T w e n t y S i d e d
Okay, so a Catholic, a Muslim, an Atheist and a duck walk into this cosplay convention…
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.
 |
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.
Alternate DMotR #40
I actually made today’s comic twice. The one I posted is the second version. Below are a few observations about making comics and using different layouts, as well as the original cut of today’s comic.
People have been emailing me links to various other webcomics and putting the occasional link in the comments, and so I’ve been reading through a bunch of webcomics I’ve never seen before.
The obvious uh, observation, is that the ones with a non-grid layout are a lot more interesting to look at. They are more exciting, more dramatic, more whatever-the-artist-is-trying-to-do. The less grid-like the layout, the better. EXCEPT: If the layout is too formless then it becomes difficult to read. I’ll jump to the wrong panel, read the punchline in the middle of the joke, or get confused about who is talking. If this happens then the layout is far, far worse than a plain-Jane grid. I have this problem with mainsteam comics all the time. There will be several partly-overlapping panels in a crazy top-left to lower-right diagonal and I’ll get confused or lost.
I doubt either style makes a strip more or less funny. Provided the information still makes it across, the joke is the same.
Still, just to amuse myself I’ve been trying to break out of the grids, but Comic Book Creator is my enemy here. The layouts are stored in XML pages. So, when I start a strip I have to know ahead of time that I want the 6-panel, or the 5 panel one with a huge closing frame, or whatever the situation calls for. There are a lot of arrangements to choose from, but you can’t edit them on the fly. If I decide I want to steal some space from Faramir’s panel and give it to the next frame, the only way to accomplish this is to edit the XML document to put the frames where I want, and then start the comic over from the beginning.
Because of this, I end up abandoning my fancy-pants layout and going with Yet Another Grid Comic. This was fine at first, but the longer I do this the more it bugs me. Now I’m wondering if there is any other comic software out there? I’m using a PC, so Comic Life isn’t an option.
For comparison, below the fold I have the original “grid-style” layout of today’s strip.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Alternate DMotR #40”
DM of the Rings XL:
What Dreams May Come
 |
Live free or die, man. Live free or die.
Does it come in avacado?
More popular pictures at Popular-Pics.com
5MB Hard Disk in 1956 – The Volume and Size of 5MB memory storage in 1956. In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5MB of data. Let us start appreciating your 4 GB jump drive!
Hat Tip: James Hudnall
From The Archives:
Wolfenstein II
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
The Strange Evolution of OpenGL
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Why I Hated Resident Evil 4
Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Batman v. Superman Wasn't All Bad
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
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 Truth About Piracy
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
Spoiler Warning
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
Push the Button!
Scenes from Half-Life 2:Episode 2, showing Gordon Freeman being a jerk.
My Music
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.