Kingdom of Loathing: An interview with Jick

It began innocently enough. Somewhere in the vast communications jungle
that is my interaction with the net, someone pointed me to this swords and
sorcery-ish game that ran on a website. “Fine”, sez I, “I’ll take a look”. I
didn’t think much of it, other than the odd name, ‘Kingdom of
Loathing’. To me, web-based gaming, in particular RPG games, never really seemed
to be worth getting into. I’d rather play something local.

A month later, I’m still playing the game daily. I work through my daily
alottment of moves usually before noon, and I’m learning all the little tricks to
get more Adventures so I can advance my character faster.

These guys definitely have something.

Continue reading “Kingdom of Loathing: An interview with Jick”

Geek Confessional

I, dbs, admit, here and for all to see, that when coding on my huge 21″ Nokia monitor, at the screaming resolution of 1400×1050, I zoom my KVim editor window up to full screen, hiding everything else under a vast expanse of 8pt font.

Loopy website du jour.

I try to keep up on websites that publish regular columns or articles that help shine the light of reason into the cold dark void of societal logic. Two in particular are favorites. The first of course is Snopes.com, which I’m sure -everyone- who reads my blog knows about, has bookmarked, and visit every few days, right? Their ‘Whats new’ column is a great way to stay on top of the latest fad-like rumors flying around the net (Did you know that the reason Taco Bell stopped the little dog commercials was because the dog had been run over by a camera crane? (hint, FALSE).
The other site is James Randi’s site, which has a weekly update on false mysticism, tv psychics, money scams and a slew of other examples of con artists bilking gullible people out of their hard earned cash.
Occasionally though they come up with some really fun ones. The July 2nd column includes a link to, are you ready for this? The site Our Hollow Earth in which they state “ My study of gravity indicates that our earth as well as all planets are actually hollow. ” But wait, there’s more! They’re mounting an expedition to the North Pole where there’s an opening (there has to be, because the Voyager spacecraft found that all the outer planets “emit more energy than they receive from the sun. Radiation is emited from their polar openings from their inner suns to light up auroras over their poles just like our inner sun does here on earth.“)
Well there you have it folks. Don’t dig that garden too deep, you might slip right through.

“Well, at least he beat out hitler.”

BUDAPEST (Reuters) – President Bush (news – web sites) is disliked by more Hungarian secondary school children than former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (news – web sites) and Osama bin Laden (news – web sites), according to an opinion poll published on Wednesday.
Bush also topped the list of most-liked foreigners with eight percent of the vote, ahead of Pope John Paul (news – web sites) with six percent.
The survey of 34,000 students, aged 16-18, from 655 high schools showed Adolf Hitler was the most disliked foreign personality with 25 percent of the vote, followed by Bush with 23 percent and Bin Laden with 16 percent.
Bush was even more unpopular than former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, according to the poll.
The most unpopular Hungarian was Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy followed by Viktor Orban, the leader of the right of center Fidesz opposition.
Orban was also the most popular Hungarian followed by Arpad Goncz, the former dissident who became the country’s first post-communist president.

snapshot of a moment in the life of a geek…

*typitytype, clickytype, click click type…,* *RadioParadise playing in the background* *click typeitytype*
*pause*
“Hmm”
*more pause, music continues, sound of me thinking*
“Gosh, i wish Evolution‘s calendar had a quicker way to go to ‘today’ than clicking the [-> Go to…] button, and clicking ‘today’, that wo… hey… there’s another button on the toolbar, looks like a little house or ‘home’ button. Hm. *click* hey! okay, scratch that feature request, they’re ahead of me.
I love mature opensource products.

Go Bush! You’ve bankrupted us!

Apparently the administration has, in the space of 3 years, made it flat out impossible to balance the budget. In fact, the GOP has succeeded in making their very own ideology unworkable.
A deep rift in the Republican Party has left Congress unable to pass a budget this year, raising the probability that, for the third time in three decades, lawmakers will not agree on a detailed blueprint for government spending and tax policy.
[…]
There are limits to the effectiveness of spending cuts. Even if Congress had eliminated every penny of the $438 billion in domestic discretionary spending this year, every education and health program, every homeland security effort, national park, interstate highway and federal prison, the government would still find itself in the red.

