Kihō no Monogatari

kihou @ 2008-06-29T02:16:00

2008-06-29T06:16:58Z

When I was in the toy store today*, they were playing "The Babysitter's Here", by Dar. It seemed really weird to me, since the other music was kids' songs, and my initial reaction was that TBH is totally not a song for kids. But then again, I guess it probably works well. If I'd grown up with it, it would probably be one of these "Mr. Tambourine Man is about drugs"** moments, since I'd not notice what was actually going on until way older than I needed to "get" it.

*: Getting a plastic fly for my Beelzebub costume for Apocalypse.
**: This is not really the example I wanted, but I can't remember the details of any better examples. There have been several words in the past few years that I had always treated as axioms but actually had very logical derivations.

kihou @ 2008-06-27T16:53:00

2008-06-27T20:53:15Z

A. I'm 7glad I did not try to ride my bike to campus today. That was quite a monsoon. And, apparently, some building across the river got hit by lightening and caught fire.

B. I honestly stared this numbering system because I had two quick things to say, but I totally lost track of the second one. And as I was typing that, I refound it. The thing about giving blood is that they put a bandage on your middle finger, which makes the MacBook two-finger scrolling thing 3awkward.

Woah.

2008-06-24T21:33:14Z

Gotta love sudden summer hailstorms, I guess? One of the lightning strikes was really close to the Grotto. Quite dramatic.

すごいから (Because It's Cool)

2008-06-21T04:06:58Z

This is from the setting document for Dreamspace, where I'm now running two campaigns. Cool word art.

kihou @ 2008-06-19T02:04:00

2008-06-19T06:11:25Z

For some reason, my router and Comcast seem to have a poke-me-and-die sort of relationship. I changed the SSID for our wireless network, and that was enough to cause the whole setup to stop working. For a while, the router could ping/traceroute outside sites, but no connected computer could. Here's what eventually worked, for future reference.

Try what some site said a few times, fail.
Reset the router to factory defaults.
Default admin password is admin, router IP is 192.168.1.1.
Change the SSID and maybe frequency, enable wireless encryption, set wireless password, set admin password.
Clone Chidori's Ethernet MAC address, which is 00:1e:c2:0c:eb:0a.
Hopefully it works?

Don't know why it stopped working in the first place, but that Japanese proverb about leeks Sam was reciting earlier.

Also, looks like Grotto!Dan may be joining the Claw and Thorn Fate campaign, assuming I figure out how to start this campaign without people dying.

EDIT: Also, I seem to have a preternatural ability to buy AAA batteries when I mean to buy AAs. I think the last 3 times I tried to buy AA batteries, I failed.

kihou @ 2008-06-17T01:47:00

2008-06-17T05:55:50Z

I just started using iCompta, a free Quicken-type thing. Not having used Quicken, I don't really know how it compares, but it is easy to use, imports stuff from my banks, and has a non-annoying interface*, and is free.

This isn't much of a post, but people keep nagging me, and if Chidori dies I can refer here to know what program to download in the NMC.

*: All the FOSS options I could find used either X11 or Java for the interface, which is just less convenient. I was originally planning on trying for a FOSS thing I could also run on Athena, but a combination of too many options and too nontrivial caused me to end up trying for something more Cocoay.

kihou @ 2008-06-14T23:43:00

2008-06-15T03:46:04Z

Back in the day (when things were much more hardcore) at Onaway (my elementary school), there was this yearly carnival with games and tickets and prizes and so on. One of the prizes was an umbrella hat, and I always wanted one but never managed to get one. Today, at the flea market, they had them, so I finally got one. It even sort of fits if I pretend my brain doesn't need circulation.

That is all.

kihou @ 2008-06-08T07:53:00

2008-06-08T12:00:47Z

Party was supermeganifty. Cool people and board games and such. And potentially ill-advised tiki torch fencing. The Haunted Grotto is warm, regardless.

I graduated. Weather wasn't as bad as it looked. Other than that, pretty self-explanatory. Since I'm still sticking around and even going to be taking similar classes while MEnging, it doesn't really feel that different.

About to travel home to visit/hit Zan's graduation. Shaker people poke me.

Testing Live CDs on a laptop with VMware is like twenty million times better than testing them on Barsgiora. No offense to Barsgiora, but it's much better when you don't actually have to interact with it in person. Keep being a surprisingly reliable single point of failure for Pianojuice!

kihou @ 2008-05-25T22:04:00

2008-05-26T05:34:07Z

I found that the local Thai Hut (near our new house) has imported (Thai) Melon Cream Fanta, just like in Japan. Made of awesome.

I also found that the house we live in was rented by cool cruft a year ago. People we know have been drunk on our back porch before we even got here.

kihou @ 2008-05-18T00:34:00

2008-05-18T05:01:19Z

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!

Opinions on syntax

2008-05-15T13:13:50Z

(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. ^_^

kihou @ 2008-05-13T04:29:00

2008-05-13T08:44:27Z

I think I've posted about him before, but Leslie Lamport certainly writes the cutest papers of any computer scientist I've read. The L^AT_EX 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++.

kihou @ 2008-05-09T19:42:00

2008-05-09T23:47:07Z

I just saw on next fall's Who's Teaching What? that there's actually a Professor Moriarty in Course 6. Awesome.

What I learned today

2008-05-05T22:26:02Z

If you break something by upgrading, obviously the solution is upgrading more.

Symbollic of Roast?

2008-05-04T06:43:18Z

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.

kihou @ 2008-04-29T21:12:00

2008-04-30T01:12:47Z

For those of you who thought the Disco Dance Floor needed more fire.

kihou @ 2008-04-28T15:01:00

2008-04-28T22:21:21Z

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.

kihou @ 2008-04-24T14:40:00

2008-04-24T18:42:41Z

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.

kihou @ 2008-04-22T22:39:00

2008-04-23T02:44:21Z

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?

kihou @ 2008-04-14T16:05:00

2008-04-14T20:09:14Z

Cute+awesome game of the moment: Planet of the Forklift Kid. The name says it all.

kihou @ 2008-03-28T07:52:00

2008-03-28T11:53:31Z

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.)

Happy Easter?

2008-03-23T14:36:15Z

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...

Durante de hacer mi tarea de Español

2008-03-18T08:09:33Z

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.

Woah.

2008-03-01T21:03:44Z

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.

For your novel, Dad?

2008-02-28T17:57:15Z

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 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.