B5, "Infection," S01E04
Babylon 5 is... a really strange show so far. My best description I can give for it so far is "A Scifi's scifi." It is so far doing its damnedest to throw in every costumed alien, laser blast, and computer graphic space dogfight possible.
...Which doesn't really forgive some of its cheese. I can see what they're doing, and I like it. They're taking most of the "soft" elements of Star Trek and filling them with other, more reasonable premises. So far, they're surviving without shields or transporters or replicators, but they're still using technobabble, pseudoscience, and one-liners as a crutch.
I'm willing to forgive, however. I'm only four episodes in, and between the cheese there are pretty interesting dialogues, character developments, and plot twists. People are *actually* devious, rather than just having the camera cutting away to them making devious faces. And when commanding officers make magnificently bad leadership decisions, their reporting officers actually report on it.
This episode was bizarre, as it managed to mix in: eugenics, criticisms against academia, the necessity for space travel for the human race to survive the death of the sun, and religious fanaticism.
It certainly wasn't one of the best episodes of television I've seen. But for the amount of shit they crammed into there, I was impressed.
B5, "Deathwalker," S01E09
Uh... real talk? This was... pretty awesome. A compelling villain in a science fiction novel is a hard thing to come by. This one was... actually interesting.
B5, "Convictions", S0302
Season three has started off pretty awesome. The second episode so far is a standalone, dealing with a mad bomber terrorizing the station.
Best part: G'Kar and Londo, stuck in a slowly burning elevator (damaged by a bomb). G'Kar refuses to help Londo and he escape, for the reason that he'd rather see Londo dead that he survive. Scene ends:
Londo: "This insane! Can anyone out there hear me!"
G'Kar: (raising his hand, and in a tiny voice, holding back his laughter, next to Londo in the elevator) "I can hear you!"
B5, "And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place," S03E20
Nobody cares, but this was honestly a badass episode. It featured a gospel choir slow motion montage, culminating in sweet revenge a dozen episodes in the making.
B5, "The Long Night" S04E05
Bunch of cool shit happened. Also, Bryan Cranston sighting. To add some legitimacy to my lonely journey.
B5, "Rising Star", S04E21
The writers have wanted to kill this show for half a season. They've resolved almost every plot thread, and explained away the others.
The penultimate episode should have been the end. But there's another episode in the season, for what reason, I have no idea.
Oh... and it's not even the last season.
B5, "No Compromises" S0501
Reminding me that you can, in fact, get used to the taste of your throw-ups.
B5, "Secrets of the Soul", S05E07
Nothing like awkward psychic sex to show you're desperate for ratings.
B5, "The Corps is Mother, the Corp is Father", S05E13
This episode tries to put a human face on the evil telepath group by doing a "lower decks" episode about two young telepaths. At the end of the episode, they shove a mundane (non-telepathic person) out the airlock.
I don't understand where this show is going.
B5, "Darkness Ascending", S05E15
Oh good. We're about to be at war with the Centauri again. Because that threat hasn't been used before. Twice.
B5, "Objects in Motion", S05E20
Everyone is leaving Babylon 5. At once.
What I would have given to just have one of the characters say, "Goodbye," and go, rather than 20 minutes (playing at 1.5x speed) of sappy goodbyes.
Other people had to suffer through watching that show 1) at regular speed and 2) waiting for it weekly (monthly? whatever) for it to be released. It's only fair if your suffering is equal to their suffering.
//I think I may have caught 5 minutes of a B5 episode once. It didn't look interesting in the slightest.
B5, "Objects at Rest", S05E21
Styooooooooooooooooooooop.
Stop having characters make interesting, flawed choices at the second-to-last episode. Just stop.
Following in tradition, here are a few of my thoughts around watching Babylon 5.
Spoilers to follow. Though, honestly, I know nobody is watching.
The show starts off in a strange place. The known, unaligned worlds of the galaxy have survived a long bloody war, and as a result, collectively decided that building a massive space station was the best way to build diplomatic relations. Actually, they built five stations, and as of the start of the show, the previous four have been destroyed or disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Babylon 5 is the fifth attempt, and the pseudo-militaristic beauracrats that run the place are the galaxy's "last, best hope for peace."
