From the pilot:
'I hate psychology; it's a soft science' -- Temperance Brennen, an anthropologist.

It's a good thing I don't write screenplays. The characters would seem totally unrealistic because they wouldn't say stupid things like that.

(Potentially relevant link)

Playing music on Windows XP? Hah! For a while, I was thinking I'd have to find some nice Ogg and MP3 libraries and write my own player. That was my plan.

Windows Media Player sucks in more ways than I can enumerate. Renamed a file? Crash! Moved a file? Crash! It's (plug-in'd) support for OggVorbis sucked. It all sucks. Everything about it sucks.
Winamp's Ogg plugin didn't work. I don't know why. WinAmp isn't what I want anyway.
Ashampoo was better, but had some serious annoyances, the slowness of it when trying to go through a 1 500 song directory tree being a major one.

Finally, however, I found a player for Windows that doesn't suck: yPlay.
At first, I was estatic because I could just do 'yplay --exit filename' and it would work like the UNIX 'play' command, but then I discovered I may not even need to. I'm undecided as to whether I'll even bother writing a Perl interface. Maybe I'll just use this thing. It's that good. Lightweight (No, I do not want to watch meaningless colours fly around to the music. I want to hear the music, and I want quick, easy playlists.)

I still may write the Perl interface so I can simply tag each song with flags and use that instead of playlists, but I'm not sure if it's worth it. That's what I really want. I don't know why n one offers that. I guess everybody sucks.

But yPlay is nice. Very nice. The randomising thing is more the way I think randomising generally should be (randomlise the list and then play through it, rather than jumping around randomly, letting the same song play over and over again), though the ability to rate music and have ++ed things played more could be nice. But that's not terribly useful. What's ++ at one time may be -- another time. That's why tags are good. Playlists will suffice, though.

I like yPlay.

(Having barely used it.)

UPDATE (before I've even posted this): When I move files, the only way I saw to refresh the song listing was to change the music folder and then change it back. Though I didn't try restarting.

September 12, 2001. I'm in line to give blood¹, and the people in front of me are talking. I get slighly involved, but not much. Anyway, at some point, what's-his-name asks Jessica her name, and she says she's alrady told him. She refuses to tell him her name 'cause he should already know it. A few days later, I see her in Brewster and ask her, and she tells me.

Some days later again, I see her outside Brewster, so I go up to her and say 'hey, what's your name?' 'Jessica'. 'Okay. This time I'll remember!' And I walk off.

A few minutes later, it occurred to me that the reason this person looked at me so oddly was that she may not have been the same person. I'm really not sure. She looked similar, but she didn't have a mohawk or anything nice and recognisable like that.

And worse, I've been calling her 'Jessica'in this post, but I really don't know. I've forgotten her name again. D'oh!

¹ For six hours. they told me it would only be three, and so I ended up missing class for the first time ever.

(Potentially relevant link)

Searchiong for 'mythical twins' gave normal results and then results for a suggested alternative search: Screenshot.

I've never seen that before on Google. If done well, it could be useful. Probably will be a small improvement, ast any rate. Probably more use for people without the good sense to refine their search themselves.

And, of course, I already had thought of Gemini. I want others. *refines search*

Challenged to come up with something good that George W. Bush has done as US president, my somewhat Liberal but more than a little Libertarian brother came up with medical malpractice award caps.

When Libertarian names price fixing as the best thing the Republican president has done, you know the world's all screwed up.

Liberals reduce the size of the government and end deficit spending, conservatives increase the size of the government and increase spending more than ever. And add price fixing to their agenda. I want a country where the parties pick their sides and stick with it.

(Potentially relevant link)

Normally I try to avoid MLP, but this fanfic is the best evAR. I muchly enjoyed Naked Quidditch Match, but this tops it, methinks.

Tripod (which, as I'm sure you know, sucks) gives us free (beer) people a CGI-BIN (with the ability to run our own scripts, of course). Now, CGI sucks, and lack of a relational database sucks, but I'm sure there's delicious stuff to be done with this.

I'm considering doing a toy virtual pet site mock-up, just because, well, I can. I've done a bit of it thus far, but it's untested ('cause I can't test it on my laptop), and doing everything with files is lame.

