it's more what you'd expect from a public IRC, so you may not like that).

If you used to use a shared UNIX server, this will all be very familiar and fun. If you haven't, it's a great way to learn more about command-line tools, how shared hosting works, how to write HTML the old-fashioned way, and so on.

Software Principles for 2020

This is both for myself, and to decide what software I'll tolerate in my presence in the future.

  1. No lag. All UI must respond and be responsive again within 100ms. Most everyone has many cores in their CPUs and a massively parallel GPU not doing that much, you can spare ONE to run your work thread. Stop with the long animation shit. 100ms is plenty to see a shadow moved from one place to another, where there is now an interactive UI.
  2. No load screens. If you can't preload "instantly", be functional, show a usable menu while background loading. Media streaming needs to buffer, but you can show a poster frame instead of empty space.
  3. No ads or spyware. If you can't subsidize your software some other way, don't ship software. Or as the late very lamented Bill Hicks said, "If anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself!" (and of course there's ads on youtube; so maybe I need to find a better video hosting system? I know there's a fediverse-based video thing)
  4. No custom binary formats. Save your data in JSON or some other common system (plist on Mac, etc), so users can export & manipulate it from their own tools.
  5. No sites without syndication. If you have a web site or blog, you MUST support RSS or Atom, or both. Failure to do so should have you removed from the Internet.
  6. No unsecure connections. I know it's hard to add https the first time, and some older services can't be easily wrapped, but every http connection is a chance for false information to be fed to you, your computer compromised, your information to be stolen.

In Which Dave Winer Doesn't Understand WordPress

I hit the bookmark link to my site (Cmd-4 for no good reason in my Safari tabs). Hover +, Post. I'm in the edit screen.

wordpress-new-post

Write my title, make sure the slugline looks OK, write the post in Markdown (I use Jetpack; YMMV if you're using bare WordPress).

Screenshot or art? I just drag it in, hit OK in media library.

Pick categories & tags (I always duplicate my categories in tags; again your process may vary), hit Publish. Note crosspost to fediverse, Twitter, and micro.blog. Elapsed time: 2 minutes at most?

Black Coffee in Friday Music

What I'm Watching: The Witcher

It is the most magical time of the year, so time to watch the new shitty fantasy series.

The show alternates between two almost totally separate shows; this season is based on prequel short stories, so apparently nobody will meet anyone until the end and the videogame starts.

Moody almost monochrome Witcher scenes where Geralt[sic, Polish can't spell "Gerald"?] broods and delivers Batman lines, refuses to do anything for anyone, but is clearly so desperate for coin he'll fight monsters on spec ("Kikimora" here being a weird swampy spider-ogre thing, rather than the Slavic mythological one which is a pair of good and evil house fairies). He meets a sexy witch in a bar who keeps the locals from murdering him and buys him beer, but he runs off with a little girl who kills rats to get a job with a magician. Who has a fairy fountain full of naked dryads, and wants him to kill the sexy witch from the bar.

Much brighter but still washed-out medieval political shit, battlefields run nothing like a real medieval battlefield (no honor guard for the queen, who leads from the front, lot of Lord of the Rings kind of cgi crowd shit). Tiny tomboy princess is about to be heir to a dead kingdom. The "Nilfgardians" are apparently black-armored psychopaths who don't take prisoners, torture victims.

I played a bit of the first Witcher game, but it doesn't explain much of the background. It's some generic pseudo-Europe called "The Continent" (or whatever that is in Polish). The Nilfgardians there are a more normal Holy Roman Empire pastiche, even leaving subject kings in place.

Why is Geralt[sic] a "mutant"? Allegedly 80 girls born in an eclipse are all mutants and evil, which is either medieval nonsense or factual description of magic world, and I can't tell which. But what's his excuse? Magic seems to be rare and super powerful, but nobody really minds its use, which seems at odds with the "he's different KILL HIM" attitude to Geralt[sic], the girls, monsters, and Elves.

We finally get a real fight scene with the Witcher, and it's pretty good; fight choreography and editing portrays a thing far faster and tougher than Human like a high-level videogame character just murderizing all the normal thugs, and fighting evenly against another mutant.

"They created me just as they created you! We're not so different!"

