The Packbats' Weblog

rewatching Devine Lu Linvega's Strange Loop talk about computing and sustainability and thinking about the one deleted tweet they mentioned

I think Twitter, Mastodon, the microblogging Fediverse, they are utterly unsuited to be archives - they are all networks in the moment, conversational spaces with just enough persistence that you can catch up on what someone said yesterday, maybe last week if you're determined

and you can download your archive but it's just a huge mess - it's not sorted or connected, you can only find a thing if you already know what it is, and you might never find the context

that's part of why we are starting to repost things on our dreamwidth blog

sometimes we want the things we say to last more than a week

What are some gripping opening lines from films or books, and why do you think they work so well? View other answers

I have never seen a book, film, song, or anything with an opening line to match one old entry by daysgoby (formerly anjimito), here:

On the way home today, while crossing the Fuller-Warren bridge, someone threw a kitten out of their window.

God themself could not write a more gripping first sentence.

(Edit: This entry was reposted to readers_list here, in the event that daysgoby is lost.)

(Also: The kitten came out all right, and went to live in a new, loving home. Sorry to spoil the ending for you. ^_^ )

Making Light has another fruitful thread, here, about perceptions of wealth among the rich. There's piles of good stuff in there (and a few of the inevitable conflicts-from-misunderstanding that always arise) – I remember one that struck me, from someone named Greg London (posted here at July 23, 2006, 01:23 AM):

I worked hard in college and grad school, but I didn’t earn the talent that made it possible to succeed—I was born with the potential.

"earn" is the flip side of "deserve" and whether or not someone thinks they "deserve" something, has, in my experience, had zip to do with reality, and everything to do with some missing piece of self-worth or self-esteem.

When you sit down to play a hand of poker with someone, you both agree that you're going to get dealt a random hand of cards, and start the game from there. Whether you "deserve" the hand you get or not generally doesn't enter a poker player's mind. At least not ahead of time. It's a weird combination of post-analysis and a person's ability to attach "value" to some randomly generated sequence of events that were completely out of their control and have it mean something about themselves that makes for the human drama called "deserve it".

Life is a weird game. You didn't even agree to play it. Someone just set you down at the table and dealt you a hand. The hand you got says nothing about you as a human being, your value, your deservedness, nothing. What does say something about you as a human being is how you play the hand dealt to you. Do you play the best you can with what you've got, or do you discard some cards and throw away a perfectly good hand? That's all you can control.

There's a scene from Good Will Hunting that cut through a lot of this. Two buddies grew up in a working class neighborhood. They're working in blue collar jobs. One guy has the IQ of a genius and knows it, but won't go to college for a number of reasons, one of which is because he feels he doesn't deserve his talent. His buddy has a talk with him at one point and says soemthing to the effect of: it's your job to make the best of what you've got. Until you do, you're squandering it on yourself, and you're insulting us.

(I have seen Good Will Hunting – that scene Mr. London speaks of is one of the best in the movie.)

(Also, I am reminded of one of the Odo quotes from Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Dispossessed", about deserving, and how pernicious the idea of it is.)

I think I mentioned Making Light a couple times before in other contexts, but the recent Open Thread 59 is really something. Just in what I've read so far, there's been:

• Discussions of the effects of vacuum on unwrapped bars of soap (the original subject of the thread)
  
• Discussions of the effects of unwrapped bars of soap on vacuums
  
• Discussions of what sort of music a 12 to 14 year old kid at computer camp in 1980 would listen to (Kraftwerk seems to be among the likely candidates)
  
• Discussions of explosive decompression in general, ranging from the modern consensus on what would occur to popular depictions in sci-fi (esp. the famous sequence in 2001 that I've never seen), including the comment which triggered this post:
  

Charlie Stross ::: (view all by) ::: January 30, 2006, 06:30 AM:

Hmm. Question for Jordin and Graydon: do you suppose you could reduce or stop the O2 loss through your lungs, if you knew you were going to be spaced, by drowning yourself first? I'd expect a couple of lungs full of water would take quite a while to empty in vacuum, and while there's water in the way the diffusion rate is going to be a lot lower -- same pressure gradient, but the exposed surface area goes from something like a couple of tennis courts down to a couple of square centimetres.

Of course, recovery afterwards (when they hook you out of the airlock) is going to be a bitch ...

I gotta start reading these Open Threads more. Just ... whoa.

Making Light is one of the best blogs out there, with excellent writing and a community of intelligent commenters. Today a post on hypothermia appeared. Very good advice, and well-written.

