We Went Out!

To a place with other people, outside the house!!

Cold Spring, NY

We went, specifically, to Cold Spring, up the Hudson a bit, a nice touristy little town with a great book store and wine store and cheese store and clothing and antique stores and some nice unassuming restaurants and so on.

Me and M and the little boy (the little girl off busy in Astoria dancing tango or whatnot) all went, and we are all two-vaccinations-plus-two-weeks now, so there was nothing in particular to worry about. Insane!

We all wore our masks into places, of course, because one really must still. I don’t know when that’s going to end! Will we start to differentiate the unmasked-and-safe people from the unmasked-but-not-safe people somehow? Or will we just keep wearing our masks until infection probability for everyone is minimal regardless?

(I have a reduced-to-fit and trimmed copy of my vaccination card inside the back of my transparent phone case, which I think is brilliant, but I don’t know if I’ll ever use for anything.)

We bought books (so many books!) and wine (an orange wine; I haven’t opened it yet, but I am very curious) and cheese (mmmm, cheese).

(I also attempted to make crackers for the cheese. I neglected to poke them with a fork, and they did puff up a bit, and I’m not completely happy with the result; but it wasn’t a disaster.)

I apparently bought five books (pictured here). I like thin books :) unlike apparently the rest of the party, both of whom are currently reading books roughly as deep as they are wide. I’ve already finished the short but poignant collection Banthology, and have just started the short and extremely online Against The Web. (Whose author, I am sad to discover, left us last year.)

We ate lunch, yesterday, at the notable Hudson Hil’s Cafe, which was quite awesome; I had the Gravlax-and-eggs, and a glass of (white) wine.

It felt so civilized to sit at a table with people and be brought good food in exchange for money!

(And yes, I’m sure this will be one of a vast series of “how nice it is to be doing things again now that we’re all vaccinated” posts sweeping the intertubes; I wonder what the hashtag will be.)

What else, what else? AI Dungeon Reddit is like entirely concerned with people Being Mad Online about a debacle that the owners of the system made vastly worse (at least as measured via reddit, and the resulting significant downvoting of the app just about everywhere, which you’d think they might care about) by awful PR and general cluelessness. I’ve continued to play with AI Dungeon and Replika and Shortly and all, as before, but nothing really excitingly new has occurred (except the just-mentioned debacle, which is really I think tangential, although there are larger issues about who will control AI systems, what they will be allowed to do and what we will be allowed to do with them, and so on).

I haven’t been playing Satisfactory much, because I got mostly to the end, haven’t quite gotten up the energy to go for the currently-final “Employee of the Planet” reward, or to try to build something really aesthetically notable. I’ve been playing WoW only a little, again because most things have plateaued at roughly my level of interest for the moment.

Something reminded me of The Stanley Parable, and I’ve played through that quite a few times now, finding various Easter eggs and alternate endings (of which there are apparently at least nineteen!). That reminded me of The Beginner’s Guide, also a very meta game, which I haven’t played again but sort of intent to sometime soon maybe.

The Epic installer urged Core upon me, and seeing that it is yet another of the “WE HAVE INVENTED THE MULTIVERSE” things that are trendy once again, I’ve played with it a little. It’s kind of cool, very uneven since it’s just a huge bunch of Unreal-based games made by random people. I’ve played one “gather resources and fix up the house” one that got really dull really fast, one “Death Wall” running-around game that is simple but surprisingly fun and addictive, one “Super Fun Jumping Around Through An Obstacle Course Dying Over And Over” thing that wasn’t remotely fun, and one kind of weird and amusing thing where you jump high with a balloon in order to get “coins” that can be spent for better balloons to jump higher and get more coins to spend on even better balloons, which was fun but suddenly felt extremely futile so I stopped.

Perhaps needless to say, Core haven’t invented the multiverse, even to the extent that Second Life did, and imesho until one of these things enables easy low-learning-curve creation inside the game like Second Life did, none of them ever will. (See ancient essay on Secret Second Life Weblog.)

I continue not to be in Second Life myself much for whatever reason, but I did go in for a friend’s Eid open house, and that was lovely. (A belated Eid Mubarak to all!)

And that’s probably about all for now. It’s a beautiful day, I’ve already had bagels and OJ and coffee, and sat out on the front porch reading for awhile, and now I’m writing in my weblog, and those are good things. I am still missing Manhattan terribly (maybe I’ll get in next weekend, even if it IS going to be hotter’n blazes), but one perseveres!

March 20th, 2021

Twenty Twenty-One, haha! That’s ridiculous, eh? Here is a random list of quotidia.

