Grey Eminence

For the first time today, I ran across the acronym “WWJTKD?”. Normally, it takes a second to decipher these things, but this time there was no hesitation at all. The meaning was clear:

Who Would Jesus Tae Kwon Do?

Then I found out she'd meant “James T. Kirk”, which is cool and all, but it's not TKD Jesus. And it never will be.

I'm home and recovered from the wedding of dark_blue_mania and silentorpheus, and my first question is: How did I lose weight? Yes, I'm on a diet, but yesterday the diet was dragged out of its keep and bludgeoned by vikings.

The other, less rhetorical question is: Did she change her last name? Despite my stupendous, almost Holmesian powers of observation, that detail somehow slipped past me.

I went shopping for a new suit at my usual place, the Salvation Army. I couldn't find one that fit, not because my size is unusual, but because complete used suits of any size are unusual. There have always been more used jackets than pants, but this time there were four pants to go with about fifty jackets.

It occurred to me that this is predictable: Pants suffer a lot more abuse in daily wear than suit jackets… when the jackets get worn at all. So the problem is the way suits are sold: as a jacket-and-pants unit destined to produce a lot of orphaned jackets.

The solution is obvious. Sell a suits as a jacket, an optional vest, and about four pairs of pants. That, or sell all the parts separately and make it easy to buy extra pants along with the jacket.

Why is this not happening already?

I spent three and a half hours today fighting the snooze button. It goes off every 7 minutes, so that means I got out of bed, walked across the room, slapped the clock, and went back to sleep (210 ÷ 7 = 30) thirty times before it finally woke me up. I have no memory of any of this.

I hate sleep.

I voted… absentee / mail-in, as always. Then I found out that Uncle Floyd is running for governor.

Argh! Now you tell me!

I woke up to five political ads on my cell phone, and the day's not nearly over. At this point, I hope they all lose.

I still have some time before my account is actually locked out, so does anyone want my stuff? I'm not rich, but I've got a few bars of titansteel and some enchanting materials. (I've got wads of cash on the Horde side, not that anyone plays Horde.)

Me, Thu 23 Apr 2009: “there will be a noticeable dip in the percent of web pages with silver text on animated starry-sky backgrounds”.

xkcd, Mon 26 Oct 2009: [animated starry-sky background]

xkcd's animated stars steal the show with a subtle bug — the colors don't loop correctly. Watch carefully, and you can see the jump from purple to green.

Is anyone planning something for Halloween this year? I haven't heard a thing.

Come to think of it, I haven't seen or heard from a lot of people recently, for holidays or anything else. I have a lot of time on my hands these days, so I'm up for anything, including aimless hanging-out if it means I get to see people.

I just heard WMMR play Joe Satriani's “Surfing with the Alien”. My car was going faster before my brain understood why. Since when does pop radio play instrumentals, let alone 1987 Satriani?

Then, to completely break character, they announced what they'd just played. I think it was the first time I've heard a mainstream DJ do that all year.

This Friday 25 September at 19:00, the NJ Film Festival at Rutgers will be showing two documentaries about education in New Jersey. It costs $10 to see both.

The first is A Place Out of Time: The Bordentown School, about the all-black (including the teachers and administration) vocational boarding school that opened during Reconstruction and was closed in the 1950s, ironically as a result of desegregation. I saw this on Sunday, when the director and producer were available to take questions (they won't be there this Friday), and many graduates of the school were in the audience.

The second, and possibly of more immediate interest to NJ teachers, is The Cartel, an investigation of the New Jersey public school systems, charter schools, and vouchers. The film focuses on aspects of the state system that seem to promote corruption, and on alternatives to the standard “zip code” school. (Don't expect the NJEA to be the good guys in this one.) The film's official website has more detail. The Cartel's producer and director, former TV news reporter Bob Bowden, will be taking questions afterward.

As a bonus, the theater at Scott Hall #123 is on the corner of College Avenue and Hamilton Street in New Brunswick… across the street from the grease trucks. The long, drawn-out death rattle of the human vascular system never tasted so good.

Not the same thing:

1. It took the PC's weapons.
2. It took the PCs' weapons.
3. It took the PCs days to get their weapons back.

You're welcome.

PolitiFact has created the Obameter to track president Obama's progress toward his 516 campaign promises. For readers with less time on their hands, they've isolated his 25 most important campaign promises.

Each rating (kept, in progress, stalled, broken, or compromise) is backed up with detail and sources. As a bonus, they give no credence to anonymous sources, something I wish the mainstream media would do. This is a fantastic way to keep tabs on the change as it happens, or fails to happen.

Prime minister Gordon Brown has finally apologized to the ghost of Alan Turing for his treatment at the hands of the British government after World War II. The Father of Computer Science was driven to an early grave for the crime (the actual, on-the-books crime) of being homosexual. This was only 60 years ago.

It amazes me that a country would rather not be home to one of the greatest mathematicians in the world, thank you very much… not if he's gonna be all gay on us.

