the cyberpunk 2020 economy

January 1, 2007  🎲 ⚔️

I’ve been re-reading a lot of old CP2020 sourcebooks. It’s sort of a bizarre game. The rules are really complicated, in my opinion, and the setting is the most obvious parts of Gibsonian cyberpunk turned up to eleven.

yet another trek-bashing entry

December 19, 2006

In “Doctor’s Orders,” Enterprise has to cross through a giant Crazy Cloud (actually, they call it Reconfigured Space, which is just about as silly). Humans who are conscious will suffer brain damage, so Phlox puts them all into comas. He and T’Pol take care of the ship while it goes through the cloud.

notes from today

December 19, 2006  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

Today has been a weird day, full of all kinds of stuff.

more enterprise plots

December 18, 2006

In the last few episodes I’ve seen travel into the past to stop an alien plot (see also DS9 in the 60’s and TNG in 1849). There was an alternate future that undid itself by the end of the episode (see also innumerable episodes of TNG), and a few others. Now we’re back to social commentary: a group of religious zealots intent on eliminating the heretics on their homeworld (“they think the world took one day longer to create than we do”) sieze control of Enterprise by setting up a group of suicide bombers around the ship. Meanwhile, Phlox and Archer learn of dissent in the ranks when one of the women in the group wants to have a space abortion.

getting bitten by universal methods

December 15, 2006  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

When I work on code, I nearly always replace UNIVERSAL::isa and UNIVERSAL::can with block-eval of a method call instead. This lets objects that overload isa or can work properly, and still avoids program death when the invocant is an invalid invocant.

improving our doors

December 15, 2006

We had an electrician out last week, and we’ve gotten just about all of our electrical work done. We still have our crappy old front porch light, as the one we got wasn’t going to be a suitable replacement. We found another one to use, but I haven’t picked it up yet. Instead, we got some more smoke detectors, a fire extinguisher for the kitchen, and a new doorknob. I really like the knobs we picked; we’re planning to use them in all the interior doors. They’re brushed nickel, lever-style knobs. (There are photos on Flickr.)

slogging through enterprise

December 12, 2006

Every once in a while I hear about how good Enterprise got by the end. I watched the first season a year or two ago, and it was so-so, but had some pretty good episodes. I’m working through the second season, now, and it’s consistently mediocre. It’s also got the most bizarre sexual overtones. In the episode I’m watching now, Stigma, there are two plots. In one, it turns out that T’Pol was mind meld raped by a Vulcan gay and has contracted Vulcan brain AIDS. Vulcan doctors are out to end her career, so Archer and T’Pol go have a Philadelphia-style trial where the gay judge doctor stands up and says, “I am a Vulcan gay!” Well, actually he says something like, “I am a member of that minority which practices a different form of intimacy, due to either birth or genetics; it isn’t clear.”

saving keystrokes in sub export lists

December 5, 2006  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

I use Sub::Exporter a good bit. It makes my life easier by letting me generate nice, simple mixins. I think I just had a good idea for typing even less.

what ever happened to quick start guides?

December 3, 2006

This week, I bought a Canon Elura 100. I figure that once we’ve got a screaming baby, we’ll want to take lots of video, so that when we have a screaming teenager, we can embarass him or her in front of his friends. When I unpacked the camera (which is absolutely tiny), I found lots of little scraps of paper. There was a registration card; a leaflet suggesting, in eleven different languages, that only Canon accessories should be used; a pamphlet explaining how to install the Windows-based video software; a blue-on-white page explaining, in fourteen different languages, how to clean the tape heads; and a 366 page manual, containing 133 pages in each of three languages.