"The other day, I came to the conclusion that the act of writing software
is actually antagonistic all on its own. Arcane languages, cryptic
errors, mostly missing (or at best, scattered) documentation - it's like
someone is deliberately trying to screw with you, sitting in some
Truman Show-like control room pointing and laughing behind the scenes.
At some level, it's masochistic, but we do it because it gives us an
incredible opportunity to shape our world." ---Chris Granger.
Damn straight its antagonistic; its also fully masochistic.
We program like this because we like to.
And after six weeks of working on Linux again, I think that's the animus primum behind that operating system. Built by programmers for programmers.
...And I can't believe this is the first time I've used a fetish tag.
"I, like most spoiled people with a internet connection..." --Jenna Marbles
I wanted to open this post with a still from XXX, the scene where the camera pans across a long line of weapons ending in front of the GTO, and Xander says to Shavers: "I want you put all of this...into that."
But google has let me down, and I'm not about to find my copy of the movie to extract a single still to provide a weak background joke. Instead I'm going to show you picture number two, which is the beginning of a new project:
All that glittery junk...I feel like a bandit from a movie.
So why did I just waste your time with this?
To paraphrase Jenna Marbles, because I, like most spoiled people with a internet connection, often have nothing better to do, and the alternative was to talk about the astonishingly line:
"...glistening from pustules of lust-sweat." which may just become my new tagline,
or the error message
Which comes across as Charles Stross crossed with H.P.Lovecraft.
Unfortunately, despite its alluringly exotic ring to a Scots-Canadian mongrel's ears, Rahul Yadav is a real and proper name, and not the dread moniker of a demonic force from Algol.
I would like to hear of a spellbook from the other side of the earth that used 'John Smith' as a exotic name, although I suspect that 'Jack Ketch' would fit the bill better, even if not as commonplace.
I will remark however, that the combination of "XXX" and "Shavers" is a rather NSFW search, and surprisingly, "GTO" does nothing to sanitize the image search results.
But google has let me down, and I'm not about to find my copy of the movie to extract a single still to provide a weak background joke. Instead I'm going to show you picture number two, which is the beginning of a new project:
All that glittery junk...I feel like a bandit from a movie.
So why did I just waste your time with this?
To paraphrase Jenna Marbles, because I, like most spoiled people with a internet connection, often have nothing better to do, and the alternative was to talk about the astonishingly line:
"...glistening from pustules of lust-sweat." which may just become my new tagline,
or the error message
" Cite error: The named reference rahul_yadav was invoked but never defined"
.Which comes across as Charles Stross crossed with H.P.Lovecraft.
Unfortunately, despite its alluringly exotic ring to a Scots-Canadian mongrel's ears, Rahul Yadav is a real and proper name, and not the dread moniker of a demonic force from Algol.
I would like to hear of a spellbook from the other side of the earth that used 'John Smith' as a exotic name, although I suspect that 'Jack Ketch' would fit the bill better, even if not as commonplace.
I will remark however, that the combination of "XXX" and "Shavers" is a rather NSFW search, and surprisingly, "GTO" does nothing to sanitize the image search results.
The Goblin Market
(In which the Internet is imagined to be a bag full of cats and goblins, shaken by a Troll.)
'Like' buttons are everywhere, sprinkled across content like a cheap garnish. Mostly they do nothing useful, beyond the up/down vote gamification* of value. What we need is a 'Idiotic' button, which applys to comments, not to content.
My critical thinking skills were developed on dead-tree media and my taste is idiosyncratic, not cosmopolitan. I ignore the like-scoring of content as irrelevant at best and misleading at worse.
Comments, on the other hand...
The Internet still can't figure out how to deal with them. Comments are often useful, but picking the utility out of the sea of crap is labor-intensive. And the trolls are offensive. Its irritating even to the thick-skinned to read twenty paragraphs of hate-mail and general crassness. Anyone de-sensatized enough that isn't rankled by half the remarks under any typical Youtube video has got a real problem, and one that is not going to be solved by more Internet.
Its not just Youtube comments***. One of the problems I have with Stack Overflow is related to this, but I'll go into that another day. What we need is some way to penalize crappy remarks. We're dealing with baby trolls, with goblins.
Trolls are the worse case situations. How do you deal with a troll? If its your site you can deploy the Ban; if you're a casual reader, you are helpless. I'm not about to** create a ephemeral user account to quarrel with a bully, but by saying nothing, I'm giving him freedom to operate. Set a threshold, and drop the comment to the bottom of the page after enough Idiotic flags.
Implement such a system, and skeletorhatesmankind may be driven from the Internet!
