Tang's DW

Song of the nonce

2018-08-05T00:27:11Z

Of all of the songs to get earwormed by, did it have to be MTC by S3RL? (NSFW)

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The best spam that I have received in a while

2017-01-27T05:26:17Z

This appeal ended up in my inbox:

(If you are not the person who is in charge of this, please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent. If this email affects you, we are very sorry, please ignore this email. Thanks)
We are a Network Service Company which is the domain name registration center in China.
We received an application from Huayi Ltd on January 16, 2017. They want to register " hfb " as their Internet Keyword and " hfb .cn ", " hfb .com.cn ", hfb .net.cn ", " hfb .org.cn ", " hfb .asia " domain names, they are in China and Asia domain names. But after checking it, we find " hfb " conflicts with your company. In order to deal with this matter better, so we send you email and confirm whether this company is your distributor or business partner in China or not?

Here is a link to my "company" that distributes HFB. In fact, you can look at all of the HFB that I am distributing.

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Star Trek Beyond

2016-07-27T01:59:38Z

Saw the movie. Quick thoughts:

The movie opens with a lens flare. Is this a giant "fuck you" to Abrams's detractors? If so, well done.
The "Sulu Is Gay" controversy was bullshit. It was handled so subtly that there was nothing to have a controversy over.
The action scenes had way too much shakycam.
The movie overall was the best of the new series. That's not saying much but it was a fair way to waste two hours.

Plot hole: ( cut for plot holes )

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Extending the X-Files

2015-07-29T05:36:35Z

They say that the X-Files is coming back, so I'll drop my vague ideas of what I'd have done with the property instead.

Introduction

Some FBI agents at a field office in the South are working a mafia case and are short of leads. The new guy Jason sets his computer to run an overnight search of all networked drives overnight for some of the names they are looking for information on. In the middle of the next day, as the search is still running, he starts getting results from file names beginning with the letter X. One of the files is a report issued fifteen years earlier by someone who had the same name as a CIA assistant director who had been in the news recently for mismanaging money.

He brings it to his partner Jeanette whose first words after glancing at the file are "It's an X-file. Those are for UFOs and stuff." He tells her to look at the name of the informant and she recognizes the importance immediately.

They bring it to the special agent in charge who confirms that the assistant director was working in this area at the time, and he finds it very interesting that a trustworthy report would end up in the X-Files. He asks for a printed copy of the report, says that he will investigate this personally, tells Jeanette that she is in charge of the investigation while he is out of the office, and departs alone.

Jason looks at a few other X-Files while he's on break and laughs at them.

A few days later, they go looking for the CIA guy's reports in the X-Files during a meeting with other agents and some of the files are missing. The SAIC's jaw drops. He orders everyone to print out everything they still have access to, "we're going back to paper for this investigation."

Jason and Jeanette get the building's IT to copy all of the X-Files to an external hard drive on the local network so it is under the control of the field office and they can search it more quickly.

The mafia investigation ends abruptly when the mafia leader's yacht sinks in the Gulf of Mexico with some of his deputies on board. Jeanette looks at the SAIC as if she thinks he might be responsible, but the look on his face is one of dejection and defeat rather than guilt. SAIC gets back in command mode: this is going to cause a power vacuum, somebody is going to take over, get on top of things before the gangs start a war across the entire state.

Jason goes home where he still lives with his parents and mentions "hey, did you know Mrs. Johnson's house is supposed to be haunted?" On his next off day he visits Mrs. Johnson and awkwardly asks her if she has ever seen a ghost, because he was reading an old ghost story and it had her address in it. She says no, but when her mother was dying she said that there used to be an angel in the house before the fire that happened when Mrs. Johnson was only four.

On his next work day, Jason updates the 60-year-old X-file about the ghost sighting with the information that he collected on his day off, writing that he did this on his day off, and marks the file as closed. Soon he is in the SAIC's office. The SAIC says "I hear that you closed an X-file. I've been hearing it from my friends in Washington. Now, I read your appendix. It was solid work and you didn't waste any taxpayer money. My gut instinct is to chew you out but you didn't do anything wrong and you did good work. Just... don't forget that we have real crimes to solve. If you want to chase ghosts, keep doing it on your own time."

