You Are My Dancing Monkey

Amusement

2009-01-16T00:17:15Z

There's a thread on Something Awful about how terrible Ctrl+Alt+Del (webcomic) is, and part way through it largely turns into being about how creepy all XKCD's relationship themed comics are. I am entertained.

The thread also pointed me at Truck Bearing Kibble, so that's a bonus.

Movies and More!

2008-08-10T02:48:16Z

[19:03] Shawn: god, this sci fi original movie is bad beyond bad
[19:05] Andrew: yeah they usually are. which one arey ou watching?
[19:05] Shawn: monster ark is the name i think....monster ark...
[19:05] Andrew: also there's a lot more trash talking freepside than creepside. about creeps, about freeps, anything goes
[19:05] Shawn: there was one on earlier just called The Rock Monster or something...
[19:05] Andrew: hahah. yeah i've seen a lot of ads for that
[19:06] Shawn: The monster is made of rock!
[19:06] Shawn: This monster is made of bad special effects.
[19:06] Andrew: i've been doing cardio around 6-7, and watching various Stargate TV shows, so I' get to see ads for all the awful sci fi original movies
[19:06] Andrew: heh
[19:07] Shawn: I only started watching it because one of the "scientists" was really hot, but then I was enthralled by how terrible it is.
[19:08] Andrew: haha.
[19:08] Shawn: Uh oh, the lead soldier "Wants some answers!"
[19:09] Shawn: See, Noah put some sort of devil alien in a box...
[19:09] Andrew: hah
[19:09] Andrew: THERE WAS ANOTHER ARK
[19:10] Andrew: yeah i've familiar with the overall plot from the promos
[19:10] Shawn: Now that the box is open, it's going to bring a world of darkness by killing about three people a day with its teeth and claws
[19:10] Andrew: somehow it is going to bring on the end of the world?
[19:10] Andrew: 3 people a day?
[19:10] Shawn: Well, about that.
[19:10] Andrew: i'm pretty sure humanity is expanding at a far higher rate than that
[19:10] Andrew: maybe it will kill exponentially more people each day!
[19:11] Shawn: It's just some sort of a grapphopper-tiger-bear. So, you know, it jumps around and bites and claws.
[19:11] Shawn: Unless it grows some sort of missile system, I can't see it taking out enough people to matter in any way.
[19:11] Andrew: DOOM!
[19:11] Andrew: hehe.
[19:12] Andrew: maybe if the people it killed turned into demons, too.
[19:12] Andrew: then, exponential growth!
[19:12] Andrew: time to see if i can do monster pvp!
[19:12] Shawn: Also, it doesn't like explosions, so one expects you could just drop some daisy cutters on it or something
[19:12] Shawn: hah
[19:12] Andrew: or I could hit the dleving for the three tier 3 stones i need. boo
[19:12] Andrew: the leggings aren't even that dramatic of an improvement over the ones i have. they give me an extra 30 agility i think, but make me trade might for will
[19:13] Andrew: yeah people are good at making explosions
[19:13] Shawn: This is the problem with all these movies about ancient killing monsters from the past. We've come a long way...
[19:13] Andrew: 23 more minutes!
[19:13] Shawn: Bitch, we kill species we don't MEAN to
[19:13] Andrew: yeah.
[19:13] Andrew: hah
[19:14] Andrew: i like the theory about north american mega fauna... basically people moved here and obliterated all of them.
[19:14] Shawn: yup
[19:14] Shawn: Hmm, you contain a lot of meat, move slowly, and don't fear small things...
[19:15] Andrew: i guess the idea is that elephants and whatever coevolved with human hunting techniques
[19:15] Andrew: haha. yeah.. i'm not sure how the giant sloth ever came to be.
[19:15] Andrew: it just sounds liek a bad idea.
[19:15] Andrew: it should just be called the big 'n tasty
[19:16] Andrew: also Leth seems like kind of an ass.
[19:24] Shawn: hah. i hate that tool. star farming cockbag.
[19:24] Shawn: now they need a 4 qubit staff!
[19:24] Andrew: heh
[19:25] Andrew: metric qubit?
[19:25] Andrew: i've got a 4 qubit staff!
[19:25] Shawn: this is a total indiana jones ripoff, with that staff map scene
[19:25] Andrew: heh
[19:26] Andrew: to othrikar!
[19:27] Shawn: wooo
[19:29] Shawn: the dorky fat scientist was just stabbed
[19:30] Andrew: hah serves him right for being fat and smart!
[19:30] Shawn: then the monster tried to grab the lead scientist and fell down a hole instead
[19:31] Andrew: heh
[19:31] Shawn: hot scientist is now attending the wounded fat scientist. lead scientist is trapped inside and less hot scientist is trying to get the lead soldier to do something
[19:31] Andrew: heh. its a rich tapestry
[19:32] Shawn: indeed. the character depth is astounding
[19:32] Shawn: ooo, a new star wars movie. i see the money corpse is still being humped with gusto.
[19:33] Andrew: yeah i'm not a fan of george lucas
[19:36] Shawn: "I'm gonna put a bullet in his heeeead!"
[19:36] Shawn: Glorious dialog
[19:37] Shawn: Lead scientist has escaped and is having a moment with less hot scientist, who may be the sidekick from Xena.
[19:37] Andrew: hehe
[19:37] Shawn: She may just have the same bad haircut
[19:38] Shawn: My god this is terrible
[19:38] Andrew: hah yeah i think it is the same person
[19:38] Shawn: She has become wrinkly fast
[19:39] Shawn: I can stand no more
[19:39] Andrew: xena was a long time ago
[19:39] Andrew: heh aww