The view around the block

In her Livejournal, Lyonesse mentions that John Kerry has chosen a slogan, ‘Let America be America Again’ by Langston Hughes. I read through this poem, and it is quite intense, but only if read in the view Kerry wants it portrayed in: “This is about all that GW Bush has taken away from America”. Moving, true, but perhaps unfair to the poems’ roots.
Langston Hughes was a black poet during the great depression, writing during the time of Jim Crow and economic upheaval in the US. A reader should take into account the environment that Hughes found himself in, where the freedom and hope he longed for was simply not available to him in the US. Hughes was also active in the Communist movements, as many were during this time, though he never actually registered as such.
There are many scurrilous individuals who are taking full advantage of this link, yammering that “This proves that Kerry is a communist!” and other drivel. I’m certainly not in that camp, but I feel that any campaign slogan should be also understood in it’s original context.
I think Kerry will do fine with this as his basis, but there’s a lot of interesting details behind it. 🙂

You’ve got spam!

I wonder if it’s some sign that my blog has gotten more popular that it’s getting more and more blog spam. Today I logged in to find 88 spam postings into various n sundry articles advertising a series of porn sites. Yee hah.
I finally updated my copy of MT-Blacklist, a tool designed to stop this sort of posting. I hadn’t updated since December when Lisa helped install the first copy. This new version has smarter and easier-to-update filters in it, and hopefully this’ll stop this crud from coming into my system.
Apparently something also twitched the LIvejournal RSS feed, so folks saw some postings from me from a long time ago. Sorry bout that, we’re not sure what causes that to happen, we’ll check into it.

Chatting with the Other Side

I try to keep a wide perspective on the world, and I’m finding that with the current heated political environment, it pays to see what The Other Side is saying. Being honest with myself, I’d categorize myself as a moderate liberal. I don’t fall into the neat categories that most would ascribe to ‘liberal democrat’.
In keeping with my seeming category, one of my favorite folks around is Al Franken. He’s a comedian turned outspoken left wing commentator, whose intelligence and depth astounds me everytime I read his works. He won’t say anything without -really- understanding the issue, and researching it before making the comment. Seriously, read his books, he has a whole team of folks that make sure that if he says Rush Limbaugh ate peas for breakfast – in fact, yes, he did, and here’s the cites!
I wish the right were this well informed. We have people like Anne Coulter “The Democrats want Saddam back.”, Rush Limbaugh “Intellectual Left Pushes Bush Assassination Fantasies”, and Bill O’Reilley “Hillary’s true colors show through”. (note: All these quotes were taken from the respective front pages of each site).
But, it makes sense to see what the right is actually saying or thinking, because in all things, Perspective: Use it or lose it (Richard Bach).
I’ve found that Jay Redings blog is a well written, well spoken, very good indicator of where the right is now. While I rarely agree with anything posted there, I find it important to read, and sometimes comment on things I see. Naturally I expect to get… responses to my comments, and do, but it’s all part of the process. It makes me think harder about my replies and commentary, doing the research before speaking.
By the way. The left is not without it’s own strong left wing voices ” exposes Fox for what it is: partisan spin, not news.”. Where I agree in spirit with much of what these folks are saying, I can’t wholeheartedly support them and their rabid attacks on the right. Just because Karl Rove is a master of spin and takes the phrase “If it ain’t illegal, it must be okay!” to new heights doesn’t mean the other side has to adopt his tactics.
I still disagree with much of the right’s way of thinking. I still stand in my strong disapproval of GW Bush and virtually all him and his administration has done during his presidency. However, I do see where the right is coming from in it’s commentary, though I feel it is based in narrow thinking, selfish viewpoints, and potentially destructive planning, for now and future generations.
Perhaps much of this is backlash against the Clinton years, where many on the right saw the roles reversed. The hatred and viciousness directed at Clinton during that time was unparalleled, though, as in so many other issues, the sense of balance seems to have been lost, no matter who is putting the idea forward.

Firefox 0.9.1 released!

Well, with the 0.9.1 point release, I decided it was finally time to upgrade to the latest version of Firefox. Unfortunately the Debian testing environment hasn’t updated to 0.9 at all yet, so I needed to download and install 0.9.1 into my home directory.
I’m pleased! I went from 0.8 to 0.9.1, and it imported all my bookmarks, though all the extensions did NOT load. The new extension manager and theme managers are nice.
For the record, here’s the extensions I run:

  • Web Developer
    This is GREAT if you’re doing coding. Highlighting table elements with a mouse click is screamingly handy.

  • FLST – Focus Last Selected Tab
    If you open a new tab from a window that’s in the middle of a bunch of other tabs, the tab opens on the end of the toolbar. By default, when you close that tab, it goes to the next to last oen (which may not have been the one you were looking at before). This fixed that behaviour.

  • Sage
    This is an RSS / Atom aggregator. I’m JUST now testing it out, I’ll give more information when I’ve given it a real runthrough.

  • Statusbar Clock
    I just think this is cute (and they have a great image on the home page :). It shows a clock in the status bar. That’s it. For some reason it just works well for me.