As Jason leaves, the SAIC adds "and let me know if you find anything interesting in those files." The viewer has seen enough of both characters to know that the SAIC's definition of interesting may be different from Jason's.

On her day off, Jeanette mentions to a friend that her partner decided to investigate a haunted house because it was close to where he lives. Her friend mentions that she knows where there is a haunted house...

Soon they are at the "haunted" house with sleeping bags, laptops, and recording equipment. Jeanette's friend brought her kids who are about 8 and 5. It's a sleepover party atmosphere and Jason mentions that if there are any ghosts they would scare them off. In the morning, they start wrapping up. No one saw anything, no one had nightmares. They walk out the door as the ghost watches.

Different attitudes, different climate

The X-Files themselves are a source of mystery and comedy until they become familiar.

Not every X-File is real. Most of them are worthless, introduced and thrown away in a short time. An extra mystery in the show is which mystery will turn out to be the real one.

There is more than one story in each episode. Some are resolved quickly, some are spread out across a few episodes, many are simply background stories.

Neither investigator is a believer in the paranormal until it forces itself on them, and their attitudes and approaches are different from Mulder and Scully. Jason is in it for the "wouldn't it be cool if..." factor and he drives most paranormal investigations with his eagerness. Jeanette prefers rational explanations but enjoys carrying out the investigation and seeing where the facts lead.

The agents solve real crimes for several episodes before they are assigned to work on the X-Files on a special request from a deputy director who their SAIC is not familiar with.

The agents work in an office with other staff. Actors playing background characters will be hired on for a season to just nod and say "hi" once an episode and to have the same familiar faces in the same cubicles. The agents have friends and families. The cost of the show is going through the roof.

Long-term plot

In later seasons:

Somebody gives the order to delete all of the X-Files. The backup drive at the field office is the only copy until they start getting requests from other field offices to make a copy.
Jason gets beamed up by a UFO. It turns out to be a secret US military aircraft. After seeing his FBI badge, they hand him over to "The Investigator": Dana Scully. She tells him that aliens do exist, and welcome to the resistance. Jason is written out of the show and replaced by another character.

Some previous concepts:

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Link of the nonce

2015-01-02T05:21:13Z

Reddit has a Bit of News bot that summarizes a news article into a few brief points. Sometimes it glitches in amusing ways. Follow the permalinks to see the user responses.

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Internet social weather report

2014-08-24T19:38:30Z

There is a category 4 shitstorm over the Internet today as Reddit administrators have been shadowbanning users for discussing the Zoe Quinn controversy (more) (more) (more+nsfw), for discussing the censorship of the discussion, and for notifying other users that they have been shadowbanned. Rumours suggest that several other prominent websites have been deleting non-intrusive, non-offensive commentary on the subject. Encyclopedia Dramatica has a long list of websites allegedly censoring discussion of the issue, but no evidence.

In one of the more notable examples, IndieGogo's administrators shut down a fundraiser that had raised $25,000 for a feminist gamer group and embedded the video "You Are An Idiot" on the fundraising page because this group landed in the anti-Quinn camp when Quinn accused them of being anti-transsexual on the grounds of requiring that applicants be "a self identified woman". There may also be a monetary angle involved.

Both pro-Quinn and anti-Quinn factions also claim the other side has hackers breaking into their websites and stealing their identities. Cover your popcorn because this might get messier than a Gallagher show.

[Edit] Fixed the KYM link. Added another summary timeline.

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Amusing link of the nonce

2014-08-20T23:44:51Z

Pop songs translated into poetry.

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augh

2014-07-03T15:38:59Z

Quote of the day and of the years:

The gap between now and "Marge vs. the Monorail" is larger than the gap between "Marge vs. the Monorail" and the fall of Saigon.

Dagnabbit.

There's a guy who puts out an annual list of things that high school freshmen will not be able to relate to, but I can't find a link to it.

