You know, every time I see this it pisses me off anew.

What kind of asshole cable installer do you have to be to PUNCH A HOLE IN SOMEONE'S ENTERTAINMENT CENTER TO RUN A CABLE? And not even leave a note saying, "Sorry, had to destroy your property to finish the install, hope you don't mind. Oh, by the way, our digital cable box is a piece of shit that never works - your VCR can tell you what's playing better than our box can. Have a nice day!"

Argh.

Sure, it's just a cardboard panel. It wouldn't bother me even at all if it weren't for the fact that I've spent countless hours trying to thread wires through the tiny little holes so that no matter what I put in there, it will always have a handsome appearance.

Alright, I know that it always bothered me when people said the same thing about Bloom County...

But how in the fuck is Mallard Fillmore not in the editorial cartoons? That's just bullshit. I shouldn't have to read anything so hate-filled in the damned "funny pages." Period.

At least The Boondocks tries to be funny.

Last night, I dreamed that I was playing an MMORPG of some sort. I do that a lot more than I probably should, especially considering I haven't had time to play them for a few months.

This one, though, this one made me realize yet again why MMORPGs are never what I want them to be. Fundamentally, the problem is that MMORPGs depend heavily on economies of scale, and therefore generally can't take giant risks when it comes to potentially alienating users. You can take bigger risks if you have a huge license behind you, but still nothing like what I want to see.

I want to see permanent death. Sure, lag, blah blah blah. So use the SWG model where many things don't actually kill you. Start characters out with one miraculous recovery, and let them earn more.

I want to see small communities of players who depend on each other. I want a group of people to be able to settle in the wilderness. I want monsters to try to destroy the town, and I want them to have a chance to succeed.

I want travel to be time-consuming as well as dangerous. I want even the most powerful character to have to think twice about a journey to the other end of the world. This is so important to me because it means that a knight next door is more powerful than a king in the capital.

So, yeah. That's what it would take to get me excited about an MMORPG, these days.

Because I hate looking for this recipe:

Mashed Potato Casserole

This recipe keeps as long as two days in the refrigerator which means you have time to get the stains from peeling potatoes off your fingers before the 25th.

Potatoes
6 oz. cream cheese
1 cup sour cream
Grated onion
1 tsp. salt
White pepper
Butter or margarine
Buttered dry crumbs

Cook as many peeled potatoes as you need, till tender. Drain and dry over heat. Mash till smooth with potato masher or electric beater. Add remaining ingredients and beat till light and fluffy. Bring to room temperature and spoon into a greased casserole (a souffle dish is ideal) and top with dry crumbs tossed in melted butter or margarine. Cover and refrigerate. On the 25th, bake at 350°F for 30 minutes or till heated through. Or follow your favorite recipe, adding 2 beaten egg yolks while beating.

Of course, when I find it, I'm always disappointed, because I'm always looking for it because I can't remember how many potatoes I'm supposed to use for every 6 oz. cream cheese and cup sour cream. Psy. Incidentally, you cannot substitute low fat sour cream in this recipe - it makes the whole thing have the texture of silly putty.

Ok. 6 medium-large bakers, one large white onion, 16 oz. cream cheese, and 1 1/2 cups sour cream worked out really well.

Bah! Wildly out-of-scale bargraphs are highly confidential materials, not suitable for open mocking on the internet.

I know I have Festival built and running on some machine or other, but it doesn't look like it's any of the machines that are actually running, right now. Maybe it's on my computer at work? Oh well, not like I was getting anything done this evening, anyway. Am I the only person who cries when they find out that the only way to get functionality they need is to compile something?

UPDATE: I was right to cry. No luck on the laptop. I'm pretty sure the computer at work is the one that I got it working on - I think every time I've tried on Win?? at home, I've failed. I have a boot partition of FreeBSD with it somewhere, but that's a pain. I got it built on my webhost shell account, and then remembered why I didn't have it built there already - If I try to do more than two paragraphs, the process gets killed off.