*I'm going to pretend this a real word, but it sounds more like Pointy-Haired-Manager talk than an adverb.
**Read this as 'lazy'
***Notice to goblins...if you think a teenager's cover of 'Heartshaped Box' is the only place to discuss the Z-O-G, marijuana curing cancer, or Bizarro-World racism, you need to re-assess your scope of venues.
'Like' buttons are everywhere, sprinkled across content like a cheap garnish. Mostly they do nothing useful, beyond the up/down vote gamification* of value. What we need is a 'Idiotic' button, which applys to comments, not to content.
My critical thinking skills were developed on dead-tree media and my taste is idiosyncratic, not cosmopolitan. I ignore the like-scoring of content as irrelevant at best and misleading at worse.
Comments, on the other hand...
The Internet still can't figure out how to deal with them. Comments are often useful, but picking the utility out of the sea of crap is labor-intensive. And the trolls are offensive. Its irritating even to the thick-skinned to read twenty paragraphs of hate-mail and general crassness. Anyone de-sensatized enough that isn't rankled by half the remarks under any typical Youtube video has got a real problem, and one that is not going to be solved by more Internet.
Its not just Youtube comments***. One of the problems I have with Stack Overflow is related to this, but I'll go into that another day. What we need is some way to penalize crappy remarks. We're dealing with baby trolls, with goblins.
Trolls are the worse case situations. How do you deal with a troll? If its your site you can deploy the Ban; if you're a casual reader, you are helpless. I'm not about to** create a ephemeral user account to quarrel with a bully, but by saying nothing, I'm giving him freedom to operate. Set a threshold, and drop the comment to the bottom of the page after enough Idiotic flags.
Implement such a system, and skeletorhatesmankind may be driven from the Internet!
*I'm going to pretend this a real word, but it sounds more like Pointy-Haired-Manager talk than an adverb.
**Read this as 'lazy'
***Notice to goblins...if you think a teenager's cover of 'Heartshaped Box' is the only place to discuss the Z-O-G, marijuana curing cancer, or Bizarro-World racism, you need to re-assess your scope of venues.
"We who have died to make the Machine have reached out to you..."
John Bloodstone was a bad writer.
Despite this, one of his books is worth reading, if one has the mental fortitude to wade through the abuse of reading a Burroughs pastiche.
Its not God-Man which is actually worse than its title; and the semi-mythical Tarzan on Barsoom is probably only of interest to the rabid slash-fic fan.
The book worth the read is Thundar - Man of Two Worlds.
Its an interesting and vivid tale. Michael Storm traverses a Time Vortex hidden in the Andes; he suffers multiple head injuries and amnesia; he becomes a savage man-beast in a jungle full of man-apes; he is tormented by nightmares and visions, especially of a Spanish longsword that had passed through his hands; he is returned to sanity by a beautiful young woman, who cannot love him physically because she is convinced he is their missing god, Thundar; he is captured by Thundar's enemies; he triumphs...
And then he doesn't. His lady-love still thinks he is an untouchable god, and she vanishes with the holy relics of the nation; the sun shines and nighttime will not come, the world starts to bake, dry out and die, the strange super-computer that controls the Time Vortex keeps transmitting messages into his brain: the book rushes over major adventures, and finally refuses to explain how he re-traverses the Vortex, and is found as a raving and fur-clad savage stowaway on a merchant vessel in San Francisco's harbor.
By this point, Micheal Storm is convinced he might very well be the missing god, and that he could re-enter the Vortex to find his beautiful Cylayne...
Questions abound. Micheal Storm is a orphan child, adopted by a rich archaeologist at the age of 14, so he could not possibly be the immortal Thundar, who disappeared in his prime of adulthood. Thundar's sword is found in the clutches of a weathered skeleton on the current-day side of the Vortex, a skeleton wearing Spanish armor of the 15th century. Thundar's ring, which controls the Supercomputer, is found in the pouch of a dead man on the far side of the Vortex. Chunks of exposition are simply not provided; the text reads like a realistic narrative in the sense that the narrator rarely has any idea why things are happening to him, or around him.
Why should there be ape-cavemen in the future? Why should the main enemy be first mentioned on page 136 of 192, brought on stage on page 158, and than escapes unharmed from the story on page 185?
Why does this villain command strange super-sciences?
The best of bad art raises endless questions: that is its value.
The writing itself is not the worse I have ever read. Burroughs or Howard have pumped out weaker dreck on occasion. But still, phrases like:
"By the the obvious young breasts of this latter creature in the chair, I knew it was female and could only conclude it was Imkuth, captured by means of some sort of scientific witchcraft that lay beyond my knowledge to define."
