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Status: Boy, that Billie Holiday can sing.

So AIM is shutting down on Dec 15: And read that FAQ. "Why?" "We know there are loyal fans". That's not an answer, AOL/Oath!

But fine. I have iMessage and a .Mac @mac.com address, right? I'm a blue bubble, I'm somebody.

Huh. Well, I can send and receive messages, but can't set my status anymore. No IM, no status. My very specific but subtle mood messaging is gone! Why isn't this in iMessage?

IM status

  • Boy, that Billie Holiday can sing.: From WHY I HATE SATURN, by Kyle Baker, which expresses like 75% of my moods.
  • Fuck Xcode: I'm working in Xcode.
  • GL_ANGER_MANAGEMENT: Look, I made a triangle appear! No, wait, it's the wrong side of the triangle and now everything is broken and the GPU is on fire.
  • Hates the Cloud: Networks are shit, databases are shit, so let's put our databases on the network!
  • is a Pepper: Last and only time I joined a movement.
  • Jon Postel Has a Posse: Postel's Law and Andre the Giant Has a Posse, but also in the sense that I am a semi-qualified angry mob who will string you up for breaking the Internet.
  • Pretentious Mac Bastard: Been called this so many time by jealous Windorks I ain't even mad.
  • [REDACTED]: I could tell you about [REDACTED], but then Apple would kill you.
  • Turns coffee into code: Working
  • Will Xcode for food: Wants to work
  • Wielder of the black sword: And even more so the books. If you know what happened at Quarzhasaat, that's what I mean by this.
  • Where are my pants?: I just got up. Don't look at me.
  • Bananaphone5: This I don't recall. Was there a song from the '60s about a bananaphone?

Anyway, my point is someone at Apple needs to add statuses to iMessage.

Cat Person

"Cat Person" is Mary Sue insertion fanfic about the origin of Logan's Run: Gross, hairy, flabby old people over 30 years should be executed/"renewed" at Carousel, so only pretty young people with hairless, plastic surgery-improved bodies get to have sex.

iMac Pro first review

Very nice! For all that I'm not the biggest fan of Apple's software choices these days, Mac continues to be the only UNIX® workstation worth buying.

The specs on this are actually top of the line, it has sufficient max RAM (128GB!), the AMD Vega card is a great choice. We'd have to wait to see benchmarks between the 10-core, 14-core, and 18-core models for ideal multi-core vs single-core performance.

That said, this isn't the machine I want. Non-expandability is a massive problem for these machines. Wrapping a high-end CPU inside a tight thermal enclosure like the iMac is not great, no matter how much ventilation you put out back; and fans running right behind your screen and speakers is awful, it needs to be on the floor or far end of a desk. When I'm doing anything with audio, I have to use the headphones not just because they're better than speakers, but to isolate the fans.

So I'm still waiting for the Mac Pro next year, and will limp along in my old iMac 5K Amateur, with its ridiculous "little" 3TB fusion drive I can't easily replace, 16GB RAM (which is replaceable, but it hasn't been a priority this year).

The Twelve South HiRise Pro is amusing/insane, it's $150 for a different paint job and reversible door from the $80 HiRise, of which there are plenty of $30 equivalents, and spray paint costs $1. That's, like, half a RAM doubling for an aluminum box. #ZerothWorldProblems.

Animal Crossing: Winter Wonderland Edition

Shut down the animal schools, snow is here! In the console/handheld AC, there's weather and snow leading up to the full snow day of Dec 11, but in PC it just flipped over this morning. Everywhere except the island is now frosty, whether snow on the coconut palms makes sense or not.

I haven't noticed any actual gameplay changes from the weather yet, but it's early days. I miss Wild World where I'd roll up snowmen, and skid when running, but it crunches nicely under my feet.

I finished the rock stage yesterday, so now my Cool animals can all go up to Level 20. It's pretty loud in the concert pit when a crowd goes over there, and KK Slider's just sitting there trying to play his guitar, man. But now I have another construction box next to it. In a few weeks when all the amenities are built, it'll be nice to not hear hammering and sawing constantly.

And Nintendo announced the gardening and clothing crafting will be coming soon. Interesting they're pushing the expansions out so fast, expected them to wait at least until spring. It's been a pretty flawless launch and support, which I don't really understand how they do it, most mobile launches are garbage for months or years (Poke Mongo, for instance).

I like these day-for-night nighttime shots, since I mostly play in the dark, but it'll be interesting to see how it looks in actual (simulated) daylight.

Autumn River

 Winter River

Winter Hollow

 Winter Beach

 Winter Island

Rock Stars

 Winter Camp 1

 Winter Camp 2

Winter Market

 Winter OK

Photos "Just Works"

"Just works", my shiny metal ass. I have a bunch of photos on my iPhone, go into Photos, select, action, wait… Airdrop doesn't show up. Aggravating, where's Dropbox action? Missing. Have to switch over to Dropbox app. At this point I'm shocked that works.

The Fall of Silly Bunny

For the last couple weeks, I've been playing Minecraft again, maybe half an hour a day at lunch or evening. I set up in a desert village at the corner of plains and savannah biomes, fortified it, then headed out looking for an End stronghold. A bit ago, I noticed a desert bunny had wandered over into the plains, and it was bouncing around; I didn't get too close and it was fine.

When I came back recently, I noticed a wolf which had somehow travelled a long ways from the nearest taiga, and realized it'd kill the bunny, so I tamed the wolf, brought it into camp and sat it down; I don't really like to haul them around, they get into fights and die quickly.

Today I went out, and apparently got too close, "spooked" the bunny, and it hopped right down into a ravine, with that horrible death cry YEEEEEeeek! Well, that sucked. I dug down and retrieved the hide, and made a grave at the edge.

2017-12-08-silly bunny

It's just some pixels that were there, somewhat out of place by random chance, that amused me until they made me sad, but it's got me pissed at Mojang again. The bunny AI is still awful; they routinely jump down tall hills that hurt them. It's been 3.5 years since bunnies were added (and the killer rabbits added and then removed because someone got scared a survival game might fight back), and nothing's been fixed.

The rest of the AI in the game is similarly still broken and awful. As noted, I don't use tamed wolves because they leap to their deaths off cliffs, into lava, under water, fight burning mobs, charge into skeletons firing arrows, or wander aimlessly as creepers blow up. Golems constantly get stuck spinning in circles between two or more goals they won't choose between; so I have to fence off villages, I can't rely on the golems to do anything. The polar bears look impressive, but are passive, the AI can't figure out how to attack when you do start a fight, they're super weak, and easily pillared out of reach (try that with a real bear and they'll climb up or knock over what you're on). Monster AI isn't too bad, if all you want is roughly pathfinding towards you regardless of hazard.

There's some amazing stuff in modded Minecraft, my favorite being Life in the Woods Renaissance, and things like the old Feed the Beast mod packs, but Mojang still slogs along adding trivial nonsense that doesn't work, or redesigning the file format so everything will break, instead of getting someone from Microsoft to help them with AI (maybe Microserfs explode if forced to write in a real programming language?), or adding some of the modded level of detail.

I simply don't understand their lack of development priorities on Java/desktop edition, which ought to be the hardcore version, the one where everything amazing is thrown in and "Hard" difficulty is actually hard.

The pocket/"Bedrock" edition's terrible in different ways, the controls are unusable for survival, the mobs seem even dumber, and exploration rapidly fills all flash storage, but I suspect nobody on pocket's ever played survival, they just stack blocks in creative mode. The half-billion or whatever customers playing that don't need smart mobs, just a cash shop full of bland skins instead of making their own.