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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Xavid's LiveJournal:
| Sunday, May 18th, 2008 | |
| 12:34 am | I just had a mega crazy but simultaneously very realistic dream. It started out walking down the Infinite Corridor with Patty; we split up by Cafe 4, her going into the basement and me continuing. A few rooms later (still in the fishmongering Infinite Corridor) these two guys blocked the hallway and made it clear that the expected me to give them money in order to pass. I refused, they attacked me, I went all Ju-Jitsu on them and called for Patty, she came out of the 8-south staircase an managed to restrain one of the guys, and I eventually managed to restrain the other. Sometime during the fight, I think someone yelled at us to be quiet, and I was all like "I'm in the middle of getting mugged!" (apparently, up until that point people had been walking past without noticing the fight...?), and then a big crowd assembled (but was absolutely no help whatsoever). I yelled for someone to call the CPs, someone seemed to do so, and then we waited there for what seemed like hours, with this big useless mob around us. At one point, the guy I was holding broke free and ran off (the mob failed to stop him), I ran after him, caught him in Lobby 10, and rejoined the mob. (For some reason, a Building 13 (but looking very Main Groupy) was in between Building 8 and Lobby 10). Eventually, I think the mob started getting cold (I guess the south 8 door must have been open?), so we all went into the basement. I was all like, who called the CPs before, we should tell them we moved, but at that point the guy Patty was holding broke free and started running towards Building 6. This time, the entire mob of useless people ran off after him, and we promptly never saw any of them again. I was like, we should probably get this guy's ID so we can identify him even if he escapes, then I gave the guy to Patty so I could call the CPs. I did an excellent job of actually remembering how to call the CPs (3-1212, which translates to 253-1212) in the dream, such that when I woke up I was all like "is that actually their number?" and had to check. I had this odd conversation with a CP person who kept asking me questions about where I was, even though I told her the nearest room number. Apparently the hallway through Building 6 was called Bemis in my dream, at least according to her. Then the dream started breaking down, and I was briefly outside by Building 12 before I ended up in some sort of rafters area in 6-3 or 6-4 with lots of steel I-beams, physically with the woman and continuing our phone conversation. When we finished, I was like "Wait... shouldn't I be down with Patty and the mugger?" Then I started worrying that it would be our word against the mugger's, since all the witnesses had vanished. I might have woken up just as the CPs arrived, or they might never have come, I'm not sure. Hmm... I feel like I had another dream where either I was roleplaying bringing two people from Ancient Japan to somewhere vaguely Europe, or I was actually bringing two people from Ancient Japan through a portal in (the actual) Building 13 to MIT. One guy was the other's uncle, and they did look like anime-style Genji-era Japanese people. Moreover, I spent the whole time talking to them in my crazy sort of Japanese/Spanish/English pidgin that I wouldn't expect anyone to be able to understand in real life. We ended up in Lobby 7 where there was some sort of hack on the second floor overlook that was basically a huge pile of pizza boxes. I remember trying to find a way to explain hacking culture in Spanish or Japanese, and eventually giving up and doing it in English. I think I was just with the nephew then, the uncle having wandered off. It mostly felt like a LARP, to the extent that I basically thought "all these normal MIT students probably think I'm really weird", but I feel like there were a ton of Ancient Japanese-looking people back around Building 13 (as if Building 13 were in Ancient Japan), so whatever. Maybe that Building 13 got Tinker-shifted to Ancient Japan, and that's why my other dream got a new one where Building 4 is. I feel like there's a possibility that I ran into Patty in Lobby 7 and started walking down the Infinite with her, thus connecting my two dreams, but I might be making that up. Regardless, no Ancient Japanese people in my first dream. EDIT: Also, at one point somewhere (possibly in Lobby 7) the ghost of the 91 and a Half Centimeter Stick (which recently rebroke in a non-usefully-fixable-by-ducttape way) invaded my dream. I think it went something like, random person asked me, "Why are you holding a meter stick?" and I responded "I'm not!", but then I looked, and I was holding one up somehow without having noticed it. Then I looked around, and everyone around me had yardsticks that all said "Shaker Heights High School" in black sharpie on the back. I was all "Why do all these yardsticks say Shaker Heights High School on them?" and no one knew. Ominous! |
| Thursday, May 15th, 2008 | |