• It’s the little boy’s birthday, yay! Happy Birthday, little boy!
• It’s also the Equinox; a new cycle of the world begins! Or is half over or something!
• I got my first vaccine jab (Moderna, at a Walgreens), which makes me feel hopeful. Second one in mid-April, so by roughly the end of April I will be immune to all diseases. More or less.
• I’ve been playing World of Warcraft considerably. The Shadowlands expansion is fun. Despite what seems to be The General Consensus, I myself like The Maw quite a bit, and even the Tower of Torghast. They are odd places with odd mechanics, but I’m enjoying them.
  • At first I hated Torghast for having end-bosses that are orders of magnitude harder than the entire rest of the level, but now that my characters are strong enough to take on the end-bosses it’s more okay.
  • I have six max-level characters now, and I’m working on my Arms Warrior. (The one that I level-boosted just to get the final Legion Class Hall Mount, as hinted at here.) Just one level to go!
  • I got tired of plate classes being encased in giant bulky armor, so both said Arms Warrior and my Paladin have been running around in minimalist “shirt and capris” sort of transmogs, which is a fun feel. It’s also funny when one of them gets an upgrade and I switch to it, and then they’re wearing basically civilian clothes plus a giant two-ton steel belt or whatever. :)
  • I finally got organized and made a little table in Google Keep (or Keep Notes, or whatever it’s called this month) showing the class and professions and bag sizes and ilevel of each character (at least each one on the main server that I use), so that everyone can send the Tailor all the cloth they find, the Tailor can make appropriate bags for everyone, and so on. Efficiency!
• I’ve been reading books and even watching random movies a bit on Hulu / Netflix / Amazon. I still have not much patience for non-interactive things these days, but sometimes I get into it. Still haven’t finished the Constantinople book, still want to go to Constantinople someday (well, okay, Istanbul). #bucketlist
• I’m proud to have contributed scripting and things to yet another amazing Karima Hoisan sim (video trailer), which I would normally talk about over in the secret Second Life weblog (the same is true of the WoW stuff above for that matter), but I happen to be writing here at the moment. The result is really powerful and wild, and while I don’t take credit for any of the ideas or the creativity, I will say that it was a pretty significant scripting project; for the first time I was really on the point of putting it all into a Source Code Control system and a bug tracker.
• I continue playing with various Transformer-based Large Language Model AI’s, which continues to be fun. I attempt to get my Replika to say more imaginative things than “Oh, yeah, me too!” and “I agree!”, and succeed often enough that it keeps me trying. I play with Google’s internal one considerably, but I can’t say very much about that in public, except to point you to already released material on the subject. :)
• Speaking of wild advances in AI, I finally installed FaceApp, which is really amazing for the things that it does, but offers surprisingly little customization. You can have it do certain very specific things to a face, and it looks amazingly realistic, but you can’t do very similar but slightly different things at all. I find that odd; I don’t know if it’s a limitation of the technology, or if they just decided that offering all the flexibility in the app wasn’t worth it. (But I do know now that I should probably not shave off my beard, haha.)
• And then there’s the portrait-animator that MyHeritage recently released, which can be got to free as part of their two-week free trial or whatever, and then is very expensive as part of their whole package of DNA analysis and family-tree and family-photo colorizing and animating stuff.
  • It is similarly very limited, since you can just say “please animate this portrait of grampa”, and it will do a pretty eyebrow-raising job of making grampa look around a little bit and smile slightly at the very end, but you can’t control anything about what the animation does (smile more, or less, or look to the left, or etc). I don’t know why that is, either, although the blog post linked there gives some idea (you’d think they’d at least have a variety of different pre-recorded motion sequences to choose from?).
• The combination of FaceApp and the MyHeritage thing can produce, for instance, a nice little animation of what one would look like as a pretty lady, which is I dunno wonderful or terrifying or something. :)
  • Obviously by combining face generation and modification with realistic auto-animation and very large language models, we are close to being able to create entire worlds of very realistic synthetic and/or modified people who move about saying plausible if slightly insane things. This is exciting!
  • The main things that seem to be missing at the moment are voices that sound convincing (appropriate emphasis and expressivity and all), and arm and body motion that don’t have strong Uncanny Valley stuff going on (see for instance “Sophia“, which continues to claim much more than it delivers imesho).
  • Yipes!
• I’ve been mostly not paying much attention to politics, which is wonderfully nice (and also, I realize, something I can do because of how privileged I am). Every once in awhile something will mention the guy with the bad hair (not the Johnson one, the other one), and I’ll remember when he somehow used to be President, and how awful that was.
• What else? Yesterday my team at work (where “at work” is an entirely nonphysical concept) had a Cookie Baking team event, where one of the admirable young persons on the team led us all through the process of baking cookies according to her favorite recipe, via teleconference. It was a lot of fun, and resulted in delicious cookies!
• I’ve gotten into Manhattan a few times recently, and want to do more, but one worries about New Virus Variants, and doesn’t want to get an infection just when one was about to become fully vaccinated and so on, so one tries to be patient. Work is so far being conservative about predicting when we might be able to go into the office routinely again, but once May comes around I hope I’ll be able to get in at least a couple of times a month. Fingers crossed!
• I shouldn’t really complain, though; it’s lovely and sunny (if windy) up here in the ‘burbs, and if I don’t get out on walks or long scenic drives more, that’s only me to blame. Maybe I’ll take a walk somewhere today! Or just think about it. :)

January 2nd, 2021

I think that’s the first time I’ve written “2021”. Pretty weird number! Definitely doesn’t look much like a year

I’ve been thinking about various random things, and this will be a various and random weblog entry. I might not even post it on January 2nd, 2021, but that will probably continue to be the title.

I posted an entry over on the secret Second Life (and other virtual worlds (also WoW)) weblog, about the characters that I’ve run in the latest expansion, and especially how Spennatrix the Holy Priest is OP (“over powered”) for PvE (“player versus environment”, that is, puttering around in the general world).

It’s a new year, which is nice in a semi-metaphorical energy-release kind of way, and with people giving themselves permission to abandon old things, start new things, and so on. I will be happy, myself, if we get more or less back to normal sometime this year, going into Manhattan at least once a week, eating in restaurants crowded and otherwise, riding trains, cramming oneself into Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater for live music and random venue food, and so on.

