(2) Fri Jan 01 2010 22:08 Apples to Whatever: I came up with another AtA (or A2A, as we in the enterprise game business call it) variant: "Apples to Placebos". Unlike vanilla Apples to Apples, Apples to Placebos can be play with only two or three people. In each round, the non-judge players play a red card to be judged, but their cards must compete against random cards from the draw pile. The judge draws one (three players) or two (two players) placebo cards from the draw pile, shuffles them into the submitted cards, and then judges the cards normally. If the judge picks one of the placebo cards, nobody gets the point.

Bonus: from the A2A game at the New Years party last night: "I just realized that 'The IRS' spells 'Theirs'. I feel like a stand-up comic should have pointed this out to me long ago. 'Where'd my money go? It's not mine anymore, it's TheIRS.'"

My original Apples to Apples variant is still the best way to end a game of A2A--proved, yet again, last night.

Sun Jan 03 2010 10:27 Audio Bonus #3: Snuggles the Pillow: The end-of-year bonuses don't stop just because the year is over. Here's the seventh crummy.com non-podcast podcast, "Snuggles the pillow". In this episode the eponymous pillow visits our household, with wacky/disturbing results.

(1) Tue Jan 05 2010 23:23 Kandinsky vs. the Guggenheim Museum: On Sunday, our last day of vacation, Sumana and I went to the Guggenheim museum for the first time. We'd planned to go about a week earlier, and then we got to the museum and there was a line wrapping around the block, in freezing cold weather. No thanks. We went to the Cooper-Hewitt museum instead. (Which was really small for the price, and also really preoccupied with the people and corporations that had been given awards by... the Cooper-Hewitt museum.)

It turns out you can buy Guggenheim tickets online, so I bought some for the 3rd. I cannot stress enough how important it is to buy tickets in advance. You don't want to be standing in the cold for 90 minutes. When we got into the museum we saw that the wraparound line wasn't even the whole line. There was insane chaos on the ground floor including milling tourists, a coat check off to the side, a small pond conveniently located for falling into, and a whole other winding line to the ticket sales area itself.

I should have seen this coming. My general theory of Frank Lloyd Wright is that his stuff is really beautiful but would be aggravating to use. I really love the FLW living room they have in the Met, but if I lived there (a la The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler), probably within an hour I'd reach for a magazine and bash my hand on something right-angled. And the Guggenheim is an amazingly well-designed museum so long as nobody is in it.

At the Met, the main entrance is really noisy and as you go into the exhibits it gets quieter and quieter. The entire Guggenheim is one big room. The whole time you're at the museum, you're in the same room as hundreds of people waiting in line for tickets, discussing with their friends what to do next, making phone calls, etc. You can't get away. They're a hundred feet away, but it's a hundred feet straight down through open air. You can see and hear everyone else just fine.

If you're the Guggenheim's only visitor, you'll find toilets are distributed for maximum convenience. Seemingly on every turn of every level you'll find a unisex toilet. That one person at a time can use. In real life you get people waiting in lines outside a toilet, blocking the ascent for everyone else, not willing to give up their space in line in hopes that a quarter-turn up or down the corkscrew is a toilet that doesn't have a line.

The same phenomenon happens whenever a timeline or exhibit description is painted on a wall. The Guggenheim is full of little inset niches containing 2-3 artworks each, where people can stand and admire the art without blocking traffic. This is good design. Good thinking, anticipating that an art museum would have art in it. Unfortunately, the same allowances have not been made for random walls with text on them. Bottom line, people stand immobile before these walls, reading, and you can't get past.

One good thing about the Guggenheim is the reading room. It's just a quiet room full of art books. Sumana and I killed time in there, reading (did you know that Alexander Calder painted full-size working airplanes? One of which was blown up in the movie "Bad Boys"?) and it was a good time.

I haven't mentioned the art itself because that changes all the time, and the museum's architecture is eternal. But wow! We went to see the Kandinsky exhibit (it's closing soon), and it was AMAZING. Kandinsky's stuff started out pretty dull--Sumana compared it unfavorably to Chagall, and I don't like Chagall in the first place. But around the time he joined Bahaus, Kandinsky literally shaped up. He started using stencils, clean lines, and proto-airbrush techniques, yielding nerdily precise paintings that look like scientific diagrams (eg. "Movement I" from 1935) or safety notices in an alien language (eg. "Succession", also from 1935).

I wrote down the names of our favorite paintings and I'll try to round up some links to pictures later. I'm absolutely not someone who tries to interpret abstract art in representational terms, but if you rotate 1932's "Black Grid" ninety degrees counterclockwise, it really looks like a seascape with airplanes, modern (for 1932) steamships, and old-fashioned sailing ships, all in front of a city. Plus a black grid and a bunch of random shapes in a corner to fool you.

Conclusion: Kandinsky is awesome, the Guggenheim is aggravating. Unfortunately, the other owns a lot of the one! We were talking about this at the New Years party; how the Guggenheim really loves collecting Kandinsky, how Charles Simonyi seems determined to buy up every Lichtenstein painting in the world. What artists would you buy up, if you had, say, a billion dollars to spend on art and could thus acquire a good chunk of anyone's ouvre?

