News You Can Bruise for 2002 May 12

Back from the party. It was fun. I played Devil Bunny Needs A Ham with Zack. Other stuff ensued which I need to find URLs so that I can properly link my description of it (a peculiar hypertextual disease: linker's block), and I'm too tired to find those URLs. I will mention that I went to Berkeley Bowl and bowled a couple frames. No, just kidding. Berkeley Bowl is a supermarket and they sell a line of very tasty soups under the "Turtle Island" brand. When I say these are tasty soups I am quite serious. This has nothing to do with the party, but before I went to the party I stopped to get some ginger beer (it turns out that everyone who brought any drink at all brought ginger beer; is it the new hip drink among teetotaling nerds?) and I also bought 6 boxes of the delicious soup. Dystopian Soup Slogan: "So good, it's thoughtcrime!"

The soup's gimmick is that it comes with a goofy little bottle of Tabasco which you can use to spice up the soup. It's really good with Tabasco (even though Daniel Rall hates Tabasco, and the Spice Weasel I got for Kevin that we use on our burritos is convincing me of the evils of Tabasco), but I haven't tried it with my generic Louisiana pepper sauce; will keep informed.

I got sidetracked again. What I meant to do was thank Shweta for hosting the party, and Zack for providing the venue, and also for providing the thing that I will talk about that I'm too tired and rambling to find the link for, and as such I will do it later today after I wake up from the sleep that will be mine once I run my nightly dental hygeine/yoga gauntlet.

Party, Part II: Zack, like Seth, has a great library, though his is a lot heavier on the fantasy and science fiction. I borrowed The Star Fraction by Ken McCleod, and Zack wrote his name on the cover page, making it Ex Bibliotheca Zack! Yes, the link to Zack's homepage to facilitate the bad joke was the link I needed to find very early this morning and didn't have the energy for. I could write three long rambling paragraphs but not find an easy-to-find link, because writing and link-finding are two different things, and I only had energy for one.

There was a bit of singing at the party. Unbenownst to ASCAP, we sang "Happy Birthday" to Nathaniel, and it was so bad that we changed key after almost every line; I think the more people you have singing "Happy Birthday", the worse it is. We also all joined in in singing TMBG's "Kiss Me, Son Of God", probably in homage to discussion earlier of Scott McCloud and his family singing "Birdhouse in Your Soul" at a comic convention and the entirety of the comic convention joining in.

We had pizza from Zachary's (the Berkeley pizza place, not the home of Zack), which was good and which people at work have been bothering me to try. I've tried it! It's good! Stop bothering me! (Note: it's not that bad (the bothering, I mean)).

Dialogue from our game of Devil Bunny Needs A Ham:

"I'm beginning to think that obtaining a ham is secondary among Devil Bunny's priorities."
"It never really was about the ham with Devil Bunny."

Also, the trailer for the sequel game, Devil Bunny Hates The Earth:

First, he needed a ham! Now, he hates the earth! And only 2-5 players can stop him!

I've MP3ed all the remaining NST MP3s and am currently hunting through through the 2000 programs listed on Freshmeat for automatically writing the ID tag of MP3s.

glark looks really cool, and (in a move sure to infuriate Kevin) has an appropriate name.

Uploading tagged NST MP3s now.

FHW: SFgate's front-page headline for this story is "What A Downward-Facing Dog". (from Sumana)

OK, they're up. My picks (among the new ones):

• Radio Free Singapore
• Vertigo
• Bastille Day
• Choppy The Pork Chop
• When I Was Young

Surprise! I spent the day at the four-track, going through old tapes, and I can now bring you the long-overdue mass of 1999-era recordings that comprise Are You An Organism?. 16 new tracks are up, and 15 of them are actually worth listening to! (Rewind is my homage to Jake's end-of-tape loops, and will probably be of interest only to him). If you're pressed for time, I recommend Underdrive, lowercase, Get Down Or Die, and Kleptomania.

A question for Seth about the EFF shirt. Is that thing attached to the scales a price tag (indicating that online freedom comes at a price?), or a mouse (indicating that the freedom is, in fact, online)?

A New Kind of Science to finally be released on Tuesday. I'm interested, but Crackpot Sense... tingling!