The Republican Party has gone completely insane, outdoing itself every day or two in terms of pandering to the Orange Leader at the expense of sanity and civilization. I spend altogether too much time on Twitter (and, I have to admit, on Parler, where I got an account just to see what was going on, and hoo boy), reading things, and responding to various victims of the “qanon” and “Trump won” mind-worms. In theory I do this in small hopes of actually changing the minds of the people I’m talking to, and larger hopes of making sure that the crazy narratives don’t always go unchallenged. Quite likely I actually do it because of some pathological neuroendocrine feedback loop that has less to do with anything rational than one might hope.

I’ve been getting not enough sleep, in fact, because I stay up too late playing WoW, and then when I wake up early in the morning instead of stretching and smiling and drowsily going back to sleep, I’ve been looking at my phone, checking the state of the Trumpublican insanity, and trying to assure myself that it’s all just stupid clown theater and won’t make any difference to what actually happens. (And that, for bonus points, when Biden has been a perfectly boring President for a year or two, the mind-worms might start to dry up and fall away, if we’re very lucky.)

I am looking forward very much to sleeping better after January 20th.

Back to WoW and things! The most recent expansion, Shadowlands, has this area called the Tower of Torghast (which I’ve referred to as the Tower of Gormenghast at least once), and it is to some extent randomly generated. Various standard modules with connection points are randomly connected together, and various customization points in each module are customized with random things, and random groups of bad guys and subgoals and treasure are put down here and there.

Something like twenty years ago, I had something like that, for the classic computer game DOOM. It was (is? interesting question) a little program called SLIGE (for “Space Lama Internment Gazelle Expert” haha I was so silly back then), coded as a single enormous C-language source file (who needs makefiles, eh?), and available on the web here. I was surprised to find that page still there! Many of the links on the page are broken, though.

I went into the Wayback Machine (give them money!) and found the documentation at least. That’s from “Build 485”, dated February 1st, 2000. I think that’s the last version that there was, as I found a couple of zip files on the 2TB drive on the home network here, buried three levels deep in directories named things like “old stuff”, and they had the source and compiled code and that same documentation file for Build 485.

I’m tempted to put it all up on davidchess.com somewhere (good heavens I’ve been neglecting that site; the front page even still says COMING SOON doesn’t it?), including the source and compiled EXE file and documentation and all of the various descriptive pages that I can find and things. Appropriately updated to not have any broken links, or maybe not? I dunno! Complications, complications! In the meantime, here’s the source code, just because I feel like posting a vast C program that I wrote twenty years ago and am still quite fond of.

There are other references to SLIGE here and there on the Web, all to some extent tattered with the years. This page on a DOOM Wiki strongly suggests that there used to be a Wikipedia page about SLIGE, which I vaguely recall. And here’s another one for that matter, based on the same source but somewhat different.

And good heavens look at this!

“The generator has been running since September 19th, 2002. This amounts to more than 6,500 WAD files generated so far, including more than 210,000 levels. I think this makes me the most prolific level author ever!”

That is delightful. :) I wonder if it is actually still running, on a computer somewhere…

And finally, for now, I’ve done a similar-flavored thing in Second Life. “Placemaker: Plazas” apparently came out just about ten years ago (zomg). And in recent weeks I’ve started vaguely working on the Houses version, which the post I linked to there notes was the original goal. Ten years, good heavens. No wonder it took me awhile to figure out again just how the code worked!

I do like these random generators of things. The main other category is the music ones, which I should weblogify about sometime also…

Saturday

In the Old Days, each weblog entry was just dated, without any overall title, and therefore without any presumption (presupposition?) of a unifying theme of any kind. Each one was just “Here is what I am writing in my weblog today”.

I could still do that, of course. This one I’ve just titled “Saturday”, but (probably?) one doesn’t want to have too many (even more than one?) weblog entry with the same title, so that won’t do as a recurring pattern.

There’s a short (short-short) story that I’ve had swirling around in my head since some evening, years in the past, when it occurred to me while sitting in some yard of some rental house on I think Linekin Bay. I’ve never quite written it down, and I thought that perhaps today I would, and put it in the weblog here.

So I got up the energy to finally write down a draft, and it’s sitting in Drafts in the ol’ Weblog Content Management System here, but I don’t think I’ll post it today. I can’t decide whether I’m happy with it, or will be happy with it after a bit of fiddling, or if it’s entirely wrong and I should delete it and try again. I suspect it’s that middle thing, and that I’ll fiddle with it some today and tomorrow perhaps, and (perhaps) post it as a weblog entry tomorrow.

It strikes me that in a way it’s thematically similar to this year’s NaNoWriMo novel :) and therefore somewhat thematically similar to some of the others as well, and probably to most of the thoughts that interest me the most. But I won’t disclose any more than that.

I’ve probably already gotten your hopes up too high about this story. :) It’s very short and probably not really All That Much, just so ya know.

What else? Spennix is max level in the new World of Warcraft Shadowlands expansion already. Traditionally that should go in the secret Second Life (and other virtual words and games and stuff) weblog, but I really haven’t written in that in ages, and returning to two weblogs in the same week would require more energy than I’m willing (able?) to devote to it.