Thu Jan 07 2010 20:08 Captain Raptor!: My now-undirected ongoing search for the phrase "awesome dinosaurs" has picked up another example of what if this was music would be called dinocore. From The Aviary I found out about a series (two is a series!) of illustrated children's books called "Captain Raptor": "CR and the Moon Mystery" and "CR and the Space Pirates". I got copies today and they're awesome. 1) dinosaurs in space! 2) everything's drawn like those gorgeous old-fashioned movie posters. 3) since it's a children's book you probably learn a valuable lesson. Minus points for stereotyping dinosaurs based on their species (which I also did).

(1) Sat Jan 09 2010 18:00: I'm in Boston, having fun with friends. In lieu of a NYCB post, here's Julia's summary of today, with pictures.

(2) Mon Jan 11 2010 21:35 Things You've Probably Seen Already: 1. "Two Gentlemen of Lebowski" I think if Shakespeare had written The Big Lebowski he would have quoted his own plays a little less, but it's good stuff. And there's a New York performance in March!

Our ringer was a ringer for the same
In odious Lebowski's rotten game.

2. Art Clokey died on Friday. I've been a Gumby fan for ages--I'm pretty sure it's the first thing I ever saw on television[0]--but I didn't know much about Clokey until I watched the 2006 biopic "Gumby Dharma", which was really excellent and which I should have mentioned on my 2009 film list. It's got fourth-wall-smashing interviews with Gumby and Pokey themselves--I'm pretty sure Gumby claims that Pokey was prone to cocaine binges, or maybe vice versa. It's not on DVD but they used to play it on the Sundance Channel all the time, maybe they still do.

At this point in my life I'm becoming accustomed to the likelihood that any random old person has accumulated a whole lot of interesting life experiences, but even so, Art Clokey's experiences were a couple standard deviations further out than I was expecting.

[0] In kindergarten I'd walk with my friend Tony after school to his house and watch cartoons for a bit. There was Gumby, and, I believe, the Thundercats.

(1) Tue Jan 12 2010 09:06 Leonard Nitpicks the Showtunes:

New York, New York, it's a hell of a town
The Bronx is up and the Battery's down

That's not really very convincing.

Wed Jan 13 2010 18:05: Origin of Mother 3's save frogs--revealed! Even if you don't know or care about Mother 3, check out the song's cute lyrics.

(4) Fri Jan 15 2010 10:51 Reviews of Old Science Fiction Magazines: F&SF 1986/03: A good issue, but the whole time I was reading, I was waiting for the story that fulfilled the promise of the cover. A spaceship landing (or, I suppose, taking off) near a stegosaur! Which story would it be? "Good Night, Sweethearts" by James Tiptree Jr.? "Still Life" by David S. Garnett? Probably not "The Dog of Truth" by Kit Reed. Well, I'm at the end of the magazine, by process of elimination it's gotta be "Sea Change" by Scott Baker. But no, it was just a misleading cover image that has nothing to do with any story in the magazine. Oh well.

I think the best story is "Sea Change", despite the stegosaurus disappointment. Although it has a little too much of a "I went on vacation and had a really evocative experience, so I wrote a story" feel. So maybe the Tiptree is the best. They're both very good.

Also recommended are Karen Joy Fowler's "Wild Boys", and Neil W. Hiller's "Peace Feelers", in which invading aliens have the same military structure as the US Army. (Points deducted for puns.) It's always strange to be on the New York subway reading about someone trying to blow up the New York subway.

Paul Di Filippo's "Skintwister" and David S. Garnett's "Still Life" are both the "eternal youth is possible but only for the rich--and at what cost?" story that was written a lot in the 80s, or maybe is written a lot by writers approaching middle age.

George Zebrowski is now officially my "writer whose work I find compelling when described but disappointing when I read it." He's got a story about semidecidability called "Gödel's Doom" (originally printed in Popular Computing!), but the story just can't happen. The Incompleteness Theorem says it can't happen. The author knows this. The characters in the story know this. They spend much of the story exchanging dialogue: "The Incompleteness Theorem says this can't happen!" "But what if it can?" And in the end it happens and makes no sense and is boring. Ted Chiang did it better ("Division by Zero").

On the plus side, because of "Gödel's Doom" I found MathFiction, which lists fiction about math and critiques the math. Here's its get-off-my-lawn page about "Gödel's Doom". Here's 29 more works of fiction that involve Gödel somehow. MathFiction also loves "Division By Zero".

In movie reviews, Harlan Ellison can't shut up about how great Brazil is (or, indeed, anything). It's an enjoyable column. Algys Burdis's book review column contains a review of Schismatrix and The Postman, which I just read. (3/4 kickass adventure, 1/4 David Brin's cranky blog!) Also the phrase "Now, Bruce Sterling is what they have begun calling a 'cyberpunk'", and these two footnotes:

*Someday if they don't stop giving Brin awards and money long enough to edit him properly, he, his publishers and we his readers will all lose. The initial burst of charming and/or socially praiseworthy ideas will have slackened a little, the need for a better grasp of storytelling per se will make itself felt, and Brin, like many another bright young star before him, will be left wondering where his career has gone. This will be a notable shame, in his case.

