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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?”

Dear everybody who loved Sideways so much

February 7, 2005 /

Didn’t you guys see it the first time? When it was called Swingers?

I liked the movie okay, and of course the cast members–especially Thomas Haden Church–did their jobs with pinhead spot-on laser accuracy. But to what purpose? How many books and movies are there in which a pessimistic, divorced English teacher writes a book that’s too long so he goes out with his immature, more handsome friend and ends up finding some kind of unresolved redemption with a woman who blah blah blah. I saw Wonder Boys too. I guess this one had wine in it, which is great, if you like wine.

February 7, 2005 /

Speaking of Leonard, you do remember Dog Bites Dog, right? I’ve been putting off subscribing to its RSS feed because man, that’s a lot of volume, but then I remember to check it again and get gems like these:

A while back, I thought about starting a weblog just to post funny Dog Bites Dog headlines, but you can already subscribe to DBD yourself, and I don’t trust that my funny-filter is any better than yours.

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

The mysteries of Halo 2

February 2, 2005 /

Now, when you play a game over the interweb against somebody who chose the username “AvengingTBag1,” you have to ask some questions. Is this player’s purpose to avenge a T-bag to which he was once subjected? Is, rather, the T-bag his chosen method of vengeance for some unknown slight? Is he a T-bag personified, with revenge heavy on his mind?

February 1, 2005 /

I can’t remember where I saw this, but a nice human with an odd smile has created a pretty nifty scheme for serializing public-domain books via RSS. He claims it’s probably slow and buggy, and indeed I couldn’t get it to work the first time I tried, but now I am happily reading through The Well at the End of the World, which is way too dense to read in large chunks on a screen, but works perfectly at a page a day. (I’m reading this book in particular because it has several of the best entries in my Dictionary of Imaginary Places.)

Anyway, you can pick any of the many books on the site if you want to do this yourself, or you can even read along with me.