This is a short post, but it had to be posted since I can’t find the damn quote anywhere on the interweb through google at least.

I’ve been having a rather rough time at work, involved in new work and people use terminology and assumed knowledge that reminds me of an article from Coding Horror which has the hilarious example of a complicated dialog box a user would have no idea what to do with: If you want to tech the tech, you need to tech the tech with the teching tech tech. Tech the tech? Yes / No
The article also includes that Far Side cartoon analog of what dogs hear versus what we say.

For me, I best represent it with one of the funniest simpsons quotes ever (in my opinion at least), even though I don’t know really what it means, or even until recently, what the words were. Google was no help finding the quote, oh yes, I found the episode alright, but not the actual quote I wanted. I eventually managed to figure out, given the context of the quote, what things it was referring to and find the words given my vague phonetic memory of them. I put it in my MSN tagline anyway, even in case it was wrong. Later that night I went home, and popped in the DVD of that episode with subtitles on, and I was so close, got one word wrong, but it wasn’t even one of the weird ones, alas.

The quote itself reflects how I can read an email from someone at work about the stuff I’m working on, and still have no idea what’s going on, who I should reply to, and so on. The season is 4, the episode is 7, the title is Marge Gets a Job. The house is sinking, the foundation needs repairing, so Homer trying to save money buys the cassette tape of The Half Assed Approach to Foundation Repair. Actor Troy McClure goes too fast for him, and utters the phrase that captures my current mindset:

“If you can’t find metal stucco lath, use carbon-fibre stucco lath. Now parge the lath!”

Almost in response to my earlier post on women in videogames, but not quite since the response arrived before my post, and was in preproduction for longer, and .. well, whatever. It is interesting that some time after my post I find tell of a game that sort of tries to reverse the Damsel in a Dress cliche plotline I mentioned before.

Super Princess Peach is the game, and boy, is it pink. I haven’t played it, not likely to either, but the screenshots indicate quite the pinkness. And it shows that even when they try to reverse the trend, and give us the flipside, in this case being that the Princess is to rescue Mario, they screw it up (in my opinion) by making it cutesy, and rediculous.

Hell hath no fury like the princess’ wild mood swings

I seem to recall that in Super Mario Brothers 2, the Princess did quite well as a character, all by herself. In this game however, she has a parasol, as her main weapon. Well, at least it isn’t a frying pan, or say a vacuum cleaner like Marge had in that weird Simpsons arcade game. But still, I guess the umbrella is her ‘Yoshi’.

Where…. *sob* … is … *sob* …. my….. *sob*… lithium

What I think is sillier, is the special abilities she’s endowed with. Which are, essentially, her womanly runaway emotions. When you power up anger, you’re all firery and boomy. When you power up your amazing capacity for sadness, you let loose torrents of salt water that somehow inspire the plants around you to grow. Happiness causes you to trip out and float around the screen. And apparently there is a Restore-Life emotion that I wish I possessed myself.

I see angry, happy and sad, that last one must be climax

So you, your parasol that eats people while smiling, go in, beat easy easy enemies (remember, this game is for girls), and rescue Mario. I say she should leave him for Luigi, but what do I know.

I’m being intentionally hard on this game, partly for the laugh. I mean, obviously this is meant for little girls, but I think even little girls are capable of thinking little of a condescending, non-challenging game where everything is a uniform shade of hyper-pink.

If they truly wanted to exploit women, what they should do is just release two versions of a mario game, the normal one where Mario shows what a stud he is, and the alternate with the Princess in the drivers seat. That way they will still sell the original to all the boys, probably sell the personalized ones to the girls, and probably a number to those people who want every possible edition of everything who will buy both. To sweeten the deal, make it so they are slightly different, and call it Pokemon. Then watch the cash flow.

I’m not much of a dreamer myself, I tend not a dream much (or rather, remember my dreams much) at all. I find I sleep too deeply for that, since I usually have dreams that I remember when I’m lightly dozing, waking up every 10 minutes, but I rarely have the time for that these days. I rarely have dreams that are so vivid that I think they could have been real, like a memory of something that actually did happen, but I had one recently that I actually forgot about, and then it suddenly came back to me and I had to check that it was in fact a dream and not a memory.