*At this point, I began picturing [Philip K.] Dick as a squid among the stars grappling Arthur C. Clarke's whale from Childhood's End. Fortunately, in most realities this footnote does not exist.

No interesting ads (apart from some classifieds pushing Halley's Comet kitsch), the cartoons still suck. The end.

Fri Jan 15 2010 16:45 Game Time:

• Apples to Apples variant fever! Now Zack's got it!
• I was hoping that Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker! would be the 1960s-student-riot tactical wargame I've been looking for. It's not, though, just a pretty simple boardgame in which Sumana's alma mater (no, the other one) is the board. Maybe Chicago, Chicago! is what I want? There's also Battle of Seattle.

(2) Mon Jan 18 2010 18:28 Little Joke: via Lucian.

Have you heard about the new corduroy pillows? They're making headlines!

The end.

(1) Wed Jan 20 2010 19:59: I was watching Computer Networks: Heralds of Resource Sharing, the excellent 1972 documentary about the ARPAnet, and one statement jumped out at me: "the large superfiles, the 10¹¹-bit weather files which we're putting on the Illiac". That's about 13 gigabytes, which will fit on a couple DVDs today but which was damn impressive in 1972.

Some Moore's Law style inflation shows just how impressive: an equivalent amount of data today might be 370 petabytes. They must have had a whole tape library devoted to that weather data.

Thu Jan 21 2010 07:41 Nethack Where You Don't Expect It: I decided to do something similar to my adventure to find the first known mention of the ARPAnet in popular culture. I'd find books that mentioned Nethack but were not books on computers or game design.

This adventure was fun but noticeably less successful. There were a number of government documents and books about oil mentioning "nethack agreements", but this was just an OCR error for "netback". I also saw one "setback" become "nethack".

There was a collection of User Friendly comics and one of BBspot news stories. I found only one work of prose fiction that mentioned the game Nethack: "Dyl", a self-published piece of French SF by Mirko Vidovic. Here's my machine-aided English translation of part of the section called "Rogue":

The system, which had seemed to boot normally, was suddenly seized with hiccups. The screen was going mad. Instead of presenting the expected prompt, Dyl found himself in the middle of a game of Hack, the successor to Rogue, itself the originator of Nethack.

"The system has managed to intercept the launching of Sarge [the Debian release?], and substituted the utility routines which it considers best suited to a strategic confrontation. Something tells me that in these dungeons are two antagonists which expect me," whistled Dyl. "I will play the game, go down there and beat them both."

Michael P. Kube-McDowell's "Vectors" contains the string "nethack", but it's a cyberpunk nonsense word ("covered with nethack gear"), possibly used as an in-joke.

Marylin Schrock's "Wake Up, Church! The Enemy Is Within Your Gates!: Astral Projection and The Church" tries to bring 80s-style Bible-thumping fantasy buzzkill into the Internet era by, near as I can tell, taking claims of astral projection at face value and blaming it all on Satan. Its big section on "Astral Projection in Our Culture" (hey, Wikipedia didn't want it[0]) says: "The astral plane is the final level of the computer game Nethack. The player must sacrifice the Amulet of Yendor to a deity in order to win." Otherkin, mentioned on the same page, are apparently an even bigger problem than Nethack.

On the other end of the spectrum, a Christian nerd with the ominous nom de plume of "Anakin Niceguy" has self-published "Rethinking 'Getting Serious about Getting Married' : A Biblical Response to Debbie Maken's Book and to the Assault on Unmarried Men by Religious Leaders". I know that religious leaders were always mounting assaults on me until I got married. Here's the Nethack graf:

A bachelor may indeed have his "golf or other hobbies" but married people have their weddings, receptions, honeymoons, McMansions, oversized SUVs [several other stereotypical status symbols elided], and piano lessons for Junior to make the parents proud. As a lawful [sic] as these things are, I fail to see how they bring a soul any closer to God than the time a single man spends in front of the computer playing NetHack.

I'm not really sure what is up with Benjamin Rowe's "The 91 Parts of the Earth", but I doubt Marilyn Shrock would approve of its "Enochian magick". The Nethack graf makes Rowe (?) sound like H.P. Lovecraft's most milquetoast narrator:

Possibly in reaction to this, I now find myself slightly reluctant to try entering the Part again. I've put off starting several times already today, on the faintest excuse, and a couple of times with no excuse at all. (In fact, I'm going to do so again as soon as I save this file, and play Nethack for a few minutes.)

Dishonorable mention to Ralph Roberts' "REBOL for Dummies", which implies that Nethack is a text adventure, and to Timothy Albee's "CGI Filmmaking: The Creation of Ghost Warrior" which implies that Nethack is a MUD. Frankly, I expected better from you.

[0] But seriously, folks: the section is largely plagiarized from Wikipedia.

