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doesn’t give a shit if they break features during minor version releases, so almost all the documentation you find is out of date without going back $n versions and applying all the errata).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).

Much easier than expected

Given the frequency with which I was inclined to post blogs having to do with me (rather than news) on Myspace, I suspected that I’d have some difficulty in finding a daily subject here. It seems that I was mistaken, and I’m rather glad of that. It’s not that I need an outlet for anything. I have enough people willing to listen to my drivel in a non-static form, and there’s nothing compelling in expounding upon my thoughts on the page (such as it is), but it’s here, and it’s oddly satisfying. I’m able to eschew the normal social mores which constrain my tongue. It’s not like I typically abide by these anyway, but I do, on some level, know that some things are just patently offensive. I can’t very well tell my friends in plain language that I think their actions are sometimes childish, nor give them advice as flatly as I would like to. This mental filtering very rarely takes any precedence in my day to day conversations.

I’m a deft manipulator of other people. It’s never the intention to coerce them into doing as I wish or acquiescing to my point of view, but it’s often the outcome. I have a certain knack for elaborating my ideas or observations in such as way that it’s natural to agree with me. I tend to be correct, so this it’s not necessarily a bad thing. What it does mean is that I’m frequently the confidante of those I interact with regularly. Should there be problems or concerns, it falls upon me to express them to the offending party, should that be desired. I’m fine with this. For whatever reason, advice I give to others is valued, and I get a bit more insight into the situation than I had before.

It’s a calculated and delicate dance at times. When it comes to my own conundrums, however, most everybody is kept at a distance. It’s exceedingly rare that I deem something so insurmountable or enigmatic that it’s worthwhile to enlist the aid of others. I’m not certain that they’d bother, but it’s apparent that it would be an exercise in futility given the blighted landscape of their own lives. Regardless, I’m not a man easily knowable. Perhaps that’s fallacious. The people who I’ve known the longest appear to willfully ignore changes since I moved away. I may have been capricious and unpredictable before I left, it’s true. That hasn’t been true for a long time. Some of the decisions in my life are a tad spontaneous. Nobody, including me, expected what happened when I helped Dan move. Sometimes we can astound even ourselves. I find it disheartening that they cannot anticipate my behavior. I’m direct with them at this point. No reason to be otherwise.

Still, there remains a sole person who knows my mind. It’s not because he hears everything (although that’s not far off), and it’s not because I’ve known him the longest. We are remarkably similar. Yes, we’ve lived apart for four of the last six years. It has not made a noticeable impact on our development. Disparate as we most assuredly are in some ways, we happen to read the same books at around the same time, frequent the same websites (even if they’ve not been mentioned), hold the same political and social views (though neither of us adhered to the current modus operandi at the time of our separation), and pursue many of the same ambitions. There’s only one person to whom I could be referring here, and it should be obvious.

I almost feel like we are one person in two places. Sure, genetics is proving to be an enlightening field when it comes to coincidences between twins. Upbringing may have had something to do with it, as could have the amount of time we spent with each other until adulthood. A lot of things have changed since May 16th, 2001 in both our lives, yet we seem tied to the same path. There is a bond which words cannot describe, and cannot be sundered. Though I had a lapse in trust not so long ago, I know without asking that he will always defend my cause, and he can expect the same from me. I need never preach my case, nor detail my reasoning. He understands, and he already knows what I what I’m thinking. What may seem opaque to others is but a veil which he has always seen through. It’s something which I cannot explain.

It’s been months since I’ve seen him, unfortunately. True, there have been longer stretches of time (mostly when he was in training), but there are no extenuating circumstances here. He has a wonderful wife who I don’t speak to nearly as often as I should (given the level of social activity I’ve been partaking in lately), the type that I would love to find one day (probability of this is near zero). Two children who I love dearly. I saw every major event in Anya’s first 19 months. Walking, first words, all the rest. I’m 1500 miles away from those now. I’m utterly absent from Alex’s development. I never saw myself becoming the doting uncle. I seem to have been wrong. Perhaps that’s because I do not, for the most part, find babies to hold my interest until they start exhibiting a definitive personality and the ability to communicate their thoughts and desires. They’re both old enough to do that now.

As to when I’ll be going down to visit again, I have no idea. On the upside, there’s a possibility that they’ll be coming here for Anya’s birthday (early June) for a weekend. That would elicit a great deal of happiness. There was some debate as to whether or not they would be moving here last summer, and I appreciate the reasons why they did not, but it was a disappointment nonetheless. Ideally, there will be a resuscitation of that topic of conversation when he finishes school (for a multitude of reasons). If not, life goes on. We’ve managed for years as it is, and it’s not the end of the world to wait longer or anticipate a few visits a year (either me there or them here). I’ll dare to hold out hope.