"If I had sensed a spell upon me before, now this vision of her--approaching me helplessly yet bravely, her hazel eyes locked on mine in full trusting and confidence--served to galvanize a psychic force which I can only describe as witchcraft. The warlock charisma fell upon my muscles and loins and heart. Where mundane rationalism would have submerged me in a sweatbath of anxiety and frustration, I was now unaccountably wizarded into a semblance of madman or godling after all."
Despite all this, the imagery is top-notch. This book screams to be a epic movie. The fights with the monsters, the nightmarish jungle life with its off-again-on-again passage of day and night, the Pellucidar meets Barsoom peoples...its as if John Bloodstone read Bloodstone by Karl Edward Wagner, fertilized it with A Princess of Mars, incubated it in the Land of Awful Night, and unencumbered by rational thought, wrote the book in one dynamic rush, possibly at the age of 14, and definitely in need of a good lay:
"Unable to analyze my feelings for her, I held her to me in one flaming moment of blinded ecstasy."
The book provides its own epigraph for this article: "Where mundane rationalism would have..."
Despite this, one of his books is worth reading, if one has the mental fortitude to wade through the abuse of reading a Burroughs pastiche.
Its not God-Man which is actually worse than its title; and the semi-mythical Tarzan on Barsoom is probably only of interest to the rabid slash-fic fan.
The book worth the read is Thundar - Man of Two Worlds.
Its an interesting and vivid tale. Michael Storm traverses a Time Vortex hidden in the Andes; he suffers multiple head injuries and amnesia; he becomes a savage man-beast in a jungle full of man-apes; he is tormented by nightmares and visions, especially of a Spanish longsword that had passed through his hands; he is returned to sanity by a beautiful young woman, who cannot love him physically because she is convinced he is their missing god, Thundar; he is captured by Thundar's enemies; he triumphs...
And then he doesn't. His lady-love still thinks he is an untouchable god, and she vanishes with the holy relics of the nation; the sun shines and nighttime will not come, the world starts to bake, dry out and die, the strange super-computer that controls the Time Vortex keeps transmitting messages into his brain: the book rushes over major adventures, and finally refuses to explain how he re-traverses the Vortex, and is found as a raving and fur-clad savage stowaway on a merchant vessel in San Francisco's harbor.
By this point, Micheal Storm is convinced he might very well be the missing god, and that he could re-enter the Vortex to find his beautiful Cylayne...
Questions abound. Micheal Storm is a orphan child, adopted by a rich archaeologist at the age of 14, so he could not possibly be the immortal Thundar, who disappeared in his prime of adulthood. Thundar's sword is found in the clutches of a weathered skeleton on the current-day side of the Vortex, a skeleton wearing Spanish armor of the 15th century. Thundar's ring, which controls the Supercomputer, is found in the pouch of a dead man on the far side of the Vortex. Chunks of exposition are simply not provided; the text reads like a realistic narrative in the sense that the narrator rarely has any idea why things are happening to him, or around him.
Why should there be ape-cavemen in the future? Why should the main enemy be first mentioned on page 136 of 192, brought on stage on page 158, and than escapes unharmed from the story on page 185?
Why does this villain command strange super-sciences?
The best of bad art raises endless questions: that is its value.
The writing itself is not the worse I have ever read. Burroughs or Howard have pumped out weaker dreck on occasion. But still, phrases like:
"By the the obvious young breasts of this latter creature in the chair, I knew it was female and could only conclude it was Imkuth, captured by means of some sort of scientific witchcraft that lay beyond my knowledge to define."
"If I had sensed a spell upon me before, now this vision of her--approaching me helplessly yet bravely, her hazel eyes locked on mine in full trusting and confidence--served to galvanize a psychic force which I can only describe as witchcraft. The warlock charisma fell upon my muscles and loins and heart. Where mundane rationalism would have submerged me in a sweatbath of anxiety and frustration, I was now unaccountably wizarded into a semblance of madman or godling after all."
Despite all this, the imagery is top-notch. This book screams to be a epic movie. The fights with the monsters, the nightmarish jungle life with its off-again-on-again passage of day and night, the Pellucidar meets Barsoom peoples...its as if John Bloodstone read Bloodstone by Karl Edward Wagner, fertilized it with A Princess of Mars, incubated it in the Land of Awful Night, and unencumbered by rational thought, wrote the book in one dynamic rush, possibly at the age of 14, and definitely in need of a good lay:
"Unable to analyze my feelings for her, I held her to me in one flaming moment of blinded ecstasy."
The book provides its own epigraph for this article: "Where mundane rationalism would have..."