(2) Sat Jan 23 2010 21:11 She-Hulk Tie-In: When I was in Boston Kirk showed me a few of his favorite games of the 2000s, including the Gamecube tie-in game for the Incredible Hulk movie. Kirk mentioned how he liked the game's dreamlike atmosphere of running up the sides of buildings, throwing helicopters, etc.

I was not as impressed. But this entry is not about how difficult it is to impress me. Instead I wanted to share my awesome idea for a She-Hulk tie-in game. It would be a courtroom adventure game like Phoenix Wright, except funnier and with the occasional fit of smashing. I can almost taste it--the only thing preventing me is the fact that video games generally have no flavor. It's such a great idea it would almost be worth having a terrible She-Hulk movie made so that this game could be the tie-in.

(2) Tue Jan 26 2010 16:22 Underrepresented in Wargames #2: I'm not a big player of wargames[0] but I like the idea of dramatizing interesting historical situations and/or exploring their tactical aspects. Especially the tactical aspects of non-military conflicts like protests, standoffs, and political struggles. After posting about UATWM! I mentioned this to Sumana, and spent a couple hours searching BoardGameGeek for wargames on such topics.

By the standard of interesting wargame topics, Ted Torgerson is our favorite game designer. He created Dawn of Freedom, a Twilight Struggle mod (?) that includes a Tiananmen Square track (not really tactical, but oh well), and Free At Last, a wargame about the civil rights movement. ("If the Non-violence track reaches Non-Violence Abandoned at the end of any game turn, the segregationist player wins the game.")

There are two games about the 1999 WTO protests: Battle Of Seattle and the longer-named N30: We Are Winning: The Battle of Seattle. Steve Jackson Games also published a tactical game about the 1980 attempt to free the American hostages in Iran.

In my experience a BoardGameGeek list is a fractal timesink as bad as TV Tropes, so instead of linking to "Wargames with Odd or Special Units" and "Overlooked but Important Battles" I'll just mention their names. If you go look at them, it's your own fault.

[0] But my current not-a-big-player state includes contingent factors like a lack of space to store games and a lack of friends who want to play them. In 2008 I played some Memoir '44 with Brendan and had a good time.

(2) Wed Jan 27 2010 10:00 HP Sauce: Possibly the greatest Lovecraft sentence ever (from "The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward"):

To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential loathsomeness and soul-sickening overtones.

Reminds me of a night when Kris and I were doing everything in Lovecraft style, like the "My most embarrassing moment" column in Seventeen magazine.

At once I felt a hideous upwelling of blood from within my bowels, a red stream of ichor that flowed without measure into the white trousers I had just purchased at this dying town's dusty Mercantile.

Kris also came up with the ultimate dinner-table line: "If you'll excuse me, I have to go give vent to certain measured sounds."

On a related note, does anyone else find it uncanny that the spokesman for Nintendo of America in the 1980s was named Howard Phillips?

(1) Sun Jan 31 2010 20:45 You gained "cows" and "hate"!: Hey, check out the Global Game Jam entry of Adam Parrish et al, Humans Hanging Out. A matching game in which you must pass the Turing test against opponents who can't pass the Turing test. Some luck is involved, but once you figure out the underlying rules you can win pretty consistently. (It helps to sniff the Flash application's Ajax requests to the web service.) Unfortunately, when you win the game you get a screen that's much more disturbing than what you get when you lose.

PS: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the game includes another sweet Adam P. chiptune.

(1) Tue Feb 02 2010 21:27 Neti Pot: I've been subsceptible to sinus problems since I was a teenager, and many's the time I've wished I could just flush that system out with salt water. The neti pot is designed to do just that, but I didn't use it until recently, probably because I also have a deep fear of having water in my skull cavities. But it works great. Sumana got me one the last time I was sick, and it relieved the pain better than useless non-pseudoephedrine-containing medicine. Since then I think it's prevented an onset of sinus sickness, and even when I'm not sick, I've found it useful for generally not feeling miserable in dry weather.

So, at the risk of having told you more than you want to know about my sinuses, I recommend checking out the neti pot. Part of me wishes I'd had one when I was a kid, and part of me knows that me-as-a-kid would never have been able to use it correctly. I couldn't even swallow pills until I was about nineteen--too squeamish.

(1) Wed Feb 03 2010 22:38 KJ Kabza: A few weeks ago when we went to Boston, we attended a dinner party with people from Julia's writing group. It's difficult for me to imagine setting up a dinner party for my writing group; we have enough trouble all getting together for the writing group itself. Anyway, one of the people I met, KJ Kabza, turned out to be a fan of mine! (Well, a fan of "Awesome Dinosaurs".) I had a great conversation with him, and this weblog entry gives me a reason to link to his webpage so you can check out his writing.

Thu Feb 04 2010 22:39: Random link of excellence, I don't remember where I found it and it's seven years old, but check it out: Cartridge covers from Thai Atari 2600 games.