UPDATE2: Well, fuck. I can't build it under Knoppix, either. Here, I thought I was being all clever. It looks like the answer is to build under gcc 2.95, or figure out why Festival won't build under 3.3.x.

UPDATE3: Ugh. Well, that just totally sucks. I couldn't get it to build under 3.2, either. I give. Guess I'll see what I have at work, tomorrow.

WOOHOO!

Ok, I tried and I tried to refrain, but this latest entry is just too much.

It's....an experience I suppose most have had in some form. You ease onto the interstate going about 55. You feel a little shaky at first because all the other drivers are speeding by, changing lanes. It's enough to make anyone nervous, then you find your favorite Elton John song on the radio and instantly you feel human, subdued, mellow, and even the world zooming by can’t bring you back to reality. With the passage of some.....time....you find yourself changing stations and eventually you come upon the intro of your favorite Guns n' Roses song. Volume increases with speed 65 the intro keeps building 75 its about to break and you want it volume is higher and higher you feel like a tall tree brave the lust of invincible youth faster swerve and cars standing still volume explodes dodge and the song develops into vocals screaming primal pain pinned up emotions begin to spill into the air volume maxed 85 and you keep going further further red lights chasing and no cop yes cop but you don’t care screams of fear screams of frustration higher 95 how much further can you go they are going to try to stop you bring you down they have you trapped you see it ahead piercing and..... for..... the briefest of moments shaking adrenaline you wander what its going to feel like the end crash gyrating mind spinning and its here they are trying to break you agghhhaggghhhgghahhhh its ahead the end the trap the corner the....finals.

Something I came across with Livejournal's random page feature? No. It's one of my fellow students. I can't deny that I succumb to the allure of the ellipsis myself, from time to time, but please - if I ever begin to use them like that (without..... irony, that.... is.), please just put me out of my misery.

Oh. For the sake of reference, whatever package is interposing itself between his fingers and the web substituted the unicode ellipsis character for his ellipses, and I switched it back. Other than that, it's cut and pasted; apply [sic] as necessary.

What I learned from the BBC World Service tonight:

• You can't escape hearing W talk just by listening to foreign news broadcasts.
• I am no longer capable of being interested by any story that begins "Pop star Michael Jackson..."
• My cat will not play in the World Cup final.

Huh. I normally don't like to go to these sorts of things, but they might have found my weakness, this time.

Bleah.

Once again, flail has been nominated as one of the worst comic strips on the web by the readers of PvP. I can't really figure out what it is about what I did that attracts such disdain. I guess I'll go ask.

UPDATE: Well. That's magnificent. It's 12 hours before my new account can post to the thread. I wonder if I'll even remember this tomorrow morning.

Oh, yeah. One more gripe I'd been meaning to air.

DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM ARE NOT THE SAME THING. IN FACT, THEY ARE TANGENTIALLY RELATED AT BEST. SEE U.S. CONST. AMEND. I-X.

Again, Damnit.

It says something about how badly CDs scale in terms of CD-audio storage (and about how astounding a technology MP3 compression is, which is easy to take for granted) that if I want a copy of a CD right now, it's faster and easier for me to burn it from my MP3s than it is to find it in the CD wallets.

AUGH!

Why do people make links open in new pages? I KNOW HOW TO DO IT IF THAT'S WHAT I WANT!

I WAS DONE WITH YOUR PAGE, OR I WOULD HAVE USED THE MIDDLE MOUSE BUTTON TO OPEN IT IN A NEW TAB.

Damnit.

Bryant offers an explanation of why he reads bloggers who disagree with him.

Shouldn't it be absurd to be asked "Why do you read the writings of people who don't share your opinions?"

There are a class of people about whom I think, "Those people do not have anyone's best interests at heart but their own." I honestly can't think of an example of a person like that who regularly publishes political commentary.