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Bay'sball

2014-05-26T17:12:16Z

The Giants and A's have the best and 3rd-best records in major league baseball. Nice.

Both teams are doing it without any superstar offensive players. They are stacked with superstar pitchers, though.

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heh.

2014-05-24T00:41:24Z

Because you can't spell "Mudkip" without "UKIP":

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Anime recommendation: Stein's Gate

2014-05-12T03:25:07Z

Stein's Gate is like Primer with madder science, with the main character being a bona fide mad scientist with a maniacal laugh who wears a lab coat everywhere. There's a murder mystery that ends with the murderee walking around like nothing's happened, a plot thread involving John Titor, and enough sitcom-like dialogue that it's almost a slice-of-life comedy except that the goings-on are very unusual. I've seen 2 eps, and it's really good so far.

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US invades Minecraft

2014-05-08T14:25:39Z

"A replica of Denmark in Minecraft has been vandalised with some areas blown up and flags of the United States created."

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Monstration

2014-05-04T16:34:17Z

The Monstration is the postmodernist removal of all meaning from May Day demonstrations, replacing a workers' holiday with a faux-protest having a carnival atmosphere.

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Doraemon + Akira mashup

2014-04-12T20:09:43Z

Doraemon + Akira mashup. I cannot stop laughing.

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An advantage to vector and 3-d graphics

2014-03-15T22:38:22Z

Someone ran a old PS2 game through an emulator that let them raise the video resolution. It went from looking like a mid-1990s game to a mid-2000s remake.

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5. Acceptance

2014-03-15T22:04:34Z

Remembering how scared the RIAA was of music on the internet, I find it hilarious that the studios put all their best songs on Youtube so you don't have to buy their albums to have a listen.

[EDIT] and in related three-year-old not-news-to-anyone-but-me, Funimation put all six eps of FLCL on Youtube. Nice.

[Edit #2] Funimation has a whole bunch of series on Youtube. Niiiiice.

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Toilet humour

2014-03-15T18:08:45Z

A story from the Vietnam war:

The flight was a Dixie Station strike (South Vietnam) going to the Delta. When they arrived in the target area and CDR Stoddard was reading the ordnance list to the FAC, he ended with "and one code name Sani-Flush" ... The toilet was a damaged toilet, which was going to be thrown overboard. One of our plane captains rescued it and the ordnance crew made a rack, tailfins and nose fuse for it. Our checkers maintained a position to block the view of the air boss and the Captain while the aircraft was taxiing forward. Just as it was being shot off we got a 1MC message from the bridge, "What the hell was on 572's right wing?" There were a lot of jokes with air intelligence about germ warfare.

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Babymetal

2014-03-13T19:05:00Z

A solitary tear rolled down Nathan Explosion's cheek. He could only stammer: "That... that's not brutal. That's not brutal at all!"

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Eh, Canada

2014-03-05T16:25:08Z

A whole bunch of Canada stereotypes. Except the octopus on the ice is a Detroit thing.

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Torture on TV

2014-02-28T15:59:40Z

TV is promoting torture as an effective tool for the good guys -- at least on Fringe (which I haven't watched) and "everywhere in American entertainment now" (which I haven't watched). Via james_davis_nicoll.

I remember hearing rumours back when "24" was a new show that friends of Rush Limbaugh were intentionally writing torture into the scripts as a way of programming the audience to support the torture which the Bush administration had already approved, but was not yet widespread public knowledge. Then a few years later I tried to find whatever random blog post I had heard these rumours from and couldn't find anything.

I have seen a couple of shows of NCIS where the "good guys" willfully break the rules of evidence, such as conducting searches without a warrant. On Law and Order, at least there's an argument about it and the judge sometimes throws the evidence out. On NCIS, the attitude is "look how edgy our guy is!"

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How much '80s video game art was ripped off?

2013-10-31T01:49:12Z

Hardcore Gaming 101 tracked down the origins of a whole bunch of video game artwork. Schwarzenegger and Stallone are an entire section, and Frazetta was a big influence as well.