(1) Sat Feb 06 2010 21:51: I haven't been writing NYCB or the novel because I've been trying to write a paper for the First International Workshop on RESTful Design. I made a great breakthrough today when I decided to just cut a third of the paper and talk about that stuff later after I fully understand the problem, rather than to improvise something and get it in before Tuesday...

Except looking at the web page, I noticed that the deadline has been pushed a week into the future. I haven't gathered enough data to be sure, but it seems like conference paper deadlines always get extended. How come they never did that in college? A week is probably not enough time to do justice to that third part of the paper, but it gives me enough of a buffer that I can take it easy tomorrow and finish the novel chapter that's effectively already finished except for little details like the words not being on the page.

This entry got longer than I expected because I discovered the deadline got changed, but here's the link I was going to appease you with: weird Chinese fake Lego. (You can tell it's fake because it's not LEGO.)

PS: If my paper is not accepted, I'll post it on Crummy for you to read. I haven't written much about web services due to novel work, but the paper should give a little insight into what's been happening at my job.

Sun Feb 07 2010 11:53 Reviews of Not That Old Science Fiction Magazines: Apex Volume 1 Issue 11 (2007): Not to be confused with Abyss and Apex. I believe Sumana got this magazine from a friend in 2008 and gave it to me so I could study the market. I studied it enough to see "Science Fiction & Horror" at the top of the cover, and then put it in with the rest of my unread magazines. I do not like horror. I realize that this says more about me than about the genre, so I will spare you my half-baked opinions and nickel psychoanalyses of the horror writers profiled in this issue of Apex. Suffice to say that I am suspicious of any genre named after an emotion. Like if comedy was just called "laughing".

That said, there was one story in this issue I really liked. Sara King's "The Moldy Dead" is one of my favorite types of story: a first contact story with no humans in it, just alien-on-alien action. The horror element is surprisingly understated, and I appreciated it on an intellectual level when it came into play in the ending. It was kind of Star Trek-ish, though (if I may damn with faint praise) more interesting than any time Star Trek ever tried to do horror. (PS: Helpful hint to space explorers. If you go to a planet looking for intelligent life, and you find only one form of life on the planet, that might be it!)

I also enjoyed the title of one of the pieces: "Cain XP11 (Part 3): Sorry About All The Blood". That was the third part of a four-part novella about a government plan to clone history's great serial killers and train them as super-soldiers, a well-thought-out plan which surprisingly goes awry.

And that's the kind of thing found in the rest of the magazine. The ads are uniformly interesting: small-press stuff with the distinctive small-press art style, and because I don't believe in the reading conventions of horror the copy just makes me laugh. ("Resurrected against his will in an unholy deal with Hell, he must now use his surgical skills to harvest the living to feed an ever-growing army of the undead.")

However, I would like to give a special shout-out to David Wong, editor of Cracked.com and author of John Dies At The End, which in 2007 was advertised as available online for free, but which since then has been trapped in a paper book. Great title! I'm getting most of my entertainment here from the titles. ("Where Evil Lurks: Special Edition") Also Alethea Kontis had an editorial about curses that was pretty interesting.

Finally a note about the cover. I don't have my camera handy but it's a brownish painting of the face of some dude who looks like an octopus (or maybe it's the whole body, if dude really looks like an octopus). Tentacles, mottled skin, big round eye, etc. I looked at this cover and thought "Man, this is why I hate horror. I'm supposed to be prejudiced against this creature just because it looks like a tentacle monster. There's probably some Lovecraft ripoff story in this magazine, instead of a cool story about aliens." But no, the cover illustration was just a picture of one of the aliens from "The Moldy Dead", a cool story about aliens.

So that was a pleasant surprise. But then I started wondering how Apex readers distinguish between a horror tentacle monster and a science fiction tentacle monster. Then while looking at the ads I figured it out: teeth. The single most reliable indicator of horror art is exposed teeth (runner-up: an open mouth without exposed teeth).

Octopus-dude's teeth, if any, are not depicted on the cover. Its most prominent feature is the eye, which you'd think would be creepier (I'd rather see a tooth lying on the sidewalk than an eyeball), but in fact it creates empathy, letting you know that this other thing is a person. In the ads in this magazine, creepy things tend to have their eyes closed, or else their eyes lack pupils.

This teeth thing is also largely a matter of prejudice (there's a funny scene in Old Man's War that makes fun of this), but I think that's how the signalling works.

Sun Feb 07 2010 12:11: "You're a pigeon, my friend."

(6) Tue Feb 09 2010 09:28 Commissar Joe: Shopping at Trader Joe's is like living under a really good planned economy. You can get all sorts of exotic food at pretty decent prices, but there's only one brand of everything: the store brand. The few exceptions (soy milk, energy bars) feel like imports from another country. Some of the packaging hasn't been changed in thirty years. The products come and go at the whim of unseen "experts", seemingly unconnected to consumer demand. There's an in-house propaganda publication full of over-the-top writing about how good you have it.

I made this connection on Sunday when I spent twenty minutes standing in the twelve-item checkout line.

Tue Feb 09 2010 22:27: "Did YOU have access to books?"