New glasses

2008-07-29T05:37:53Z

I bought some new glasses, and they are in the style of the day, which is to say tiny. My eyes are sometimes irritated by my contacts, or sometimes I'm just too lazy to put them in, so I figured it was time to replace my glasses from high school, the pair I had from college having broken one PayPal push night.

Since I can always go to the contacts when I want my full field of vision, I figured I'd go with socially acceptable frames rather than my usual old man/super dork frames. I think this was a mistake.

Some of you have probably been told the dull tale of my insane visual field. It's pretty ridiculously large apparently. I tell my optometrists about it to aid them in the diagnostic process, and they never seem to believe me. Until they test me. It's really only thought their tests I know that my visual field is larger than normal as, really, how would one even know that. I was first made aware in the informal test where the optometrist asks you how far out you can see their hands, and I told them their arms were not long enough for the test. This was confirmed by the cold, hard logic of a machine when I moved to California, and I essentially buried the needle on the peripheral vision test. Whatever my range is, it's at least as wide as the test can cover. I have some anomaly in one iris that shows up on those optomap things that could normally be a problem, and one symptom is decreased peripheral vision, but in the words of the doctor "I'm not concerned about that at all, since you have eyes in the back of your head."

The point of the above boring crap is that my new glasses are driving me nuts. I feel half blind. I'm constantly turning my head like a god damned owl to figure out what's going on around me. The side to side cut is actually pretty minimal though. It's the loss on the lower vertical that's causing real problems. I can't read a book at the angle I am accustomed too, and I keep having to decline my head to see what's at my feet. Seriously, how am I supposed to walk when I can't see my feet. Eating dinner was obnoxious, as I had to keep looking at my plate to cut my meat.

They do look a lot cooler than my old glasses though. I'll have to post a pic.

clothedmonkeys @ 2008-07-26T02:50:00

2008-07-26T09:50:19Z

This is an example of a perfect first reply.

Random late night thought

2008-06-12T11:49:59Z

There's a minor location in LOTRO called Burzum Pushdug (there's something about the sound that makes it stick in my head), and watching the black speech scene during the Council of Elrond in the movie, I realized Burzum meant dark. A quick google search for "pushdug" suggests Burzum Pushdug is the Stinking Dark or Dark Cesspool or something along those lines.

That game probably works on a whole different level for serious Tolkien lore geeks. Turbine has a staff member whose job is more or less knowing the various Tolkien languages(he probably does other stuff too).

Another similar one would be the Ongburz orcs, but I don't know what an "ong" is.

If I knew what a Carg was I could tell what sort of wraith the Carguls are (like Nazguls).

How the fuck do bulimics do it?