  • Mozex
    I’ve alread talked about this. A great little tool for invoking an external editor on a textarea.

Last but not least, the Pinball theme is very nice, thanks to Nathan for pointing this one out to me.

Stop using IE. Really. It’s not just me.

Folks in the biz have been telling users for years that Internet Explorer is a garbage browser. The waves of incompatabilities and just plain boneheaded design decisions weren’t enough to sway most people.
Now though, the security issues in IE have gotten to the point where it would be foolish to even use IE as your primary browser.
The Motley Fool site has an article on the recent viral attack on Internet Explorer. They point out:

At the beginning of this development, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or CERT, and Internet Storm Center reportedly suggested that Windows users not use the most widespread Web browser out there -- Internet Explorer. (It seems that machines running Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Linux operating systems were safe from the threat, including those using Internet Explorer for Mac.)
.
This is not just the geeks saying this, folks. This is CERT, one of the most widely respected organizations regarding security on the net. And this isn’t a “You idiot, you clicked on an attachment in Outlook? Don’t do that!” sort of situation. Your machine can and may already have been hijacked without you even knowing it, and you’ve done nothing wrong other than gone to check out the news on CNN.com.
Go to Mozilla’s Firefox page, download Firefox, and enjoy safe browsing without popups, withour virii, and the bonus of a stable, well designed, FAST browser.
I swear, it’s almost time to put up those annoying pages that say “You’re too foolish to run a real web browser. We don’t support Internet Explorer.

Things I learned this weekend.

  • I CAN go 2 days without checking email. It’s tough, but possible.
  • When spam filters stop working, I get a lot of spam. And they’ve only failed part way (about 20% of the spam is getting through), but since I get upwards of 350 spams a day, getting only 20% of that in my inbox is a lot.
  • Sarah, the Poi spinning goddess she is, taught me how to spin poi, thanks to Cat’s skillfull preparation of some string, handles, and a pair of tennis balls. It’s loosely related to juggling, so I understood a lot of the basics, and caught on pretty fast. It’s _FUN!_. Nice having an exercise that does something with the upper arms. 🙂
  • Camper trailers rock.
  • Coffee prepared in a camper trailer on a propane stove in the morning rocks.
  • My family and I can in fact coexist in a close environment for several days while camping and not be at each others throats. Yay!
  • Organized drumming can be wonderful, particularly with a good leader. 4-5 drummers who are in sync, paying attention, and can hold a beat can blow away a roomful of noisemakers. Couple that with a lovely fire, great dancers, and a beautiful evening, and you have some mighty nice space.

This has been a PSA.

boy…

… nothing like coming home from a great weekend camping with the family to a couple dozen Blog Spam entries in the blog here. I’ve blacklisted the dorks site now, so he/she/it won’t be able to make any more referrals to his sex-with-horses site (i’m not kidding) but I would have preferred to have something else to come home to.

Dad’s day.

Well, huh, today was father’s day.
I had actually completely forgotten about it until Zach came charging in with the perennial fathers day gift (a mug with his picture on it, we have one from every year so far). That was sweet.
Had a lovely brunch with Cat’s mom, Ben, and Zach, then Zach and I headed outside to do some machine-stuff.
Had to get the mower running, so ran down to the store to pick up fuel, explaining to Zach why it wasn’t okay for him to play with the gasoline. I came up witha mighty long list of reasons not to. Anyway, while I was mowing, I was watchign Zach play on the new bicycle that his uncle Brian gave him. This bike is a ‘serious’ bike. 6 gears with derailler, hand brakes, even has a computer on it. Brian found it for $80 on craigs list, so can’t complain too much.
Anyway, he’s zipping all over the place, and making trails around the house and up over the hill across the driveway. It’s great fun to watch.
After mowing, he and I decided to go ride the ARRT bike trail. The weather today was magnificent. Low 70s and breezy and dry. Mmmm. We rode the paved section end to end and then some, probably a total of 5-6 miles, then just noodled around in the cul-de-sac at the end of the feeder road. This was great fun, just riding around in circles just like kids do on their bikes. Me chasing him, him chasing me – what a flashback.
Anyway, after that off to the Mosaic meeting, which unfortunately had a couple bad moments in it (Zach didn’t get enough to eat really, and totally lost it at one point in the meeting), we got past that okay, but it left cat and I pretty worn, and now we’re home again home again. 🙂
I can’t say enough about how impressed I am at the whole ARRT rail trail. The next section is building right before our eyes, which should result in 6 miles or so end to end riding, which makes a nice day-ride for me and zach (12 miles can at least be loosely called exercise). The next sections won’t be done for a long time, alas, but this’ll be great. Should be done by September.