Wed Feb 10 2010 20:44 Crummy.com Podcasts: Leonard and Lucian's Inaccurately Sepia-Toned Retrofest #1: On Sunday, Lucian Kahn and I had a long conversation about our respective childhoods, growing up in southern California in the 1980s and 90s. I've cut the conversation into two parts and part 1 is now available.

In this 41-minute episode, Lucian and I discuss our early encounters with the mysterious personal computer. Most retrocomputing podcasts focus on video games, but we talk about everything: school computer labs, operating systems, paint programs and creativity suites, online services, weird DOS front-ends, wooden mice, and the "turbo" button. All with no nearby Internet access, so we can spout off half-baked theories informed only by the vague ideas we had as children.

In next week's episode, Lucian will explain things I never understood when I was a kid, like fashion and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Bonus: I have bowed to popular demand and created an RSS feed for the podcast. Let me know if it doesn't work. You can also see a HTML page with the same information as the RSS feed.

Sat Feb 13 2010 22:20 Videos I Haven't Watched: No guarantees.

• Salman Khan (not the famous one) explains it all.
• Richard Feynman explains some subset of "it all".
• Everything on this damn list.

Audio I'm listening to while running: The Tolkien Professor. And as long as I'm straying further and further from the title of this post, an excellent poem: "Answer to an Invitation to Dine at Fishmongers Hall", with its incredibly quotable first stanza.

(1) Tue Feb 16 2010 07:57 Deadlines: In a remix of college insanity, I have to finish a project before the Ubuntu feature freeze on Thursday; plus yesterday I had to submit my WS-REST paper and complete a novel chapter for writing group. All that's missing is the crushing angst! Oh, there it is.

(2) Tue Feb 16 2010 20:35 Hey, Who Doesn't?:

And forty-one, a prime number, was a significant number for the Shaa, who loved primes and multiples of primes.

--Walter Jon Williams, The Praxis

(3) Wed Feb 17 2010 09:18 Crummy.com Podcasts: Leonard and Lucian's Remedial Pop Culture: Hey, it's part 2 of my conversation with Lucian. This time, we talk about boys' and girls' fashions from the late 80s and early 90s, the styles that caused a nationwide push for school uniforms. Lucian then explains the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to me (apparently Raphael is cool but rude), and explores his lifelong obsession with being a cool dude.

I was going through a box of old stuff from my childhood and I have this thing I wrote then I was six, a list of things I like. And it's like "cats", blah blah blah, "COOL DOODS!"

Here's the direct download; here, the RSS feed.

(1) Fri Feb 19 2010 06:00 More TV Oddities: Both from 1981, both thanks to bobtwcatlanta.

• "Fitz and Bones": The Smothers Brothers and Diana Muldaur star in this "hour-long comedy/drama show about a mis-matched TV news team". IMDB reports one episode. A show generated from one of the more obscure tables in the Dungeon Master's Guide.
• "Falcon Crest": I made a joke about star Jane Wyman looking like Nancy Reagan; IMDB reveals Wyman was Ronald Reagan's first wife. Maybe I already knew this subconsciously, but clearly Reagan had a type. Robert Foxworth gets second billing as a winery owner who undoubtedly plans to betray the Federation/Vulcan High Command/Earth Alliance as soon it comes into existence. Also stars Lorenzo Lamas, who went right from this show to "Renegade".

(3) Sun Feb 21 2010 22:51 Guess The Verb! (It's "Said"): This has bothered me for a little while. In general, it's considered undesirable to use too many adverbs in writing.

He messily ate the sandwich.

But you can replace a generic verb with a fancy evocative verb that does the work of an adverb.

He assaulted the sandwich.

In fact, you can replace a whole clause (often including adverbs) with an evocative verb that conveys the same information.

He walked aimlessly around wandered the room.

Except when the generic verb is "said". Using fancy versions of "said" is "said-bookism", also considered undesirable.

"Just as you wish," he preened said.

And you can't use adverbs here either.

"Just as you wish," he said obsequiously

Hypothesis: by preventing you from describing the way someone says something, these rules force you to write dialogue that explains how it should be read.

"Just as you wish, O most esteemèd lord."

vs.

"Well," he said, "if such is my lord's wish..."

Tue Feb 23 2010 08:57 The Palace At 40 Million Dollars: Went to the MoMA yesterday with Peter Hodgson (high-quality photos coming soon). I was raving over The Palace at 4 A.M., official Crummy.com Sculpture Of The Millenium (1001-2000).

"I can't believe Alberto Giacometti did all those horrible elongated pinched statues of people, and then he also did my favorite sculpture of all time."

"You know, one of those statues just sold for a hundred million dollars. It's the most expensive sculpture of all time."

"That's awful," I said.

"Well, it means your favorite sculpture of all time probably just tripled in value."

"Great, now I'll never be able to buy it from the MoMA."

I guess I could make my own copy out of kebab skewers.

PS: I structured this entry like the weblog entries in my novel, because I was worried that the style would seem really unnatural in a real weblog. But I think it works okay.

