“Emacs itself was one of about half-a-dozen dispatch-vector-driven editors developed circa 1971-1972, and is known to the world at large primarily because it absorbed the functionality of all the others before one of them could successfully absorb it. Emacs has been much like an amoeba from the very beginning.”

— Lum Johnson

3D cheesecake 22


“Cheesecake. Cheesecake never changes.”

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"Fixed that for ya..."


I’ve made a modest revision to that “rpg consent form”…

Oh, Sweet Meteor Of Death,


Why Hast Thou Forsaken Us?

Anyone who thinks this is a good idea, please write on the board a thousand times:

Therapeutic Role-Play Is Not Gaming.

UPDATE!

Someone has responded with the treatment it deserves:

This is a DM-less narrative RPG. Before play commences, players need to have read and filled (anonymously) the RPG CONSENT FORM. If any items where ticked, then do not, I repeat DO NOT, play the RPG CONSENT FORM: THE FREEFORM RPG.

The object of the RPG CONSENT FORM: THE RPG is to create a romantic scene that tried to break from the normal tropes and cliches. Here is how to do this.

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Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Alice Wndr'lnd wgah'nagl fhtagn


Proof that the stars are aligning to seal our doom is the announcement of a new Hogan’s Heroes tv series, sure to destroy my few remaining childhood memories.

Sounan Desu Ka? 12


In which Shion learns a new survival skill, opening up the possibility of an exciting career in the soapland industry.

“Let us never speak of this again.”

"War. War Never Changes..."


And by that I mean the war on users filling up file systems.

When I got into this business, it was whack-a-meg, as undergrads discovered Usenet binary newsgroups and the “zurich” ftp site at MIT, and tried to be clever about hiding their stash.

Over time, it became whack-a-gig, and largely moved from porn to work-related stupidity, such as tarball-based version control (bonus for having multiple sets of tarball, compressed tarball, and unpacked source tree), two-year-old copies of Production logs (often with an accompanying set of tarballs…), laptop backups including music and video libraries, etc, etc.

This week it’s whack-a-terabyte, as I try to figure if there’s actually a legitimate reason for the accounting share to have multiple folders that are each larger than the entire company’s 13-year source-control history…

Pixiv artist: Kemineko


For obvious reasons, Kemineko doesn’t post new work as often as the more cheesecake-oriented Pixiv artists.

Unrelated and amusing, I just got a variant on the “I hacked your account and recorded you watching porn” scam email. The content is the same, but the subject line includes emoji (🍆✊💦) and the body text is mangled with similar-looking Unicode characters (“I ίɳfected your ɗevίce”, etc). The, um, “thrust” of the message is familiar nonsense.

(sending it to an email address at a vanity domain that has never had any kind of account or password associated with it just adds ❄️ing to the 🎂)

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Dear Apple,


I wiped the disks on an old Mac Mini running Yosemite 10.10.x and went to reinstall the OS from the recovery partition. It went online and verified that the system was eligible to install this OS, asked me to agree to the license, and then failed, because Yosemite was not available.

Following the misleading and at least partially incorrect instructions on the support site, I rebooted while holding down Option-R, and got the same behavior.

So I rebooted while holding down Command-Option-R (seriously, is a fucking boot menu too usable for your designclowns? has no one ever thought about replacing the ever-expanding suite of invisible magic keystrokes with a few lines of text? or even cryptic pictures?), and it downloaded and began installing Mountain Lion (10.8.5, possibly, although I won’t find out for 3.5 hours).

So, the OS that last shipped 2 years ago isn’t available for download, but the one that last shipped 4 years ago is? And I’ll have to upgrade through 6 major releases to get it current (hopefully without multiple intermediate installs…)?

Ironically, I only really wanted to get the updated firmware and recovery partition, because the spinning disks in this box are far too slow to run Mojave, and I’m going to crack it open next week, install SSDs, and reinstall the OS again.

If the upgrades finish by next week, that is.

(all with the goal of having a machine that stays at Mojave forever to run all the 32-bit software that Apple is screwing over next month…)

Update

Well, that didn’t work. Turns out that was a 2011 Mini, which won’t run Mojave and is stuck at High Sierra. Good thing I have a 2012 Mini that already has an SSD in it…

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”