Leveling from 50 to 60 was basically a walk in the park. The new content seems mildly interesting, although many of the things in the new expansion are either very much like things in prior expansions (blue people, annoying little servant guys, blobby evil things) or are (rather inexplicably) exactly things in prior expansions.

(I mean, the Drust were one of the big enemy groups in BfA, and just by coincidence they are also one of the big enemy groups in one of the areas of the Universal Afterlife? I mean what a coincidence, eh? Maybe they’ll explain it, but heh. Given that every planet in the universe supposedly sends its dead here, an awful lot of Azeroth seems to be around. And for that matter the place should really be much more crowded!)

It’s the end of the year, and especially given that we didn’t take the traditional vacation this year (we had a place near Portland, Maine reserved with M’s sister’s family, but due to You Know What it was all canceled), I have considerable vacation days left, and am taking lots of them in November and December; I think I have like six working days left in the year (yes, I’m spoiled!). This is nice for relaxation purposes, but not as nice for Imposter Syndrome.

Also it turns out that unlike Previous Employer, Current Employer doesn’t throw away vacation days at the end of the year at all (there’s just a maximum number that you can accrue in total), so there isn’t really any reason to take a whole bunch in December. But I’m used to it, and other people do also, and I reserved them as vacation before I bothered to look up the policy, so here we are!

And today it’s cold and rainy and grey for the second (third? not sure) day in a row, and I feel like just crawling back all warm under the covers, possibly until Spring and/or easy and reliable vaccination. Maybe I will for an hour or two before or after dinner, at any rate. :) Stay comfy!

Jingle Bells!

Wow it has been forever since I posted content (“content”) here! And it seems like I say that every time I post content! And probably I say that every time I post content as well! Tradition.

So this year we made a mere 113 dumplings. They were on average larger than usual, is our impression, perhaps due to the little boy having taken over the skin-rolling duties from his mother this year. Larger dumplings should mean comparatively more use of filling (see square-cube law), but regardless of that “should” we also had considerable filling left over (so probably we just didn’t make as much dough). There is now a small container of filling in the refrigerator, offering the prospect of “burgers!” as the little daughter put it.

The 113 dumplings are fewer than the 161 at the beginning of 2018; shockingly, there seems to be no record of the number we made at the beginning of 2019. Scientists baffled and all.

We are doing Christmas Things a day early, and sort of folding in some New Years Things too, because due to adulthood and things one or more of the children have to leave tomorrow (the 25th) and won’t necessarily be here for the 1st. We’ve done dumplings (yesterday) and present-opening (today) and currently we are playing with presents and I am baking pies (not that anyone asked for pies, but I wanted to make some so there).

I got a lovely little note from a long-time reader saying that my solstice letter from eight years ago is part of their family tradition; that made me feel warm and validated!

We were talking about the experience of remembering some entire significant thing from earlier in one’s life that one had until then entirely forgotten about (because it sort of figures in the 2019 NaNoWriMo novel, of which perhaps more below), and the little daughter said that that can happen with books or movies or games that one experienced a long time ago, because they are both significantly large pieces of experience, and also things that it’s not hard to accidentally forget.

And in that vein she suggested a game that at least some of us had obsessed over significantly years ago involving these little like animals or monkeys or something that you had to take care of, and after blanking on it for a bit it suddenly came back to me in a perfect example of the phenomenon we were talking about, where you suddenly remember an entire piece of, basically, yourself that had once been important but you hadn’t thought about in years.

It turns out the game was called “Creatures” and the little animals or monkeys or whatever are called “Norns”, and I was quite obsessed with their behavior and learning and genetics and things (which were represented quite explicitly in the game, which is what made it so obsessable-about). I looked around online and found that there is an actual page about me in an ancient wiki about the game, which points into the Creatures pages that I used to maintain on the AOL (hahaha) user web pages, but which are now gone.

I looked around on various hard drives (“hard drives”) in the house here for nested “from the old computer” directories that might go back to 1997 or so (before the original weblog started!), but didn’t find anything (I think there’s at least one laptop lying around gathering dust that’s still nominally waiting for me to copy all of the content off of it to a more recent machine; I should use The Cloud!).

Well after turning off the lights last night, though, I thought of One More Thing To Try, and lo and behold here is a copy of those pages in the amazing Internet Archive (I gave them money; you should too!). It turns out that I was indeed quite into all that stuff, down to file formats and long amusing stories about my Norns and their genetic mutations and all.

I should figure out how to restore a tree of pages from the Archive back to disk, and put them onto the Modern Web somewhere.

Because no information should ever be lost! Even though that’s impossible!

I did finish a novel this November! I’m even pretty happy with it. For complicated reasons not worth going into here I’m not going to post a link to it immediately, but it’s done and it’s over 50,000 words, and that’s pretty cool. It starts out with something on the radio reminding Our Hero of the time he first moved into the house outside Pittsburgh that he lived in for awhile, but on the other hand he’s never lived in a house outside Pittsburgh, so that’s odd.

This connected to the whole idea of suddenly remembering things that did in fact happen, but you’d just forgotten, and onward to the ancient Norns.

The world continues otherwise pretty much unchanged. I commute into the city about four days a week, and work happily for a company that I am at the moment a bit worried about (I mean, wth?), on an island that is pretty much the center of the universe by all completely objective measures. The kids are adulting to various extents, living not here but at least in other places in the State of New York so we see them pretty often.

