meehawl

So one good thing at least has come of the sad sports frenzy engulfing San Francisco for this “World Series”. Driving into the city tonight there were so many blimps and helicopters buzzing and ballooning over the city it looked amazing. Especially the glowing searchlight-festooned blimps… for a brief moment it seemed like one of those crazy deco cityscapes from the 1920s, or one of those cool Michael Moorcock steampunk novels where the Victorians have taken over the world for ever.

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Not for nothing did Stephen King call his writing-obsessed fan book Misery. With so many formerely disfiguring diseases easily cured, exhibiting gross physical externalities is no longer titillating. So we turn instead to the modern literature of psychological exhibitionism. It’s no longer sufficient that writers write well, it’s more interesting if they can demonstrate a fractured and benighted family structure. Eggers’ life can be seen from many viewpoints, but the media’s continued fascinated delight in constructing a tale of family disintegration is notable for its repetition. One small problem is that Eggers is running out of family members…

I fully expect this trend of desolation exhibitonism to continue, and Modern Art’s infatuation with the display of bodily excreta is perhaps groundbreaking. Soon we will have a whole new literature of excretion.

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So, I think I got a porno spam, but it’s hard to tell, seeing as how it arrived in German…

Unlike Swedish, unfortunately, the German language just doesn’t see to lend itself to the production of rude-sounding words. Is there a less-sexy sounding language? What are German love poems like? In English they seem more manageable.

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So I added some new functionality to the site: a bulletin board system. If I can figure out the API I can inject the subject direcly into the posted message and replace the dotcomments, which are okay but not great. Tech used: PHP, MySQL, PHPBB.

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So me and Lisa were shopping in the local lesbian health food co-op, Rainbow Foods, and amidst all the granola there are some extremely dubious items. Like, what’s going on when there is chipotle chile for $150 a kilo, and some ugly kind of dried mushroom for $350 a kilo. These are some rich hippies!

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So now that I read that Madonna’s latest gambit to break into movies has failed, utterly, I wonder how long before she discards the drained husk that was Guy Ritchie, Hot New Edgy Film Director. For the past couple of decades it seems she’s battened onto the hot new director de jour in the hope that this time it will be different. Actually, perhaps the most sinister thing about Madonna’s non-career in movies is that dumb execs someplace keep greenlighting her movie projects even while the many lessons of history should immediately inform them that their success is a longshot at best. She’s just eminently unfilmable. Gotta admire her dedication though, she reminds me of the desperately unfunny guy (Rupert Pupkin!) Robert De Niro played in King of Comedy. I just wonder who she will next descend on to suck dry their creative soul: my money’s on either Shyamalan or Aronofsky.

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So I’m back from Vegas and my immediate impression was that it’s a bit like being at Black Rock City (Burning Man), only with less nudity but more fake boobs. The exploding stuff and crazy lights are pretty similar. And there are just as many cheesy performers. What is it about Nevada that seems to inspire people to make these crazy cities.

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Next stop… the Flamingo. Where did I leave that Elvis mask?

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Well, I’ve managed to crap out my router at home by adjusting *one* *little* *setting*. I was trying to set up a VPN endpoint. Now I’m stuck in work and there’s no way to reset it. This really sucks.

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Oh dear, although Zona’s product is written largely in Java, the client and server APIs are written in C++ (for the game coders). I’d forgotten just how damn ugly and complex C++ was compared with Java. This is going to take much work…

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