The dream itself was fairly short, or at least the segment I can remember. It’s scary because it actually happened in the context of being in bed, asleep, so it’s easy to place it as a memory of something that happened in the middle of the night than as a dream. Anyway, I was in bed, and a tooth was starting to feel sort of itchy, like, at the nerve, so I started massaging it with my tongue. I get that feeling sometimes when something goes under the gum, like irritating popcorn bits. Then the tooth started to come loose, and I could even taste the tanginess of areas of the mouth my tongue is not supposed to come into contact with, and the tooth was swiveling, and I touched it with my fingers and tried to align it so I could bite down and keep it in place until morning when… when I would do something about it I suppose, in a sleepy half-panic. I evidently woke up that morning but didn’t remember the dream, until now. I just checked my teeth, I couldn’t tell whether it was dream, or memory. It appears to have been dream.

It is actually not the first dream I’ve had about my teeth coming out… and in fact, it is one of very very few typical dreams. The other of which are falling, and being chased. Being chased is easy, since it harkens back to the days we feared predators, or it might be the alternate sensation of chasing something but it’s more the feeling of running with anxiety and maybe when we wake up we just choose the representation of ‘being chased’, but I’ll group them together. The falling dream seems to be, at least sometimes, a result of the falling sensation that occurs when the brain disengages motor control and puts us in paralysis for the purposes of sleeping without flinging ourselves around. This also leads to the fun hypnic jerk, which as far as I ever learned, was due to this disconnection, which causes a twitch in the body as a reflex action. Sometimes this is so strong that it actually wakes the person up again (thus completing the pattern of the falling dream, waking up just as you hit, or somesuch).

Why “teeth falling out” is part of this collective unconscious dream grabbag, I don’t know. It appears to be just as common, and some of my friends (of whom I’ve asked) have reported similar dreams, something involving the teeth. There are many interpretations of this, but I never put much faith in dream interpretation, so I haven’t looked into it. A popular theme is that of anxiety, so you symbolically lose your teeth as the anxiety causes the loss of your self-determination or similar. I don’t know, if it was that, everyone would dream of their mouths exploding every night (perhaps we do).

I don’t know if sexual dreams are considered part of canon in that dream grabbag. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be, since the being chased and teeth and falling would sure cover three of the four basic instinctual emotions, fear, fight and flight. My prof jokingly referred to them as the Four F’s, but I suppose the last one could be rendered as Fornication easily enough without resorting to slang. I have had laughingly few sexual dreams that I can recall, worse still because I seem to self censor them. It’s not that are covered with black bars or strategic houseplants, but that they can’t be seen. Further, in the dream context, I’m not aware of not being able to see things, I merely accept the censored parts as symbolic representations. Like, for example, I had another dream about being abandoned by friends (my subconscious is just rife with problems, eh?) but one of them was indeterminate, as a person, just a symbol for another friend but not a specific friend, and no memory of a face or anything recognizable to identity the person in the waking world. Same thing for those sexual dreams, in fact, I seem to put a lot of effort in the surroundings… in one of them, even in the dream, I remarked how incredible this girl’s room was, it was huge, with all kinds of pillows, decorations, paintings, knick-knacks, just amazing, and I even thought, in the dream “wow, this is a lot of stuff”, where did all that come from? I don’t know, and why do I censor myself, is my imagination really that poor, is it intentional? Not that I’m incredibly eager to star in my own x-rated dream, but I’m still curious what goes on in that rats maze in my head.

I’ve only ever had one lucid dream, it was really weird, it wasn’t completely lucid because I couldn’t really control everything. But part of the dream was in this room with this big pillar, and I got control enough that I flew around spiraling up the pillar, but somehow I feel it was more like I was dreaming that I was having a lucid dream or something. I’ve never managed it again.