From the same site: The European box art for The Guardian Legend is much better than the American box art, and the Japanese box art is a work of art.

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Comedy

2013-10-18T16:36:53Z

People are upset that a graffiti artist painted over some of Banksy's graffiti. Pardon me while I attempt to stop laughing.

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Sci-Fi or fantasy?

2013-10-14T16:14:43Z

Wizard School weighs in on the Sci-Fi vs. Fantasy debate with a bit of Trekkishness and an inverse of Clarke's axiom: to a sufficiently stupid character, any science is indistinguishable from magic.

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Novelty progression and feature progression in video games

2013-09-17T16:51:50Z

Many good video games have a feature that I call "novelty progression". As the player advances through the game, they are continuously introduced to new experiences that are outside of the core game experience. One form of novelty progression is "feature progression" in which the novelties will change the core game experience.

As an example of a game with novelty and feature progression, consider Starcraft's single-player campaigns. You begin the campaign with a small number of units available to you and new units with new abilities are unlocked as as you progress through the game. You continuously encounter new environments and new enemies, and you are given an unfolding story with new characters and new twists. Furthermore, every stage has something different from the core game in terms of gameplay. There are scripted events, a timer, hero units with spoken dialogue, allied units to rescue. Several missions only give you a small tactical squad and no base with which to produce additional units. None of these changes to the gameplay are overdone to the point of being considered a normal part of the game. Once you beat all of the missions and become used to one of the races, you start over with a second and then a third race whose strategies are different.

What makes novelty progression work? First, there must be a solid game core that is fun to play without the novelties. The novelties must be new and not something previously seen with a different skin. Also, with so many games having been produced, novelties must not be the same thing that the player has seen before in many different games unless it is done well in a new way. A desert level or an ice level might have been awesome in its own right in the 1980s, but today you will have to add something special.

What makes feature progression work? The new features must be useful, so that you can use them in more than one place. They must be more than keycards. Also, new features must not break the game unless they are added near the end.

The Metroidvania category of games are based on feature progression. Get the item that makes you jump higher and you can reach the next cave. Get the item that lets you swing around and you can reach the next cave. Get the item that lets you blow up barriers and you can reach the next cave. As already mentioned, feature progression works best when you can use these features in normal gameplay.

The Legend of Zelda is worth mentioning in terms of feature progression. Of the many items you get, you can use many of them in normal gameplay but generally half of them are not very useful outside of the one place where you need them. However, very few of the items are totally useless in normal gameplay. In the original LoZ, the fire, arrow, and bomb were usable in normal gameplay but had enough drawbacks to not be worth using. The programmers got around this drawback by providing enough places to use these limited-use items to make them seem more useful to the player.

There have been some experimental Flash games that are based on feature progression (or progressive feature removal). One that comes to mind is Tower of Heaven.

RPGs are based on novelty progression with their storylines, environments, NPCs, and enemies. They also have some feature progression in that as the game progresses you get new abilities with new effects that may change your decisions in battle. This feature progression has tended not to work well even in big-name games because the new features either are game breakers or are degraded to the point of uselessness to prevent them from becoming game breakers. Game developers also have a tendency to introduce all of the classes, elements, and status effects early in the game or by the midpoint rather than progressively introducing them a bit at a time throughout the game. This may be justified by certain features of RPGs being subtle enough, with calculations based on many factors, that the player might not notice some of these features unless an early tutorial introduces them.

What happens when a game has a good core but does not have novelty progression? You get the RPG trope "You must collect ten blue ratsasses" where you keep getting assigned the same task with a trivial difference. You get the Arkandian game series in which there's a very nice RPG engine but every event is the same and you've played out the game in fifteen minutes, after which you're only raising numbers for the next ten hours until you reach the end of the scripted content. You get bored, and that is the ultimate condemnation of a video game.

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Fun stuff

2013-05-11T18:43:33Z

Megalomania - A rocking track from the Super Famicom game Live-a-Live.
Little Witch Academia - A full-length anime episode released as a free public demo.
VGPerson's translated games - Translations of indie RPGs from Japan, many of them in the creepy/horror genre.

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