NEWER POSTS

Shiritori Word Loop

By Shamus Posted Saturday Feb 3, 2007

Filed under: Projects 11 comments
Using Google AdsPrevious Post
Next PostDMotR: Director's Commentary

I’m still working on Word Loops. I like the Japanese term “Shiritori”, which Steven proposed. I’m not sure it’s technically correct. From the way I read how a Shiritori is played, it uses the last “part” of a word, but my understanding of Japanese language is too crude to take that any further. At any rate, Shiritori is a better term than “thingy”.

You can take the movie Blondes Prefer Gentlemen and the movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and make a stupid little two-element loop.

Not very interesting.

Someone else suggested a one-element loop: Duran Duran. Ha ha.

I did manage to close the loop on the one from the previous post, but I needed a little help from IMDB to come up with “Blue Water, White Death” as well as “Gentlemen of the Hunt”, neither of which I’ve ever heard of.

So here is my 29 element Shiritori Word Loop, which started with Paris Hilton:

  1. Paris Hilton
  2. Hilton Hotel
  3. Hotel California
  4. California Girls
  5. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
  6. Fun With Dick and Jane
  7. Jane Eyre
  8. Eyre Affair
  9. Affair to Remember
  10. Remember the Titans
  11. Titans of Justice
  12. Justice League
  13. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
  14. Gentlemen of the Hunt
  15. Hunt For Red October
  16. October Sky
  17. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
  18. Tomorrow People
  19. People are Strange
  20. Strange Days
  21. Days of Thunder
  22. Thunderball
  23. Ball of Fire
  24. Fire in the Deep
  25. Deep Blue
  26. Blue Water, White Death
  27. Death be Not Proud
  28. Proud to be an American
  29. American Werewolf in Paris

I could easily pad this list in a few spots. In particular, there are several movie and song titles that go “People [something] People”, and so I could chain them all together and stick them in right before “People are Strange”. I was trying to stick to famous movies and top 40 songs (from any time period) and other things that should be easily recognized by the average English-speaker. Making a “themed” list – such as anime, song titles, might be interesting.

Anyway, I’m done with this for now.

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Using Google AdsPrevious Post
Next PostDMotR: Director's Commentary

11 comments

 

Getting Along

By Shamus Posted Saturday Feb 3, 2007

Filed under: Random 19 comments
Happy New Year!Previous Post
Next PostWorth Repeating

As a follow-up to Repent, Believer, the original poster (Dave Godfrey) responds in the comments here.

And not to misrepresent myself as a sort of mechanical thiest theist: I also believe in the Bible. I’m not as literal as some (for which they look down on me) but I do believe in it (for which others look down on me). To an Athiest Atheist this distinction is pretty much meaningless, but to Christians this is important, so let me just set that straight so I can go home with a clear conscience.

More importantly, I would never impose these values on others against their will. I share them with the curious, keep them to myself with the uninterested, and in all ways strive to respect others. I see no reason why reasonable people cannot get along, even when they differ on beliefs they hold most dear.

Thanks to Dave for the temperate response.

(Thanks to everyone else also, for many kind words and yet more praise for the work I do here.)

I consider the subject resolved.

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Happy New Year!Previous Post
Next PostWorth Repeating

19 comments

 

Repent, Believer!

By Shamus Posted Friday Feb 2, 2007

Filed under: Rants 78 comments
Scaling the Low WallPrevious Post
Next PostRingtone Verboten

From this site:

So. DM of the Rings. Very funny (even to someone who’s never played D&D – Cyberpunk and Paranoia for me). Turns out the author is part of a family of rabid homeschooling creationists. I expect my heroes to have feet of clay, (although Darwin didn’t by all accounts). But when a random cartoonist turns out to have brains of crap it’s rather depressing. Frankly I was expecting him to be a christian- he’s American after all, and homeschooling, for all sorts of reasons, is really popular over there, but creationist? That I can’t overlook.

What? What the heck? Now, if someone were to pan this site as un-funny or boring, I would have nothing to say against them. But this? This makes no sense to me.

Let’s go through this a bit at a time:

“Creationist”

There are the “The world is 5,000 years old” creationists. Then there are the “the universe is billions of years old and was created by God” creationists.