2008-06-01T06:04:22Z

So, after eating a couple bites of something I considered dangerous due to a preparation error on my part, and not wanting to spend the next couple days married to my toilet, I decided to remove the offending material from my stomach.

It turns out, putting a finger down my throat doesn't really work. I eventually settled on putting two fingers down my throat, and wiggling them around. Even that was barely successful. There were many false gags, and it took over a half dozen actual vomitting actions to clear the offending two bites worth of food.

I judged myself to be done when only that bile looking stuff was coming up. I then drank a couple shots of JD on the theory that maybe alcohol would help kill any microbial invaders.

Seriously, how the fuck do bulimics do this all the time? It's just a colossal pain in the ass. Maybe it gets easier with repetition?

Trader Joe's Produce

2008-05-23T06:41:06Z

Yeah, I know I should get my produce elsewhere since the stuff there is usually craptastic, but, really...

Oh good, there's a worm in my artichoke that I've been eating. Oh well, it happens. At least I have a second one. Oh, look, there's a worm in this one too. Delicious.

I decided not to bother checking out the rest of the pack, but I'm guessing it's worm city.

Trader Joe's, for all your worm ridden produce.

So, I tried out the free LOTRO weekend

2008-05-13T02:11:09Z

It's really amazingly better in a lot of areas. The developers actually seem to be doing shit, which is a fucking shock for an MMO. On top of that, most of what they're doing is new content and fixing busted shit, rather than nerfing. It's as if they actually listen to their players. It's...baffling...

The bad part is I'm just not sure it really matters. It's basically this situation.

It also doesn't help that I think Andrew and I chose the crappiest server out there, in terms of player population and player competence. I'm thinking I may give it another try, on Brandywine instead. Nimrodel is just a fucking pit.

Really? CMU? You can do better than that...

2008-02-20T06:19:35Z

From Facebook

Top Books in the Carnegie Mellon network.
1 Ender's Game
2 Harry Potter
3 Catch-22
4 1984
5 The Unbearable Lightness Of Being

Ender's Game? Harry Potter? You sicken me.

Lost

2008-01-23T10:24:16Z

Ah Michael, you know your strength, and you play to it. Unfortunately, your strength is unwavering idiocy.

Should I respect that the writers are consistent? I think only if they reward me with his gruesome death.

I think I should just stop watching. The stupidity of the characters is tiresome, and the overall plot is so far pointless.

Err, Lost

2008-01-20T10:11:42Z

I started watching this series this week, and just hit season 2. My greatest hope for the show at this point is that Michael dies. Soon. His whole deal with becoming an irrational fuckwit any time some matter comes up concerning his son is entirely obnoxious.

Sure, about nine tenths of the characters are morons (Jin and San are tolerable, Sayid has his shit mostly together, Sawyer is reasonable within his own limited scope), but Michael is basically an animal that learned speech as a trick. (Like Fry! Like Fry!)

I also hate Jack and Kate, but that's mostly because they're completely boring characters that get too much story.

clothedmonkeys @ 2008-01-07T03:09:00

2008-01-07T11:09:28Z

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3030987572930384032&hl=en

Hilarity

2007-12-20T08:40:08Z

I guess they're still working on it...

I love these bluesnews responses to "We plan to have a multi-platform release if possible."

"I plan to win the lottery and sleep with Scarlett Johansson, if possible."

"Well, yeah. When they haven't written any code yet, anything is possible."

I hate IE6

2007-12-18T02:22:43Z

I know Facebook is with me on this...

Fan Fiction

2007-12-16T20:47:26Z

DRAMATIC!

Democracy!

2007-12-12T22:32:13Z

This is why you don't ask the internet things.

This has me wondering though, how many votes a year did Optimus Prime get for student government president at CMU? I know I was voting for him.

The 20 Ugliest Colleges in the USA

2007-12-06T00:47:17Z

When I saw this link, I knew CMU was gonna represent.

clothedmonkeys @ 2007-12-05T15:42:00

2007-12-05T23:44:04Z

The best WoW PVP guide ever written

UPDATED Halbrium's Shaman's PVP GUIDE(Quebec)

UPDATE TO THE SKY: Novembre 19th!!! Many of you shaman's have requested me that I add guide to kill fellow shamans brothers. YOU ARE TRAITORS. You must love your shamans. When you see shamans you use do not fight. use spectral wolf ability and you dance with the other spectral wolves.