| 8:49 am | Opinions on syntax (This is mostly for my own benefit, but I'd appreciate opinions if you have them.) In the proud tradition of taking breaks from computer science by programming, I've been working on Gameki (my crazy object-oriented wiki GameTeX replacement of DOOM) a little lately. One thing I'm not sure how I want to handle are "binary macros". Gameki markup is currently based on Creole, where macros are formatted like tags with double angle brackets. I sorta want to have some macros with two contents areas, like an if with a true side and a false side or a card with a front and a back. There doesn't seem to be any consensus on how to do something like that (tag-based templating languages seem to mostly make you do two separate if statements, for example). Some syntax possibilities are below. <<if condition>>True side<<else>>False side<</if>> <<if condition>>True side<</if>><<else>>False side<</else>> <<if condition>>True side::False side<</if>> <<if condition>>True side&&False side<</if>> <<if condition>>True side||False side<</if>> and require empty table cells in an if to be | | not || <<card>>True side<<flip>>False side<</card>> <<card>>True side<</card>><<back>>False side<</back>> <<card>>True side::False side<</card>> <<card>>True side&&False side<</card>> <<card>>True side||False side<</card>> and require empty table cells in an if to be | | not || I sorta like the first option for the if statement; it generalizes to <<elif condition>> well, and it's easy to read and less magical. I'm less fond of it for cards, I guess because the word "flip" is sorta dumb (but I can't think of a better one) and it doesn't seem to benefit from multiple continuations or continuation arguments. Sam was in favor of a briefer, punctuation-based separator like the last one before. I'd sorta like all binary macros to be consistent. I'll probably end up going for expressive power and minimization of magic (i.e., the first option), but if you have an opinion, I'd be interested to hear it. I'm not always a great judge of what's easy for most people to understand, after all. ^_^ |
| Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 | |
| 4:29 am | I think I've posted about him before, but Leslie Lamport certainly writes the cutest papers of any computer scientist I've read. The LATEX logo is along a similar vein, though that's really Knuth's fault. Hmm... he also does the version numbers; I should girl up to reading some of his stuff sometime. Started moving stuff over to the house this past weekend; Maya's spending the night there tonight. It still has a splendid amount of space. Also, a hazardous basement for tall people (not naming any names...). I'm looking forward to the whole house thing, though I'll probably end up spending plenty of time on campus what with all this research I'm assisting with and maybe even SIPB or SCA or something. Also, trees++. Current Music: Joe Satriani |
| Friday, May 9th, 2008 | |
| 7:42 pm | I just saw on next fall's Who's Teaching What? that there's actually a Professor Moriarty in Course 6. Awesome. |
| Monday, May 5th, 2008 | |
| 6:20 pm | What I learned today If you break something by upgrading, obviously the solution is upgrading more. |
| Sunday, May 4th, 2008 | |
| 2:41 am | Symbollic of Roast? Day 1 of Roast: Someone leaves an anonymous note on my door congratulating me on my rejection letters. Day 2 of Roast: Someone steals one of the rejection letters from my door. That is all. |
| Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 | |
| 9:12 pm | |
| Monday, April 28th, 2008 | |
| 3:01 pm | Spent the weekend playing Final Fantasy: Yielding Stone with the Guild. It was fun (and intense), but since it's not dead I'm not going into more detail here. However, one nonspoiler is that each common room had a soundtrack, and the church had a large preponderance of modern songs done in a Gregorian chant style; my favorite was Sounds of Silence. Good stuff. |
| Thursday, April 24th, 2008 | |
| 2:40 pm | Hmm... I was just thinking how you could interpret "Horton Hears a Who!" regarding religion (particularly animism, i.e. just because something doesn't look alive/sentient doesn't mean it isn't), which made me think of the Whos as Small Gods, which amused me greatly. |
| Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 | |
| 10:39 pm | Just a link to a game I think is cool and could make a good Guild Game mechanic: Proximity. Not that it's likely to go into After/Xibalba like Ring Pass Not, though I guess it could... It's somewhat in the ticket-to-ride category, by which I guess I mean it involves territory claiming, not that it's anything like Ticket to Ride. EDIT: I was going to edit this to fix the spelling of Xibalba, but it turns out that, contrary to my recent statements, I did know how to spell it. Go being phonetic? |
| Monday, April 14th, 2008 | |
| 4:05 pm | Cute+awesome game of the moment: Planet of the Forklift Kid. The name says it all. |
| Friday, March 28th, 2008 | |
| 7:52 am | We toured an apartment on Spring Street today. It was, however, not notably small, nor to my knowledge have any artists died there yet. (It was actually pretty nice. If all goes according to plan, we're going to look at a few more apartments today and then make a decision.) |
| Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 | |