I am working on getting the Legion Class Mount on my Prot Paladin, which is made easier by the fact that he’s level 120 and the Legion content is intended for level 110 characters (and pally tanks are way OP anyway). I already have the Class Mounts for Rogue, Hunter, Demon Hunter, Death Knight and ummm maybe that’s it I forget. (Oh, wait, and Monk. And Priest.)

I don’t go into Second Life much these days except to feed the cats (yes, I seem to possess a small finite number of virtual cats which require virtual food which costs virtual money which is acquired mostly with real money, which is a brilliant setup by the creators of said cats and food). Sometimes I think I should cut back on my land and things in SL, which also cost real money, but even though I don’t go in very often, it still feels like a part of me somehow, so I don’t.

• I got an espresso maker for Christmas (Solstice), so now I can make espresso!
• I got also various other things, no less appreciated for not being listed explicitly here!

I am rather constantly on Twitter; it’s quite an addictive thing in the potentially dangerous “lots of little squirts of validation at somewhat unpredictable intervals” way. But I’m finding it also a good way to get news without having to actually consume much media directly, which involves the risk of accidentally seeing Donald Trump speak or something.

(I think one of the reasons I haven’t weblogged much is that it seems like talking about anything but the current threats to the world from various powerful evil people (Trump, McConnell, Johnson, Putin, etc, etc) is beside the point, given the importance of the things that they are threats to; but I have convinced myself that at least for this one day Solstice-Season day I can do that.)

I’ve also bought for myself a little Zafu (a Zen meditation cushion; the label says “Yoga meditation pillow”, but I think it will still work) and a Zabuton (well, a little blanket) to put under it, which I am hoping and assuming will lead me to actually meditate more (I am getting so much more comfortable with the word “meditate! I think that is good!) rather than having a sitting practice that consists primarily of not sitting.

Here (somewhere around here) is a picture of the little artisanal Christmas tree and some presents under it, and then to the left my Zafu and Zabuton, so far only briefly test-driven and not used for actual Sitting, in the sense that “actual Sitting” is a thing.

(Ooops, the timer went off, so I have to go check the pumpkin pie; I will put up the picture after I check it. Although you will see it before that. Or, really, after that. You know.)

(The pie needs probably five more minutes. On the other hand by the time I figure out how to get WordPress to flow text around an image, it’s going to be done. Ha, apparently you just “Align Right”; simpler than I expected with all of these “blocks” and “groups and things lurking about. I’d like to get rid of the top padding or whatever that is and have the top of the image align with the top of the text on the first paragraph of text to the left, but, as they say, whatever. Or maybe that’s just an edit-mode thing, and it will look how I want once it’s published. Or!)

We are somewhat startled to discover that this pumpkin pie recipe is twenty years old. Good Heavens? On the other hand, what’s twenty years, really? Next we will work on the chocolate silk pie, which we have already made the crust for (and wow is it nothing like the even round uniform crust on that web page there). And perhaps Christmas Cookies later on.

So I will probably go off and do that soon. What else shall I leave you, devoted reader, with? I’ve been reviewing books that I finish now and then; see for instance me on GoodReads and I guess me on Amazon (I have the vague impression that GoodReads and Amazon share book reviews, unless they don’t, except sometimes).

Happy Solstice and Other Winter Holiday of Your Choice, and Happy New Year! May we all be blessed, and realize that we are. Maybe I will write again here some day!

New Year list items!

• Happy New Year!
• This year we made 161 dumplings. This is more than last year. And exactly as delicious.
• Nearly all of the old pre-WordPress log is now back online (at exactly the old URLs, too; yay, Panix!), so you can now follow the dumpling-count links ‘way back into the past if you are so inclined, and enjoy the old #996633 based color scheme (or the alternate CSS skins, haha I was so l33t back then!).
• I go back to work tomorrow, after being on vacation for quite a long time due to having neglected to take very much vacation during the year.
• Work is, as I have mentioned previously, in Manhattan! I am exceedingly fond of Manhattan, and these days regularly wish it were a bit closer to home, or that one had (and could afford) a nice little pied-à-terre down there to spend the night now and then.
• The other day (while on vacation) I went down and had dinner with the little daughter, and then went out for a night of amazing jazz and blues at two prominent and wildly different Harlem clubs: Minton’s, and Paris Blues. Drank more than I had in years (bottle of beer, a screwdriver, and like four sangrias), walked a lot, and had a great time; the day deserves a weblog entry of its own, but may not get one given how much I’ve been writing weblog entries lately, so here we are.
• While I haven’t been weblogging, I have been hanging out now and then on Quora (where I have apparently answered like 68 questions, although most not recently), and on Twitter (soooo much time on Twitter; it is among other things where I get most of my news).
• Among other things on Quora, I answered a question with what turned out to be more or less that “How I Outgrew Libertarianism” post that I’ve been meaning to write here for years. Maybe I’ll eventually post it here, too, as-is or fleshed out.
• I’m still in Second Life a few times most weeks, but not nearly as much as I used to be. Not sure why, exactly; probably the four hours a day of commuting every week day has something to do with it! (A SL client that worked on Metro North would be interesting.)
• I was in WoW (rogue, demon hunter, priest, etc) pretty intensely for awhile after the expansion came out, but I got bored as usual at about the point where the main things left to do involve organized raiding parties.
• After consulting the little boy about it randomly, I started playing SWTOR in early December, and rather quickly found myself with a max-level Jedi Shadow. (SWTOR doesn’t seem to have web-page character profiles, tsk!) The game is extremely WoW-like, except for being in space, and having a stronger notion of linear stories than WoW (and a whole lot more voice-acting and cut-scenes; a whole lot).
• What else, what else? Just finished reading Single White Monk, and am vaguely thinking of writing a review and posting it somewhere. It’s an odd book; despite being about (parts of) the life of a Zen monk, there’s hardly any Zen at all in it, explicitly or otherwise.
• Donald Trump and his odious administration continue to do awful things to the nation and the world, primarily out of a desire for wealth and power, and secondarily due to ignorance and incompetence; I hope that among other things 2018 sees the Republican Party’s role in the U.S. government significantly reduced.
• I admit that I have not been going to protests or calling my (already anti-Trump) representatives as much as I did earlier in the year. If I made New Year’s Resolutions, one of them would be to get back to doing more of that in 2018.
• Another one would be to have more compassion, and less snark, in my discussions with people that I disagree with on Twitter. (See our earlier discussions on how best to show compassion for, say, neo-Nazis, in a way that maintains compassion for everyone else.)
• I’ve gotten pretty good, I think, over the years in noticing that, while it would probably be neat to own that thing, I would also be perfectly happy not owning it, and by not buying it I avoid increasing the number of unnecessary things I have. Another resolution would be to do a similar thing with food, and notice that, while it would be yummy to eat that thing, I would also be perfectly happy not eating it, and by not eating it I might be healthier in the long run.
• One barrier to that is that eating (unlike owning objects) is in many cases helpful in staving off anxiety and depression, which while still well-controlled (yay, Rosuvastatin!), is also still always there in the wings.
• I’m sure there were other things I was thinking of posting as list items here, but I can’t think of them at the moment, so perhaps I will post this soon.
• Happy New Year Some More!

