News You Can Bruise for 2005 October 31

Today I realized that I should probably rewrite one of my old songs because it mentions a file format that's obsolete, or at least not used for what it used to be. Then I started thinking about all those old file formats. Remember when files used to use different data serialization techniques, rather than just different XML tags? Seems like every application had its own three-letter extension, or a mysterious set of .DAT files. Am I the only one who feels nostalgia for these weird beasts?

You may have noticed that I try to avoid telling you about my dreams unless some aspect of the dream would be interesting if I'd thought of it while awake. There's no need to thank me for this, though large cash donations are always appreciated. Anyway, last night I dreamed I was reading a Terry Pratchett book and weird punctuation started creeping into the middle of the words. There'd be a string of periods or an exclamation mark where it didn't belong. More and more of these strange characters started showing up in the text, and then you turned the page and there was a two-page spread that looked like a screenshot from a roguelike game. In retrospect all the weird characters made sense within the roguelike game, and the screenshot accurately represented the state of the plot of that scene in the book.

It would be pretty neat if someone could actually do this for a nontrivial story, but it seems like a task similar to the map of Rome in Gigamesh that you see if you only look at the commas.