As far as I know, only three people have ever dreamed about me, that I know of. My mother dreamed about me killing the dog accidentally (thanks), a friend dreamed about me in some vague sexual context, probably as a warning. Another friend dreamed that I was in her house, breaking stuff and insulting her parents. So all and all, people have a great subconscious opinion of me.

To close, here are quotes from Waking Life, a movie I suggest you see, if you have the patience for it:

Man on the Train: Hey, are you a dreamer?
Wiley: Yeah.
Man on the Train: I haven’t seen too many around lately. Things have been tough lately for dreamers. They say dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore.
–
Man: As the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough

I’ve been thinking about this entry for a while, so I’ve sat down and I’m going to try to type the thing. Basically, it’s about the role of women in videogames (in the videogames themselves) while having done absolutely no research, heh, but it’s an opinion piece, so you can leave taking away that I’m just crazy and forget it.

So what we seem to have these days, is an increase in female characters in strong, leading positions, but it seems the people making the characters almost always get it wrong (assuming what they are trying to get right is making female characters feministically acceptable, which I’ll probably have to define later, but it’s more of a feeling than a defined state, plus I just made it up).

Let’s start at the beginning, women didn’t play games, they didn’t care (apparently), well, girls I guess, since at the time, video games were for a younger audience, things like PacMan. So they come up with Ms. PacMan, which was actually a surprisingly good step when you think about it. They added a Bow, okay, stereotypical, she’s adorning herself, but when the original character was a pizza with a slice missing, it certainly seems acceptable. And hey, it’s not like they added two really big yellow circles just ahead of her intersecting with the body, and bobbing along as she moved.

Well, actually, if you read the history of Pacman itself from the original creator, it seems that the point of the original Pacman was to appeal to women, and that the Ms. Pacman bit was just a gimmick later on. But when I read his inspiration, I think it’s a little chilling, don’t you?

“So there I was, wondering what sort of things women would look for in a video game. I sat in cafés and listened to what they were talking about: mostly it was fashion and boyfriends. Neither of those was really the stuff of a good video game. Then they started talking about food – about cakes and sweets and fruit – and it hit me: that food and eating would be the thing to concentrate on to get the girls interested.”

- Toru Iwatani http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1718312,00.html

I don’t know, something about that makes me feel depressed. I wonder if Pacman were created now, that after eating all the dots you needed to get to the middle section and vomit all the dots up before moving on the next level, oh, and the bonus items would now be worth negative points, and would spawn immediately in your way.

What the last step of each level would be if it had been made today

Okay, so his reasons weren’t great, in my humble opinion, but still, something for the girls. Well, also, a way to market to girls to get their lovely money, if I were to be cynical about it, but when have I ever been cynical… really.

But as a yellow dot goes, it’s not like it was revolutionary anyway, more like lip service. It seems that the big jump to a positive female gaming role model would be in the form of Samus Aran. I was never part of the group that played it at the time, in fact, I started with Metroid II, and never played the original until quite recently. From what I heard, it was a bit of a stir when it was revealed that under that suit was a woman, especially since the instruction manual referred to the character as a He, so either they were trying to throw players off, or they were just as surprised as everyone else. The nifty thing about the character, all the way through to the 3D Metroid Prime (the last Metroid game I played) was that there was no inherent sexuality involved. The character was a woman, in a suit, so it dodged any Lara-Croft’ian problems, which might be a cop-out, but at least it’s neutral…

Except of course, whenever they get the basic idea right, they ruin it utterly and miss the point. For it’s been a sort of tradition now, in Metroid games, that you get ‘rewards’ for completing the game fast enough, and with enough of the items, so that in the credit sequence, various things happen. In Super Metroid, if you finish the game in less than three hours, you get to see Samus in what I can only describe as a bathing suit, no doubt required for her suit to function. So hurrah, strong female character, itty bitty bathing suit. Alas.