What stands out most is that all his achievements were judged to weigh less than his sexual preference. Not that a gay man has to earn his keep by proving the halting problem is undecidable, or defining the limits of computation, or saving your country from marauding U-boats… or even all of the above. It's just that, if your country does happen to have someone like that on hand, discarding him because he enjoys the wrong kind of sex is a pretty extraordinary example of “irrational fear”. It suggests that Alan Turing was not the one with the mental problem.

Update: It seems that one guy got this ball rolling in his spare time. Wow.

Because I'm stubborn, I started pulling everything out of the bathroom to search yet again for signs of a leak. The tell-tale clue was a spare roll of toilet paper that was suspiciously damp. I found a tiny trickle of water sliding down the back of the toilet seat and into the crack between toilet and floor, from which it was traveling seven feet to empty into my kitchen.

The ultimate source of the leak was the rearmost of the three bolts that hold the tank to the seat. I thought to myself, “That bolt looks loose. I think I'll touch it. What could go wrong?”.

The toilet's reply went something like: “Loose? It was never tight in the first place! The nut has been dangling at the bottom of that bolt since before you moved in. The only thing keeping this throne together for the last five years was gravity. YOU HAVE MEDDLED WITH THE ALMIGHTY FORCE OF GRAVITY!”

And with that, it started dumping the tank water out the half-inch hole where the bolt had been.

For future reference: If you ever have a similar problem, flush the toilet immediately to get the water out of the tank and into the bowl. Then, prevent the tank from refilling by finding the input pipe and closing the cut-off valve, which all newer houses have. If, like me, you live in an old house, the cardboard tube from the roll of paper towels you will have surely gone through by now is exactly the right height to cram under the float arm. Mine lasted the better part of a half-hour, which was enough.

So now everything is back together. I'm arranging paper towels around the scene of the crime, and I'll look for evidence of more leakage in the morning.

So far, there's no visible water damage. If I get out of this with nothing more than a mold assessment and (another) night of no sleep, I'll consider myself lucky.

PS: In pulling the rest of the junk out of my bathroom to complete the mop-up, I discovered that my toilet does have a water cut-off after all. Bah.

I came home tonight to a soaked kitchen table and floor. The culprit appears to be the ceiling lamp, which is producing more water than is usual for an electrical fixture. The less-immediate cause has to be the bathroom on the second floor, but:

1. The bathroom is bone dry.

2. The house had been unoccupied (and the bathroom unused) for about five hours.

3. The bathroom isn't actually over the leak. No pipes are near the leak, as far as I can tell.

Looks like I'm spending tomorrow with a plumber. Possibly a contractor. And a priest, in case my house has developed stigmata.

Don't mind me, I'm just… uh, watering the bushes.

Tree surgeons are hard at work in the next lot. Intermittent chainsaw harmonies with long, warbling solos. It stops long enough to convince me it's over, then it starts again. A symphony of flies.

I guess I'm awake.

I've spotted Rich, Dom, and Alissa (sp?) on rare occasion, and Matt appears to have Azeroth socketed into his brain, but otherwise I haven't seen anyone I know since around 2008. World of Warcraft as a solo experience lost its shine long ago, but I've stuck with it based on the promise that “level 60 70 80 is a completely different game”.

What I'd like to do, if anyone's still there, is to try exploring some of the dungeons with people I know. That's why I bought Warcraft in the first place… to hang out online with people I wouldn't be seeing in person much any more.

I'm dimly aware that Andy, Kathy, and Tim still play, but at a level I will likely never be prepared for. (Assuming “Adjective Noun Raiding” was them, they had questions in their application that I didn't even understand, let alone have an answer for.) The “Three Rivers Raiding” group looks like they'd take me, but due to the bizarre forum policy, they can't tell me if they're anyone I know or not. <boggle>

So, if anyone still makes a habit of wandering through Warcraft's group areas, where are you and when do you meet? I've got a paladin in the Alliance (protection or retribution) and a rogue on the Horde side (subtlety), and they're equally sick of getting turned away from dungeons because they haven't already done those dungeons.

PS: Is there any “don't miss” single-player content I should check out? I saw the Borean Tundra, Howling Fjord, and most of Dragonblight before I hit level 80 and stopped. The Knights of the Ebon Blade might be fun to work for (not that they'll talk to me), and that troll city looked different, but I'm primarily in Northrend to fight the Lich King. I'm looking for the fun parts, and I'm willing to do a few “kill 12 zombies” or fed-ex quests to get to them. But only a few — Hemmit Nesingwary need not apply.

Are we in the middle of a cricket rebellion or something? Suddenly, they're everywhere. One's hiding in my living room right now, chirping madly. I've had to shoo them off (and out of) my car every time I've gone out, and then out of my house every time I've come back in.

Anyone else having this problem?

I've been in Boston all week for training, and thanks to the parking garages, the trains, and buying lunch every day, I've had far more contact with cash than I usually do. The silly cosmetic changes to our coins and bills have accelerated over the past few years, apparently for the sole purpose of making them collectable. I expect we'll soon see bills with embossed foil covers, re-numbered from 1 to reflect their new origin stories.