I’m one of the latter. There are, in fact, lots and lots of distinctions between these two groups, who get along about as well as creationists and evolutionists. What if I’m an evolutionist but I subscribe to an inflationary model of universe expansion instead of a non-inflationary one? What if I agree with evolution but think God created the first replicating organisims? What if I think the God just created the process of evolution and let it run on its own? How far are my beliefs allowed to differ from those of others? Am I allowed to believe in God and still be one of the cool kids?

Or is the goal here Ideological Purity?

“Rabid.”

Right. What makes me rabid? Have I ever hinted at, spoken of, or in any way broached the subject here or anywhere else? Have you spotted me trading flames with others in alt.philosophy.evolutionists.are.dumb? You have not. I have no animus towards people of other faiths (or of no faith) and see no reason for them to have any towards me.

“homeschooling.”

My wife double-majored in Special Education and Elementary Education, and also minored in Art. Where might I send my children that they would have a teacher with such qualifications, such dedication, and a class size of 3?

“Brains of crap.”

This is left as an exercise for the reader. Does this site look like the product of an imbecile? Even Einstein insisted that “God does not throw dice”. More to the point, even Einstein believed in God. (Sometimes.)

“depressing”

If this is all it takes to depress you, then your life must be grim indeed.

What I find depressing is that people will dislike each other and fight with one another for no damn reason at all.

“he is an American after all”

A sin of which I will repent the moment a more suitable alternative is offered.

“but creationist? That I can’t overlook”

This website is dedicated to the love of a unique hobby, a facination with videogames, an appreciation of anime, and a desire to make others laugh.

Note my blogroll. Fledge is a Muslim. Then there are a couple of Atheists, a Messianic Jew, and a Mormon. I consider all of them to be friends. My blogroll wound up that way on its own, and not out of a desire to perform some sort of multi-culti scavenger hunt. (I didn’t really think about it until I tried to make this joke.) These are all people with whom I can enjoy these hobbies, despite our differences on what are often deeply personal and sensitive issues.

Who is tolerant, and who is a zealot?

Now – back to… whatever it is we do around here.

LATER: Comments are closed. Thanks to lots of people for so many kind words but… let’s do something else, eh?

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Scaling the Low WallPrevious Post
Next PostRingtone Verboten

78 comments

 

DM of the Rings LIX:
Disorder of the Stick

By Shamus Posted Friday Feb 2, 2007

Filed under: DM of the Rings 88 comments
DM of the Rings LVIII:
It is a Silly PlacePrevious Post
Next PostDM of the Rings LX:
The Madness of King Whatsizname

Party must disarm in Edoras..

Everyone has walking sticks.

I don’t blame them for wanting to hold onto their walking sticks. Edoras has about the worst wheelchair / handicapped access I’ve ever seen. If you take a bad step at the entrance to the Golden Hall, you won’t stop rolling until you’re outside of the city.

Wheelchair deathtrap
Laying that aside, this is a great case of, “a small change to the script throws the whole conversation into the blender and hits liquify.” If you have a conversation which requires information to be revealed in a certain order, you can bet the players will – without even trying – turn the whole thing sideways and backwards. They will trick you into revealing the catch to doing a job before they’ve agreed to do it, or goad you into revealing a loophole in the local rules while they still have the opportunity to exploit it.

They are devious little buggers, for sure.

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

DM of the Rings LVIII:
It is a Silly PlacePrevious Post
Next PostDM of the Rings LX:
The Madness of King Whatsizname

88 comments

 

Delay of the Rings

By Shamus Posted Friday Feb 2, 2007

Filed under: Notices 4 comments
WarningPrevious Post
Next PostAkismet and Spam comments

Hosting Matters – my web host – went down last night, so I wasn’t able to get to the site until this morning. As you’ve probably noticed, this has delayed the posting of the new comic.

It will be up later today.

This is the second night in a row my site was down. On Wednesday night my database stopped working for about six hours, and then came back without explanation. Last night nearly every site on Hosting Matters vanished for a good nine hours or so due to some major connectivity problems.

This sort of thing happens from time to time, but two nights in a row of total site failure is pretty upsetting. I really hope things are back to normal now.