Great Minds think alike, and Fools seldom differ.
Read the Internet long enough, and you'll always find someone who's thinking the same things you are.
Hitting that resonant phrase then makes you feel twice as right about what you were thinking.
Example? Certainly.
After a lifetime of struggling with Artificial Intelligence, gradually being reduced to the point where I would accept a robot with the brainpower of my terrier as amazing (Goodbye, R.Daneel Olivaw. Goodbye, OLGA.), I came to see that one of the sticking points of figuring this whole mess out was too little sensory input from the real world.
Well meaning academics would construct elaborate programs, and then connect them to reality via 1-10 sensors, with a bitrate of a few hundred bytes/sec. (Don't get me started on cameras, and the difficulties of implicit vision.) Even CYC, which I think was an amazing attempt at bootstrapping, is going to go nowhere, because it doesn't have a connection to the real world*. Intelligence works against reality; philosophically speaking, Intelligence is Figure to Reality's Ground**. Or vice versa.
So I was entertained to encounter this article by this blogger:
"...The idea of embodiment always struck me as both stunningly good and rather obvious – or more precisely, the fact that it wasn՚t obvious and needed to be put forward as a radical insurgent movement was kind of alarming. It indicated that there was some kind of culture-level sclerosis going on, a form of brain-damage that I avoided mostly by unplanned deficiencies in my education." --mtraven
Not to mention 'unplanned deficiencies in my education' could almost be a rephrase one of my favorite quotes:
" "Were we all well adjusted, we would ossify and die.The world is kept healthy only by some of the unhealthy minds lurking in it. The first implement made by man was not a scraper or a celt or stone knife.It was a crutch, and it wasn't devised by a hale man...Know you that it is not the fine bulls and wonderful cows who make the new paths. Only a crippled calf makes the new path. In everything that survives there must be an element of the incongruous." -- 'Eurema's Dam', R. A. Lafferty
*Terminal input asking question like 'WHO IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?' is not going to generate a recognizable intelligence. I don't even know what sort of mind would inhabit a space like that.
**No, I didn't make that phrase up.
Hitting that resonant phrase then makes you feel twice as right about what you were thinking.
Example? Certainly.
After a lifetime of struggling with Artificial Intelligence, gradually being reduced to the point where I would accept a robot with the brainpower of my terrier as amazing (Goodbye, R.Daneel Olivaw. Goodbye, OLGA.), I came to see that one of the sticking points of figuring this whole mess out was too little sensory input from the real world.
Well meaning academics would construct elaborate programs, and then connect them to reality via 1-10 sensors, with a bitrate of a few hundred bytes/sec. (Don't get me started on cameras, and the difficulties of implicit vision.) Even CYC, which I think was an amazing attempt at bootstrapping, is going to go nowhere, because it doesn't have a connection to the real world*. Intelligence works against reality; philosophically speaking, Intelligence is Figure to Reality's Ground**. Or vice versa.
So I was entertained to encounter this article by this blogger:
"...The idea of embodiment always struck me as both stunningly good and rather obvious – or more precisely, the fact that it wasn՚t obvious and needed to be put forward as a radical insurgent movement was kind of alarming. It indicated that there was some kind of culture-level sclerosis going on, a form of brain-damage that I avoided mostly by unplanned deficiencies in my education." --mtraven
Not to mention 'unplanned deficiencies in my education' could almost be a rephrase one of my favorite quotes:
" "Were we all well adjusted, we would ossify and die.The world is kept healthy only by some of the unhealthy minds lurking in it. The first implement made by man was not a scraper or a celt or stone knife.It was a crutch, and it wasn't devised by a hale man...Know you that it is not the fine bulls and wonderful cows who make the new paths. Only a crippled calf makes the new path. In everything that survives there must be an element of the incongruous." -- 'Eurema's Dam', R. A. Lafferty
*Terminal input asking question like 'WHO IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?' is not going to generate a recognizable intelligence. I don't even know what sort of mind would inhabit a space like that.
**No, I didn't make that phrase up.
Couth Numbers
There are certain numbers that I don't like. Not in the sense of being phobic, or that I'd avoid them, just in the sense that the number does not 'feel good' when I think about it.
'Feel good' .
That's a nice sloppy phrase, not very exact. It is similar to 'mouth feel', and maybe it is 'mind feel' I am talking about. Anyone want to coin a word for the sensation of a thing that seems 'ugly' or ' not right' when thought about?
Shall we rehabilitate 'ugsome' for this idea?*
But I don't want to talk about ugsome numbers. The number 6,000,000 could be ugsome, when considered as a summation for the Holocaust. The number -1,500 could be ugsome, if its the value of a tax bill.