Between the state quarters, the close-up nickel, the new bills, the new new bills, and Bob knows how many attempts at a dollar coin, I have no idea what my country's currency looks like any more. I got four dollars in change out of a vending machine, and every one of them was different.

I've heard the claim that this was all to prevent counterfeiting, but if so, then the US Mints have only made the problem worse. At this point, I'd accept dead turtles as legal tender, so long as they came out of a MAC machine and had a “20” on them somewhere.

When you're in the middle of shifting to a sleep-at-night schedule for a week out of state, that's the awesomest time for insomnia to start a riverdance on your brain stem. I'm so wired I'm twitching, but so tired the words keep wobbling all over the place.

The day they discover a cure for sleep I will be first in line, and I don't care how many people I have to chew through to get there.

If you're like me, you read an awful lot… or at least, you want to. But if you are like me, you also have the attention span of a tumbleweed.

You're probably already flipping through some other tabs by now. I know I am. I have <counts> 63 tabs open, including this one, plus 24 more on the other machine. (And to think I've spent the last hour closing tabs.)

Back on topic: Spreeder is one of the few sites on the Internet worth turning JavaScript back on for. Copy and paste an article into Spreeder, and it plays the text back at a brisk 300 words per minute. The blink-and-you'll-miss-it speed keeps my attention better than any static page could, because I can't risk looking at anything else, even for “just a second”.

As a bonus, it gets the words into my head faster than normal reading.

I suggest these settings:

• Three words at a time, to improve continuity.
• Left-aligned text, so your eyes don't waste precious milliseconds locking on to the first word.
• Advanced: Start new chunk at end of sentences and paragraphs.
• Advanced: Slight pause at end of sentences and paragraphs.

I accidentally stumbled headlong into World of Warcraft's (in)famous “Wrathgate” storyline last night. Blizzard's plot might motivate the humans, orcs, and other characters, but it doesn't play so well to an undead alchemist who introduces himself as an “apothecary”.

It also didn't handle my stubborn insistence of discovering the Wrong Way to do everything in this game, but no one could plan for that…

As you WoW veterans might have guessed having played through this, or just knowing of my luck with “big battle” missions, I went and broke the quest. The Horde outside had been waiting for a designated mission start time, and my sneaking in early completely messed it up.

In my defense, when you send a rogue to assassinate someone, what do you expect him to do?

I would never have stayed with World of Warcraft so long if not for the Horde, especially the unapologetically evil Forsaken Undead. For starters, they heal by eating your brains. Just for starters.

Why are we so evil? Because bad guys have all the fun.

PS: King Varian Wrynn doesn't have pockets. What a rip-off.

I wrote this in an RPG.net forum thread about plots you hate to encounter as players. I'm re-posting it here, because I think grousing brings out the best in me.

The worst plots for me always have an underlying sense of “Continuity? Setting? Rules? Bah! Mere trivialities to a Master Storyteller such as myself. You want story? I've got more story than you can handle!” Examples that keep recurring:

The “Like a Geas, Only It Sucks More” Trifecta

1. A plague is tearing through the countryside. It is mysteriously immune to “cure disease” spells, potions, prayers, and the numerous other means your fantasy society uses to handle this sort of problem three times before lunch. Only a Quest for three particular Ancient and Powerful Artifacts (which no one has so much as heard of before today) can Undo the Evil of this Dread Pestilence. A sage said it, so it must be true.

2. A Buried Tomb of Ancient and Terrible Evil has somehow resurfaced. It's stone doors can not be opened with “rock to mud” spells, acid, lock picks, or the numerous other means your fantasy society uses to handle this sort of problem before lunch. Only a Quest for the Rod of Entendres and the Babbling Bauble of Barf, which no one has blah, blah, blah. A sage said so.

3. The King has been Laid Low by an Assassin's Terrible Poison, which is mysteriously immune to “stay the poison” spells, yadda, yadda, yadda, sage.

“But First, You Must Prove Yourself”

The world is Doomed! Only this one band of Noble Heroes can Quest for the Ancient… Jesus H. Christ, sage already! …until at last, the party reaches the saint, ancient oak, dragon, or god who alone has the power to prevent the end of the world, and it can't be fucking bothered. But if the PCs solve a crossword puzzle, fold its laundry, and herd sheep across a chessboard trap, it will realize that the world is Worth Saving After All, and the PCs may finally get their experience points.

It's Not Absurdity — It's Backstory!

A polar bear walked ten miles south, ten miles east, and ten miles north, where it came to a bridge. There it met a sage's evil twin trying to cross with a cabbage, a goat that always told the truth, and a wolf that always lied about where they buried the survivors. At the far end of the bridge was a finely-balanced scale, which could only be used three times eight queens placed on a chessboard so that none were threatening the arch-lich, who was at that moment engaged in a titanic ritual to determine which of the nine coins was a counterfeit. After the maid, who as fate would have it received a mis-addressed letter for the butterfly, took off from the train traveling west at 80 miles per hour to return to the spot where it started, the general, being hard of hearing, realized that he couldn't be hanged at noon on the seventh day, because manhole covers are round.

And that is why you, the PCs, are the only ship in the sector. Only you can tell us if the light is on or off.