From #sancho on irc.lunarnet.org.

Hyptosis’s homepage
chrisa’s homepage

(source: this guy)

James:
speaking of bitches

James:
I just found out in the sequel to that talk you sent me that women find different things attractive when ovulating.

Ben:
yeah

James:
not ovulating: nice guys
ovulating: muscly aggressive guy

James:
those whoresome whoring whores

Ben:
whoremones.

James:
fuck you evolution!

of course we carry that genetic code too, in hopes that our daughters will act in such a terrible way as well!

…those hypowhorical whores

it’s like, that’s it!

I’m a creationist now

this kind of thing cannot be tolerated

…

…hey Anna is online, sweet.

Ben:
“Sophia: You are both a nice and aggressive guy! I am satisfied!”

James:
Awww. She’s not ovulating, how adorable.

Ben:
I can be macho if needed and I can be sweet if needed.

James:
You should get a pheremone sniffing dog to tell you which to be.

Ben:
“What’s that, Lassie? She wants it rough? ”

It’s all just a manefestation of the whole “girls like to be manhandled sometimes” thing.

Ben:
When they’re being saucy, you start asserting yourself and they love you for it.

James:
> grow muscly set of arms with which to manhandle girl

Ben:
Surely you can overpower a girl, even with your spindly arms.

James:
Yes, of course I can.

…I just feel like they’re used to being overpowered more easily.

Kevin
Nothing illegal about it.

Kevin
Slightly immoral, perhaps, but what ISN’T these days.

Kevin
…Other than feeding the poor.

Benjamin
I feed the poor to other, less poor people.

(Sick still. Doused in NyQuil.)

HOW CAN SOMEONE BE NUDER OR NUDEST? Isn’t “No clothing” a goddamn boolean state?

A nude person is nuder than a non-nude person. If he is the only nude person, he is also the nudest.

Back in 2004 I wrote

Nobody understood this properly when I wrote it originally, so then in my comments I wrote some psuedocode to explain the logic flow of that sentence and it cleared it up.

(Aside: Comparison of the previous two sentences shows that in five years I’ve not stopped ending my sentence in prepositions. I, like most of you, run english in quirks mode.)

The conclusion

Code is far less ambiguous than english because people are not used to strictly interpreting english. (The previous sentence implies that math majors are not people; I’m willing to defend that.)

So I revisited the psuedocode in the post and found it amazingly brittle and unreusable! And there was a bug in the final clause. Oh, the perils of not test-driving your emotionally charged statements. So, in the interests of avoiding arrogance-rot, I refactored and generalized it a bit!

An Exemption

I’m not sure if I believe this anymore at all. It’s been a while since I re-evaluated my political stances. I think I’ve gone from a hardline libertarian to a broken, beaten, shattered shell of a libertarian.

So, the contentious arguments here aren’t so applicable anymore. I just wanted to point illustrate that the opening statement is hyper-charged and people fail to interpret it correctly, whereas the code is much easier to interpret to those who have been trained in the Way of the Computer.

/// Takes a Person object, and sets it's member variables accordingly for
/// it's 1::1 relation with Grue in respect to Grue's respect for that
/// Person.
///
/// @param you The person to judge.
/// @see Person::ProcessReaction()
/// @see _BattlegroundStateCalculator()
/// @todo implement all of the various non-election-related ways a person
///       can be a total douche in my eyes.
/// @todo exemption clauses for 'lesser of two evils'?
/// @todo set dead_to_me flag if '3rd party'/'wasted vote' argument comes
///       up.
void Grue::CalculateRespect( Person you )
{

    PoliticalOffice* p_office;
    p_office = PoliticalService.getCurrentOfficeUpForGrabs();

    if(
        // if you think the current system is Shitty...
        you.opinion_on_US_govt == E_FUNDAMENTALLY_FLAWED &&

        // ...and if you *dont* live in a battleground state...
        // (calls a helper function)
        !_BattlegroundStateCalculator(you.state_of_residence) &&

        (
          you.vote[TimeService.getCurYear()][p_office] ==
              PoliticalService.getCandidateForOffice(p_office,'GOP')
          ||
          you.vote[TimeService.getCurYear()][p_office] ==
              PoliticalService.getCandidateForOffice(p_office,'DNC')
        )
    ) {
        you.hypocrite = true;
        you.sentient = false;

        // set all possible forms of respect as false.
        for( int i=0; i<MAX_RESPECT; i++ )
            you.grue_respect[i] = false;
    }
    else // only do this if they were not deemed Horrible.
    {