Wed Feb 24 2010 19:33 Prime Suspect: More from Walter Jon Williams's The Praxis:

The 313-degree Shaa compass had no zero coordinate, but began instead with one, the odd number left over after factoring the prime number.

I guess that's true. Maybe the Shaa could help Bill Gates factor those large prime numbers.

Apart from prime number weirdness (and species essentialism), this is a really fun book. There was a lot of boring clan politics at the beginning, but it turns out that was setup for an examination of how totally dysfunctional is a society based on clan politics. I often suspect these authors of being secretly enamored of the petty intrigues of clan politics, but it's clearly not the case here.

Insta-update: Before posting this entry I asked Adi about the compass thing. His response:

I don't understand that statement at all. Do the Shaa simply relabel their compass? Instead of using labels of 0,1,...,360, their compass uses the labels 1,2,..,313? (i.e., their compass has a full range of motion, but simply a different scale)

If this is in fact true, then I wonder what additive identity the Shaa have chosen. From the statement you wrote, it seems as though the additive identity is 1... which can't of course be consistent with 1 working as a remainder after division by prime numbers. And the "odd number left over after factoring the prime number" does not make sense to me... Why one would use the multiplicative identity [ie. 1] as an additive identity is beyond me.

Unfortunately, by this point in the book the Shaa are all dead, so we can't ask them, and it's clear that a bad compass is the least element of their legacy of incompetence.

(3) Fri Feb 26 2010 10:17 Satan vs. Leonard: In the late 90s I did some work on a rock opera called "Porcelain Puppy vs. Demon Dog". On the whole, it was terrible, and I never completed or recorded it, though some of the better songs have shown up in my subsequent albums ("Royal Jelly" is one). But I did record one tiny test skit to satisfy my love of overdubbing my voice with itself, and for some reason put it online.

A few years ago, Katie Bolte, student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, found this test skit and liked it enough to animate it. She emailed me about it yesterday. So check it out and relish my humiliation as teenage-me tries to do the voice of Satan in a Saturday morning cartoon. The narrator's overblown description of Cerberus is funny, though.

Sun Feb 28 2010 21:12 Original Research: Sumana is planning a trip to the extensive archive of the Museum of Television and Radio, with the goal of resolving a couple nagging pop-culture conundra that can't be resolved by Internet-based means.

Since it costs $25 to get in to the archive, we thought it would be nice to pool conundra. Bothered by something about television or radio history that, if you had access to a huge archive, could be resolved within fifteen minutes? Search the archive index to see if they have what you need to check, and post your comments here or on Sumana's weblog.

(1) Tue Mar 02 2010 18:27 Star Trek vs. Batman: No need to dream, it's a filmed mashup of the 1960s Star Trek and the 1960s Batman. The Batman writing is pretty decent, but the Star Trek writing is bland and doesn't capture the feel of the series.

Thu Mar 04 2010 16:47: Last week Sumana and I went to the launch party for N.K. Jemisin's epic "The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms". Nora founded the writing group I'm in, and I read and critiqued a draft of the novel just before she sold it. Then she left the writing group and went off to be a famous novelist.

I always have a difficult time at events held in bars, but Sumana is very good at introducing me to people. For instance, I met Saladin Ahmed, who along with Nora was nominated for a Nebula this year. And then comes this SF Signal interview with Saladin, Nora, and many other Nebula nominees. "If your work couldn't have been on the ballot this year, what work would you have liked in its place?" Saladin:

I'd also have been happy to see more two-fisted fun on the ballot. Two of the absolute best stories I read this year were "Zeppelin City" by Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn, and "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" by Leonard Richardson. Both were ridiculously enjoyable and Nebula-worthy to my mind.

I'm encouraged!

Thu Mar 04 2010 17:21 Incomprehensible Joke:

S: "I always wondered what would happen if you put a disc in the Wii the wrong way."
L: "It shows a Koopa Troopa on its back."

Fri Mar 05 2010 20:58 Work humor:

"I will lock you and [x] in a room for a week to sort this out."
"We would spend that week planning vengeance on you for locking us in a room!"
"The scenario you put forward seems all too plausible."

(1) Mon Mar 08 2010 14:44: Tired of finding kitten? In Robot Wants Kitty, kitten is dangled just out of your reach for the whole game. And since there's a power-up early on that makes precision movement pretty much impossible, I never found kitten. On the plus side, hey, it's another robotfindskittenlike game.

(2) Wed Mar 10 2010 21:29 It's All Fun And Games: Check out REDDER, the psychotropic game with the palindromic name. I'm a big fan of the strange effect that happens as you play, but I won't mention too much to avoid whatever passes for spoilers when it comes to strange gameplay effects.

Fri Mar 12 2010 07:39 "Frankly, I do not feel this hatred.": The Israeli fanzine Bli Panika (Don't Panic) has published an awesome Hebrew translation of Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs by Ehud Maimon. Google Translate translates the title back into English as "Mention dinosaurs and glory", and Tark and Entippa's names are transliterated Tariq and Antipathy. Pretty fun!

