Category: Plugs

February 9, 2005 /

Ah, damn. Hitherby Dragons has 367 entries today–actually yesterday–which means it’s officially outstripped Anacrusis, with its mere 365. Anacrusis started first (July vs September 2003), but Hitherby posts on Saturdays, so that was guaranteed. By math.

What you have to understand is that Hitherby Dragons and Rebecca Borgstrom are superior to my writing and myself in every possible way. I live in Kentucky; Ms. Borgstrom lives in Seattle. I have nearly completed a Master’s degree in CS; Ms. Borgstrom has her doctorate. I took AP classes; she registered at UCLA when she was 12. I want to design games someday; she writes for White Wolf, and already wrote Nobilis, the greatest damn game I’ve ever read. Her daily fiction work is usually about ten times as long as mine, without feeling like it, and every one is invested with the kind of psychotic whimsy I’d love to capture once a month. Anacrusis has 40 subscribers to its LJ feed; Hitherby Dragons has 161. It was described as “a webcomic without words” before I even thought of Anacrusis that way.

So I nurse just this tiny little coal of envy in my heart for Ms. Borgstrom and her extraordinary stories. In case you can’t tell!

You should be reading Hitherby Dragons. I have run out of words trying to find superlatives for it. I will steal them instead, by quoting Penny Arcade’s Tycho (in reference to Checkerboard Nightmare): “It’s so good that it’s depressing for me to read it. I don’t really want to talk about it anymore. How am I supposed to stand out against that level of quality?”

Little epiphany

February 7, 2005 /

It occurs to me that I finally have a use for that old iMac on which I installed Yellow Dog Linux over a year ago: the Ultra Gleeper.

Also, check out this hilarious graph from Leonard’s official Gleeper paper, on methods of obtaining new links to recommend:

Method Link quality Limitations
Stumbling upon incoming links while following outgoing

links

 Pretty good Depends on serendipity
Google Web API (link: queries) Not good: ordered by

PageRank instead of recentness

 1000 queries/user/day
Technorati web API (Cosmos query) Excellent 500 queries/user/day, frequently down
del.icio.us screen scraping Excellent I tried this and Joshua Schachter got mad at me

Pipe Dream #sRAND()

January 28, 2005 /

I want to open a game-comic-bookstore with two attachments: a set of rooms with gridded tables and whiteboards, reservable cheaply for gaming or brainstorming meetings, and a coffee and sandwich shop. The place would be called The Purple Hippo, possibly.

Problems with this pipe dream:

  1. The Purple Hippo is not as funny a name as I thought it was in high school.
  2. I know jack shit about running a store, a coffee shop, or a business in general.

Shockingly enough, #2 is the sticking point for a lot of my pipe dreams. (I also have no capital, but I assume that’s implicit.)

In an oddly appropriate segue, I should probably talk about The Louisville Game Shop now. I was lucky enough to find out about TLGS before it opened, back in December, and I even managed (through dint of extreme endurance and sharp eyes) to show up at its grand opening. It’s got a great inventory, and its owner (Colin) is friendly and helpful. Almost painfully so.

I really, desperately want TLGS to succeed. I want it to draw in thousands of customers and ignite a latent gaming esprit de corps in the Highlands. I want Colin and his business partners (if any) to be rolling in filthy lucre. I want them to experience so much demand that they have to buy adjacent buildings. I want there to be a real game store in Louisville.

I’m aware that no link on the interweb is really one-way, so I assume that Colin will eventually read this, and I wanted to make sure I said that stuff first. Consider it a preface.

Because it really doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. The place has “Nice Guy Tries To Start A Business, Goes Bankrupt In Under A Year” written all over it. I try to patronize it whenever I can, and most of the time I’m the only customer there. When I came to the grand opening, they didn’t take credit cards yet; I hesitate to think how much that cost them. Like I said, there’s some excellent inventory–I bought my copy of Nobilis there–but it doesn’t look like any of it is moving. (This is also the situation at Great Escape, but that’s because their game inventory is crap and they make their money on comics and DVDs.)

I don’t have the money to even be a good regular customer at TLGS, much less support it entirely myself, as I’d like to. I find myself thinking of ways to give in-kind, as if it were a charity project–I can host your website! I’ll print flyers! The advertising for the store is pitiful, by the way. I found one flyer in an engineering buildings at U of L, and I think there was a half-page ad on the back of LEO once. There appears to be a little interweb buzz, but in Louisville that’s really not worth much.

