The USS Quad Damage

So I talked with Simon recently after his surgery, and somehow talk went onto Myspace (Simon has a page), then this site. He says there’s two things wrong with the site:

• The questionmarks above. You guys should get gravatar thingies.
• He’d prefer a summary instead of the full article “Like how oddthinking has it”. I don’t understand how some people get so much street cred.

I’m also aware of the following:

• It doesn’t appear to render correctly on IE.
• The comments, when you submit them, don’t show up until you reload the page.
• flickr doesn’t work anymore.
• The site doesn’t have the nifty timeliney features I wanted for it.

Any other requests?

Addendum: From BoingBoing

My friend danah boyd, frequently featured here, is one of the best social scientists working on social networking sites today. She’s just published a working draft of a paper called “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace,” which posits that well-to-do, stable American teens with “good prospects” end up on Facebook, while poor, queer, marginal and non-white teens end up on MySpace (even in the military, grunts are on MySpace and officers are on Facebook—guess which one the military banned!)

So it looks like Simon is a poor black gay dude.

I recently discovered that “tyre” is spelled “tire” in American English. This is abhorrent.

I like Ye Olde English of the Commonwealth. It has culture and some silliness. Life just wouldn’t be right if if “gaol” didn’t permute to “goal”. However, I appreciate the fact that the Americans have tried to simplify their language. Pragmatically, I think it’s fine that they use color instead of colour. I still like the British way better, but “color” is fine.

I’m slightly less happy with all the “z”s, “specialize” instead of “specialise”, “categorize” instead of “categorise”, “rize” instead of “rise”, and “democratize” instead of “hostile takeover”. I accept this, however, and in the end it doesn’t bother me at all that they’ve traded one contradiction for another.

“Tire” on the other hand is retarded. Why on earth change it to an “i”? The “y” was a perfectly serviceable letter in that position. If the attempt was to remove all homonyms, why not spell “weak” as “week”? Seriously, what the fuck?

Speaking of languages, the C++ should be called C!, which means contradiction. See, it seems in order to convert C to C++, they gave it a nice long contradiction bath. Afterwards, it didn’t have any contradictions left, but it still smelled like it.

I want to create a Bjarne voodoo doll. I think I’ll make a lot of money.

I think it is about time that the rest of you gits got around to setting up a gravatar. Those little question marks up above are really starting to get on my nerves. Fix this post-haste!

Alice Roberts is hitched, unfortunately, because in a couple of short episodes of Quantum’s cover of “Don’t Die Young”, her documentary thing, she’s won my heart. It’s so bad I’ve completely forgotten about Donyelle Jones.

I won’t explain why. You just have to watch the show to see. It’s one of the best science shows I’ve seen evar. The only person barring Donyelle who is not on a science show on TV (but really ought to be) is the hot pure maths lecturer from my uni. She had some serious fanboys.

Jeff Atwood wrote about bloggers not being as trustworthy as journalists, but I think that you just have to go to mediawatch to find out that, yes, even if you’re paid to write stuff, journalists are still fat lazy bastards.

If there’s two groups I like, it’s the ABC and the ACCC.

Why is it that people dumber than me about a topic have a blog site that’s more popular than mine? I’m talking about Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror. He’s always bitching about one thing or another. He’s usually wrong and writes two or three articles trying to justify his original arguement, which was wrong, only now he knows it and is trying to cover it up.

His latest set of articles are about how white people use typefaces differently than black people.

Or something.

He starts off with some well established truths: Both ways of rendering fonts are OK, but different. Hell, on Windows you can even choose at what point size you want to change between the the Windows way of rendering fonts (better contrast) and the Mac way of rendering fonts (better shapes). I’m sure Mac’s got the same fucking choices. Hell, on Linux, which is an operating system no human uses (apparently), I can choose between best shapes, contrast, and the amount of this shit that I want.

That doesn’t even begin to get into the fact that different fonts look differently good using different strategies, and the hinting on these fonts is crucial to making either strategy work correctly. It’s a total fucking crapshoot, and it depends mostly on the font you’re using. Jeff is talking shit. It’s like he’s talking while he’s vomiting shit and the words and the shit are indistinguishable.

He does this often. He says something that is full of shit, and when someone tells him “hey, you’re full of shit and I have evidence”, he says “Ah, I am partially full of shit but you misunderstand the grain of non-shit in my original article”. The grain does not exist. It is all shit. He is full of that shit.

He puts that horrible merda on his blog and it’s still more popular than the Quad. I want to cry now.

[Edit: BTW linux wins so lick my balls.]

Pixar vs DreamWorks:

Toy Story / Small Soldiers
Antz / A Bug's Life
Monster's Inc / Shrek
Finding Nemo / Shark Tale

They had a pretty good rivalry there, but I think they both feel secure now. Sony are the new kids on the block and they’re ripping on everyone:

DreamWorks vs Sony Animation:

Madagascar + Over The Hedge / Open Season

KFP (au) vs Sony Animation:

Happy Feet / Surf's Up

Fox Animation is the only other company I can think of (they did Ice Age and Robots), which I don’t think rips anyone off. Pity they suck so bad.

I’ve recently discovered I have high expectations of the things around me. Moreso, that this “character trait” is well known among my friends. I guess that’s how it is, you don’t know things about yourself that are readily apparent to others.

But I’m not going to bitch about how Silver is a bad colour for a new car. Instead, I’m going to bitch about Guild Wars & Puzzle Quest, both game I recently purchased.