        // Now see if the person was offended by the process we just judged
        // them against...
        you.ProcessReaction();

        // if somehow you're offended during this evaluation for any
        // reason, mainly for not understanding the hierarchy of judgement,
        // then you're dumbstuffs for being offended, but I cannot judge
        // you otherwise.
        if( you.offended_flag )
        {
            you.grue_respect[i] = REPECT_INTELLECTUALLY;
        }
    }
} //Grue::CalculateRespect()

• A rat always knows when he’s in with weasels
• They’re lining up to go insane.
• That deep blue sky is my home
• Independent as a hog on ice
• It was all ripe for dreaming
• All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes
• Stayin’ out of circulation till the dogs get tired
• At night I pray and clean my gun
• Whittled from the bone of Cain
• I feel like a preacher waving a gun around
• God used me as a hammer boy to beat his weary drum today
• Damn good address for a rat
• I’d like to hammer this ring into a bullet
• I’m not Able, I’m just Cain
• They sharpen their knives on my mistakes
• There’s always free cheddar in a mousetrap, baby
• Man’s a fiddle that life plays on
• They that dance must pay the fiddler
• Don’t go dreaming, don’t go scheming
• Well my friends think I’m ugly I got a masculine face
• Don’t trust a bull’s horn, a doberman’s tooth, a runaway horse or me
• Like a kid who captures a firefly, leaves it only to die in a jar
• Who ever thought hell’d be so cold?
• I wanna look in the mirror and see another face
• Yellow dog knows when he’s sinned
• The carpet needs a haircut
• He’s been seen at the table with kings
• He can turn himself into a stranger
• Everything this doughboy does is wrong
• Lie to me baby, I have no use for the truth

describe a girl as…

• a “tawny moor”
• a “sad luck dame”
• “Nothing wrong with her that $100 won’t fix”
• “all liquored up on that road house corn”
• Hair black as a bucket of tar, skin as white as a cuttlefish bone
• I was the jewel of her sin
• a “Salvation Army Band girl”

Advanced mode

• Your love is a faucet
• Got a wooden coat, this boy is never coming home
• The day when home early and the sun sank down into the muck of a deep dead sky
• The cracked bell rings as the ghost bird sings and the gods go begging here
• I feel like a slave ship upside down wrecked beneath the waves of a grain
• And by the time they finished “Moanin Low” I was soakin’ wet and wild eyed.
• There’s always some killin’ you got to do around the farm
• For want of a bird the sky was lost
• There are those who say beneath his coat there are wings
• He once killed a man with a guitar string

For over a year, on the Lunarnet IRC Network, Gayo had a bot running around many channels with a variety of commands.

It would pull a quote from his quotefile if you used !q. It could generate slashfiction on the fly if you used !slash. It would generate gibberish on some commands. It would pull from and if you ever did a ! command that it didn’t recognize, it’d md5 the string and modulus the result to the size of the array of all known commands, so that no matter what, a line starting with an exclamation point would trigger some sort of reaction from the bot, and always the same mapping for the same nonsense command. !penis would always do what !penis did before… unless the list changed.

And if you ever did a lone !, it would emit a number.

And if you ever did it again, it would emit another number, exactly one less than the previous one.

Nobody knew of this at first. Gayo kept his trap shut when he re-tooled from a static list of commands to a “everything will do something” structure, and implemented the counter then. The lone !‘s existence went months without anyone noticing it.

And then it was discovered. How curious: it’s counting down.

We’d hit a !, and it’d say 912323. We’d do a !slash and a !q and a !, and then it’d say 912320. It became very clear that it was counting down it’s every use, and we became very interested in what would happen when it ran out.

It always impressed me how the mysterious countdown captured the imagination, and how willing people were to mindlessly press this big red, but unlabeled, button.

Increasingly over months in various rooms of lunarnet, groups of people would spam the bot in idle hours. Speculation grew high. Some imagined it’d do nothing, by intent or programming flaw. Others speculated that it’d just keep counting into the negatives. But most of us were hoping for something… awesome.

Gayo says that when the feature was installed, it was set to 1000000. It took over a year to hit the end. When we got into the 500,000′s, people started passing around a large text file consisting only of exclamation points and newlines and using mIRC’s /play command on it overnight to help run down the counter.