A quarter of a million beings live in B5, and is, oddly, largely staffed by humans, who among the known races are probably the least sophisticated, least advanced, and most war-like. The ambassadors from the larger, older worlds resent the humans, but tolerate them so far as they don't get in their way. The galaxy is filled with the relics and mysteries of the "Old Ones," races that date back to the birth of the galaxy itself. And from the outset, telepaths have a mysterious, critical function in the workings of the universe.
It's a weird place to start. For instance: how would the unaligned worlds have ever gotten to the point where they could agree to build a space station, no less five of them? And if they can build five of them, why aren't there more stations like it? And why build it in orbit around a strange, mysterious planet on which no one is allowed to set foot?
Anyhow. There are at least a few interesting questions to answer. Add a few compelling characters, decent acting, intriguing world building, and solid plot narratives, and you could go far.
This, sadly, did not happen. The acting is mostly terrible, the dialog is cheesy and stilted, and the only interesting plot narratives dry up completely 3.5 seasons in (out of 5). It was incredibly frustrating to watch. As I mentioned, I've watched the last season or so at 1.5x speed. Because I didn't want to have it take up my whole lunch hour. And because it makes it seem sort of like an Aaron Sorkin script.
But compare this to Seasons 1 and 2 of TNG? Or DS9? Honestly, the first seasons of these shows are pretty bad. Laughably bad. In shows that run some hundred or so episodes, it's guaranteed that at least a few will be crap. Add to that the amount of abuse scifi fans can tolerate, and you have more than just a few.
A better question is: when the shows are good, how do they rate?
TNG and DS9 benefitted from a solid narrative universe, and a common, understood focus. It had actors that, when they needed to, could belt it out, even if the situation or the dialog gave them nothing. And while some of the episodes were fluff and filler, a lot of the questions asked were important, and handled well. They made for memorable episodes and plotlines, which become part of the shared experience that is Star Trek.
Babylon 5, however, has 1 or 2 good episodes. In the whole thing. No kidding. They had one that was nominated for a Hugo award, but I didn't think that one was that great. The ones that shine are the ones that actually contain character development, and improvement, and not just "another day on Babylon 5." And, more or less, they are the ones that feature Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik) and G'Kar (Andreas Katsulas), whose acting and delivery make the rest of the cheese worth it. What were the episodes about? What were they talking about? Who knows. Much of the show, sadly, is not memorable, just a fog. Maybe I can attribute that to my poor memory, or the fact that I was watching these mostly at work, or while riding the exercise bike. But if something really was great, it would have found some way to overcome such things, and a little more often.
The B5 universe was an original creation, whose scale and mechanics had no basis to work from other than its competitors. Immediately, it had to distance itself, which meant abandoning some of the "softer" scifi elements from the Star Trek universe (transporters, Warp drive, replicators, etc.). This means that they had an opportunity to fashion their own unique look and feel, set their own rules, and learn from the mistakes of the Trek universe. They didn't. In their place was telepathic abilities, ancient prophesy, and "souls." B5 gave up "soft" elements for "spongy" elements, for which it suffered throughout. They also suffered by throwing way too much against the wall, and having way too much of it stick. Entire, universe-driving things are posited in the early seasons that are simply forgotten or ignored later. Which is strange, given that most of the show's episodes are by a single writer, J. Michael Straczynski. Usually, this only happens with writer turnover.
The Shadow War arc up until the 3.5 season point was the most interesting, if a little predictable, being what I assume was the original intent and arc for the show. Essentially, all of the Minbari religion and its associated prophets relate back to the disappearance of the prior Babylon 4, and the original commander of Babylon 5. Traveling to the distant past he becomes a religious leader, and sets into motion things that change the course of a galactic war a thousand years later (never mind the inherent time paradoxes, which are then never addressed, or quantified the greater backdrop).
The problem becomes this: the time travel gambit works, and good guys win. They win the war they've spent three seasons building up to, and they do it mid-season. And the "bad guys" go away, disappearing past the edge of the galaxy, never to be seen again. And this is where the show becomes incredibly painful. For the last 1.5 seasons, the show has no driving force. It has no thing bigger than itself, each episode strangely detached, though still plodding along an arc. It is purely an exercise in picking through the pieces after the dust settles.
The Shadow War ends, and Babylon 5 then wages a campaign to take back Earth (which had severed ties and became a xenophobic surveillance state). They, of course, win Earth back (through a series of space battles whose CG does not hold up over the years). They ask pointed questions about what it means to be a combatant in a fight amongst those are on the same side. Then once again, they are picking up the pieces. The characters try to continue with their normal lives, but half of the characters leave, and the others suffer from some form of substance abuse (alcohol, stims, unrequited love, etc.).
