News You Can Bruise for 2005 December 11

Sun Dec 11 2005 16:40 PST Truth In Advertising: I misread "Is SRSM the Next Microcap Stock Opport unity?" as "Is SPAM the Next Microcap Stock Opport unity?"

(5) Sun Dec 11 2005 21:56 PST: Now that I've gotten recording to work on my computer I'm having a rare old time actually doing recordings. So far I've recorded two new songs for my upcoming album, which I hope to release next month in time for the ten-year anniversary of the day I bought my first guitar and started learning to play. I'm not totally sure why I would want to advertise the fact that I've been playing guitar for ten years, given my current level of ability, but it seems like the kind of things real musicians do to prove how self-indulgent they are.

Should I release (drafts of) my songs as I complete them, or keep them hidden from you until everything's ready to be released? Also I need to pick a name for the album. This is my first serious musical release in five or six or eight years (depending on what you count as "serious") so I'm a little out of practice with the cover art and the naming and whatnot.

Sun Dec 11 2005 22:42 PST Quote: "These hypothetical scenarios are weird; you can go back in time and tell someone what job to take, but you can't say 'Hey! Stop 9/11 from happening!'"

(1) Sun Dec 11 2005 23:02 PST The Ultimate Star Trek Slash Pairing Generator: I created a web toy that generates pairings for your romantic or erotic Star Trek fan fiction. No longer need fanfic authors fall back on the standard pairings in use since 1966. There are bold, new, arbitrarily complex romantic entanglements to be explored!

Sumana claims that people keep writing slashfic with the canonical pairings because they prefer those pairings. I think this just shows a failure of imagination. If I wrote Trek slash I would like an occasional challenge like trying to fit Phlox, Lore, and Yeoman Rand into the same story. At any rate, the generator comes up with some really funny pairings.

This is also my first Ruby CGI program. The code's pretty bad; I've decided I don't really like Ruby's HTML generator. It's very idiomatic, but it combines logic and presentation like... well, like the farewell embrace between Spock and Vic Fontaine that fateful day on Starbase 26.