I also started working on a multi-player mod of the JS text adventure game I started some time ago, but again, untested.

Surely there's something trivial and amusing to do?

(Potentially relevant link)

Intended more seriously than my previous games, this is a Javascript-based Text Adventure Game. It's still alpha (my stuff never leaves alpha; I'm too lazy), but fairly functional. It can't yet compete with Hamlet: The Text Adventure (Or Robin Johnson's 'The NONDESCRIPT Text Adventure Engine for Javascript', which Hamlet uses), but it's a nice start for no more than a couple hours work. Most of the time was probably spent writing the example game.

I was writing a Perl-based engine last year, but it got lost when my hard disk died.

(Potentially relevant link)

I friend mentioned how he'd like to make a text-based GTO game:

I have this odd urge to make a text-based RPG version of Grand Theft Auto. Something like this:

Your Ubercar 3500X is on Fubar Road facing east. The corner of Crime Street is twenty-five ahead on the right. There are three pedestriants directly to your left.
> turn into crime street
Your Ubercar 3500X is on Crime Street facing south. There is an EvenBetterCar 9000N in the parking lot to your left.
> steal evenbettercar 9000N
You stole the EvenBetterCar 9000N. It is facing Crime Street facing South.
> drive south
You drive 50 feet south. There are ten pedestriants in the area, six on your left and four on your right. A police car is chasing you.
> bump police car
You bump into the police car. It takes 2% damage; your EvenBettarCar 9000N's armor keeps your damage to 0%.
> drive south
You drive 50 feet south. Two police men get out of their police car and approach your car.
> run police men ove
You run one of the police men over, but fail to hit the other. He advances toward your car and forces you out. You've been arrseted.

It would be mostly for parody, but with more-or-less complete game play.

Then again, the name Grand Text Auto is apparently taken. Maybe I won't do it.

(Posted by Leif K-Brooks).

This inspired me to make a little Javascript racing game. Future versions may include:
* Other people driving.
* More gruesome deaths (your engine can overheat, but currently that's no problem)
* Better controls (this really should be command-line based. :-)
* Better gameplay (turning all the time is boring. It needs more.)
* More!

But for now, here's the alpha.

Initially, it was going to be much simpler, which is what was so amusing about it. This was my original idea:
* You could accellerate.
* You could decellerate.
* If you went fast enough, you'd win.
No skill involved. No reason not to accellerate as much as possible. Just keep typing 'go faster'. Truly, that would have been fantastic. But then I had to get fancy.

I'm not the ambassador to Chad. You are.

You need to learn French if you don't already know it well. They speak French in Chad. Or maybe they just write it. It's pronounced completely differently from how it's spelled anyway.

You have to wear green always. Green underwear, green shoes, and green hats. Yes. Never fewer than eight hats on your head at a time. It could be worse: my brother has to wear a green cape.

Bring the bug spray. Chad is occationally plagued by locusts.

Don't be old. Only 2.8% of the population is over the age of 65. I think maybe they eat the old, weak people.

Read the news papers: all public service announcements are outsourced to Germany, but you'll be speaking French. Or writing French. If you want to learn when the unscheduled natural disasters will be occuring, you'll need to study the papers. They're written in French, because Chadians speak French. Or maybe they just write it. Newspapers are written anyhoo.

Get a lot of sleep. Chad is in the southern hemisphere, so it's day there when it's night in England, and the Sun never sets on England. Perpetual darkness means you may as well just sleep all the time. I should be sleeping right now. But instead I'm posting a bunch of poppycock about your new job.

Your salary will be paid in the official Chadian currency: XAF. It's X-rated, so you can only use it to buy booze and porn. I recommend the booze. Porn can be found for free online.

A few years back, there were five times more mobile phones than 'normal' phones. don't bring your own: just steal one. You'll have diplomatic immunity.

Lose weight. One of the primary industries is meatpacking. You don't want them packing you.

Don't wear jewelry near the military personel. Chad spends about 0.03% as much money on military as the US does. The soldiers may be seeking alternative sources of revenue. Luckily, the government couldn't afford to buy them real guns.

(Chadians hate curious people.)