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I’m clearing out the drafts folder for Aquarionics. All these come from posts that will never be finished.

Event. July 2010:

Last night, in between dreaming of the great hall of beds in Oxford University and arguing with my girlfriend about something her Maelstrom character did, I dreamed about a friend of mine attempting to control a group of thirty or so six year olds, hopped up on sugar, armed with rubber swords. They were screaming loud enough to crack the paned windows of the hall of beds (which were made out of “distilled glass”) and kept on crashing into priceless black vases. Dan was, apparently attempting to herd them to the next thing they had to do.

On a possibly related note, I recently spent three days reffing a larp event.

(Written and posted before I’d agreed to help ref Odyssey and WITW)

Not Useful, July 2010:

Register.com, Please stop dragging your heels on domain name transfers. It’s petty and degrading, it makes you look desperate, and it just delays your customers and makes them ensure they won’t ever transfer back.

Bookmeme, August 2010:

“A book series you wish had gone on longer OR a book series you wish would just freaking end already (or both!)”

I’m not really very completist about book series. I’m fairly completist about cycles – if I read two books of a trilogy I’ll generally read the last – but if a series is bugging me I’ll generally give up on it without malice (or, when it’s fun, with malice. This will come up later). I stopped reading the Wheel of Time at around book three when my friends who were on the latest book at the time (7, maybe) said that nothing had happened, nothing was going to happen, and the wheel of time needed some kind of clutch control. I gave up on the Robin Hobb books after the Farseer cycle (I do appreciate the “What’s the worst thing that could happen right now?” method of keeping the plot moving, but I feel that the exponentially increasing weight class of the tragedies that befall the main characters was excessive. When the first chapter of the Liveship books set up the only thing the character had ever loved or could ever, I said that if that got destroyed in the first half of the book I’d give up. As I recall, I didn’t get past chapter two)

Clickity Clack, August 2010:

A few years ago, someone fullfilling my eternal desire for feedback described something I wrote as “kind of Douglas Adamsy”. They said a number of enormously good things about what I wrote.

I was taken aback. I was shocked and stunned. Chuffed to the mintballs, DNA being one of my favourite orderers of words ever.

I then promptly stopped writing for about six months.

Playing With Half Finished Things, August 2010:

last week, I was attempting to work on PiracyInc.com when I couldn’t. I ended up yak-shaving. In order to work on PiracyInc’s ship combat, I needed to fix a problem with the data model. The problem with the data model was that where it interfaces with sessions was causing PHP to segfault on any page without an associated user login. Somehow. Debugging a scripting language is usually pretty easy, because you can throw in debug statements and see where it gets to, but when PHP segfaults, it does so with no line numbers or anything. Somehow, something in PiracyInc, Plank (the PHP framework I built for PiracyInc to be on), the Database Abstraction library I’m using, or possibly even PHP itself, something is fucked. I decided that I was building too many storeys of this stack, and decided to switch to a framework.

Civilisation V, September 2010:

“”

(Only had a title. I don’t think I stopped playing long enough to put my thoughts down)

The Tyrany Of Being Sold Things You Want, November 2011:

A man walks into a bar pub

The barman says “Oh, hello Bob, Pint of the usual? Or I’ve got this nice Espresso stout you’ll probably like?”.

What happens next?

a) “Sounds good, I’ll take a pint of the stout please, Mike. How’s it going?” “Well, I’ve ordered some scaffolding for the beer festival next week. Usually I borrow the local CAMRA stuff, but it’s all booked up at the moment…” and the evening carries on.

b) “LOOK. I HAVEN’T ASKED YOU YET. ARE YOU WATCHING MY EVERY MOVE? RECORDING EVERYTHING I DO? THIS IS LIKE 1984!!!!”

Have you spotted my delicate simile yet?

I’m aware that there’s a somewhat hypocritical bias against people making money online. If you display adverts, you’re selling out. My favourite was a site which ended up using content-covering pop-over adverts due to falling revenues, and the users complained – obviously – and then said they prefered the older, less intrusive ads because they were easier to block.

Yes, exactly.

I’m sure I had an idea for an actual argument there. Ah well.

Crazy, January 2011, in reaction to the shooting of congresswoman Giffords:

Did you know that crazy people have a detachment from reality?

Video games do not make people crazy.

Violent films do not make people crazy.

These things are established. We’ve done studies,

Gun sights on a poster do not make people crazy.

Status, March 2011:

Okay, so I’ve been a little busy recently. These are the things that have happened:

(End. I’m good at this blogging thing, honest)

The Routine, June 2011:

There is a morning, and my phone informs me of this. I lie back and attempt to reconnect from reality from the more entertaining world of dreams (My dreams at the moment tend to conflate the most recent Larp systems I’ve been playing with the computer games. Given that the Larp I’m overdosing on at the moment is Odyssey (a Miffic world of greeks, romans and gods) and the computer game is Bulletstorm (A game which gives you massive bonus points for firing a grappling hook at someone, pulling them towards you, shooting them in the crotch and then kicking them back into a cactus) this is currently on the surreal side of interesting).

I pick from the redundant array of inexpensive teapots (A system that insures that at any one time I should have at least one small teapot available, saving the terror of having to wash up before tea happens) while the kettle boils. Warm the pot. Dry it. Add tea leaves and then boiling water. Quick shower while it steeps. TEA.

Security, July 2011:

Imagine a world where there wasn’t a building code.

There was a really popular way of building houses, but you had to install the door properly, otherwise it could be opened with a credit card and a bit of skill. Now, imagine that this way of opening doors was well known and avoidable, but that even people building houses now still installed doors in the same way, with the same flaws, in a way that let anyone with a flimsy bit of plastic get into your house.

Now there is a guy, who is kind of a dick, and has a knack for getting people to listen to him. In order to demonstrate exactly how useless badly constructed doors are at defending stuff, he goes into some houses using this method, photocopies their financial records (easily enough for someone to commit serious identity fraud with them) and papers the neighbourhood with the copies.

Who is irresponsible for this? Is it the builders, the jerk, the people who live in the houses, or the people who commit identity theft?

Actually, it’s all of them. A culture where the people who hire the builders don’t think door security is their problem and that it’s somehow a “builder problem” are being irresponsible for the records inside, which they are holding in good faith, is making the situation worse. The jerk believes he is providing a public service by demonstrating that faith in doors is misplaced, but is still breaking into places and causing trouble mostly for people who believed the builders. People a lot like the jerk, in most places.

My thinly disgused metaphor for Lulzsec verses the world falls apart around here.

 

Right. That’s them deleted then, no more cloud of things I might want to finish over my head. With any luck I’ll finish more articles than I start from here on out.

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