E2

Now there's another storyline: Hunchback Pig-Girl can teleport to magic fairy-land, and gets bought by a witch for half the price of a pig. No worries, tho, someday she'll become Yennefer[sic] the Witch and make herself pretty, because only poor & non-magic people are ugly in the Witcher. But first she has to go to Shitty Hogwarts, which is a series of caves and stone classrooms with a loading screen showing two towers and a bridge for context; there's no scenes set where you would see the matte painting/loading screen behind anyone. Total set budget: $50 for plaster, scrap wood, and a veritable mountain of plastic skulls & bones.

We finally get back to Geralt[sic], remember the main plot? Hunting "devils" who steal grain for a leather sack of coins, which is suspiciously exactly how much he negotiated for. Zero effort was made to make anything plausible, it's just like the videogame. Ah, I love a good kill/fetch quest. We get a lot of sitting around hearing about Elves and how Humans have massacred them. Which never makes sense to me: If Elves are a superior, magical, immortal race, how are mere trash monkeys able to kill them?

The princess runs away from the Evil Dark Army, and is taken in by stupid refugees who don't realize she's clean and pretty and therefore royalty; they are of course dirty and ugly because they're Working-Class with Ambitions, and therefore doomed. Their Dwarf slave doesn't like the situation, but nobody likes him either. Well, I like him more after [SPOILER]. The princess has zero personality (or the actress simply couldn't even read lines), she's a plot coupon that moves thru scenes on rails.

I'm perplexed by the period this is supposed to be in. The Witcher game is sort of medieval 12th C Poland? But there's post-Renaissance bards with 18th C or so lutes, singing about potions for abortions. I'm shocked I haven't seen more anachronistic technology with the casual disinterest the show takes in period drama.

The currency situation is bugging me, too. In two episodes we've had marks, ducats, orins, and florins? Marks are German and only in Shitty Hogwarts land, but the other three are within a day's ride of the starting forest and are Italian. Why aren't there any zloty, if this is so Polish? Why is any of this historical Europe if it's a completely different fantasy world?!

Well, so far this is about on par with Uwe Boll's Bloodrayne, but lacks the star power (Michael Madsen, Ben Kingsley, Meat Loaf, and a dozen Romanian whores!). All this has is Henry Cavill (the doughy, vapid, murderous Zack Snyder Superman) who does fine standing around growling, and he can fight well, but he's barely even present for "acting", he just hits his marks and says his lines. Lars Mikkelsen (Mads' wuss brother, who we last saw in the original Danish The Killing 13 years ago) is sort of amusing and cuddly as the magician Slartibartfast or whatever; but I think they wanted menacing and mystical, which he is not.

★★☆☆☆ script, production, and acting quality, ★★★½☆ for fight scenes and entertaining stupidity. Totally going to keep watching, this is a nice fun trainwreck show.

Year of Commercial Crew

"Liftoff! The rise of Starliner and a new era of human spaceflight!"
—Josh Barrett, Boeing launch commentator

"I’d say we’re in the 85-90% range of our test objectives."
—Jim Chilton, senior vice president of Boeing’s Space and Launch Division

This is why Boeing is so terrible: They can't even acknowledge their failures and address them. Starliner isn't a new era of anything, and didn't make it to the station. If there had been crew on board, they'd sit in orbit, possibly for days depending on how far off orbit they are and the ground weather, then risk reentry for no purpose, and the station wouldn't get resupplied. Best case is nobody dies but the mission's still a failure.

And for this they're taking $300M? And a couple billion wasted on SLS which may never fly. This is just pork. Politicians giving money to a company, who cares if anything works. Everyone involved is committing fraud.

I think NASA should cancel all of Boeing's contracts. Let them try to qualify again, submit bids like anyone else, without political bullshit. Maybe Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic can launch better and faster.

SpaceX has been supplying the ISS since checks Falcon launches 2012-05-22. They were supposed to get Crew Dragon to the ISS in 2015, but didn't finish it until 2019-03-02 with flight 69 (nice), and still aren't crew-rated until an abort test next year; but they're taking half as much per flight and are far less likely to blow up or fail.

Roscosmos are still the only ones capable of getting a crew safely to and from orbit. Foust's article doesn't go into how Roscosmos is run by thieves and plunderers while trash overflows, but they don't seem like they'll be long for the world Solar System.