Obviously they wanted to remove any lingering doubt as to her gender

Okay, so lets move away from the strong female leads, into the damsels in distress. These are easy to pick on, but I will anyway. So we’ve got a mustachioed Italian plumber rescuing princesses left, right and center. At least the princess got out and started fighting a bit herself in Super Mario Bros II, the Doki Doki Panic hijacked game. Sure, she was in a dress, but somehow that allowed her to float, which was a characteristic I liked since I’m terrible at the tricky jumping crap. Mario seems to be ceaselessly rescuing this woman, well, Princess Toadstool in most of the games, but Princess Daisy in the gameboy game, perhaps others, I wasn’t paying enough attention.

Link is just as bad in this regard, always rescuing Zelda, for the same reasons (damsel in distress archetype), but a Link to the Past made this worse, she was captured a number of times, as well as several other girls, and they are supposed to be all magical, but of course are defenseless. Zelda herself doesn’t appear to be overtly sexualized yet, so her being a playable character in a Zelda game (perhaps, where she rescues Link, hmm?) would be compelling enough. In Wind Waker, the last Zelda game I played, she at least was a decent character, but not playable and not very active herself, until the very end, where she helpfully shot light arrows at you. Thanks. Maybe the new one will do something more with her, Twilight Princess I think it’s called, might be promising.

Scene from Link: A Zelda to the Past

I’m on a never ending quest to save my boyfriend

I should perhaps now talk about a game that did things pretty well. American McGee’s Alice is one that stands out for me. It’s just you, a slightly grown up Alice, against a deranged wonderland. You are neither attractive nor not, somehow striking a good balance that is more easily seen in male characters in other games, where they are neither chiseled nor lanky. She is herself, running around wonderland, with a knife. Though she does sob a lot through the story, it all makes sense and is perfectly orchestrated, it makes you wish you could fight your own demons as literally. I enjoyed playing the character, and I wasn’t outraged once. The nifty story and environment helped too.

At this point, the narrator was running out of ideas

In terms of sexism on all sides, there can hardly be a better example than Duke Nukem. Both 3D and the Manhattan Project 3D-sidescroller thingy that came later (under license). Now, I liked Duke Nukem 3D, I thought it was a great game, but there were also the naughty bits. It had really great environments, not just dank dungeons like Doom and Quake, but places that looks like what they were, if, unfortunately, theaters of and dance halls of ill repute. The story hopped along well enough, challenge was decent, enemies were, well, lacking somewhat, but had interesting characteristics. It’s also the only game I took my hand at creating maps for, making a semi-completely and mostly terrible Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy run of maps, with the story of Duke following on the heels of Arthur and Ford across the various locations, Vogon Ship, Magrathea, Heart of Gold, Milliways, Frogstar C, Krikkit, and others, while killing ‘Vogons’ who looked suspiciously like the aliens having been killed up to this point. Ah, memories.

But it was sometimes difficult populating those maps, since, and I think this is a telling point, that the only non-hostile animated and interactive ‘people’ in the game were either strippers, prostitutes, or women held or killed by alien intervention. I swear that in Lameduke, a really fantastically crappy alpha of the game released for fun by 3D Realms, that there was a male, normal, NPC… but I could be wrong, hard to recall. In any case, basically the prostitute was the only useful one since out of the context you normally found them in the game, they still looked like they could belong elsewhere. While the dancing and stripping women did not. Not at a cricket match, in any event.

Yes, we have much to answer for. This is true.

Duke Nukem 3D, in addition to having these sprites in the game at all, decided to make them interactive as well, in two ways that I think caused upset in some circles at the time. Firstly, you could walk up to them, the dancers, strippers and prostitutes and hit the USE button, which otherwise activated things in the game, and you would give them money, say something like “Shake it Baby”, and the strippers would, in exchange, flash you and shake their.. er, tassels, at you. Of course, this illicit act is pixilated all to hell and isn’t alluring, but it’s still something that might have best been left on the drawing board (but given the things reportedly seen and done in GTA: San Andreas, I suppose it could have been worse)

Which brings me to the second thing you can do in Duke Nukem with these characters that brings us to that worseness, which is kill them. You can blow away any of the NPC’s, which range from the strippers, to the alien-goop-bound girls. When you do, Duke says “Dammit” to himself (we’re really feeling for him at those times) and usually, this causes more enemies to appear. So I guess that’s one thing, it punishes you for killing them. To me, that’s not too bad really. But if they had some male NPC’s, and didn’t sexualize them as much, then it would have just been by-standers getting killed and it would be up to the player to avoid them since it just produced more enemies.