UPDATE TO THE SKY: Novembre 16th!!! I AM ADDING GUIDE TO OTHER CLASSES FOR MAXIMUM EFFECTS!

Hello all shamns!

I am Qubec so please excuse my unexcellence typing.

Things may seem stupid but if you fret you will be apologetics because what i bring is smart witty and satisfying to all shaman.

first i say hello and then i say PVP!!!!

_________________________________________________________________________________

Mage - This fight is for the ones who say "SHAMAN NEED BUFFS" HAHAHA!! because mage is EZ SELECT MODE.

STEP 1: Lay down your main friend totem! The one I spoke of is grounding totem! This highly effect totem is used to vacum spells that your oponent sends to your face!

STEP 2: PURGE PURGE PURGE! Take his powers and make him waste his MANA!

STEP 3: Pray that you receive the excellence of windfury! You will be so sweet and set! When you get 10,000 DMG!

STEP 4: USE EARTHSHOCK CONSERVATIVLEY (like your bush!!) Because when you do that it will be very difficult for them to destory you when you are weaked at the end of the fight. DO NOT BLOW YOUR MANA FOR DMG! HAMMER IS FOR DMG!!! ES IS FOR GETTING OUT OF MEAN SITUATION

Warlock - This fight is for those who say OHHHHH NOOO NOT WARLOCK!!! They are very hard fighters because they use the power of main fire and the Satan!!!

STEP 1: Again lay down the grounding totem!! It will steal his shadowbolts! WASTE HIS MANA!

STEP 2: Purge his devil horse.

STEP 3: Again! Pray that you receive the excellence of windfury! You will be so sweet and set! When you get 10,000 DMG!

DRUID: This fight is for those that say "OH NO WHY IS ANIMALS ON MY FACE?!"

STEP 1: This fight will be very slow and it will be very diffcult. Use WF and whittle him down like a stick

STEP 2: USE Earthshock to hurt him while healing.

STEP 3: PURGE THE REJUV

STEP 4: WHACK THAT BEAR LIKE YOU HAVENT A CARE!!!!!!!

Warrior: This is easy fight because warriors have so many abilities that dont hurt shaman very much. The best way to kill is to use as many spells as possible since they bypass his BIG armor

STEP 1: Shoot him with power!

STEP 2: NO SPELL INTERUPTS SO JUST KILL HIM WITH YOUR MANA!! BUT BE CAREFULL WHEN YOU GO BELOW 20% EXECUCUTE IS MEAN!!!! Run and heal yourself

STEP 3: KILL IT

HUNTER: This is one fight worth remebering because hunters are common! it seems everyone is elf hunter

STEP 1: USE earthbind totem to slow that man and his beast to a crawl. Use frostshock if he gets too far, or for quick slowing. Try and keep his beast seperated from him so his beast does not turn your body into a delicious treat for consumption.

STEP 2: YES YOU HEARD ME. WINDFURRY!

STEP 3: Do now slow down to heal, this is a bad idea. The only time you should heal is if you can do it super quick. It is like if you just sat there licking your blood but have arrows shoot in your eyes causing more blood. you will use your mana to get rid of the blood till you have no more mana and the arrows cover your entire body in a coat of pain.

PALADIN: He will hearth alot so watch out for his bubble.

STEP 1: To stop his heath interup him or just keep hitting him. This is where quick weapons like two knives are valuable. Just keep tapping him with knives and it will defect his escape

STEP 2: Incase he decides to try his luck, he will take a long time to die and its best you manage your mana wiseley. If you keeping shocking earth he will kill you because you will be out of mana and paladin uses power of the immortal god so he can stay alive/awake for hours.

STEP 3: If you get him down low and he still has enough mana to heal, stun that sun of the gun, and do all the dmg power you can. windfurry, earthshock, nature swift!, and stormstrike all in UNISON. make him say "I am going to win" and then bring him the dead screen. He will think he is under the lag.