What I am talking about is a number that is unpleasant, without having any conscious** context attached to it.
I was lying in bed when Liz asked what I was thinking about, and at that moment I realized I was thinking about couth, and uncouth numbers. She instantly understood what I meant, and agreed that there were numbers she found uncouth as well: 73 for example, but not 37.
There seems to be more odd uncouth than even, but our sample (n < 100) is small enough to skew an expected 50/50 distribution. It seems like some decades had a different distribution than others, but again, that may be a effect of sample size.
30,32,33,34,35,36,38,37, all seemed couth, where only 70,72,75,76,77 were couth.
Now this leads to a small fact about arithmetic: there are three ways of handling a small arithmetical transaction such as 27 +14:
What numbers do we encounter in everyday life, and does each person develop a mental fingerprint of numbers that is different? Or, like with Liz and I, the list of couth/uncouth numbers should nearly match?
Is anyone looking for a thesis concept that combines mathematics and psychology? The Tiny Lab is not going to get around to writing 'Historical Arithmetic Experience Manifested in Subjective Affectivity Gauges', as the Tiny Lab is a little busy with 'Sauropod Beat Frequencies: Femur kinematics as a Metric of Scale-Dependent Improvisational Tempos.'***
I may however, sit some people down with a list of numbers and see if I can gather a complete list up to, say 200. It would be interesting to do this in conjunction with a polygraph, to see how far the ugsome effect goes.
* Old word, 15th century, Norse roots, useful.
**You cannot have thought without unconscious attachments.
***I.E. that a dinosaur is going to play rock music at a different tempo, because the natural tapping-speed of its legs is much much lower than a humans.
'Feel good' .
That's a nice sloppy phrase, not very exact. It is similar to 'mouth feel', and maybe it is 'mind feel' I am talking about. Anyone want to coin a word for the sensation of a thing that seems 'ugly' or ' not right' when thought about?
Shall we rehabilitate 'ugsome' for this idea?*
But I don't want to talk about ugsome numbers. The number 6,000,000 could be ugsome, when considered as a summation for the Holocaust. The number -1,500 could be ugsome, if its the value of a tax bill.
What I am talking about is a number that is unpleasant, without having any conscious** context attached to it.
I was lying in bed when Liz asked what I was thinking about, and at that moment I realized I was thinking about couth, and uncouth numbers. She instantly understood what I meant, and agreed that there were numbers she found uncouth as well: 73 for example, but not 37.
There seems to be more odd uncouth than even, but our sample (n < 100) is small enough to skew an expected 50/50 distribution. It seems like some decades had a different distribution than others, but again, that may be a effect of sample size.
30,32,33,34,35,36,38,37, all seemed couth, where only 70,72,75,76,77 were couth.
Now this leads to a small fact about arithmetic: there are three ways of handling a small arithmetical transaction such as 27 +14:
- Counting on fingers or with tokens (This is how computers do it)
- Algorithmic such as with paper and pencil,
- Memorization, e.g. mental table-consultation.
What numbers do we encounter in everyday life, and does each person develop a mental fingerprint of numbers that is different? Or, like with Liz and I, the list of couth/uncouth numbers should nearly match?
Is anyone looking for a thesis concept that combines mathematics and psychology? The Tiny Lab is not going to get around to writing 'Historical Arithmetic Experience Manifested in Subjective Affectivity Gauges', as the Tiny Lab is a little busy with 'Sauropod Beat Frequencies: Femur kinematics as a Metric of Scale-Dependent Improvisational Tempos.'***
I may however, sit some people down with a list of numbers and see if I can gather a complete list up to, say 200. It would be interesting to do this in conjunction with a polygraph, to see how far the ugsome effect goes.
* Old word, 15th century, Norse roots, useful.
**You cannot have thought without unconscious attachments.
***I.E. that a dinosaur is going to play rock music at a different tempo, because the natural tapping-speed of its legs is much much lower than a humans.
Romeo and Mercutio
FiveThirtyEight has an entertaining article on interaction measurement in Romeo and Juleit. Part way through, Pierson makes the baffled remark that the two lovers actually spend little time talking to each other, and that perhaps the play should have been called Juleit and her Nurse or Romeo and Benvolio.
Pierson's missing the point of the play, which isn't a big deal, because nearly everyone misses the play's main drive:
The family heads, senior and respected are publicly embarrassed by their children's brawling; the violence spreads to the gormless fool Romeo, who manages to fumblingly set the stage for the greatest disaster of the great House's quarrel.