First Puzzle Quest. This game is addictive. I’m not sure if it’s in a good way, but you sit down to play it for a few seconds and five hours go by. That part’s all well and good, but there are issues as well. I’m going to assume you all know about Puzzle Quest, but just quickly it’s like Bejeweled with levels. The game works by you “battling” an enemy, and you and the enemy take turns on a bejeweled board matching things up.

Since the game rewards you doing well, it also rewards the other guy for doing well, which means it punishes you for doing badly. Because the game is essentially random, this means that once one of you ends up on a lucky break the fight’s essentially over. That’s not to say it’s all about luck, but the elements of luck there mean sometimes you get.. lucky.

The single worst thing about the game is the music. More specifically, the sound samples. There are strings which loop really badly, so there’s an awful lot of clipping when they’re playing. Another thing that is bad is slowdown. For a puzzle game on the DS, a hand-held which can run Mario Kart with no slowdown, it’s really weird to see that kind of slowdown.

Onto Guild Wars. It was on sale (AU$35) and I figured since my little brother plays it and so do a couple of my friends from work I should give it a shot. The Lore and the intro sequence made me feel like I’d made a grievous error:

Erol, the first of the mages they had rescued from the Charr, had seemed fairly certain the horn was the answer to all of Ascalon’s problems. Devona wasn’t so sure, and she was in good company; the prince had registered his reservations as well. How could a horn hold the key restoring a ruined kingdom to its former glory? Well, no matter what role the horn played in the kingdom’s future, it didn’t hurt to have another weapon in the war against the beasts from the north.

That was from Book 1 – The lore of Guild Wars. The emphasis was mine. Sorry if you threw up, I didn’t give enough warning. Anyhow, it sounds like a five year old writing his own version of Harry Potter. Why is the lore so bad in a game which involves what I expect to be a lot of reading? Hopefully there’s something other than the hott chixxorz which make the game worth my while.

And I wasn’t even expecting much from this game…

People seem to be having some trouble in the east. I just hope Chatty is OK, but me and my car feel a fair bit safer in the west for this long weekend.

A dead issue, don’t wrestle with it, deaf ears are sleeping
A guilty bliss, so inviting (let me in), nailed to the cross.

I feel you, relate to you, accuse you
Wash away us all, take us with the floods
Then throughout the night, they were raped and executed
Cold hearted world
Your language unheard of, the vast sound of tuning out
The rash of negativity is seen one sidedly, burn away the day.

The nervous, the drifting, the heaving
Wash away us all, take us with the floods
Then throughout the day mankind played with grenades
Cold hearted world
And at night they might bait the pentagram
Extinguishing the sun
Wash away man, take him with the floods

Odd as it seems, I’m quoting that respectfully.

God did not create peanut butter, ergo peanut butter does not exist.

Supreme Commander. It’s a game which has bought a headache into my life for a reason you wouldn’t expect. I’ve been trying to play it a bit, and it’s TA-like charm has found some favour with me, but not a lot. The biggest problem is what you call the damn thing. You see, “Supreme Commander”, unlike “Toblo” (which you can say all day long), is way too long to say properly. In addition, saying the name in full implies no familiarity with the game. It’s not your friend. You’re not “with it”. It’s quite likely you’re a noob.

This makes perfect sense, of course. No idiot would ever say “Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War – Dark Crusade”. We’ve shortened it to “Dow” when speaking, “DoW” when talking, which usually refers to the original, as well as both expansions of Dawn of War (Winter Assault and Dark Crusade), and whenever we need clarification, we’ll usually say “DC” or “WA”. When you’re talking about these things a lot, this is a time saver. and when you’re talking to people you’ve never met, then referring to these things as “Dow” shows that you’ve spent long enough talking about the game that you must know at least some of what’s going on.

As I was saying, “Supreme Commander” needs a contraction. A friendly name which is quick and easy to say, something that shows your familiarity with the game. Friends of a friend have taken up calling it “Supremo”. This is completely abhorrent to me, since “Supreme” is the unimportant part of the game title, and it sounds like a Pizza. Calling the game “Supremo” is… inappropriate.

Unfortunately, when you contrast this with the “official” contraction, it still stands on top. When I say “Official” I don’t mean something created or sanctioned by GPG, the company which makes Supreme Commander, rather something which has been taken up by the beta testers of the game, the hard-core players, the lore-masters. These are the guys you go to when you want to know that you want your “BO” to be “2 mex, 4 gen, and fac, and some PDs” and which race is “imba” in the latest patch. These guys have taken to calling it “SupCom”.

“SupCom”. They may as well have called it “SPCM”. It’s easy enough to write, but saying it is hard. Way too fucking hard.

I’m a big proponent of reading something as you write it. I’d pronounce “lasguns” as “lazzguns” as opposed to “laysguns”. I know that it’s a contraction of “laser guns” but the whole point is that you’re inventing a new word that’s easier to say. “lazzguns” is easier to say than “laysguns”, so “lazz” is what I say. According to the rule, then, I’d say “sahpcom” instead of “soupcom”. I think “soupcom” sounds stupid, but “sahpcom” sounds dumb as well.

I’ve been trying to refer to it with “SC”, but that term is heavily overloaded – “StarCraft” being the most notable game in the same genre that people just won’t give up on (Let it go you fucking retards!). “Star Control” and “System Shock” are just two other excellent games it conflicts with.

I thought of the Japanese and how they shorten words “persacon” for “personal computer”. They’d probably say “SuCom” which everyone would agree is pronounced “soocom”, but the problem is that this conflicts with “SOCOM”. In any case saying the “su” part is the difficult bit. I could go with “mander” but this is as bad as “supremo”. I’m completely lost with this.

Does anyone have any ideas?