Back when I first heard about this project, I mentioned to editor Rami Shal'heveth that the story's title is a riff on a phrase originally in Hebrew, but he probably already knew that. Actually, no: "Ben-Sira's book is one of those canonical texts that everybody knows of, but nobody reads."

(2) Fri Mar 12 2010 08:47 The Long Joke: In 2001 my sister Susanna sent me the birthday card you see before you. It said "Whee! You're 3 22!" I thought this was hilarious, and I kept the card.

Then Susanna had a daughter, and I had an idea. Recently Maggie turned three, and I gave my niece the birthday card Susanna had sent me eight years earlier. "Whee! You're 3 22 3!" The payoff was worth it. "I laughed for like 5 minutes," said Susanna.

Recently I was doing a video chat with Susanna and I mentioned:

L: So I'm jogging for an hour every day, and I realized I wasn't doing enough reading, so I decided I also needed to read for half an hour every day. And I also want to devote half an hour to games, though that's not as much of a problem. And I think I should also allocate at least half an hour for writing. But if I keep dividing up my free time like this then my whole life will be...

S: Organized?

Hmm.

Sat Mar 13 2010 13:29: Evan: "You really need to watch Summer School on the original rental VHS. It's like listening to the Beatles on LP."

Sun Mar 14 2010 22:34: Speaking of Evan, he's started a new weblog, walltype, where he curates photos from Flickr that fit his own baroque categorizations. I think it has explodingdog-esque potential.

Speaking of new weblogs by my friends: Pat Rafferty's Raffertyesque. Now you have something to read while you look at Evan's curated pictures.

Wed Mar 17 2010 21:24 Alternate ETag Validation Functions: Yes, months after driving away everyone who read this weblog hoping I would talk about RESTful topics, here's some REST stuff. This is an idea I got from my co-worker Björn Tillenius. I hope someone else has come up with the same idea and given it a better name.

Here's the problem, on a high level of abstraction. Consider a representation (#1):

<p id="1">Forklift</p>
<p class="read-only" id="2">Green</p>

And let's say the ETag of this representation is the string "x".

According to the protocol governing this media type, you can modify the text in any paragraph unless its class is "read-only". So maybe you can PUT a document like this (#2):

<p id="1">Hovercraft</p>
<p class="read-only" id="2">Green</p>

Or PATCH a document like this (#3):

<p id="1">Hovercraft</p>

OK, that's easy. Now suppose that the read-only text changes randomly according to conditions on the server. Let's say the read-only text suddenly changes from "Green" to "Red". If I were to GET the document again, I'd get this document (#4):

<p id="1">Forklift</p>
<p class="read-only" id="2">Red</p>

And let's say the ETag of this document is "y". If I sent a conditional GET with an If-None-Match of "x", I'd get 200 and a new representation instead of 304 ("Not Modified").

OK, but I don't send a conditional GET. I don't get the document again at all. Instead, I PUT document #2, with an If-Match of "x", and the request fails with 412 ("Precondition Failed"). Maybe it should fail anyway; maybe the server is very strict and thinks I'm trying to change a read-only paragraph from "Red" to "Green", which would probably be 400 ("Bad Request"). But we don't even get to that point because the ETags don't match.

The request also fails with 412 if I PATCH document #3 with an If-Match of "x". But there's nothing really wrong with that request. The point of If-Match in conditional writes is to avoid conflicts with other clients, and there are no other clients here. The ETag is different because a read-only paragraph changed on the server side.

One obvious solution is to calculate the ETag only from the read-write portion of the document. This fixes conditional writes, but it breaks conditional reads. A client that requests document 1 and then makes conditional requests will never get document 4. The ETag is no longer a strong validator; the document might change without the ETag changing. So that's no good.

The solution Björn came up with is to split the ETag into two parts. The first part is derived from the read-only portions of the document, and the second part is derived from the read-write portions. The ETag is a totally opaque string to the client, but the server knows what it means. On a conditional read, the server checks the entire ETag. On a conditional write, the server only checks the second half.

In this example, the ETag for document #1 might be "1.a" and the ETag for document #4 might be "2.a". A conditional GET of document #4 with If-None-Match="1.a" would fail, but a conditional write with If-Match="1.a" would succeed. When the write went through, the document's ETag would change to "2.b", and "1.a" would not be good for either conditional reads or writes.

From the client's perspective everything just works: your conditional read returns 200 iff the representation has changed, and your conditional write returns 412 iff someone else is messing with the resource. But is this okay from a standards perspective? Section 13.3.3 of RFC 2616 says "The only function that the HTTP/1.1 protocol defines on [ETags] is comparison." That doesn't seem to prohibit me from defining another one.

If "x" is a strong ETag then so is "1.a", but the new comparison function ignores some of its information about the resource state, effectively treating it as a weak ETag. Is that okay? Would you believe the following definition of a strong validation function? "In order to be considered equal, the second halves of both validators MUST be identical in every way, and both MUST NOT be weak." (cf 13.3.3 again)

I'm interested in your thoughts on this. Smartass comments like "you should have two resources" will not be dismissed out-of-hand but also will probably not convince me. If you're curious, here's the real-life bug that spawned this thinking.