That Mercutio, happy-go-lucky and largely harmless*, should not only die in a pointless quarrel, but one where Romeo was actually trying to play the adult, is the first ironic stroke, and is indeed, the deftest touch in the complex interplay of emotions.
Tybalt's brutal murder leading to more shame; Madame Montague dying of grief and stress; the possibility extended of things finally settling down, and then at the perfect moment, the twist of the knife! Juleit dead - the famous suicides - and the audience crowds out of the theatre, the final scene of dead and twisted bodies discovered slumped in the tomb fixed in their minds.
Shakespeare go to some effort to undercut the love story: the lovers are immature, Romeo is shown to be explicitly fickle.
Its quite the death-toll: Tybalt, Mercutio, Paris, Romeo's mother. With the exception of Tybalt, the ones that die are merely caught up in the whirlwind, and the ones that should act as brakes on the madness- Friar Lawrence and the Nurse - are astonishingly derelict in their duties, and while truly to blame for much of the destruction, escape unscathed.
And while in Othello, the destruction is caused by a clear villain, Romeo and Juleit is almost a study in murky causation. Even Tybalt's position has some justification,especially when considered in a historical light.
God, as the wit once observed, is an iron.
*Except that he is the voice of cynical rationality, and in this maelstrom of emotion, must be destroyed: there may be some connection to the film American Beauty.
Pierson's missing the point of the play, which isn't a big deal, because nearly everyone misses the play's main drive:
Its not really a play about star-crossed love.
Its a play about collateral damage.
That Mercutio, happy-go-lucky and largely harmless*, should not only die in a pointless quarrel, but one where Romeo was actually trying to play the adult, is the first ironic stroke, and is indeed, the deftest touch in the complex interplay of emotions.
Tybalt's brutal murder leading to more shame; Madame Montague dying of grief and stress; the possibility extended of things finally settling down, and then at the perfect moment, the twist of the knife! Juleit dead - the famous suicides - and the audience crowds out of the theatre, the final scene of dead and twisted bodies discovered slumped in the tomb fixed in their minds.
Shakespeare go to some effort to undercut the love story: the lovers are immature, Romeo is shown to be explicitly fickle.
Its quite the death-toll: Tybalt, Mercutio, Paris, Romeo's mother. With the exception of Tybalt, the ones that die are merely caught up in the whirlwind, and the ones that should act as brakes on the madness- Friar Lawrence and the Nurse - are astonishingly derelict in their duties, and while truly to blame for much of the destruction, escape unscathed.
And while in Othello, the destruction is caused by a clear villain, Romeo and Juleit is almost a study in murky causation. Even Tybalt's position has some justification,especially when considered in a historical light.
God, as the wit once observed, is an iron.
*Except that he is the voice of cynical rationality, and in this maelstrom of emotion, must be destroyed: there may be some connection to the film American Beauty.
O.S.I.R. 7 (I think - do updates count as integers?)
This is maybe a minor detail, but its really damned annoying, and I can't think of how to solve it.
The mouse lags.
Not a lot - very little, in fact, just enough to make it feel soggy and inaccurate.
I'll be the first to admit that maybe all those years of Quake and Doom II have sensitized me to draggy pointers, but its still really damned annoying. (How many times can I use that phrase?) Whats also interesting about this problem is that the pointer also has a bad case of quivering; the mouse is noticing tiny vibrations, and the pointer is displaying them.
"The predictable pointer acceleration code is an effort to remove the deficiencies of the previous acceleration code. It is intended as a drop-in replacement. Most users probably won't note it, which is ensured by reusing existing controls and aligning closely to them."
Do they mean 'note' or 'notice'?
This is the only complaint I have about using Puppy Linux for surfing the Net.
I have little interest in a machine that can only surf the Net.
Bah.
The mouse lags.
Not a lot - very little, in fact, just enough to make it feel soggy and inaccurate.
I'll be the first to admit that maybe all those years of Quake and Doom II have sensitized me to draggy pointers, but its still really damned annoying. (How many times can I use that phrase?) Whats also interesting about this problem is that the pointer also has a bad case of quivering; the mouse is noticing tiny vibrations, and the pointer is displaying them.
"The predictable pointer acceleration code is an effort to remove the deficiencies of the previous acceleration code. It is intended as a drop-in replacement. Most users probably won't note it, which is ensured by reusing existing controls and aligning closely to them."
Do they mean 'note' or 'notice'?
This is the only complaint I have about using Puppy Linux for surfing the Net.
I have little interest in a machine that can only surf the Net.
Bah.
