News You Can Bruise for 2002 May 20

I held my nose I closed my eyes, I read A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius. My mother read it when she was visiting me last year, and left it in my book pile. "You should read this," she said. So I did. It's okay. Not much need for me to review it since I mainly agree with the self-review in the introduction (I suppose I'm supposed to be suspicious of the self-review, but why? Is published self-analysis of a work automatically invalid?). The funny parts were pretty funny, but it had a tendency to turn into the boring parts of Microserfs. Is it a personal failing that I can only appreciate fiction in which things happen?

Mike Popovic's secret project revealed!

On Friday I went to a graduation party for Sumana. Happy graduation, Sumana! (even though you're not done with your finals... I never understood that) We played Taboo. I always start out not liking Taboo but eventually I warm to it. There were enough geeks present that we could effectively describe appropriate words ("throne", "leprechaun", "wish") in terms of Nethack; that was pretty funny.

I also concocted punch with Nandini, Sumana's sister. Everyone loved the punch. We are wizards of punch!

I told Seth about my game. "Your text adventures are better than any other text adventures," he said. Wow! He wasn't even drunk!

Joe Barr's frontier attitude has clearly been rubbing off on Nick Petreley:

It should be against the law to use POP3 for e-mail, and in anticipation of that law, I've used IMAP4 for many years.

Jason's worst-case scenario: "Imagine debugging a genetic algorithm on a buggy quantum computer running a Microsoft webserver."

Oh no! Steven Jay Gould dead at 60! (Seth brings the tragic news)

The mundane follows the tragic: I changed the front page to display the most recent 20 entries, since the old practice of displaying the current month's entries got a little bandwidth-intensive around the end of the month.

More game work. I discovered that one of my features is of the class of "Wow, this is a lot more difficult/tedious to implement than I thought." This is basically the state in which I spent the entire Degeneracy development process, and for a while I was fighting off despair, having subconsciously decided that IF programming was inherently as tedious as writing Degeneracy had been. That's not the case, though; this game is orders of magnitude less tedious to write than Degeneracy.

The default Inform magic system is so procedural! If you cast a spell on an object, the object never actually finds out about it; all the logic for handling the magic is inside the spell! I changed it to do dispatch to the object.

Wow, the meaningless option poll is so meaningless that COPOUT can't accurately display the results.

Early entrants in the spam scam contest:

From me:

• Amount: $20,500,000
• My cut: Not specified
• Proposed crime: Embezzlement of Nigerian government funds

From Sumana:

• Amount: $30,000,000
• Sumana's cut: 25% ($7,500,000)
• Proposed crime: Embezzlement of Nigerian government funds

From my mother ("The syntax does appear to be from a Nigerian English language learner," she says):

• Amount: $40,600,000
• My mother's cut: Not specified
• Proposed crime: Hiding assets from the Nigerian government

For some reason I get the feeling that people think this contest is not a real contest. Well, it is! Right down to the valueless prizes! Send in your incitements to fraud today!

I have a feeling that the new scams are a bit toned down compared to the old-school ones, in terms of the unsavoriness of the characters and activities involved.