ROGUE: You will not be able to see this character. The rogue can hide from your eyes, like water or transparent glue.

STEP 1: This character should probably be played with a nintendo wifiii because it would be so fun to shake the wand like a person on very exciting drugs. People will think you are crazy but you will be doing MASSIVE DAMAGE.

STEP 2: Much like Paladin, you must trick the rogue to think you are about to die and your powers will combine for the power of planet.

EARTH!
FIRE!
WIND!
ICE!
SHAMAN!
GOOOOO DAMAGE!

STEP 3: The rogue will not attack you as frequently if you are not in an area with many quests like STV.

PRIEST: This is a fight for people who are not afraid to anger the main god.

Step 1: Priest are a healing class, which makes them vurile foes in one on one, but you need not worry about that in group pvp.

STEP 2: If they turn dark, you have made them angry and your brain may start to smell like burning. Run quickly away. This situation is what spectral wolf talent is made for.

STEP 3: If you see a golden water fountain occur, you make breathe sigh of releif because your opponent is a child.

the angel with the breasts is your sexual image reward for victory

______________________________________________________________________________

I will have more later but my mom is taking me for excellent ice!!!!!!!!!!!!! EDIT: 11/16/07 I HAVE ALREADY GOTTEN THE ICE!

EDIT: I HAVE ADDED LINES!
EDIT: I AM BACK FROM ICE!!!!!!!! IT WAS SO GOOD. I put maple syrup on it like always but my sister whom, has amrican boyfriend does not use tree syrup, she uses blue juice that is like fruit, but it does not taste like fruit.

To RU!

2007-12-03T10:07:29Z

LJ is being sold

I'll just continue shifting to facebook as my primary platform.

LJ feedback

2007-11-27T05:33:17Z

I don't pay to see garbage like Snap Shots

It's bad enough that you have this on your site, but when you start shoving it at paid accounts that's when you never see another dime from me. I don't care if there's a config value to turn it off. As a paid user I should never have seen it in the first place. Until your company gets its act together you deserve nothing.

My Elementalist Monk

2007-11-25T06:40:36Z

Time sucks

2007-11-25T06:07:22Z

This is a terrible morality quiz. I COULD undertake any of the actions on the list. In many cases I just wouldn't bother. Where's the "I let events run their course, as I am not invested in the outcome" option?

For instance, why am I going to push one random, faceless person to their death to save five random people? The question is basically asking me "Is 1 more than 5" since it leaves out all details about the individuals. It's a math problem.

Does the "no penalty" clause from the first question extend to the others? For example, were I to throw the switch that killed the one man instead of the five, I would be sued into bankruptcy by his survivors. In the case of pushing the man onto the tracks, I would be charged with 2nd degree murder. That's rather relevant generally speaking, although I would still stand by my "I don't care enough to act" answer.

Also, the claim presented at the start of the quiz is that "While it's impossible to directly measure empathy in animals, in humans it's another matter." I fail to see how these questions measure empathy. If I kill one person to save five, do I lack empathy for the one or have empathy for the five? Am I showing a greater quantity of empathy for saving five? Do the five saved know what I did, so I have to consider their empathy, and thus their guilt, when I am evaluating through the lens of empathy? How can empathy even be a factor if I am not given the details of the people, thus leaving me nothing to empathize with, but merely a thought problem. In the case of instant death by trolley, empathy should be used to relate to the survivors in the form of potential victims, their families and onlookers. What if, to use a ridiculous extreme, the one man crushed were an obvious homeless derelict with few attachments, and in another case it was clearly the only child of a couple nearby. Am I more or less empathetic for weighing the impact of the deaths of such individuals differently? Without details I'm just doing math.

Of course, Time is a rather infantile magazine, so I shouldn't expect more. I curse Fark for calling my attention to this trash. Now you may curse me.

More things that annoy me

2007-11-15T06:16:59Z

Trillian can't fucking relocate its window when I undock my laptop. Yeah, I know I'm dropping to one monitor from two and reducing my resolution, but EVERY SINGLE OTHER FUCKING APP figures out where to put its window. Why can't you?

