Elijah Meeks's Blog

And other papers that I would write if I had the time and learning…

"Michel Eyquem and Other Western Daoists"

"Quest for Glory: The Hero with a Thousand Builds"

"A Survey of Thematic Spam Based on Thematic Blog Posting: Effects on Machine Learning"

"But a Medieval Peasant Understood His Small World: An Exploration of Relative Ignorance and Its Implications on the Adoption of New Technology"

"Stockholm Syndrome in Large-Scale Electronic Surveillance"

The United States of America – Founded in 1776 – was managed by George W. Bush from 2000-2008.  The Texas Rangers, founded in 1961, was managed by the same man from 1989 to 1998.  Given that Dubya's managerial stint took place 224 years after the founding of the former and 28 years after the founding of the latter (that period lasting 3.45% of the lifetime of the organization as of time of management and 24%, respectively) and that the Texas Rangers had to wait until 12 years (24% of the lifetime of the organization at the time of measurable success) after Dubya's time to achieve any measurable success, then according to my calculations we'll be in an economic funk for an adjusted period equal to the period of reign, or 8.004 years, from the time of Dubya's exit.

Dammit, I just lost a piece of my life on MS Paint Adventures…  And for this?

Of course, I'm still not sure, but I think this method of storyteller as parser, whether community-oriented or feigned, is somewhere near Sword and Sworcery's faux authentick.

Stuxnet seems to be a warvirus, and it seems to be finished.  But if I was in charge of the systems running a major site considered critically important, I'd make certain that when I installed the hotfixes and cleaned the system that the fixes didn't themselves contain even more pernicious code.

Plans within plans…

Millions of books lining the shelves at Borders and stacking up in Googlespace and literature moves on…

One thing to make clear is that I try to make everything an interpretation of the game. If I went around inventing stuff it wouldn't be fun anymore, because you wouldn't know what I'm making up and what is the game being crazy. Plus, Dwarf Fortress is such an excellent story generator that it's always more entertaining to write around what it gives me. It's a fun creative limitation...

Elsewhere at my workaday life, I went on and on about the digital humanities relates to how Google canned Wave.  Here's the tl;dr:

Either very funny or very dumb.

"Dwarf Fortress is really the kind of game that benefits third party viewers most when it's transcribed and narrated and illustrated, rather than just watched."

You'd imagine that, at some point, when all things approach infinity, we'll be able to link Utah Phillips with Zork.  The former, a storyteller and a wobbly, seems at least categorically dissimilar enough from the latter, the ur-Interactive Fiction, to avoid easy, triples-formatted, linking.*  But I've stumbled on evidence to the contrary, in my constant attempts to keep up with the development of what the French refer to as le jeu incroyable: Dwarf Fortress.  I'm not sure if it can be...

Pulitzer Prize-winner and App Store Censoree Mark Fiore explaining the hidden costs of your latest status symbol.

In other news, ESRI's new ArcGIS app reports the area of San Francisco to be 69 square miles, which is wrong, and different from the 79 square miles that it reported on Friday.  Of course, I was in San Diego on Friday, so maybe the reason it gave me a different value was because it was assuming a projection based on my location, which would make no sense.  More likely they're just ...

So, I’m trying to get an episode of ST:TOS on Youtube and the rights-management requires an upgraded Flash Player on this laptop and that borks Firefox for some reason, so I figure I’ll give Chrome a try because it just happens to be built by the people that own Youtube.

Guess what innovative feature I get to try out?