I Am Completely Serious

Three small bets I just made with myself:

1) I bet the City of Heroes website is red or blue. (I won - both.)

2) I bet the EVE Online website is black. (I lost, it’s brown.)

3) I bet the Star Trek Online website is dark blue. (I won.)

I didn’t think to make a bet about Star Wars, but it’s also blue.

What is it with “serious” game websites and light text on dark backgrounds, though? Are they scared of being taken for a flash game portal? If so, so are some of the flash game portals.

(Bad decision time is when I decide I’m going to play an MMO.)

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Dear snarp,

Your account has been randomly selected to receive someone's payment through our program that allows users to buy paid time for random free accounts. The account that was purchased is: Premium Paid Account for 6 months.

Yay! Thank you, Dreamwidth Person Who May Never See This!

(I'm assuming this is Person's response to DW's loss of revenue after PayPal behaved badly; they just got support for Google Checkup online. You are awesome, Person!)

There’s an interesting interview here (via Ta-Nehisi Coates) about an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks whose cervical cancer cells were taken as samples in 1951, shortly before her death, and were found to reproduce in a culture so quickly and efficiently that they revolutionized research on human tissue. They called them HeLa cells, and her family knew nothing about it until twenty-five years later, when her daughter Deborah was contacted by researchers who were interested in getting a sample of her own cells.

There is no earthly way that Octavia Butler didn’t know about this when she was writing Dawn. The heroine with whom the frightening, inexplicable alien falls in love/lust mainly due to her body’s fascinating ability to develop tumors? I think that is what a metaphor looks like.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

So I’ve been looking at the message board for a Facebook game.

I know that I yelled at my cold cream the other day, and I made libelous remarks about Octavia Butler due to my displeasure at her having gotten Serious all over me, and I suggested that Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest series might have been the result of a stroke or head injury. And I may have threatened Nalini Singh’s pets.

But… I’m not serious about these things? I think I would feel kind of embarrassed if people thought I was truly distraught about my cold cream, or seriously angry at writers for not meeting all of my expectations. Yet I think these people on Facebook are seriously angry at the programmers of the little farm game.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

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Technically, Maryland, but there’s a subway station. What should I do in Washington, DC? Aside from go to the Freer and Sackler galleries and wish I were a master thief, probably from a manga with peculiar ideas about either Catholics or consent. Because I can only do that so much.

(Restaurants and used book stores count as things to do. Also, protests.)

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Bring back negative feedback for buyers RIGHT NOW.

Auction Title: Pokemon The Movie 2000 DVD - No Box

Gray Feedback Left By Stupid Stupid Stupid Idiot Buyer: i didnt know that it was only the cd with no box

(I am very petty.)

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Neither Darkover Nor Manga

• Fool Moon (Dresden Files 1), Jim Butcher</p>

  I heard somewhere that Jim Butcher and the Ah! My Goddess guy can combine to form a bigger misogynist.

• Dawn (Xenogenesis 1), Octavia Butler

  Octavia Butler punches you repeatedly in the stomach.

• Adulthood Rites and Imago (Xenogenesis 2, 3), Octavia Butler

  Octavia Butler punches you in the stomach more lightly, provides gender-bendy but oddly heteronormative tentacle sex utopia, repeats.

Darkover

• The Spell Sword, Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Guy from earth lands on the planet of the red-haired sorceresses and goes native (he doesn’t turn into a red-haired sorceress, ’cause that would be, like, weird). Disney could make the movie of this without changing it too much.

• The Forbidden Tower, Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Guy from earth’s adjustment to his new psychic family life is hampered by his wife’s psychic powers accidentally zapping his testicles and his attraction to his sister- and brother-in-law. Maybe orgies will solve these problems?

• Heritage of Hastur, Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Being gay is wrong and bad, but Regis Hastur thinks he might be gay! Betraying the Comyn is wrong and bad, but Lew Alton thinks he might betray the Comyn! OH NOES

  (I would argue that “OH NOES” does not constitute a sentence.)

• Stormqueen!, Marion Zimmer Bradley

  People have terrifying uncontrollable psychic powers that may destroy them and EVERYONE THEY LOVE, and pregnancy is TERRIFYING, and everyone’s family is trying to KILL THEM, and so is the WEATHER.

Manga

• Yotsuba&!, volumes 1-3, Kiyohiko Azuma

  cannot form sentence dying of cute

• Crimson Spell, volume 1, Ayano Yamane

  Ridiculous high fantasy comedy/porn. Why is it that transforming into your demon form always seems to involve stripes these days?

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

4 cups water
2 tsp instant hon dashi powder
4 tbsp miso (red/akadashi)
3 tsp olive oil
1/2 tsp chili powder
1 tsp minced garlic
1 tsp minced/ground/powdered ginger
2 slices bacon, sliced up into squares
1 scallion
2-6 packets instant ramen (depending on how much broth you feel like using with each block of noodles)

( Read the rest of this entry » )

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

( Read the rest of this entry » )

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

You cuss at Game Maker for having no mechanism for stepping through your code when something goes horrifically wrong with a script containing multiple layers of nested loops.

AND OH WAIT I THINK I KNOW WHAT’S WRONG HANG ON

(this is what the blog is for)

ETA: HAHAHAHA YES I am in charge of A* pathfinding!

“what the blog is for” = getting my brain into critical mode and out of “my code isn’t wrong yours is” mode. See, that’s why I mostly only post about books I didn’t like! It’s not just because I’m a jerk!

In general, it is not constructive when I convince myself that my code is perfect and there is clearly something wrong with the interpreter/compiler. I am sure that people have existed who have found that there was a bug in the interpreter/compiler, which just happened to affect the long piece of code they’d written in one inspired sprint without any testing. However, given my habits, the odds that that will be the source of my problems are not high.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)