The end of the Shadow War had the ancient races departing the galaxy, and leaving the younger races to fend for themselves. And, generally, they fend poorly. The ancient races represented two competing philosophies in how to survive as a species. First, to be in constant conflict, so the stronger, smarter, and more willing survive in the face of chaos. The second philosophy was one of ever increasing order and control, over oneself and others. Both species/philosophies depart the universe, leaving behind the brash, from-the-hip humans telling them about how they're both wrong despite having survived tens of thousands of years in space. Then there's a weird quiet as everyone looks around at each other with a look of "Now what?"
I feel like this is metaphor for the show's downfall. When you take away stakes, and interesting and competing philosophies, you lose your ability to maintain interest and convey a message. You can choose to completely do away with the old, but your "new" has to compete in its own right. Nevermind that they brought up souls migrating from Minbari to Humans and never again. Nevermind the concept of Thirdspace which was a threat for 1 made-for-TV movie and then never brought up again. Nevermind the planet below, a beacon of ancient technology that nobody seemed to notice until the station was built. Nevermind the prophesies and future dreams that will never be fulfilled. Nevermind that a character commits an apparent and unabashed act of terrorism, but never faces the consequences for it. The technomages, the rogue telepaths, the Zathrus creatures, the Drakh. Nevermind... a lot of things.
The final season closes with the young races squabbling, trying to make their thin alliance work. A new threat appears on the horizon, and in predictable irony, razes the planet of the race that had only two years earlier razed another. But nobody seems to care, or care that much. It's just 'nother thing. In the galactic scope of things, it's just another problem for Babylon 5 to solve for the rest of the now-aligned worlds. The Council of the Aligned Worlds is just as effective as any United Nations. Which is maybe commentary. But makes for a terrible story.
Anyhow. My favorite characters, Londo and G'Kar, have bittersweet endings. Londo becomes emperor of the aforementioned razed planet. We last see him sitting, unhappy, in a darkened throne room. G'Kar, much to his chagrine, becomes a religious icon for his people, but then seeks solitude by going out on a long-distance explorative mission. These characters had a few heartfelt goodbyes, and there was certainly more depth and weight to the end of their friendship, but I felt they deserved much more.
This goddamned show. I wanted to like it. It operates in a headspace that I love to visit. It wanted to be a darker, grittier space opera like the later Battlestar Galactica, but the context, the look and feel, they just weren't invented yet. Scifi fans didn't know what they wanted yet. And the writers weren't ready to offer any surprises that would distance themselves too far from the competition. It suffered, I feel, from its early-to-mid 90's production era, something I feel when watching it but I can't necessarily explain.
I was never part of the Babylon 5 fanbase. Growing up, Babylon 5 was always a show that somebody else watched. I would see it on elsewhere, or see its advertisements. I remember it looking interesting, but my parents never watched it, so neither did I. Asking them later, they said only, "Yeah, it wasn't very good." They made a face. Friends of friends, and parents of friend would watch it, but they also liked weird, fantasy shows I wasn't keen on. By that time, I think I had moved on to The X-Files, which was way, way more interesting. Babylon 5 was a lamer, stranger, parallel universe that I never visited. And I never felt I needed to.
And yet, the show had a fairly dedicated fanbase. They had a following. People liked it. But I have to question on what basis. Did it compete with TNG and DS9? Yes, but only to say that it went after the same market. Artistically, I would say no, it didn't compete. Would the show have worked in a vacuum? If I didn't like scifi? Or I hadn't watched Star Trek and its kind? I don't think so. They hired a bunch of soap opera actors, gave them a couple of bulkheads to act around, and interspersed mid-range 90's era computer graphics. It was a business decision. It was a Dreamworks to a Pixar. They had their own fan conventions for a time, but nothing like the longevity of the Star Trek franchise.
As somebody who likes to write and create tiny, self-contained universes, Babylon 5 is a terrifying example. Everyone can say, "Oh man, I love Star Trek, but I would fix problem X." (You may not actually say this, and it's fine, but it's a thought I've had frequently, and discussed at times) Star Trek's universe has an unrealism to it introduced by its transporters, replicators, Warp technology, and a laundry list of others. Every created universe is broken to some degree. But the question is whether it is believable despite being broken. Whether it has a good story around it. Someone like me might look at Star Trek and say, "Hey, I can do better. I'll get rid of X, and then add Y, and Z, and it'll be so much better." That person like me might fail to recognize that X worked despite it being a problem.