Some Notes on the Probable Career of the Creature
Brought to life on the workbench of Victor Frankenstein, the Creature demonstrated superhuman intelligence and learning abilities immediately. Perhaps its most striking features is its yellow skin and strange eyes.The Shelley-Wollstoncroft Papers conclude with it being sighted on the Arctic wastes, heading northwards, presumably to self-destruction.
Fifty years later, the seas are ruled by the enigmatic 'Captain Nemo' who commands a self-manufactured vessel of astonishing capacity and power. He supplies revolutionaries, destroys warships, and broods over the rotting carcass of Grenville's Revenge.
Aronnax does not really supply much information but what he looks like beyond that he is tall, pale, and symmetrically constructed: he does note however that his eyes are unusually far apart.
Professor Aronnax's account ends with the professors escape from captivity; Nemo is assumed to have been destroyed in the Maelstrom whirlpools off the Norwegian coast. (The Mysterious Island appears to explain Nemo's origin and provide his concrete death, but is riddled with inconsistencies when compared to Aronnax's account. The most telling being that The Mysterious Island occurs in 1865 to 1867, while Aronnax definitively dates the Maelstrom event to June 2 1868! The Mysterious Island is disinformation. How much did the Creature pay Verne?)
In the 1890's, a tall , thin man calling himself 'Doctor Nikola' appears and there are reports of strange and terrible experiments and bizarre schemes in pursuit of a Tibetan process of raising the dead. Nikola is slender, 'perfectly formed' with strange eyes and 'white, toad-coloured skin' He has a pet black cat he calls Apollyon ( 'The Destroyer', also known classicly as Abaddon)
Twenty years later, a tall, 'yellow-complected' man with strange eyes, and commanding ever stranger scientific breakthroughs is revealed by the detective work of a Burmese police commissioner.
Calling himself 'Doctor Fu Manchu': a sobriquet as unrealistic as 'O'Irish' or 'MacScotsman' he masquerades as a vaudeville Chinaman with pigtail, lisp and inscrutable expressions. Fu Manchu mugs for the metaphorical camera, but the Clouseau-like Denis Nayland Smith can never see the joke, and swallows the masquerade hook, line and sinker. He is accompanied at all times by a creature described as a small black marmoset called Peko. This in itself is strange because Peko is the name of an Estonian god of brewing and crops.
At around this time, a dope-fiend by the name of Costigan reports a wild narrative involving a skeletal figure known as 'Old Skullface' 'Kathulos' or simply 'The Master' who was reputedly found drifting in a strange sealed sarcophagus in the Atlantic. I imagine that one of Nemo's strange, decked-over submersible dinghies could have been described as a 'sarcophagous'. Costigan's opium addiction is cured by the administration of a powerful stimulant that converts a weak and dying addict into a physical powerhouse. It does not entirely cure his mind; the climax of his account features a hallucinogenic dream centered around a Mesoamerican pyramid built deep in the heart of London.
In 1946, a tall, thin man calling himself 'Jonas Sown' claims to have 'come out of China' and to have instigated the second world war.
The trail grows cold here.
If the Sown lead is actually unconnected - and the connection is very tenuous - than the Creature perished at some point during the Second World War. He would have been around 130 years old, but we have no data on the ageing rate of artificial beings.
No trace of the Nautilus has ever been found, yet in 1963 the US Navy tracked a single-screwed submarine operating at depths and speeds no other submarine has ever reached.
In 1972, the Norwegian Navy was involved in a two week long battle with a small cigar-shaped submarine that ultimately escaped unscathed.
So where is the Creature today?
Fifty years later, the seas are ruled by the enigmatic 'Captain Nemo' who commands a self-manufactured vessel of astonishing capacity and power. He supplies revolutionaries, destroys warships, and broods over the rotting carcass of Grenville's Revenge.
Aronnax does not really supply much information but what he looks like beyond that he is tall, pale, and symmetrically constructed: he does note however that his eyes are unusually far apart.
Professor Aronnax's account ends with the professors escape from captivity; Nemo is assumed to have been destroyed in the Maelstrom whirlpools off the Norwegian coast. (The Mysterious Island appears to explain Nemo's origin and provide his concrete death, but is riddled with inconsistencies when compared to Aronnax's account. The most telling being that The Mysterious Island occurs in 1865 to 1867, while Aronnax definitively dates the Maelstrom event to June 2 1868! The Mysterious Island is disinformation. How much did the Creature pay Verne?)
In the 1890's, a tall , thin man calling himself 'Doctor Nikola' appears and there are reports of strange and terrible experiments and bizarre schemes in pursuit of a Tibetan process of raising the dead. Nikola is slender, 'perfectly formed' with strange eyes and 'white, toad-coloured skin' He has a pet black cat he calls Apollyon ( 'The Destroyer', also known classicly as Abaddon)
Twenty years later, a tall, 'yellow-complected' man with strange eyes, and commanding ever stranger scientific breakthroughs is revealed by the detective work of a Burmese police commissioner.