But, from the pictures, pixilated as they may be, I think the game goes overboard. And also for male sexism too, look at him, all muscle, all attitude, probably flooded with steroids. He screams he male version of the sexist attitude, but it doesn’t affect men as much it seems. Well, researchers say that it does have some effect, and I can well believe that. But for some reason, a man can just be a man, as long as he’s not grotesquely fat or ugly or anything. I have yet to see a game where a serious lead character was some fat guy, because no one, not guys, nor women, would want to play such a character. But you can have an average built guy character, but the women have to be these bombshells.

Now it gets tricky after that, why would women want this anyway, why aspire to the female “ideal” (and I really do mean the quoting there). They do seem overly preoccupied with how they look. Of course, there’s a trap right there, as from their point of view, men might be thought of as insufficiently preoccupied by how they look, suggesting some baseline “normal” level, that itself shares the type of quotes I put around “ideal” earlier. I really don’t know, but back to Duke Nukem 3D

Duke standing on a broken barrel with money in his hand

If you need further evidence of this game’s general sexist theme, one need only listen to the last bit of audio once you beat the game.
Duke: “My name’s Duke Nukem. After a few days of R & R, I’ll be ready for more action”
Woman: “Ohh, come back to bed Duke. I’m ready for some action, now!”
[grunting, moaning, and Duke ending with a bit of a laugh]

Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project took the character and the attitude to a 3D sidescroller, where to beat each level you needed to find a key, and also disarm a bomb that would mutate some captured pneumatic woman. On rescuing them, they show their appreciation by jumping up and down. I decided to fix her reaction by quoting Rocky Horror Picture show.

Ooooh, burn! Duke is denied! [general Fox audience noises]

I remember an article, can’t seem to find it (but as this is still an opinion piece, I’ll just say stuff without evidence). Anyway, I remember this article about a game development studio that was working on a title, and they were trying to decide whether to have multiple characters. I don’t recall if the change was anything other than cosmetic, but they had a guy character, and a girl character, and they found themselves asking internally if people played one more than the other, and if so, why? And as it turned out from their own investigation, no one was really playing the male character, and the reasons are kind of funny. Girls play girls, since it’s a reflection of themselves in the game-world they are in. Guys, however, play girls, since they like looking at girls. Huzzah.

Of course, the above recollection doesn’t make a whole lot of sense (it did play out like that, but I can’t remember why exactly they did their investigation) since most games give different skills to the different playable classes, so playing as a woman would be different than playing as a man (if those were the only options)

Which is sort where the title of this entry comes from, since I’m reminded of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. It was the first of that series-types-whatever of games I had played. Curtis and I were playing as a duo (not the whole time, we imported around a bit), I played as the gruff Dwarf, and he played as the unnecessarily buxom and pert Elven Sorceress. And it’s funny how that went, since of course the woman is weak in nearly every way, which were two important ways: Firstly, she couldn’t carry much, and half the point of the areas was to get weapons and then sell them for gold to buy the good stuff later on. Secondly, she couldn’t really fight. She had some spells, but it was a lot of hit and run tactics when Curtis was playing alone. There were areas early in the game (when we had been playing separately) where I had run up and just slashed my way through, where he had to cast, cast, cast, refill on mana, and cast again to survive. Then we teamed up, I went barreling in, while I got magic backup. And we both got experience as we went, and the Sorceress got quite powerful in fact. Ball Lightning, a somewhat cheap semi-area affecting spell, was leveled up until basically it killed everything before I could get there, even when using my Dwarven Magic Flatulence. Still, she couldn’t carry much. Now I’m not sure what the point of this section was, oh well.

