not falling down

It took the Ben Folds cover of “Bitches Ain’t Shit” to make me understand that it’s a ballad about the breaking of a friendship, love betrayed and the loss of innocence. Also some pretty bizarre pronoun mappings. Consider:

“I used to know a bitch named Eric Wright

We used to roll around and fuck the hoes at night

Tighter than a muthafucka with the gangsta beats

And we was ballin’ on the muthafuckin’ Compton streets

Peep, the shit got deep and it was on

Numba 1 song after numba 1 song

Long as my muthafuckin’ pockets was fat

I didn’t give a fuck where the bitch was at

But she was hangin’ with a white bitch doin’ the shit she do

Suckin’ on his dick just to get a buck or 2

And the few ends she got didn’t mean nothin’

Now she’s suing cuz the shit she be doin’ ain’t shit

Bitch can’t hang with the streets, she found herself short

So now she’s takin’ me to court”

This all refers, of course, to the feud between Eazy E and Dr. Dre that was associated with the breakup of NWA (longtime readers may remember my fascination with Eazy’s response to the album). To parse it correctly you have to understand that except for the passingly-mentioned “hoes,” everyone referenced is male.

The gender issues involved in early 90s gangsta are a Master’s thesis all their own. (Actually, I bet they already have been, cheap Berkeley joke here.)

I just had a stupiphany that would have been great if it had happened six months ago, when I had the option of submitting a thesis. Whoops!

See, you could store bitmap indices on a varchar field in a database as a two-dimensional black-and-white image for each character position! Normally you wouldn’t use bitmaps for text because the density would be less than 1%, but what if you compressed them like PNGs? You could save a huge amount of disk space, because sparsity would improve the compression ratio, and clock cycles aren’t nearly as valuable as disk access in this kind of situation so the decompression would be parallelizable. The binary operations would reduce wildcard search time by like an order of magnitude! Hell, you could probably store an average-value flattened composite for returning more relevant results faster, and since varchars only go to 256 you could do it as a standard grayscale image! And imagine the data mining you could do on a map like that, pattern recognition, domain linguistics, not to mention just rasterizing it and putting it on your wall…

I promise there are people out there to whom this makes sense. Oh well. Maybe someday I’ll write a paper.

The motherfucking Compton streets.

I’ve gotten bored with Dog Bites, so I’m probably gonna quit posting there for a while unless something blah blah blah. This is what RSS feeds are for!

Every day or so I come up with an idea for a story and hold it underwater while it thrashes. After 101 words, most of them stop kicking and go away. Sometimes they don’t, and my life gets a little more interesting (and, hopefully, so does yours).

I’m interested in writing fiction. But I’m already pretty good at that, for certain values of “good.” I’m also interested, really interested, in game design. I don’t think I’m good at that for any value of “good,” largely because I’ve never finished a game design. I think it’s harder to design games than it is to write fiction; you don’t need more information, but you do need more people. I want to get better at designing games.

It is for these reasons that I’m launching Dispatching the Dungeon Master, a place to hold game ideas underwater and see whether they fight back. I’ve turned on both the comments and public draft submission on that notebook (both xorph.com firsts). I’m hoping that there will be other people who are interested enough by this to talk about it with me and each other. Idea springboards, isolated mechanics, design goals–I want to stick my hands in and splash around and see what floats, and I’d be very happy if you’d get your hands wet too.

Music that manages to combine bossa nova with breakbeats in a non-annoying manner. I’m not sure this is possible, although I’m sure people have tried (I discovered last night that “electrobossa” is already a pretty strong subgenre, but everything I heard was a bit milquetoast, even for me).

I’m not honestly sure I like either bossa or break, but everything I’ve heard of either genre I liked, which I think is encouraging. One of my favorite albums ever is a bossa nova album! Kind of. Most of the breakbeats I like are off soundtracks.

I’d just like to point out that you don’t actually care about Terri Schiavo. Thanks.

I’m glad to say that Bruce’s condition is improving. My uncle John is closer to the situation and has more info, so I’ll direct you to his journal instead of just repeating his entries.

I did my taxes last night. More importantly, for the first time since 1999, I did not complete the FAFSA. TAKE THAT, HIGHER EDUCATION!

Man, I really hope I graduate.

My cousin Bruce is critically ill in a hospital in Indianapolis. He’s had a transplanted kidney for the last seven years, and things have often been a little rough with it, but this time a viral infection in his pancreas seems to have caused it to fail entirely. The last I heard, things were improving slightly for him–they reduced some of the swelling and fluid buildup, but he’s still on oxygen and morphine. I hope things continue to improve.

Bruce lived with my family for a while, when I was in middle school and he was taking classes at EKU. He brought with him a huge and nearly comprehensive collection of first edition AD&D resource books, miniatures and modules, not to mention games like Paranoia and Gamma World. When he moved out, he left them to me. It was a huge and valuable gift, magnified by who I was (and am). I still have every piece of it.

He went to dialysis at the time, of course, and had for years, and would until 1998. I wonder what it was like when he went in for the last time. He showed me the scar tissue that had built up on his arm from the treatments, once, and the image has never left me.