LATER: I want to add that I didn’t even know what was going on. I had to visit Chizumatic to get the story. It was kind of strange reading about what was going on with my own site on other blogs. It was like watching TV at a friend’s house and seeing a news story about my house catching on fire.

This is the second major outage they’ve had which has been attributed to Level3. What do you do when your provider is great, but your provider’s provider sucks?

Grumble.

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

WarningPrevious Post
Next PostAkismet and Spam comments

4 comments

 

Word Chain

By Shamus Posted Thursday Feb 1, 2007

Filed under: Nerd Culture 23 comments
Do you do this?Previous Post
Next PostLiveJournal

I was in seventh grade (1984) when I came up with this silly game that I’d play in my head during moments of boredom. (School.) The idea is to take pop culture names – movies, famous people, famous places, song titles, etc – that are two or more words long, and then find ones where the end word of one matches the starting word of another. Consider:

Loverboy George Michael Jackson Browne

So the list contains five two-word names:

  1. Loverboy (Slight cheating here, using a compound word.)
  2. Boy George
  3. George Michael
  4. Michael Jackson
  5. Jackson Browne

The goal is obviously to make a chain with as many names as possible. Above is the longest one I can remember from my teenage years. I’m sure I had longer ones. (In fact, I suspect the above is only a fragment of a longer one, but I can’t for the life of me think of what it might have been linked to. I’m not sure “Browne” is right, either.) You could put “The Big Easy” on the front, but the word “The” is an annoying dead-end in this game. Browne is also a dead end. We could try:

The Big Easy Loverboy George Michael Jackson Five Easy Pieces

…which brings us up to eight names, but I can’t think of anything that starts with “pieces”. At any rate, my ultimate goal at the time was to make a loop, which I never accomplished. Still, I was about 13, and hadn’t absorbed much pop culture yet. I notice the game seems much easier now.

Let’s try a new one. I’ll start with Paris Hilton:

Haunted Honneymoon in Paris Hilton Hotel California Girls of Summer of Sam Rami

  1. Haunted Honneymoon
  2. Honneymoon in Paris
  3. Paris Hilton
  4. Hilton Hotel
  5. Hotel California
  6. California Girls
  7. Girls of Summer
  8. Summer of Sam
  9. Sam Rami

Nine items in that one, although to be fair I don’t think “Girls of Summer” works. To my knowledge, It’s not a famous person, movie, TV show, famous place, or song: It’s just a phrase.

Try again:

Haunted Honneymoon in Paris Hilton Hotel California Girls Just Wanna Have Fun With Dick and Jane Eyre

Dang. “Eyre” is a dead end for sure. How about:

Haunted Honneymoon in Paris Hilton Hotel California Girls Just Wanna Have Fun With Dick and Jane White is Sick and Twisted Sister

Someone needs to make a movie called “Sister Haunted”, and then I will at last meet my goal of making a loop. The game gets a lot easier if you’re willing to use IMDB and just accept the names of obscure indie movies nobody has ever heard of, but that seems to defeat the purpose of the game in my mind. It seems a lot more interesting if everything in the list is more or less easy to recognize.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find out I’m not the first person to try this, although I have no idea how I’d go about searching for it.

What would you call it? I mean besides a waste of time?

Anyway, it’s been years since I even thought about this. I have no idea why it came to my mind now. Still, now I suppose I’ll have to try and come up with one that loops.

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Do you do this?Previous Post
Next PostLiveJournal

23 comments

 

Using Google Ads

By Shamus Posted Thursday Feb 1, 2007

Filed under: Projects 16 comments
Wizard vs. CatPrevious Post
Next PostShiritori Word Loop

This is a collection of notes and observations on Google Ads. Nothing really interesting to see here, unless you use them on your own site. If you do (or are thinking of doing so) then you might want to check this out.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Using Google Ads”

 

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Wizard vs. CatPrevious Post
Next PostShiritori Word Loop

16 comments

 
OLDER POSTS
From The Archives:

PC Hardware is Toast

This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.

 

The Biggest Game Ever

Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?

 

Do It Again, Stupid

One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.

 

Revisiting a Dead Engine

I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.

 

The Best of 2013

My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.

 

Skylines of the Future

Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?

 

Twelve Years

Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.

 

Crysis 2

Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?

 

The Brilliance of Mass Effect

What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?

 

The Dumbest Cutscene

This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.