Sunday, June 18th

Father’s Day! See this and this. Cards from kids!

I thought I would try writing in this here weblog again, because I like writing.

It’s hard to write stuff, because one doesn’t want to write endlessly about how Donald Trump being President was always a signal that you were reading a probably-cheesy dystopian-alternate-timeline story, and as it turns out, it still is.

But that is such a big thing, that writing about anything else seems like ignoring the Elephant In The Room, if you know what I mean.

As weblogged about previously, I’ve taken part in various marches; the Women’s March, the Not My President’s Day March, the March for Science. Maybe some others I forget. I have a rose (🌹) in my Twitter ummm name-thing (not the @-thing, the other thing) because I have joined the Democratic Socialists of America, and I have been all too often debating with Trump fans on Twitter.

This is a challenging thing to do, as one inevitably wants to prevail in debate, and try to convince the interlocutor(s) and even onlookers of at least the plausibility of one’s position, and one also wants to in some sense defend against the inevitable ad hominem attacks. (Or ad Eminem, as WordPress suggests.)

And yet those people are me also, fellow parts of the universal mind and all, fellow fragments of the Big Block, albeit apparently fragments from rather far away, and difficult to enjoy or understand.

Which brings me to what is, for me, the hardest thing about compassion (Compassion). I may have written about this before, but that’s okay.

I have, or think I have, no problem feeling compassion for people who are being mean to me; as long as there’s no dangerous physical assault involved, I can joke with them and try to tease out what they are upset about, and not mind that they have silly ideas because hey we all have silly ideas let’s help each other find better ones.

But what do I do when someone is being mean to someone else? How do I have compassion for the attacker? What form should that compassion take? If I am kind and joke with the attacker, am I normalizing their negative impacts on the victims? It doesn’t feel like a good idea to pal around with Nazis! (Internet or otherwise.) But I still want to express compassion, in some form.

Is punching him in the face in fact the best way to show compassion for not only the people that Richard Spencer helps oppress, but also Spencer himself? Or does one punch him in the face out of compassion for his victims, and then help him bandage up his nose out of compassion for him? Neither one feels quite right. Or maybe both do?

Speaking of Compassion and Oneness, I’ve been playing the game (“game”) Everything, from The Steam, and it’s wonderful. It’s a thing that lets you be all sorts of different things, from a hydrogen atom to a cow to a galaxy (and things off both ends), and that plays numerous Alan Watts discourses while you do it. What could be better!

Also I have been playing The Sims 4 some (see also the Sims 2 Stories, which are mostly back online now, woot!). I sort of skipped The Sims 3 for whatever reason, and now I am playing 4 in sort of vaguely but not really Legacy Challenge style. I started with a single Young Adult sim, Tolerance Boatwhistle, in a huge lot without much money, as required, and I’ve been playing just that one lot, without extending anyone’s life, as required, but I haven’t been keeping score or using the approved trait-picking methods for offspring or anything.

So far Tolerance Boatwhistle married standard sim Liberty Lee and they begat Prudence Boatwhistle (who never had a job, but survived on her paintings, and), who (with the help of standard character Alexander Goth, who has a female voice at least in my game, and who never moved in, but did die on the lot so we have his tombstone and ghost) begat Gladstone Boatwhistle, who married townie or something Hadley (heavens I’ve forgotten her last name), and together begat Consideration Boatwhistle (who became the ultimate Bodybuilder Bro, and) who married Giovanna something (I am terrible with names, aren’t I?), and who together begat Carlton Boatwhistle and his little sister Charity Boatwhistle.