Then, one night, after months of the lunarnet community speculating and joining into the count-diminishing effort, the end was finally in sight:

The Final Countdown

<Zack> ALRIGHTY THEN
<Lucca> Here we go!
<Zack> !
<Hotpants> 8
<ketsugi> !7
<Hotpants> Qrngu Ung: gur Ung gung Znxrf Lbh Qvr
<ketsugi> !6
<Hotpants> Qrrc-Sevrq Cresbeznapr bs gur Gurgna!
<Shastao> !
<Hotpants> 5
<ketsugi> !5
<Hotpants> Ø_ø
<Zack> !
<Hotpants> 3
<Random> !
<Hotpants> 2
<Zack> !
<Hotpants> 1
<Random> !
<Hotpants> 0
<ketsugi> !
<Zack> ...
<ketsugi> ...
<Random> :D :D :D :D :D :D
* ketsugi laughs
<Zack> HA
<Lucca> ...WHAT A GREAT PAYOFF ;D
<Etir> What, it says 0.
<Zack> Bravo, Gayo
<Hotpants> It's been a long road, getting from there to here...
<ketsugi> !
<Zack> ...
<ketsugi> !
<Lucca> ...no look!
<ketsugi> !
<Etir> :o
<ketsugi> hm
<Zack> STOP
<Lucca> It's talking! :o
<Shastao> stop you twits
<Hotpants> It's been a long time, but my time is finally near!
<ketsugi> no more?
<ketsugi> ah
<ketsugi> ...
<Zack> Mr. Roboto!
<Hotpants> For I will see my dream come alive at last...I will touch the sky!
<ketsugi> Gayo needs a headcheck
<Hotpants> No, they're not gonna hold me down no more; no, they're not
           gonna change my mind!
<Etir> Well duh
<Hotpants> 'Cause I've got faaaith of the heaaart, and I'm going where my heart
           will take me!
<Hotpants> I've got faith to believe I can do anything.
<Zeke> HA HA HA HA HA
<Hotpants> I've got streeeength of the soooul, nothing's gonna bend or break me!
* Lucca stares. O_o
<Hotpants> I can reeeeeeach any staaaaaaar....
<Zack> ...
* Zeke awards Gayo a purple heart.
<Hotpants> I've got faith!
* Etir snickers
<Hotpants> (I've got faith.)
<Hotpants> (I've got faith.)
<Hotpants> Faith of the heeearrt.
<Hotpants> THANK YOU, THANK YOU ALL
<Hotpants> IT WAS A LONG, STRANGE TRIP, BUT IN THE END, WE MADE IT, AND I THINK
           WE ALL LEARNED SOMETHING ALONG THE WAY
<Hotpants> I COULDN'T HAVE MADE IT WITHOUT MY MANAGER GAYO, AND BAHAMUT, AND
           EVERYONE BACK HOME WHO SUPPORTED ME
<Lucca> Gaaah! ;D
<Zack> HEH.
<Hotpants> THANKS YOU GUYS, THIS IS FOR YOU AS MUCH AS FOR ME
<Random> Is someone logging this?
<Hotpants> I TELL YOU
<Shastao> duh
<ketsugi> My client at home is, if no one else
<Hotpants> I BEEN A LOT OF PLACES ON THIS TOUR, BUT I GOTTA SAY, NO PEOPLE OUT THERE
           KNOW HOW TO PARTY LIKE #RPGCAFE PEOPLE
<Lucca> Damn right!
<Zack> Huzzah.
<Hotpants> CMON YEAH GIVE IT UP
<Shastao> and Rand hit the 0 :P
<Hotpants> YEAH, YEAH, YEAH!!!
<Zack> There's your claim to fame, Rand.
 * Hotpants is now known as Rockpants
<Etir> Forever known as "that guy who hit 0"
<Random> Whoo!
<ketsugi> ...
<Zack> ...
<Lucca> OH GOD!
<Etir> ...haha
<Zack> Bwahahah
<Rockpants> ONE TWO THREE FOUR
* Mune` has quit IRC (Ping timeout)
<ketsugi> o_O
<Rockpants> STOP!
<Zack> o_o
<Rockpants> IN THE NAAAAME OF LOVE
* Shastao thuds
* Mune` has joined #rpgcafe
<Lucca> Yeah! ;D
<Etir> lol!
* Lucca swoons for rockpants
<Zack> Bwahaha.
<Rockpants> BEFORE YOU BREAK MY HEART
<Rockpants> BABY, BABY
<Rockpants> I'M AWARE OF WHERE YOU GO
<Rockpants> EACH TIME YOU LEAVE MY DOOR
<Shastao> how long is this?
<Rockpants> I WATCH YOU WALK DOWN THE STREET
<Zack> No clue
<Rockpants> KNOWING THE OTHER LOVE YOU'LL MEET
<Rockpants> BUT THIS TIME BEFORE YOU RUN TO HER
<Lucca> brb
<Rockpants> LEAVING ME ALONE AND HURT
<Rockpants> THINK IT OVER
<Rockpants> AFTER I'VE BEEN GOOD TO YOU?
<Rockpants> THINK IT OVER
<Rockpants> AFTER I'VE BEEN SWEET TO YOU?
<Rockpants> STOP!!!
<Etir> This would be perfect if it reset to 1,000,000 again for round 2 at the end. ;)
<Zack> Oh god. :P
<Rockpants> IN THE NAAME OF LOVE
<Rockpants> BEFORE YOU BREAK MY HEART
<Rockpants> (clasps hands over heart)
<Rockpants> STOP! IN THE NAME OF LOVE
<Rockpants> BEFORE YOU BREEEAK MY HEART
<Rockpants> THINK IT OOOVER
<Rockpants> THINK IT OOOVER
<Rockpants> YEAH YEAH
<Rockpants> ETC ETC
<Rockpants> I WILL NOW RECITE FROM "THE WRECK OF THE HESPERUS," BY LONGFELLOW
<Rockpants> COLDER AND LOUDER BLEW THE WIND
<Rockpants> A GALE FROM THE NORTHWEST
<Rockpants> THE SNOW FELL HISSING IN THE BRINE
<Rockpants> AND THE BILLOWS FROTHED LIKE YEAST
* Shastao is now known as Shas-zzz
<Rockpants> DOWN CAME THE STORM AND SMOTE AMAIN
<ketsugi> amain?
<Rockpants> THE VESSEL IN ITS STRENGTH
<Rockpants> SHE SHUDDERED AND PAUSED LIKE A FRIGHTED STEED
<Katt> o_o
<Rockpants> THEN LEAPT HER CABLE'S LENGTH
<Zack> Ooookaaay..
<Random> ...He's had how many months to work on this?
<Rockpants> HLAGHLAGHLGHAHGH BALLS HONK
<Zack> Not sure.
<Rockpants> BONG BONG BONG BONG
<Zack> Anywhere from 2 to 6, maybe. I dunno
<Rockpants> LORD JESUS COME CARRY ME HOME
* Rockpants has left #rpgcafe (SPORK)
<Zack> ...
<Ashton> ...
<DooM_GazE> ...
<Zack> Ladies and gentlemen, Rockpants has left the channel.
<Etir> hahahahaha

