News You Can Bruise for 2002 July 30

Enjoy the Python Cookbook , including the Borg design pattern.

Hm...

"Cephalopods have no gas-filled sac, so they have no way to make that type of noise," he said.

vs.

"They made these strange noises like a dolphin or a seal as they were dying."

There's the Angband comic, previously mentioned here, and there's also a Nethack comic (well, one based on Nethack, anyhow). It's not as funny as the Angband comic, and it hasn't been updated for a couple months, but unlike the Angband comic it is actually text-based, and it has some funny moments:

Waltraute wields a long sword! The long sword slips from her hands!
@: Damn you fried food! First you ruin my girlish figure, then you make me helpless!

I wrote a labor-saving device I'd been meaning to write for a while, which breaks my long streak of not writing code except for work. Hopefully my burnout is subsiding, and soon I'll be interested in working on my game again.

DSC:

• robotfindskitten slash ("Way to go, robot!")
• Geographical location slash (eg. Des Moines and Beijing, or the Atlantic and Arctic oceans)
• Founding Fathers slash

Leonardonics backlog clearing-out: X Sense... tingling!, Seth David Schoen, The original x, x brand y. Four more on the way.

In other long-neglected Crummy feature news: Tonight's Episode will return tomorrow morning, with Jason's 14-part series The Jury Did It.

Time for some Murphy-style "laws" which for some reason writing them makes me think it's the mid-90s and there's nothing better on the Web than lists of Murphy-style "laws".

• Leonard's Law Of Advertising: "promotes x" means "we hope you'll experience a placebo effect and attribute it to this product". Eg. "promotes wellness" for dietary supplements, "promotes productivity" for day planners and other business gear.

• Leonard's Law Of Editorials: If an editorial mentions "the culture of x", there probably is no culture of x. If someone is blamed for "creating the culture of x", they probably didn't actually do anything.