Calling himself 'Doctor Fu Manchu': a sobriquet as unrealistic as 'O'Irish' or 'MacScotsman' he masquerades as a vaudeville Chinaman with pigtail, lisp and inscrutable expressions. Fu Manchu mugs for the metaphorical camera, but the Clouseau-like Denis Nayland Smith can never see the joke, and swallows the masquerade hook, line and sinker. He is accompanied at all times by a creature described as a small black marmoset called Peko. This in itself is strange because Peko is the name of an Estonian god of brewing and crops.
At around this time, a dope-fiend by the name of Costigan reports a wild narrative involving a skeletal figure known as 'Old Skullface' 'Kathulos' or simply 'The Master' who was reputedly found drifting in a strange sealed sarcophagus in the Atlantic. I imagine that one of Nemo's strange, decked-over submersible dinghies could have been described as a 'sarcophagous'. Costigan's opium addiction is cured by the administration of a powerful stimulant that converts a weak and dying addict into a physical powerhouse. It does not entirely cure his mind; the climax of his account features a hallucinogenic dream centered around a Mesoamerican pyramid built deep in the heart of London.
In 1946, a tall, thin man calling himself 'Jonas Sown' claims to have 'come out of China' and to have instigated the second world war.
The trail grows cold here.
If the Sown lead is actually unconnected - and the connection is very tenuous - than the Creature perished at some point during the Second World War. He would have been around 130 years old, but we have no data on the ageing rate of artificial beings.
No trace of the Nautilus has ever been found, yet in 1963 the US Navy tracked a single-screwed submarine operating at depths and speeds no other submarine has ever reached.
In 1972, the Norwegian Navy was involved in a two week long battle with a small cigar-shaped submarine that ultimately escaped unscathed.
So where is the Creature today?
"At first I thought we were in the hands of people that would understand..."
Frankenstein's Island(1981).
Who are supposed to be the barbarian survivors of a pre-historic, yet alien race.
Why do they do nothing but smoke from modified human skulls, pray to the ghost of Doctor Frankenstein, and initiate each other by stretching themselves between trees?
Why is one of the alien women not a alien woman, but a human girl, daughter of the caged and raving blood-donor?
Why are they wearing leopardskin swimwear?
Why is Frankenstein's ghost raving about the power of the thread of gold?
Why is the lab decked out with more high voltage equipment than any three mad scientist's labs -- but includes a ammo tin, spray painted pink , and whirling balanced on one corner?
This has the worst Frankenstein's Monster I have ever seen. Really. To the Stiff Servo Effect we can add the Fly Combat Combo. Or musical sound effects. Seriously, he's lurching so hard in some scenes that it looks like he's dancing to the Monster Mash.
I could go on like this for an hour.
In what world do Colonels of the American armed Forces wear baggy dark-brown jumpsuits?
In this movie's world. In this movie all cinematic normality is overturned. This film could b e a dadaist masterpiece, and may indeed be a hidden and unknown one.
The deliberate lack of action, followed by the epic brawl through the laboratory. The camera pausing part way through its exploration of writhing semi-naked female 'warriors' and their turtle-neck clad, sunglasses-wearing zombie enemy, (each of whom stand and walk as though their testicles ache unbearably), to watch the plucky terrier enter the battle, bark merrily and flee again.
"Those logs are tangible...rooted to the ground."
I'm willing to bet that the producers laid their hands on some footage of John Carradine...perhaps a minutes worth of film stock, something that was thrown out because Carradine looks like he'd died and was being animated by strings. They use the footage to put his name on the billing.
Its a transparent con, but still, the image of a hologram of John Carradine being worshipped by nearly naked dope bunnys on a far-away jungle island is strangely compelling.
The movie's refusal to be exciting, or to explain anything, is hypnotically tantalizing. Its like watching a strip tease where the dancer keeps shimmying and wiggling and discarding clothes only to reveal more layers of inexplicable raiment; the creeping madness kept in check by the banality of set and actions; the dialogue drifting in and out of sense like the rambling of a schizophrenic , or trying to read a newspaper in Cyrillic....
"Doctor Frankenstein, before he died, perfected a very startling theory which utilizes a intermediary - a human brain which is the connecting link for transnmission"
"the brain is kept alive by---low voltage?"
"its staying in an expanded threshold - a super nourished state"
Thank you Madame Exposition, everything is clear, now. But why does the One Eyed Man laugh?
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