Anyway. I’m going to be crushed when TLGS fails, as I’m pretty sure it will. And even though I can think of things they could be doing better (1: don’t put your shop on the first floor of a musty double-zoned house), I know that the same or worse would happen to me if I tried to start a business now.

But now is when I want to start a business, because I have only myself to risk. When I’m thirty-five and understand business better and have capital, I’ll probably also have a family of some kind to worry about; I won’t have the option of living on ramen noodles for a year, or whatever, if I fail.

PS As if I needed another reason to be bitter, Fourth Street Live is doing great!

Watch, I’m going to make intellectual property activism cute

January 24, 2005 /

Because friends don't let friends elect legislators who support draconian intellectual property law while neglecting the public's rights and the social benefits of fostering innovation.

Okay, so it depends on your perception of “cute.”

I’m pretty much sold on iPAC now, and I’d send them money if I hadn’t already spent it on tsunamis. Even if you don’t think that’s funny, though, surely you can show respect for the Downhill Soldiers, who actually made good on their promise and sent the RIAA and MPAA 1558 pieces of coal for a belated Christmas present. Wildly pointless as a gesture, but it sent some money toward the good guys listed on the left. I am a sucker for goofy nonsense acts of protest, largely because the coal thing is something I could totally see the DBC pulling off.

John and Jon

January 19, 2005 /

I finally convinced one of my relatives to get a blog! My uncle John, about whom I’ve written before, has already started things off on the right foot with a post about how bad for you blogging can be. I wholly support this!

I’m hosting somebody else’s blog now! This makes me really excited!

Well, actually I host two: Jon, King of Former Roommates, started his songwriting journal back in December and then forgot about it. You’re fired, Brasfield! Hand over your badge!

I should go ahead and make the co-opted Crummy Standing Offer here: If you are part of my family (and this includes more than just my relatives) and you want a place to keep a journal, I will gladly host you.

Gordon Atkinson is Real Live Preacher, in case that’s not clear.

January 12, 2005 /

I don’t know why I don’t immediately subscribe to everything Sumana mentions, because her taste in blogs is pretty impeccable. Case in point: Real Live Preacher, whose journal I started reading only because she belted out its praises day and night. His entry today about lemons, among other things, is touching and real and sublime.

It’s so hard to make things that are quirky in real life interesting in writing. Real quirks tend to seem forced when written down, and people who lift quirks from fiction are just annoying. Gordon Atkinson’s ability to write about the facts of his life as he does is extraordinary; he illustrates the beautiful potential that public journals have, and almost always fail to fulfill.

December 17, 2004 /

I’ve had a long and passionate love affair with iamcal’s Noted, a lightweight text editor that is everything Notepad ought to be. It has toolbar search and replace. It can read and convert linebreaks from (or to) any OS. It has an unlimited buffer size. It has no associations in the annoying editor wars. It counts lines and even lets you jump to them! And that’s almost exactly all it does. Noted is great.

The only things it doesn’t have that I wish it had are a tabbed interface like Firefox and a word counter so I could stop using stupid MS Word. The former would probably be very complex to implement, but the latter shouldn’t be too hard. I checked the Noted page again today to see if its source was available. It is! So I poked around and discovered that it’s written in… Pascal.

That’s really weird. People still write in Pascal? (Maybe not, as Noted hasn’t been updated in a couple years.) I used it as a training language in my sophomore year of high school–it was fun but bad for me, as it gave me lots of procedural habits that I had to break before I got good at OOP. A glance at Noted’s code just now mostly made sense, although it also shows some indications of classes, which I don’t recall in Pascal. For that matter, I never knew Pascal could do native Windows GUI apps.

I do realize that there are form-based web pages that count words, but unfortunately I haven’t found one as smart as Word’s tool, which isn’t all that smart. I also realize that I could write a form-based PHP script that would be as smart as Word’s word-counter (and probably will do so), but I’d really rather have it in a text editor; Noted is almost perfect for my needs, and browser textboxes aren’t.

November 29, 2004 /

Hi, Mom. I finally put up a permanent link to Anacrusis on the right side of the page (I think you are now the only person who reads the NFD front page, actually). That’s the place where I do the stories that you haven’t read yet. I promise there is not very much cursing in them, usually.

For the rest of you who read both notebooks, I should take this opportunity to state that while I endorse certain political ideologies, Anacrusis does not–except that, universally, it should be difficult for one human to kill another.