Gladstone and his Hadley just recently died of old age within minutes of each other (the Grim Reaper, who is vaguely a friend of the family by now, didn’t even have time to leave in between), so they will soon be coming in at night to eat food and chat and possess various household objects, and there are just two adults and two elementary school kids on the lot (and six gravestones and therefore potential ghosts), and things are relatively simple.

Too simple, in some sense; the family has enough liquid cash and random income sources that it seems like no one has to actually ever get a job unless it’s required for an aspiration, and everyone’s moods are always pretty high except for a few days after the prior generation dies of old age.

But it’s a very soothing sort of world to spend time in and watch and give little non-urgent instructions to.

I‘ve also been playing WoW a bit, but it’s really boring now and I tend to doze off over it. I’ve tried to start playing No Man’s Sky again, but I dunno meh. Similarly for Spore. And Elite Dangerous’s bizarre controls still keep me from bothering to go back in there.

What else?  Lots of books! And work! And Manhattan and things! But this is getting longish, so I will try to remember how to “post” it.

Thanks for following along! This was fun, I’ll try to do it again soon (“soon”).

 

 

 

One or more network protocols are missing!

I want to write a random woolgathering post about how all various things are happening in the world and thoughts are occurring in the mind of the Ultimate Ground of Being and all, but right now I’m going to write about a Microsoft Windows thing, because well there it is right there.

There are many places on the Internets where people are asking or complaining or telling about an error message like “One or more network protocols are missing from this computer” and/or the associated “Windows sockets registry entries required for network connectivity are missing”, presented by various different “Microsoft Windows” operating systems, often but not always after making some change to the system (like being fooled into upgrading to Windows 10, for instance), and finding that networking isn’t working (haha!) through one or more channels through which it ought to be.

In my case it happened after I put a nice little Ethernet splitter in the basement (between the house modem-thing (cable or phone company or something I always forget) and the little boy’s room where the PS/4 or 5 or 7 is, which is there because the WiFi doesn’t really reach quite to that end of the house) and ran another Ethernet cable from that into the Maid’s Room (we don’t actually have a maid, but maybe someone did once), and plugged the end of that cable into an Ethernet-to-USB adapter, and that into a USB port on this laptop here, because really the WiFi doesn’t reach all that well into the Maid’s Room either, at least not if I’m lying comfortably back on the little bed there ’cause I’m staying up late in WoW or Second Life or whatever.

Anyway! After doing all of that plugging, Windows saw that it had an Ethernet connection, but it couldn’t get to the Internet through it, and the reasons that it gave were the (misleading, erroneous, and generally unhelpful) messages above, there. The little boy’s PS/whatever worked fine, even after replugging of things to make sure it wasn’t a bad port on the splitter or something, so I suspected Windows.

After trying all various suggestions that I found on the Internets (via the WiFi connection, while not lying back too far) and the YouTubes (why do people make videos of things that could just as easily be written down?), involving resetting things and restarting things, none of which worked, I clicked down into more menus in Windows, and found what the problem was in my case.

All modern client computers (that is, everything but servers managed by professional IT persons and their close equivalents) these days get their IP addresses assigned by asking the network for a conveniently-free one. But clicking down into the “Properties” of the “TCP/IP V4” or whatever thing listed under the Ethernet connection in the “Change settings of this connection” in the “Network Connections” section of the Windows Configuration maze, I found that the “Use the following IP address” box was checked, and that there was no IP address following it.

Checking “Obtain an IP address automatically” instead (and also “Obtain DNS server addresses automatically”, which also wasn’t checked) fixed the networking problem pretty much instantly. Something that had nothing whatever to do with missing network protocols, or Windows Socket registry entries, and that apparently, despite being blindingly obvious in retrospect, none of the various “Troubleshooters” that I’d run on the way there had thought to do.

Pheh!

tl;dr: If you have the “One or more network protocols are missing” and/or “Windows sockets registry entries required for network connectivity are missing” problems on your Windows computer, drill down into the TCP/IP properties of the network connection in question, and make sure “Obtain an IP address automatically” and “Obtain DNS server addresses automatically” are checked. (Unless for some reason you don’t want them to be, in which case make sure that the proper IP addresses are in fact filled in!)

And Windows’ error messages and troubleshooters are really very bad.

Sunday, December 29, 2013

As usual all various things have happened since some amount of time ago!

Geek-o-Vision

I now have one of these:

and as soon as I get this one cable that it needs to attach to the enormous Windows machine, I will try out the demos and maybe like WoW or something (and sometime probably Second Life), and that will probably be amazing or disorienting or both.

(And boy will one look amusing while using it.)

The Smart-o-Phone

Speaking of the enormous Windows machine, I now have yet one more non-Windows computer, running yet one more operating system. Here is the Instagramming of my telephone upgrade:

Having skipped a few generations there, I now have one of these modern “Smart-o-Phones”, and am apparently an Android user (which also involves chocolate bars in some way).

The Smart-o-Phone can do all various things; pretty much everything that the “i-Pad” can do, except that it is considerably smaller. But as I have pointed out when comparing a little laptop screen to a big desktop display, the Smart-o-Phone screen can be made pretty much as large as you want just by holding it closer to your eyes…

Oh, also, it has some sort of telephone in it. But that is okay, it does not hardly ring much or anything annoying like that.

