I find this fascinating. Not the comic itself, but its existence and its self-perceived import.

I’m doing some ads for my sites, which is how I came to notice it, the referral logs said I got a few hits from it. I take a look, and okay, it’s of a certain class of comic where objects are put together and text is put around it which some people find entertaining. I scroll down to the associated blog post.

Two things about micro-story:
1 – Just because Devil can look like a red dot DOES NOT mean he was the red dot from when they went to Japan. it’s just coincidence.
2 – I think I could have done another two strips of just Baron taking off hats to reveal other ones. I have to move towards the end though. Ah well, maybe another day.

It just struck me as so self-important that I had to keep reading. Read the rest of this entry »

Usually, when I have something of mostly personal interest that I want to write about, I try to work out an interesting way of saying it. In his case I gotta apologize ahead of time, because I expect I’m going to ramble in an uninteresting way for a bit. This is mostly going to be Scribs minutiae.

So, I’m starting Scribs again. Typically I keep this sort of thing secret until the last possible minute, but that’s probably because I want to reserve the right to give up on a project if I lose interest. In this case, though, I have about 65 comics ready to go, so I’m in a good updating position. I’m shooting for having 75 before I start, which represent six months’ worth of updates on a M-W-F schedule. I’m hoping that’s enough buffer to stay ahead of the inevitable lapse of motivation.
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As I was walking on the treadmill Saturday, my legs were getting really tired, but then I hit my second wind. I don’t think I’ve ever even had a second wind until then.

I’ve done a lot of complaining about my weight over the last year or so, but despite my daily strenuous whining regimen and griping reps, the weight would still not come off. About a month ago that changed; I’ve seriously curtailed extranneous eating, somehow developed the willpower to disregard snacking during the workday, and have been taking advantage of our treadmill. People say things like “it’s easy to lose weight, you just have to decide to do it.” That’s true and false. Yes, making the decision is easy — but you have to get to a point where it’s possible to make that decision, and that’s not so much. I finally did, and now I am.

I was really pushing over the edge of “the heaviest I’ve ever been” and was getting grumpier because of it. And occasionally buying a self-hating bag of mini Reese’s peanut butter cups and finishing them off in three days. (Reese’s are my major junk food weakness. Well really, peanut butter is my weakness, but wrapping it in chocolate makes it a flavor delivery system that my body turns directly into dopamine.) But I kicked that habit through sheer willpower so far and haven’t had a Reese’s since. I had been in the habit of hitting the vending machine for a candy bar after lunch, but I haven’t done that, either.

The interesting part will be to see if I can maintain this down to my target weight. I’m 205 now, and throughout my life I’ve pretty much hovered around 200. I’d like to get down to 180, but the previous pattern has been that I lose weight until I get back down to the mental image I have of myself, and then lose interest. But I haven’t seen 190 for maybe a decade, and even then it was only temporarily. I’d like to try to see 180 once just to see if I can.

This all goes towards my longer-term goal: once I get to that weight, I figure it’ll be good to keep in the exercising habit. So when/if I hit 180, I’ll buy myself a bag of Reese’s mini peanut butter cups and spend the rest of the week working it off.

I left a trap for a really high-strung woman at work. Can’t wait til she comes over to my desk all flustered and apologizing.

Debb and I went to Costco a few weeks ago and bought a box of Chex Mix bars to have as snacks; we’re both working on losing weight, and keeping bad stuff out of the house, but these were 130 calories each and we’re not anti-snack-food commies. But we weren’t enjoying them, they’re too salty and generally unpleasant, but we’re also cheap and have difficulty not eating something we’ve bought. But in the end we decided to eat the loss instead, and I took the box to work to let the locust swarm take them.

And take them they did…there were about 30 in the box and they lasted for just over 24 hours. But just before they all went, I put up a sign. Sorry about the crappy pic, I had to borrow someone’s cellphone.

<spinn> I’m pretty sure if obama made them all magically shit money they’d complain it itches

I am a little intrigued at my sudden ability to drop bad habits like a bad habit. Last week, not reading my usual political blogs, to stop the mountain of stupid that was crushing my soul; two weeks ago, going cold turkey on snacks at work, to stop my gut from crushing my pants. Both are things I assumed I would be powerless to affect, but I don’t even miss them very much. Sunday my PC’s video card died, rendering useless my game machine, and the replacement came today; I’m even wondering if I should bother installing the new one.

Talked to my therapist yesterday, and she suggests that I’m feeling overwhelmed. I think I’m getting along with that explanation. The whole health care debate has really been a big weight on me — not so much the health care issue itself, but seeing all these people who are so drastically mistaken, and angrily so. And it’s just…well, I’ve known for a long time that people are dumb, so in itself, people being dumb about health care is no big surprise. But I guess the rational part of me held the belief that, with proper discussion and reasoning, people can general be brought out of the ignorance and into the light. Or at least halfway out of the darkness, to a place where they understand that the only place “death panels” exist are in the minds of those who fear.
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I seem to have traded my World of Warcraft obsession for a dual Team Fortress 2/Demigod demo obsession. It’s sort of at once better, and more insidious. Neither TF2 nor Demigod are engrossing enough to sink a lot of time on, but one can capture my attention for a half hour, and then as I try to get back to programming, the other one seems interesting enough to spend a half hour on. And then it’s 12:30 and I have to get to bed.

