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.
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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.