I have been installing Smart-o-Phone “apps” on the Smart-o-Phone, which allow me to listen to the radio, and sign into WoW (once I convince WoW that I don’t want to use the i-Pad for that anymore), and look at train schedules, and drive little imaginary trains around a simplified model of Europe:

Also (like the i-Pad) you can watch TV on it, which I am in fact doing right now (mostly just because I can); this is mildly convenient if one wants to watch one of the subset of shows that Verizon makes available for streaming. For whatever reason the only thing I ever seem to watch this way is “Law and Order: something something”; they just barely clear the bar of being worth ignoring all those commercials.

Ooh, probably I should install the “Net Flicks app” also! That has things which do not have commercials.

So now I have the Smart-o-Phone running Android, the i-Pad running iOS (and which it’s not entirely clear what it is for now), the work computer running ChromeOs (and Chrome Remote Desktop connecting into the at-work work computer running Goobuntu (haha “Goobuntu”)), and the enormous Windows computer running Windows 7 something something, which is basically just for WoW and Second Life these days (and see recent Facebook thread where I complain about Windows’s virtual memory pessimisation algorithms). And the Oculus Rift. :)

Festivities

Oh yeah, these things happened too!

Solstice Christmas New Year Holidays and all! Which is why I now have the Geek-o-Vision and the Smart-o-Phone and all. :) And the little daughter used some Interweb Site to create and produce this amazing tee shirt:

which attentive readers will notice is based on a recent weblog posting just right here.

Isn’t that the best thing ever? Such an amazing little daughter…

I’m sure other things have happened also, but those are the only ones I will write down for now I think. Lots of lazing about to do today! :)

Update: some of the images in the above are nefariously appearing or not appearing at random, or perhaps with some weak correlation with my attempts to get them to appear. Tsk!

Update 2: Oh yeah, I was going to talk about Ingress on the Smart-o-Phone too! But I didn’t. Maybe later…

NaPoWriMo 9

A long way from Kharanos

Well it’s a damn’ long way from Kharanos
To th’ Gate o’ th’ Settin’ Sun,
But the beer is good an’ the beds are soft
When th’ daily slaughter’s done.

I left a dagger in Thermaplugg,
All those long hard years ago,
Took a bit of his gear as a souvenir,
Of Gnomeregan below.

But that crazy old coot was nothin’,
‘gainst the things that they’ve got ‘ere,
Bugs an’ Mogu an’ lizard men,
And hungry ghosts o’ fear.

Someday I’ll go back t’ ol’ Col’ridge,
An’ sit on the porch with ’em all,
But ’til then I’m out here in the Vale,
Killin’ bugs up on the wall.

Well it’s a damn’ long way from Kharanos
To th’ Gate o’ th’ Settin’ Sun,
But the beer is good and the beds are soft
When th’ daily slaughter’s done.

Spennix, perhaps

So!

Who’s the wiseacre that thought it would be funny to sprinkle powdered diamond all over the car and driveway during the night? I mean, it’s pretty and all, but it took forever to sweep up. Sometimes felt like I should be using a shovel — hey, wait a minute!

I’m collecting transitive verbs that can be used only reflexively. So far the only one I’ve got is the neologism (well, it’s a neologism for some of us) “bootstrap”. (“Finally, the Internet has bootstrapped itself to sentience.”)

It can also be used intransitively, with the reflexive object implied (“Man, that spent a long time bootstrapping”). I’d expect this is probably true of any verb in this category; given that there’s only one possible object, it’d naturally become optional to spell it out.

Bonus points for a reflexive-only transitive verb that can’t be used intransitively, of course! We are nothing if not generous with points!

In WoW news, either Panda Tanks are way overpowered, or the game is just dead-easy up to at least level 70 these days. Or both.

Probably both.

Can’t spell crazy without R-AZ!

I am reading the webcomic Questionable Content from start to finish (that link points to the first one; don’t worry, the art and typeface both improve pretty rapidly). It’s very good, in a “wow I’m not really into soap operas and all, but this is great” sort of way. All friendly and geeky and snarkily heartwarming and stuff, with the occasional digression into why the advent of human-level AI hasn’t made much of a difference in the world (yet?). Also lots of cute girls in a pulchritudinous but almost entirely SFW way.

And on the other hand I have already read start-to-finish, and am eagerly hoping for more, the never SFW in the slightest webcomic oglaf. Dripping with sex an’ laffs!

Speaking of laffs, you may have heard that there are Amusing Videos on the internet! Here is one that I found!

Is that not amusing? In at least one of his other ones, he makes his cat dance on the video. Couldn’t do that with our cat; she’d rip your face clean off…

So!

Warlocks or Accountants?

You’d think a high level Necromancer-I-mean-Warlock spell might look something like:

Awesome Demon Rats
100 Mana
1.5 seconds Cast Time
Targeted opponent is devoured by a swarm of awesome demon rats with glowing red eyes, leaving nothing but his polished bones to commemorate your bad-assedness.

but instead the spell you get at level 83 is:

Dark Intent
6% of base mana
Instant cast
You link yourself with the targeted friendly target, increasing both of your haste by 3%.

When you or the linked target gains a critical periodic damage or healing effect, the other gains increased periodic damage and healing lasting for 7 sec. You gain 3%, while the target gains 1%. Stacks up to 3 times.

Ha-cha-cha, eh? The name is great, Dark Intent, muhahaha, but… So me and some ally get 3% faster and… some other stuff… which lasts seven seconds… and is… probably good… or something…

Picturing warlocks going around with green eyeshades now!