There is another class of people about whom I think, "Those people have a fundamentally flawed understanding of the topics they discuss." A topical example would be the people who are attempting to proselytize through the medium of Texas biology textbooks. I think they honestly believe that they are trying to make the world a better place. I often avoid writings from this class of person because, in my opinion, they do not understand logic and consistently ignore reasoned criticism. Without naming names, the list of popular bloggers I avoid for this reason is very, very short. (And his initials are...) I find a lot more of these people (of all political persuasions) on teevee and radio, though.

The class of people about whom I think, "They are the problem," or more specifically, "Those people are capable of presenting rational arguments, but they are honestly incapable of distinguishing between a good rational argument and an ad hominem attack as long as the end result matches their ideology," are the reason I tend to read more liberal writers than conservative. (The careful reader will note that I have just admitted belonging to this class.) I think most political bloggers fit here.

The final class are people who consistently focus on rational argument. They may examine a person's claims, find them wanting, and conclude that that person is an idiot, but they never examine an idiot and conclude that their claims are wanting. (See the stopped clock, above.) Why are these people vanishingly rare? I think the most monstrous symptom of the lack of this level of debate is arguments like, "Democrats defended Clinton, therefore they have no right to criticize Republicans" and "If Republicans are so interested in ending terror, why aren't we invading Saudi Arabia?" There are well-formed arguments that arrive at the same conclusions as these, but the difference is informative.

It is a peculiarity of representative systems of government that we must critically examine the ideological framework of our representatives. This is necessary, good, and just. But it's important to remember that we do this because we want to find people who are capable of consistently exercising good judgment, and not because the only good decisions are those made by people who consistently make good decisions.

It should be obvious on its face that no broad ideological group is ever going to be so shamed by an ad hominem attack that they change their way of thinking. The culture of insult is stupid. It is unproductive to believe that everyone who disagrees with you is either immoral or insane. I understand the allure, but it seems clear to me that it is a tendency which must be resisted.

Ok, this one is actually worth sharing. I'm just guessing at the measurements; I'll try actually following these and see if they work right.

1 container Bisquick Shake'n'Pour pancake mix (original or buttermilk, doesn't matter)
1/4 cup semi-sweet chocolate morsels
1 tbsp cocoa
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 cup water

Open container, add dry ingredients, add water, shake'n'pour per package directions.

I always thought there was some sort of secret to making chocolate pancakes. I don't know why I expected it to be anything but sweet pancakes with chocolate in them. It's interesting how my perception of the texture of the pancakes changes based on the taste - they seem much more cakey when they taste like chocolate.

Update 1/4 cup isn't nearly enough. 1/2 cup is the bare minimum. The other measurements seem just fine. Careful not to scorch the pancakes.

Well. The exercise in stupidity is complete - although I didn't bother sorting the bottom 40% or so, since a huge chunk of them are albums I'm not familiar enough with to really have an opinion about. Here's my 50 favorite albums, apparently. I went ahead and alphabetically sorted them on the principle that it's a little less embarassing that way.

So, as an exercise in stupidity, I wrote a program to help me do a quicksort on my album list. I don't think I'm up to sharing the results, even if I manage to finish. (I made it about a quarter of the way through before realizing that I had written it with a serious memory leak, and that it would probably tank before I finished.) Fortunately, the first pivot point in my list turns out to be "On How Life Is" by Macy Gray, which is fairly close to the middle. It's a little surreal, though, going through your whole music collection comparing every album to an album that you kind of like, but don't really feel strongly about.

It's even more surreal later on, when you get to questions like, "Which do I like better? Straight Outta Compton or Music for Airports?"

I somehow managed to lose the world's largest citrus.

Well. 616 albums, all but two of them legitimate. Now I have to figure out a scheme for dropping them all to CD. This will be complicated somewhat by the fact that I don't have a hard drive which can store all of them at once. Alphabetically is patently useless, but making "mix CDs" that consist of 10+ whole albums gets complicated.