| 10:24 am | Happy Easter? Spring break, which means I've been... paying my taxes (not playing golf, though*). Also doing some creative stuff and brawling and futzing with Gameki. And getting sick of apartments. People who are going to discriminate against students or slightly large groups should girl up to saying so upfront, in my book. I'm actually a big fan of Project Wonderful. I went to the trouble of unblocking their ads because I actually tend to like some portion of the webcomics that advertise on the webcomics I like. At the risk of overlinking to webcomics, the latest in that category is Marry Me, which is more on the chick-flicky side of things. *: Though I could be playing it on the Wii right now... |
| Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 | |
| 2:53 am | Durante de hacer mi tarea de Español Whenever the idea of washing hands before eating comes up, it always reminds me of the old "Choose Your Own Adventure", Bobby and Bonnie, Zan and I used to do with Dad. It was effectively a rulesless tabletop with Dad as the narrator. Anyways, our mother in the game always made us wash our hands before eating, even though neither Dad nor Mom made a point of it in real life. We got trained to wash our hands only in the game. Hmm, that game had some great stuff in it. I was just reminded of my Spell Checker, a black checker you could cast a spell into (spells were Enchanted Forest Chronicles-style rhymes) to see what it would do and how well. And, of course, there's a very useful (to certain people) magic item in Boreala that comes from Bobby and Bonnie. Actually, it sorta reminds me of Minus. I guess omnipotence doesn't get boring if you're a kid? I do like the idea of a pantheon with a "most powerful" god that's a Minus-like kid and thus doesn't participate properly in the struggles of the other gods, though I'm sure things like that have been done before. P.S. I hadn't seen this other comic by the Minus girl* before, but I'm a sucker for things that're very Japan, and I also like the handling of invisibility/ghostishness: Socks. *: Yes, he's actually a guy, though I didn't know that 'til I checked. I'm tempted to start using girl gender-neutrally for the power of awesome and to confuse feminists, but I'm not sure I'm girl enough. Or something like that. |
| Saturday, March 1st, 2008 | |
| 4:03 pm | Woah. Just saw a hawk with a dead rat land on the top of the hallway between 2 and 14 from the 2-3 athena cluster. There's something you don't see every pset. |
| Thursday, February 28th, 2008 | |
| 12:55 pm | For your novel, Dad? I don't normally repost links, but this seriously amused me: statistical analysis on the relation between homosexuals and natural disasters, in response to Pat Robertson. From ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} bulby01. I do like the idea of a religion that starts with the axiom that natural disasters are created by god and determines the rest of its beliefs by statistical analysis of this sort. |
| Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 | |
| 3:22 pm | On an impulse to make things maximally complicated, no one's particularly looking for housing for just the summer, are they? |
| Monday, February 25th, 2008 | |
| 5:12 pm | So, when an apartment doesn't specify a particular availability date, does that probably mean it's available now and thus not likely to wait around a few months until we want an apartment, and therefore not worth looking into? That's what I've been assuming, but I don't actually know anything about apartments, so I thought I'd ask the æther. |
| Thursday, February 21st, 2008 | |
| 9:28 pm | So bizzare. Condry was out of town this week, and his substitute was the move Perfect Blue. It's by Satoshi Kon, who would later do Paprika, and it's certainly the most freaky supernatural-free movie I've seen. Fight Club, once you figure out the gimmick it all make sense, but here there were so many false leads and layers of indirection, it's just like boingo. I was sorta hoping the dude would get redeemed, but this way was probably better. I can totally imagine having a conversation with Mom at an unZanish restaurant trying to figure out what "actually happened". Speaking of movies, I also saw Mar adentro/The Sea Inside, a movie about euthanasia, for Spanish class recently. I thought it was well done. It was certainly very touching at times, but it wasn't nearly as sad as I had been lead to belive. It's no Todo sobre mi madre, but it's still good. In jamakusai news, Gigo seems to be trying to die again, and this time it's not something I can fix myself. Mass Storage error 2STF/1/4. It's out of warrenty, but I guess I'll just have to see if I can get my junk off of it and then actually pay for repairs this time or something. You'd think I'd have learned not to keep any photos uniquely on Gigo HD after what happened last time... ah, well. |
| Thursday, February 14th, 2008 | |
| 3:02 pm | While waiting to give blood I'd never been bothered by the Red Cross (or other medical thingies) asking for my gender, because they have legitimate reason. Still, they get bonus points for specifying biological gender. (I totally need a skirt!Xavid icon, btw.) |