News You Can Bruise for 2001 March 10

Sat Mar 10 2001 21:32: I still feel awful, but not posting to NYCB does not make me feel less awful, so I might as well make a few notes.

One thing that's big is the coverage of Reddish Purple vs. Bluish Purple, the chart which is interesting because it is not interesting. Mike posted it to Plastic, from whence it was picked up by Andrew Sullivan, who apparently writes for the New York Times, and then by the folks who started me on it, Salon. I'm just hitting the big players here; there's also MetaFilter and many other places linking to it. The upshot of all this is that Crummy got over half as many hits today as did Segfault (Crummy usually gets about 5% of the hits that Segfault gets; it didn't hurt that Segfault gets relatively few hits over the weekend). In addition, I was on the receiving end of a Katzian outpouring of mail: four whole messages, including more accolades from Greg Knauss. Never let it be said that it doesn't pay to get aggravated about really trivial things. So long as you do something with it, rather than just being aggravated and not doing anything.

While everyone in the world was hitting my site today, I was working on Degeneracy. My state-of-the-art issue tracking system (a text file) says I fixed 23 bugs today, not counting the huge rewrites I made to the text I wrote early on in development (before I'd gotten into the game's idiom, as it were). Now that I'm done with those rewrites, I feel a lot better about a March release. Plus, I've only got 24 more bugs to fix, though more are probably hiding in the two latest transcripts from Mike. Another pointless statistic: so far, I have logged and fixed about 300 Degeneracy bugs.

Also, today I found the ancient (hand-hacked HTML) NYCB archives, adding fuel to the eternal question of whether or not I should convert them into NewsBruiser format. Pro: I would get to claim that my weblog archives go back to 1997. Con: Someone might actually look at them. The internal debate rages on, with the various factions manifesting themselves as small costumed versions of me, which flutter around in the vicinity of my shoulders.

Tomorrow I might write a code-generation script for the djinn game so that it's easy to add text. Tomorrow I will definitely be going to the mall, in hopes of drowning my sorrows in consumer goods and services. Also, I need a haircut.