I do have to admit I’m having more fun with them than I was Warcraft. Turns out I’m not all that great at the game, really. I got into a really good guild, and then was surprised to find that I was just mediocre. I thought for a while I’d be able to tolerate being a second-rate player in a first-rate guild, but in the end my pride couldn’t hack it. And as the only other choice available to me was being a first-rate player in a second-rate guild, I didn’t really have much that I wanted to do in the game anymore.

I did make a bit of distance on A1, though. It’s grabbing captions in an ajaxy way, but I have some polishing to do on that part. I’m kind of lost on the whole sorting/voting part, though, but I haven’t really sat down and planned it out yet, which I really have to convince myself to do. I was getting really frustrated last month because I figured I should just be able to sit down and start typing out code and then the damn thing could be working already, but I should know better than try to start coding a project without getting a clear spec from the client.

In case you missed the recent MSNBC appearance of Orly Taitz, the de facto queen of the Birther movement, I’ve put together a summary:

I’ve been using the phrase “Geek wins!” a lot recently. It’s my summarized victory speech after I puzzle out a particularly tricky computer problem, or get around someone else’s technology road blocks to get what I want. The latter category’s generally petty and nearly more a testament to my stubbornness rather than my brain, but life’s just a set of word problems to me anyway, so I’ll still add it to the big board.

Here’s an example. Today, Greg posts a link to a Tom the Dancing Bug comic.

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Well, the one big one is using my own name and then having Fuck All from high school think I want to read about their kids’ bowel movements as updated at the 5’s, but I got that one covered, sorta, by cleverly not using my real and easily searchable name. But the other one is not wanting to write things of much import…well, more specifically, having an easy way to write about things of little import, and not wanting to spend time on the big ones because it’s a hassle.

That’s why I was able to knock out a few Scribs in the last few weeks: the comic existed at all because I wanted to do some visual humor but didn’t want to be slowed down with the foolishness of drawing something and get straight to the humor. But I got tired of my own programming, as I always do, and then continuing Scribs became yet another exercise in trying to deal with old programs I wrote, and hating them, and then wanting to rewrite them, and hating that. And thus Scribs, like so many other of my questionably bright ideas in the past, fell down the languish hole of my own lack of tenacity.
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Three bits of commentary on Palin’s resignation.

(1, 2, 3)

Also, she put out another statement today to expand on her statement yesterday, which in addition to being some of the most tetchy, self-centered sort of thing I’ve seen from a politician, includes this: “I’ve never thought I needed a title before one’s name to forge progress in America.” If I was an Alaskan resident who’d voted for her, I’d be thinking “well thanks a fuckin’ lot for wasting my time, then.”

There’s some hope for these old bones yet — I see some use in the new-fangled geegaw they’re callin’ The Facebooks. I did it all completely wrong and I still can’t figure out how to bookmark to it properly, but I can at least tell you this goes to the last (and first) thing I’ve posted there. I’m going to try to get into the habit of using that for small updates, as I’m more willing to write things there and less willing to go through the effort of writing a full post here, so we’ll see how it goes.

It’s stuff like this that makes me think I could write good music, if only I had the right interfaces:

http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix

Also neat because you can copy and paste patterns. (Might be easier to right-click.) They come out as a series of numbers, so you can easily share them, like so:

Note: For formatting reasons, I put each one in an input box so you can click, select all, and copy.

Would be neat if it had some sort of time-based pattern switch. This next three is a series; let the first run a couple times and then paste the next one.

And in fact that last one I would like to be able to alternate one square on and off for alternate passes, and rather than trying to bother describing it I’ll just paste the two sequences here:

Microsoft unveiled (or, according to some videos I saw, unleashed) the Natal Project at E3 yesterday. It’s a game system that doesn’t require controllers, because it has a camera on the tv that detects your movements, has facial recognition, etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0IqdRTDJQc

You have to see that to believe it, and whether you think that statement is a compliment or an insult depends on your predisposition towards Microsoft, I suppose. Me, it makes me want to make sure none of those actors ever work in this town again.

Here’s Microsoft Dude presenting it at E3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWnZOseA3Lw

He shows a woman interacting with the TV. The view closes up to the water, and it shows a faint reflection of her, and the water ripples as she moves her hand back and forth. What gets me most about that is the audience being aghast and delighted and bursting into applause at the technology that’s been around for umpteen years.

I wonder if it’s going to work as well as their voice recognition. The videos are old, but…I remember seeing a commercial for that years ago, it was an old actor guy whose name I forget, who had some shakey problem with his hands, presumably unable to write letters, so he was just naturally talking to his computer and the exact correct sentences were naturally flowing out. Yeah.

Obama and Biden go to a local burger place and get burgers. Obama gets a burger with Dijon mustard. I learn this from a “oh-christ-what-is-the-Right-complaining-about-now”-style post on C&L. This leads me to a Media Matters post about Hannity, Ingraham, and Mark Steyn going on about his choice of condiment. I mean, given, it’s generally tongue in cheek, but in some sense you get the impression it’s actually a problem for them. (Like the standard tough guy real man Republican thing, illustrated with Ingraham’s comment: “What kind of man orders a cheeseburger without ketchup but Dijon mustard?” Obama’s just a faggy arugula-loving liberal, clearly.)

It further leads me to a blog called Legal Insurrection by William A. Jacobson, with a post called MSNBC Hides Obama’s Dijon Mustard (aka Dijongate). (incidentally, this page drags down my firefox something awful, for some reason.) The dude goes on with several breathless updates about the Dijongate situation. I start going about the business of writing my own chirst-are-you-kidding-me blog post in my head, but then further reading reveals he was joking. His point was that MSNBC had dutifully reported it as a character piece exactly how the White House wanted them to cover it:
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