Babylon 5 is an example of a failure to innovate. A failure to inspire a belief. And how that can saddle you with mediocrity, even at your highest point, which you'll have to ride out to the very end.
Also, reading more into the background of the show, a weird number of cast members had bizarre and sad personal lives that affected the overall flow of the show and likely affected production:
Given how many characters and entire episodes in the show deal with substance abuse, it's weird how many cast members either ended up suffering or dying from the same.
I'm not sure where Babylon 5 fits on the spectrum of space scifi. As is my bias, I wouldn't place it above any TNG or DS9, but it would not be too far behind Voyager or Enterprise at their worst. I'd easily place B5 above Andromeda, but it'd be a tough call between B5 and Farscape. Farscape was not necessarily great, but it almost never took itself too seriously, which at least established clear expectations. Nowhere near Firefly, of course, but it's worth the comparison to demonstrate that a show with a smaller budget and more limited scope did a lot more with a lot less. I did give a shit when Firefly characters died. For B5, I celebrated the death of most. It meant that there were consequences in the universe.
The final episode of Babylon 5 is actually pretty good. They manage to revisit a lot of the themes of the show, and then do a lot of close-ups of actors in old people makeup crying and dying. It got to me a bit, admittedly. The commander, on the eve of his death, revisits Babylon 5. Where previously the sets were full of people in full alien dress and makeup, the corridors were instead quiet and deserted. The commander walks onto the ship and surprises a mechanic lazily reading a magazine. An officer hurries up to him, and salutes, telling him that he wasn't expected, and that they're just making preparations for the decommissioning of Babylon 5.
"Well, with the Alliance serving its function, Babylon 5 is redundant," the officer says.
The commander nods, glancing around the station. "Redundant," he repeats.
The show ends as they demolition Babylon 5 so that it can't pose a navigational hazard.
I woke up this morning, trying to remember something. "What was that show... where the alien races thought that humans were idiots because they kept rebuilding things after they were repeatedly destroyed? And the humans thought it was an admirable quality? And the writers thought it was somehow thought so, too?"
It took me a while. It was season 1, after all. But it was Babylon 5.
It haunts you.
This would be a dangerous LotR drinking game: https://www.youtub...watch?v=L2VnvNDH_FM (www.youtube.com)
Today's xkcd is great: http://xkcd.com/1207/ (xkcd.com). I hear the "wrong" just like Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor in Superman.
On it. I got my bike out today to give it its inaugural "Well, might as well ride it when I don't need to be anywhere" jaunt. Went pretty well.
The only bad part is that I have appointments and social engagements all this week (and work isn't quite as lax as it once was on showing up 20 minutes late because I wanted to take the coastal trail).
It is a month of riding activities. Well most places it is anyway, though it seems Anchorage just kinda goes for the single day thing. Anyway it looks like the 17th is the day to get out and do it if you were planning on giving it a try.
This year due to my company moving to a different part of seattle, I have the opportunity to ride past both REI's corporate headquarters and it's Flagship store in Seattle. So I'm going to get pretty well loaded up with treats if I can ride fast enough between places. Also I was able to convince my company to host a snack station in conjunction with the bakery downstairs.
The last week of April we were getting morning temps in the high 20's low 30's. Which is pretty cold, but at least we don't have to deal with icy roads in the mornings even when that does happen.
On the actual bike to work day I usually can hit enough stations that I supply myself with enough cliff bars and power bars and the like to get me through a summer of hiking.
Star Trek Voyager meets West Wing.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/04/13/star_trek_and_west_wing_captain_janeway_killed_president_bartlett.html?wpisrc=obnetwork (www.slate.com)
This (www.youtube.com)is why Brandon Sanderson is the most ridiculous writer ever. Who the fuck live-broadcasts writing a book???
Break room. Pretty Red Corolla Lady walks in.
Josh: (cleaning coffee cup with 180F water dispenser)
[TV: News coverage on Boston, a crowd singing "America, America, God shed His grace on thee..."]
Corolla Lady: (standing by patiently)
Josh: "Ah, here you go..." (switches to normal sink)
[TV: "And crown thy good with brotherhood..."]
