Bored

So bored it’s unreal, actually. Other than a strong desire find a Haskell developer and treat him like a punching bag (but that’s another rant, probably this weekend, now that I’m finally done getting a working Xmonad/xmobar/Mutt/zsh combination on OpenSolaris with proper statistics), I haven’t had anything to do. I haven’t logged into WoW in a month or so, though I may do that this weekend also. I’m sort of stuck in a rut here.

Half-Price Books had their warehouse sale last weekend, so I picked up some new books, but those aren’t going to keep me occupied for very long. Heather’s website has to be rewritten at some point, but I’m still debating technologies to use for that (I like Rails, I really do, but the core team doesn’t give a shit if they break features during minor version releases, so almost all the documentation you find is out of date without going back $n versions and applying all the errata). Django is seeming appealing. I do not, however, have any idea how well that’s supported on Dreamhost. Sure, there are entries for it on their wiki, but Rails wasn’t exactly stable when they first added support for that. For a personal site, m’kay. For a site for her business? I’d rather have something reliable. Not that Django isn’t reliable, just that I don’t know how reliable it is on Dreamhost. Maybe I’ll set up a Django site on my VPS and just point her DNS servers (which are not hosted by Dreamhost) there.

I am, in truth, spending an inordinate amount of time questing for the Amulet of Yendor. I forgot how much I loved NetHack, and Slash’em just makes it better. On the downside, valkyries don’t appear to start with a longsword in Slash, so I’m not going to get any free Excaliburs at level 5. Monks aren’t bad at all, but food is kind of a pain in the ass. I’d also guess that blessed scrolls of genocide drop less frequently, leading to me getting killed by liches a few times. Awesome.

I’m sort of considering implementing Vassal in PyGame. Vassal 40k is a really neat system. Dice rolling isn’t handled all that well, it doesn’t import AB files, and the Vassal engine doesn’t do reforms/wheels well at all. I’m not going to hack at the Java to fix Vassal (thought the developers have started work on Vassal Fantasy Battles), and I sort of want to learn PyGame anyway, which seems like a good motivation to do it. Dan and I never did finish the C# implementation (in fact, I never really did anything other than the XML parser, and I have no idea how far he got). I don’t imagine it taking me all that long to do it in Python though, with PyGame doing the heavy lifting of the GDI crap C# needs for me. Thoughs (take a look at Vassal 40k, for instance)? I don’t picture it being difficult to render sprites from images of models I find on Google Image Search, but I guess you never know.

I do have lots of time to read news, though, and I’ve come to the following conclusions:

• Slashdot: My first, and probably still my favorite. The Firehose is worthless, but the community moderation system is incredibly effective. It is the only place I visit where I can regularly expect to see somebody with a post-graduate degree in whatever subject it is posting. People like NYCountryLawyer (who is actually a lawyer) make the site. There are, of course, some libertarian “omg government never solves any problems” trolls (who don’t think they are trolls), but that goes across the spectrum (generally people who say this in response to anything have never looked at numbers comparing government spending to private spending in the same field — Medicare being a great example — and mistakenly believe that corporations wouldn’t rape everybody). Increasingly dominated by people who have never worked worked in the real world (with user ids near 1.5 million) and an astounding amount of GPL trolls (who think it’s the greatest license since sliced bread and slander any company which does not abide by it — including Sun’s CDDL, which was devised because they don’t own the IP on some of their drivers — while simultaneously whining that they can’t steal code [ZFS, dtrace, etc] from alternatively-licensed projects). These, though, are generally modded into oblivion also.
• (Total)Fark: Biting headlines, little regard for the average human being (which I sort of appreciate, actually, since most of the people in their stories deserved what they got). Effective moderation, but the comment threading system sucks (not that I really need to read the comments with TotalFark having ~1 story per minute, most of which are worth a read). JonSnow is awesome.
• Reddit: Reddit seems to be a mixed bag. I love /r/programming, and some of the other SubReddits are great. At the same time, the average Redditor believes that they are much more intelligent than they actually are. I often see people talking about how they were “too smart” to be in school which, while possibly true, isn’t really relevant given that school is primarily a social tool. People spew nonsense about how the public education system was designed to make for complacent workers who will follow commands and obey the bell (this is true, but that was 130 years ago, and I’d hardly say school is psychological prep for working in a meat processing plant these days). There’s a lot of talk (on Reddit and Slashdot) about home schooling by parents who believe their children are beautiful, brilliant, unique snowflakes. Their child is doing $randomthing (3d rendering, programming, whatever) or is in “7th grade” at age 9, so it must be better, though they have no unbiased metrics to use for comparison.

  This particular aspect of Reddit comes out in shit like this (which is, by the way, the 2nd time that subject has been on AskReddit in the last few months). I’m all for being inclusive, but seriously? Not everybody deserves it. Reddit’s comment threading system is good, even if I don’t like it as much as Slashdot’s (in particular, if a parent post is downvoted too many times in Reddit, it hides the entire tree, even if one of the replies has 1,000,000 upvotes), but I don’t know where the fuck the moderation is sometimes. To give this guy a platform where he can answer selected questions to rationalize his behavior and make it seem as if he doesn’t need help is, well… Ephebophilia isn’t that uncommon, but this guy states he’s attracted to 2 year olds, FFS, and that he “admires them” at playgrounds and whatnot (he says he’s never touched them or seen images/videos, but that’s extremely dubious, and it’s virtually assured that he will act upon his urges at some point). I’m not easily sickened but, well, read the comments. Virtually nobody calls him out on it. They just stroke his ego.

Somebody give me a suggestion. If not, I’m just going start writing a frontend for a Vassal clone (while that may sound stupid, I suspect that the biggest obstacle WILL end up in unit reformation/wheeling/etc rather than back-end logic, so I’ll write it first. Integration tests can cover everything else when I write it).