And I think the telling factor of the Tomb Raider series is that when I was looking for game shots, I also found lots of fairly suggestive fan art, and then the fairly suggestive game shots on which they were based. There’s not much of a challenge there, people have been going after that series for years.

90% of the polygon count was allocated to the stars of the game

Here’s one final bit from a game I liked way back when I played in arcades. It was called Astyanax, but being a non-word, it took me quite a long time to track down a ROM for it. I played through it in MAME, it’s your typical side scrolling monster killing quarter guzzler. You’re some muscle bound guy, hurrah, killing monsters and grasshoppers, hurrah, and then in one of the later levels, you attack women. Okay, fine, but part of defeating them is cutting off their tops, they expose themselves (in 16 by 16 pixel glory) and run around embarassed, where you can finish them off without further defiance. How sporting.

Will I get 1000 points if I disrobe someone? Now that’s imitatable

And I think it’s important to show that, at least in a single sample, that it’s not just the games alone that have succum to this effect, but even in the basic notion of 3D gaming itself. Here again is the picture of the 3D game programming book I bought a while ago. I rest my case…. oh, sorry, I thought that was just a figure of speech… case closed.

3D basics: vectors, matricies, half-naked-ninja-women

Anyway, I think I’ve prattled on enough. I don’t offer any solutions, just pointing out some of our past difficulties. I think, and hope, that as more women enter the technical fields, such as programming, and become involved in these projects, that there will be a balancing out of concept and perhaps women will be portrayed better. Unless this is what everyone wants, women included.

In which case sorry for wasting your time

This article is presented as was originally not published in MathNEWS many years ago. It was rejected because the editors were simply too wimpy (opinion, not libel) of its content, and I always felt mathnews, as part of mathSOC, was pretty cliquey. Also, considering the quality of the other articles accepted, I didn’t really have that much hope. The only thing I’m really embarassed about in this is the Seinfeld reference.

A Virgin’s Guide to Sex

This article is directed and intended for those of us who are both mathies, and virgins (in pretty much every sense). You know who you are, the shy, those who go to a party and lean against the wall, probably trying to avoid being spotted as you didn’t have any friends to invite you.

This is presented as a series of points, to help speed reading of the article, and so they can be referenced quickly later (but please, not when attempting what is described below, nothing wisens a person to the inexperience of their partner than when they are caught referencing a manual). This article has been modified from it’s original version, it has been changed to fit your page. I suggest you get the wide-page version.
(This article assumes a certain amount of knowledge. If you don’t get the ‘mulva’ joke from Seinfeld, now would be a perfect time for you to stop reading.)

Some general points:

-Guys, if you must, you can gauge your successes in your head, but do not volunteer this information to your friends, or it might get back to the girl, and does increase the chances of saying “boobies, score!” at an inopportune moment.

-Do not complement the fiddly bits on your girlfriend. If you say “You’ve got amazing [insert part(s) here]!” then she might believe that you would rather exclusively date those parts, take them out dancing and out for coffee afterwards. While this in and of itself is not much of a problem, the girl to which they are attached might feel left out. This also applies to girls staring at guy-ass, but this is much less of a problem as guy-ass is nasty anyway.

-It is probably a good idea to know your lovers name before engaging in sexual relations, as you might resort to moaning out the names of ex’s, family pets, and deities who would probably not like to be called on at that moment.

-Remember guys, No means No. I’m sure no girl would be interested in your lengthy mathematical proof that No, in fact, does equal Yes, no matter how many lemmas you use.

-Please, for the love of Bob, do not use math-related pickup lines like “Let’s integrate baby”, or even worse, if you’re a CS major, ones like “I’m gunna mount your drive” or “Programmers ‘do it’ bit by bit”.

-Never ask your friends for advice on sex and relationships. If you are reading this article for advice on sex and relationships, then you probably don’t have any friends anyway, or you would have asked them first. The risk about asking friends is that they might not have had ever been with anyone either, so any advice they give is likely to be absolutely wrong or very dangerous, or both. Try not to look at the title of the article at this point.

