tuesday, september 28, 2004
New weather
The United States, Canada, Sweden, Jesper’s friends (including me), and group blogging. It’s pretty cool — we’re discussing the weather currently.
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monday, september 27, 2004
Lizard
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Mustache mission
A mission from Elvis (indirectly): find origin and etymology of phrase “crazy moon language”.
393 hits on Google. Some of them appeared to stem from Things to Say When You’re Losing a Technical Argument, a list from 2001. However, “crazy moon language” showed up on Usenet as early as 1996 — on alt.tv.the-tick.
In episode 27, season 3, “That Mustache Feeling”, the Tick has a mustache and says “I can’t read your crazy moon language”, confirmed by TICKisms. The episode aired on September 14, 1996.
There was another mission, but it was more difficult and I chose not to accept.
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friday, september 24, 2004
A graph and musicking
A graph of how often I’ve listened to each band/musician in my iTunes library:
It’s almost neatly exponential (not surprising…but interesting). Those two at the top — the ones I’ve listened to too much — are Bob Dylan and The Magnetic Fields. The little cluster below them represents other bands that I like a lot: The White Stripes, Yo La Tengo, Radiohead. The rest is just anything that my ears like.
I seem like a fairly average rock person. Then, you go down the list and you get Burr Settles, Daler Mehndi, Patrick Ferris (a friend’s friend’s friend), and the Colburn Orchestra da Camera. Of course, any exceptions prove that I really am an average rock person. I like that.
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monday, september 13, 2004
More of my room
I picked up this pocketful of smooth, agatey stones at a beach somewhere near San Francisco. The old scottie dog ashtray was a gift from my illustrious yard-sale-shopper grandma — I used to collect dog things.
These things were relegated to a shoebox at my mom’s house after I decided to live at my dad’s. Now they decorate my room, along with a hundred other little things.
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sunday, september 05, 2004
Dungeons of…demigodhood
I’ve been playing Nethack for about five years. It is the best game ever, of course. I played 3.2.3 until a few months ago, when I updated to 3.3.1.
Tonight, my chaotic human priest ascended with 8,492,108 points and 368 hp (max 409), after 128k turns. In other words, I finally won the game. It was shiveringly wonderful. I spent all of Friday and Saturday on this game; it took maybe 30 hours. My on-and-off Nethack obsession should (hopefully) cease for a while, just in time for school!
Now, you might think “huh? what a weird game!” Or, you might think “give us the details!”
It is a weird game, old and proverbial and ascii-based. It is complicated. I’ve read mounds of spoilers. It has a good IRC channel, #nethack on irc.freenode.net, which is integrated with the public nethack server at nethack.alt.org — making a single-player game addictively social. Anyway. To the details.
Stormbringer was my trusty, bloodthirsty weapon. Armor wasn’t a problem, luckily. I had AC -43 for a while, down to -29 at the end. I tamed a couple of purple worms (which I named Ballerina, though I’m not sure why) near the mid-end, but they died. I learned 33 spells and maintained 5 of them. I must have laid 20 very useful cockatrice eggs. I had 18 potions of holy water left over when I ascended.
I was the Hand of Antioch. I was female until the very end, when some polymorphing went weird. I never got sleep resistance. I used three amulets of life saving, including two on the Astral plane. I genocided 32 species, including h, T, ;, Z, and L. I used 5 wishes. I was very proud of my gem collection: 225 stones worth $295,650 (30% of my total score). The Astral plane was tricky, but in all it wasn’t a difficult game.
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saturday, september 04, 2004
San Jose and stuff
Mister Kyle goes to school here in southern California, but during the summer, he’s home in the old Capital of the Silicon Valley, San Jose. After three weeks apart we were withering away, so I went to visit him.
The plane ride going there was just long enough for a complete meal of sunset and honey peanuts.
Some things are very alien if I think about them: plane rides, the face of a donkey, auto shop in a high school, the abandoned forts of San Francisco, and my boyfriend’s grandma’s sister’s daughter’s home.
On Saturday, we went to the super-cheesy-lame Santa Cruz Boardwalk, rode the merry-go-round and ferris wheel, ate disgusting funnel cake, had lots of fun, etc.
I want to construct a post-modern boardwalk. It will have a limited color scheme of red, grey, black, silver, and brown. Concession stands will only carry Joyva halvah, baklava, Silk soymilk, and vegetarian sandwiches. The rides will be minimalistic — chunks of curved plastic for the merry-go-round, a completely black rollercoaster, and no spinning rides that make Mister Kyle sick. It will be a very good boardwalk. It might be nowhere near a beach.
We took a trip to San Francisco and roamed around. That’s the boy, on our Twin Peaks hike (firey blue dragons [ambiguously] included).
We also went to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. I remember reading about it in some book-of-facts a long time ago. Thursday, we went to the little Happy Hollow kids’ park + San Jose Zoo, which all seemed kind of half-hearted until I found the mini-house full of history stuff: newspaper articles, old signs, old t-shirts. Then, it was very cool.