Coda

Rockpants has been mentioned for years after as a fond network memory, but neither Hotpants nor Rockpants rejoined after it auto-left. It always impressed me how the mysterious countdown captured the imagination, and how willing people were to mindlessly press this big red, but unlabeled, button. Gayo later would replace Hotpants with Knickerbockers, who was shortened to KB for ease of readability, but to this day KB’s never responded to !.

We went with a nintendo sprite and phallic object theme.

The ceilings were so high in this place. Also, we didn’t have wireless ethernet. I still prefer wired to this day.

The bar. I miss the bar. I bought the bar new from Oak Express when we were decking the place out.

That bar and I have had good times.

It looks like good times were had immediately prior to taking these pictures, actually.

The mantle. The white mage and black mage represent the eternal battle of light and dark over conquest of bananas.

Our living room even had a jew!

Jonah was usually in the living room. Living.

We had a ‘Community Oriented Policing’ propaganda poster on that door. Don’t know why…

And we’re back! I also was planning on getting an enormous television, but am glad I didn’t. I’d've basically been destitute that semester without money for rent, food, etc.

I love my iPhone and Zune 120, but I hate albums that don’t have cover art.

A simple modification to the ocremix.org masthead, to use as cover art for mp3 players! (click thumbnail for full size)

And a lot of my music comes from Overclocked Remix.

Now, they have several compilations and all of those have cover art, but there are so many delicious standalone tracks based on video game music.

• Tracks like Ilari Nieminen’s ‘Lake in Ontario?, which is a superawesome Yes/ELO/Prog Rock remix of a few of Final Fantasy X’s themes.
• Tracks like The OneUp’s ‘Terra Haute’ , which is like a Chuck Mangione rendition of Terra’s Theme from Final Fantasy Six.

I could go on. There are too many good tracks. Regardless, they always come up with a terrible default album art in modern mp3 players. And so, I took it upon myself to spend 3 minutes making something appropriate. And here it is fo you to enjoy as well!