Google Wi-Fi is a steaming pile of shit. Even in downtown Mountain View it's a sack of fail. There are dead spots all over the place, it sucks nards inside most buildings, and even once it's connected it slows down or simply fails much of the time. What's the fucking deal? This is your fucking home town, and the only place that is worth spending time in in said town. This is your ground zero for proving you can make this shit work. Well, apparently you can't. To give them some credit I am posting this while using their service. However, to put it in perspective, I'm only about 70% confident this will actually post.

Hellgate continues to bring the suck

2007-11-13T19:43:40Z

Cellwind posted:
Hi, I'm one of the devs on the team. I am currently working on fixing the memory-related crash most of you are seeing. I am very sorry that the game was released with such an issue.

I have browsed through many of your posts - enough to know how upset and frustrated you are. I share your frustrations - I expect more.

My plan is to keep you updated on the progress of this issue, what I'm doing to attack it, and let you know when you can expect a fix. I'll let you know if there is anything you can do to help out. If you have some technical knowledge, feel free to offer any suggestions that would be helpful. If you are good at virtual prodding or whipping, you might offer that extra "encouragment" to tide me through.

On to some details of the problem:

The out-of-memory issue is caused by fragmentation in the virtual address space of the process. On 32-bit windows, running without the /3GB switch, there is a limit to the amount of memory that a process can address (2GB). This address-space becomes fragmented with frequent allocations/de-allocations. When it is fragmented, it is analogous to your in-game inventory without auto-sorting. There is space in there, but because things aren't ordered back-to-back, there is alot of wasted space that can't be used. So that's what is happening to the process address space. There is memory to be had, but it can't be used because it's not contiguous. This fragmentation will slowly build up over time to where the next big allocation request will fail and the game will crash and give the out-of-memory popup.

I've been working on a solution for this problem for a couple months now. I've replaced our entire memory system with a set of pool and heap allocators designed to reduce fragmentation. It's been "done" for a few weeks now, however there are still bugs that need to be worked out. It's a large set of changes, and I didn't want to just throw it in there right before launch with no testing.

So there is still ongoing work on this new allocator system and it needs more testing. When it does work, it may either solve the problem, point to what the problem is, or point to what the problem isn't. If the fragmentation and crashes go away, great problem solved. If the crashes remain and our internal allocators are growing due to fragmentation, we can see which system is the problem. If the crashes remain and the internal allocators look good, it will mean that our systems are okay and our usage of D3D or some external library could be the source of the problem.

Our testers here seem to be crashing less after turning the new allocators on and were unable to reproduce the crash the last two days, so that is a good sign.

A problem right now is getting a crash dump when an out-of-memory crash happens. Our current crash handler system will just exit the process. I need to modify it to output the stats of the allocators and dump them to log files so we can see exactly what's going on when it crashes due to VA fragmentation. This could take a couple of days.

My current target is to get the known bugs fixed and into our test center by Wednesday. I'll have to check and see what that means for getting the bits to you, but probably sometime later this month. I'll keep you updated as I find out more.

I'll read this post and try to answer any questions you have if I can while I'm waiting for the app to compile. Again, I'm very sorry about the crashing.

Saturday: So I've fixed all the known bugs in the allocators. Now on to fixing the crash handler. I'm one day behind now.

*UPDATE
Monday: Did some research about structured exception handling and messed around with some of the crash handler code. It normally will upload a crash dump to us when one of the clients crashes, but not the case in the out-of-memory situation. Since the upload code is allocating a bunch of memory it causes a second exception in the unhandled exception filter, terminating the process. I'm probably going to reserve 1MB of memory for this situation and see if that fixes that. I'll also enable some of the metric information in the allocators for the release build, so if the new allocators themselves don't end up fixing the problem, at least you'll all be generating tons of data that I can scan.

Here's a great link if you read this kind of stuff: http://www.microsoft.com/msj/0197/e.../exception.aspx

- Cellwind

So, basically, in addition to the game routinely wanting to use over 2 gigs of memory (WTF?), it takes a total shit over said memory and has, apparently, no coalescing scheme.

Things that piss me off

2007-11-07T22:01:37Z

Forums that are open to read, but require a login to search. Get your fucking head out of your ass.