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And I pretend I don’t care about having an audience

November 29, 2004 /

The NFD LJ feed and the Anacrusis LJ feed each have exactly 32 subscribers. Of those, 23 of the NFD subscribers are on my LJ friends list, whereas 12 of the Anacrusis subscribers are. Only 10 people on said friends list subscribe to both.

Interesting, but probably only to me.

I would like to have similar statistics for the regular RSS feeds, but of course there’s no big site organizing and tracking who hits those. Does anybody know a way to parse Apache log files and see who’s hitting a given location? My current (weak) webstats software won’t do it.

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.

Somebody Fark this

November 25, 2004 /

Lisa came over tonight, and two things happened.

  1. We thawed some pre-cooked shrimp and, lacking cocktail sauce, attempted to make our own. You need horseradish to make cocktail sauce; we lacked horseradish as well. The ingredients we did have were ketchup, lemon juice and worcestershire sauce. We decided to attempt to make it, with something (garlic? cayenne?) substituting for horseradish.

    Extrapolation of how this went is left as an exercise for the reader.

  2. We played some Halo 2, the first chance I’ve had to play co-op and a lot of fun. At one point, near the end, we witnessed something so fantastic that it forced the two of us to drag out my vidcapping equipment and record it for posterity. This is maybe the most important thing I have ever done.

    Ladies, gentlemen, I give you: Headless, Breakdancing Master Chief.

Master Chief Breakdancing in .MP4 (4.23 MB)

Master Chief Breakdancing in .MOV (10.9 MB)

Screencap 1

Screencap 2

Screencap 3

Screencap 4

Screencap 1 Zoom

Screencap 3 Zoom

Post script: the above video formats are the only ones in which I can get a workable file size. If you can convert to .wmv, .mpg or .avi (and either get it under 10MB or host it), write me and I’ll arrange to get you a copy of the 30-meg source file.

Gibson Strikes Back

November 23, 2004 /

“… I see from a post that Neal Stephenson has evidently used it as well. I would have liked to have gotten him permanently out of the way shortly after reading Snow Crash, of course, but I could already see that I would need him one day to help battle Bruce Sterling. Literature is a long game.”

–William Gibson

It was true!

November 22, 2004 /

I love constrained writing, and I checked Constrained today and got reminded why.

While I recognize that neither of the two stories I’m about to link is particularly original, I admire them because they are brilliant exercises in form (some people use that term as a pejorative; I don’t). You can read them very quickly, and I recommend them to you with this note: read the stories before you click to see which challenges inspired them.

November 20, 2004 /

Mister Rogers came home every day and changed from a suit and dress shoes into a cardigan and loafers.

What the hell was his job?