-Math can never be used to make a sexual joke, no matter how funny you think the integral of e to the power of x is.

-Don’t bother remarking how many times integration has been mentioned thus far, I have my own problems.

-In fact, it’s best not to mention you were ever a mathie, say you were in Arts

Of course, all this doesn’t guarantee that you will find someone. In a search, I once started with a rough approximation of 6,000,000,000 people, halved it for a female population, take the percent that live in this province, another for those of whom I would fit their attraction threshold, and again of whom would fit my attraction threshold, again for religion, language, hobbies, general dispositions, and worked it out to one girl, she didn’t return my call.

Good luck to you

-00010011

Well, perhaps in addition, some elements go against my later feminist attitudes… they were always present, but I think I even might have been a little harsh on some of this, but I think of it more of a parody of people’s behaviour. The part I most relish, to this day, is the last section, where I can say that she did finally return my call, but she was permenantly washing her hair. The hair wants what it wants, alas.

I’ve gotten a lot of emails from sources claiming to be me, well, various accounts off my domain. Usually a few, maybe 10. Today, it seems that a spambot decided to spoof one of these fake addresses of my domain to a bunch of other people, and they got bounced back, all 231 of them.

How I hate what the net has become.

I’ve given up, and set my non-routable email address to bounce.

I don’t know about any of you loyal Firefox users, but I had run into a problem recently, and only now discovered how to ’solve’ it. The problem was an odd one: Saving something to disk took waaaaay too long to get underway, like, you’d click a link to something and save it, and then it would take upwards of 30 seconds for it to respond afterwards, just spinning the system. It was a part of the main UI thread I’m guessing, since sometimes the download would complete before FF would respond again.

Anyway, I always have a few things running that I put up as ante against the problem, some software that’s always running playing with my disk *cough*, oh, and my USB drive which I’m never sure if it’s causing problems.

I didn’t really discover the problem until recently, but it acted like it crept up on me, but certainly it occured after installing Firefox 1.5. Anyway, I finally figured out, possibly, what it was.

I never clean out my Downloads window, I tend to just close it. It had, after all the time I’ve used firefox (I think it ported the history from previous versions) gotten so large that adding a new entry to it brought the system down to it’s knees. I had disconnected the USB, closed down everything else and saw it was still happening, so on a whim I clicked the cleanup button… then it took entirely too long to clean up, and then blamo, everything downloads insta-like again.

A lesson kids, always implement such frivolous features as a bounded queue (maybe it already is, maybe my computer just sucks)

Brought to you by Θ(n!)

I’ve just looked at my website’s stats, and people left right and center are coming in and killing (relative to the 3 and a half bytes of traffic I get a month usually) me with linking to my photo1alter.jpg I mentioned in my previous post as an aside.

I’ve got people seemingly coming across it all the time through image searches on the term ‘junk’ (for google, it’s on the first page, but only barely), people on myspace linking to it, and it’s posted on forums for some reason. It’s not that interesting a picture, they don’t even say much about it, if anything, it’s just a half-meg picture they link to which has been downloaded, apparently, over 500 times. Nutso.

Instead of just locking those sites out with the no-hotlink-for-you bit, which would be cruel, I’m just going to move it elsewhere. Perhaps to be slowly rediscovered again, I’ll put a downsampled one in it’s place to keep from breaking the interwebs

Looking closer, it was worse in January, but I didn’t realize it.. I forgot to carry the one

Another year, another Valentine’s day sans autre significatif, turning into quite of a pattern. Sure, it’s a Hallmark Holiday (it’s alright to look for the hallmark on the back of the day) to sell cardboard splattered with pink, decomposing vegetation, and sugary milk solids in boxes which may or may not be in the shape of parts possessed by women. But maybe it would be fun, maybe.

I’ve never been on the receiving end of an honest valentine, or gotten a candy-gram or whatever. Still, I guess I’ll miss richard’s odd Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle valentines he used to spring on us at uni. Heheh. But other than that, I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything to change, as I haven’t.

Anyway, a lament for the day as it ever has been. I have nothing further to add.