News You Can Bruise for 2006 February 10

I missed the deadline for The Ultimate Genre Challenge because it was buried in my RSS feeds, but I was intrigued by its premise: to write a coherent story containing dragons, spaceships, and vampires. Here is my belated entry, which contains one of each. It scores relatively few points (six to eight, depending), but I think it's a pretty good story for 100 words. Because that's Anacrusis-length, I give it the Anacrusish title of

Malcolm

"I'll have you know I find this whole thing very distasteful," says Charmed. Slaved to the ship's fins, his wings carve microgravity.

"What part of 'thrall' don't you understand?" says Malcolm. "Ten minutes before last time. Do it n-- as soon as is safe." His voice commands; he can no longer seduce.

Charmed visualizes a familiar point in spacetime. He yawns wide and breathes neutrinos.

Just before last time, Malcolm wails as he dyes Malcolm's lips red. "Diffbuhphting," says Malcolm, but he cannot allow the plague to spread. Each time he does this, his new shape feels a little older.

Does anyone here think that Ruby's DBI module is abandonware and should be shunned in favor of database-specific Ruby bindings? I have heard this opinion and it seems bizarre to me. Even if DBI is abandonware, it's stable and it seems to work fine. Plus it's got features like prepared statements, which are otherwise a big database-specific pain. So are we going to be passé if we write recipes for the Cookbook using ActiveRecord and DBI instead of ActiveRecord and database-specific Ruby bindings?

I'm having a lot of fun playing with this game that uses Super Mario Bros. 3 as a game engine. It really messes with your preconceptions of what a Mario game is like. Reminds me of the first ZZT game you play that uses the weirder features of the ZZT Toolkit or whatever that was called. Highly recommended.