I, of course, linked it purely so I could quote this paragraph:

The buddy system isn’t just for Girl Scouts. If you go into the woods, take a friend. When his teeth start chattering, his lips turn blue, and he starts acting goofy, you’re hypothermic too.

Excellent reversal of expectations there, and probably more true than it looks.

Have you seen baxil's latest puzzle (based on a PartiallyClips comic)? Recently*, he has been posting mathematical and logical puzzles on his LJ, and I, being a great fan of both, have finally decided to promote them myself.

See them! His latest is a logical brainbuster in the style of Smullyan, et al.; before, he has posted river-crossing puzzles (one from a commenter, one original), a math puzzle, and a classic-style riddle. The solutions are unscreened for the old ones, but they're still fun!

* Maybe not – I'm assuming.

From Making Light: The Lyttle Lytton Contest!

As she explains, this contest was made in a similar spirit to the original Bulwer-Lytton contest, but with noticeably different judging criteria. Both were inspired by the oft-maligned opening sentence to Edward George Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford (the original source of "It was a dark and stormy night"). However, the Lyttle Lytton organizer decided that the old contest was biased far too much towards long, convoluted sentences, so he made his require the sentence to be relatively short.

Naturally, this year's contest is already over. Thus, this advertisement is particularly pointless, since submissions won't be judged for over eight months.

Still a cool link, though.

From ksleet, here.

Apparently, Star Control II has been reinvented as a free open-source download under the name of The Ur-Quan Masters (its original name). You can download it here for Mac, Windows, or Linux.

I completely remember the first Star Control game. I really hope this is good.

Real quick, before I hit the sack:

• Went to the laundromat to help Dad (^z) with laundry. Worked part of a Forms of Verse exercise while there.
  
• Went to a friend's house yesterday for a sleepover. Played on his incredibly-awesome swing, which I will have to post about later. Also played on his slightly-less-awesome videogame systems, and watched the pilot episode of the original Star Trek on his parents' computer.
  
• Went from aforementioned friend's house to another friend's house for a graduation party and, much more importantly, D&D. Watched "Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones" before leaving – accepted offer to go watch III with said friends sometime next week.

Oh, and on a different note: paperspace is extremely cool. I saw the original post where kevinpease got the idea, and have been reading it since.

More later. G'night.

When I first heard of fanfiction, I was pretty sure I didn't want to read any. I had reasons for this, of course, but they aren't really pertinent quite yet. What is pertinent, is that I changed my mind.

The proximate cause was limyaael, as it happened. You see, I started reading her journal, fell in love with her brilliant ranting on all things fantasy-novel, and began paging through all her old entries. Eventually, I ran into a post reviewing a fanfic (in an unusual manner, as it happens), and I decided to investigate. So, I followed the link to Blood Magic, a Harry Potter alternate-universe fanfic in which ...

Actually, just read Limyaael's description. Or her other description. Or, y'know, read the real thing, if you trust me that much. It's really quite good, even if you haven't read the Harry Potter books. (And I haven't.)


In any case, I was quite surprised, three days ago, when Eric Burns posted an essay about fanfiction. And I was quite happy. Huzzah! Websnark agrees with me about fanfic!

Then I read the fic he'd linked (Special: The Genesis of Cyclops; a X-Men novel-length fanfic, and it's Not Safe For Work like whoa). And I ... didn't like it.

Or rather, I fell out of liking with it. It started off terrific, all psychological and exciting. The main character (Scott somethingorother – he turns into Cyclops) was severely messed up in realistic and scary ways, and it was great watching him recover from all the damage going on in his head.

But then ... romance started happening. And love triangles. And clichés so corny that even the characters acknowledged them. And I ditched it.

Now, to tell the truth, I've no clue when it comes to actual, real-life romance. I haven't even been on a date. I don't know how people act when they're in love. Not really. All I have is this sense of out-of-characterness, this sense that the author was bending the characters to fit the plot.

So, I'm disappointed.

---

I originally intended to end this article with some hypothesizing about established characters, and prequelitis, and the fear of changing other peoples' creations, but I realized I didn't know enough to make any such claim. Instead, I will plug more good fanfic: archangelbeth has been writing this cool series of In Nomine fanfiction she calls Interesting Times (I link the first in the series).

It's not as stand-alone as the HP one, though. There were several spots where I was flat-out lost, and imagining the visuals was very difficult without having ever read the original In Nomine material. Apparently, In Nomine is a tabletop (is that the term?) roleplaying game, and a first-rate one, based on some big conflict between Heaven and Hell. Most of what I know comes from the several mentions it's had on Websnark (they're in there, somewhere).

And now my eyes hurt. Goodnight.