T w e n t y S i d e d
Nerd culture is going to hell in a handbasket: (Warning: Colorful language.)
Dang kids.
I didn’t see Optimus Rhyme in there, which would have been nice.
DM of the Rings FAQ
I’m seeing a lot of the same questions in the comments of DM of the Rings. Rather than answering the same question in the comments of a dozen threads, I’m going to gather it all up here and deal with it in one post so that I can link back to it as the need arises.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DM of the Rings FAQ”
DM of the Rings XLI:
A New Hope
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It would have been pleasing if this extra-large (double, actually) comic had ended up being number “XL”. Missed it by one. (What kind of a dork obsesses over details like that? Sheesh.)
I’m sure this is an unexpected turn of events. Don’t worry, I know where this is going. You don’t. Ha ha.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…
Anime Day
Steven has a post up on the whole deal with Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky, who has filed suit to be permitted to put up a menorah next to a Christmas display, and…
Oh what’s the use? It’s like part of the holiday now. Every year we turn on the TV and it’s either playing It’s a Wonderful Life or a story about another Christmas-tree lawsuit. The whole thing is so cliché that even the jokes about how cliché it is have themselves become cliché.
But Steven suggests:
If Ron Karenga can do it, so can I. The newly-formed Otaku religion celebrates Anime Day on December 25. It’s a jenn-you-wine traditional Japanese holiday (that I just made up) which otaku celebrate by putting up life-sized cardboard cutouts of Sailor Moon. We demand that Usagi be placed next to Rabbi Bogomilsky’s menorah, and if they won’t do that then we’ll sue.
That is something with which I am down. Er. Anime Day. Not the lawsuit.
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You know what I mean.
Session 10, Part 3
From here on, the campaign is going to be very, very sketchy. The audio recordings are lost, so all I have to go on are the notes my wife took and my own fading memory. All I can do now is try to sum up and bring some closure to this story, which I’ve left hanging for far too long.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Session 10, Part 3”
Spam: How to Make Things Worse
Some Sysadmins evidently have spam filters in place that let you know if your email was eaten by their spam filter. It does this by replying to the suspected spam. I can see the reasoning here. If the filter eats an email I’ve sent to their system, the filter lets me know so that I can pick up the phone or otherwise make another attempt to reach the intended party. This seems like a helpful thing thing to do, until you come out of your stupor and realize spammers usually don’t use a valid return address. If a message is suspected of being spam, then the odds of the return address being vaild are astronomical.
The result of this idiocy is that if a spammer uses a real adress of some unrelated third-party (say, for example, mine) then the target’s filter will, in turn, send a whole bunch of “Your email could not be delivered” crap to this third party. Some are even stupid enough to include the text of the original spam, thus helping the spammer by propigating their spam even further. To me.
What would happen if I installed a similar filter on my end? When I got hit with one of these “warnings”, would my filter would turn around and send the warning right back at the original target? Would the two mail servers then begin an eternal game of ping-pong with the message?
I bring this up because the number of warnings outnumber the actual spams in my inbox this morning. One or more spammers is using [random]@shamusyoung.com as their originating address, and so my inbox has over a thousand of these “Your email was intercepted by our junk mail filter” warnings. These filters should at the very least have some sort of breaking point where they realize, “Hey, I’ve eaten a dozen messages from this guy. Maybe he is, in fact, a spammer, and maybe I should stop notifying him that his stuff isn’t getting through.” These filters should never, ever, blindly reply to hundreds of random emails comming from the same address.
I am reminded of a passage from Cryptonomicon:
The noise detonates car alarms down in the hotel’s lot.The noise of one alarm triggers others, and so on. It is not the noise that keeps Randy awake so much as the insane stupidity of this chain reaction. It is an object lesson: the kind of nightmarish, snowballing technological fuck-up that keeps hackers awake at night even when they can’t hear the results.
Yes. That is exactly why this bugs me. It is not the volume of mail that irritates me, but the pointlessness and stupidity of the chain reaction.
UPDATE: I was just emailed a link to this post. Looks like I’m not the only one with this problem.
From The Archives:
The Gradient of Plot Holes
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Starcraft 2: Rush Analysis
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
Autoblography
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
The No Politics Rule
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
Object-Disoriented Programming
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
Trekrospective
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
Gamers Aren’t Toxic
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.