Corolla Lady: (begins filling water pitcher)
Josh: (finishing cleaning cup) "Sad stuff, eh?"
Corolla Lady: "Yeah."
[TV: "From sea to shining sea!"]
Josh: (fills up coffee cup) "..."
Corolla Lady: (finishes filling water pitcher, walks out of room)
I was the awkward break room transgressor this time around. The circle is complete.
Josh, I'm confused by your use of modifiers. Is the Red Corolla pretty or is the lady who owns the red corolla pretty?
Also "I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I don't know." - Groucho Marx (that's one of my favorite linguistic jokes about the imprecise nature of the English language.)
If it isn't obvious, I'm mostly giving you a hard time.
I wrote that and thought the same thing. Then I remembered that I found this (english.stackexchange.com), and that I needed to check my adjective ordering (the ordering seemed fine, but I wanted to read it more closely regardless). Then somebody walked into my cube, and the thought was lost.
In the programming world, adjective ambiguity is syntactically impossible (or at least yields incorrect results). If we had some of the same punctuation operators as programming, and natural language followed the "fluent" programming style (where all operators return their original calling objects, unless the function/property refers to another child object) we could have something like:
Lady.Pretty().Corolla.Red()
...but that sort of violates word order. And probably causes lots of problems elsewhere. For the time being, my love for Corollas can remain ambiguous.
I auto translated it in my head into "the woman who drives the pretty Red Corolla who always takes up two parking spaces and hogs the refrigerator space."
In short: the only way I remember anecdotes about people at work is if they're bad/annoying/painful. I will never default to good attributes for coworkers.
Ok, twitter and facebook won't work for this post, and no way in hell i'm posting in the comments section on news sites.
The bombs that exploded in Boston yesterday were technically unsophisticated weapons. The white smoke following the fireball is characteristic of a rapid combustion event, such as black powder, not a chemical explosion, such as plastic explosives or gunpowder-laced nitroglycerin (TNT). ANFO, another rapid combustion based propellant, leaves black smoke after combustion due to the inclusion of diesel or heating oil as the oxidizer.
So, if it's a black powder or similar explosion, and it used BBs or ball bearings, as news organizations are saying, that means it used materials that you could gather in a shopping trip to Walmart and Sportsman's Warehouse - black powder, BBs, a digital watch w/alarm, a primer from handloading (or even just a bullet, any caliber, any cartridge), and a container.
that's technically unsophisticated.
We know from two different wars in Asia that our opponent force there is very sophisticated, in the type of explosives, in the manner of delivery, in the activation device, and effectiveness of the placement.
I'd be really surprised if we find out this attack comes from a foreign source. They'd either be really stupid or really smart. I can't decide.
A pressure cooker is a poor choice for an explosive shell, compared to other options. The maximum velocity of components from a bomb is dependent on the pressures generated during bomb's explosion/combustion. High explosives are engineered to generate the highest possible pressures for a given weight of explosive. Gunpowder is capable of very high pressures, but a pressure cooker is a poor delivery vehicle.
A common pressure cooker, in order to be a truly effective weapon, needs to have it's safety valves defeated, and the lid welded to the saucepan.
Let's take a .45ACP cartridge. In order to send the bullet downrange, pressures of ~20,000 psig are generated by the gunpowder. Or a .300 Magnum. In order to send the bullet downrange, pressures of ~60,000 psig are generated.
A pressure cooker's safety valves start releasing pressure at about 25 psig, and the lid's connections generally fail around 200 psig. This is orders of magnitudes less than what's capable in gunpowder. Which is why a pressure cooker is a poor choice.
And one of the deformed lids was found on a roof? Only possible if the pressure cookers were set down with the lid up. If this person had set it up on the side, more than 3 people would have died. It would have sent most of the shrapnel, the lid, and most of the explosive force into the crowd.
This goes to show that not much technical sophistication was involved in these bombs. Everything technical is pointing to garden-variety amateur.
.45ACP diameter is 0.452", which yields a cross sectional area of 0.6418 in^2. Multiplying by 20E3 lb_f/in^2, you get 12837 lb_f.
My pressure cooker at home is ~14" diameter, which yields a cross sectional area of ~154in^2. Multiplying by a (likely conservative) 100 lb_f/in^2 relief pressure, you get 15394 lb_f. There are, granted, probably some volume / force dispersion things going on, but the pent up forces themselves can be comparable.
When you do blast radius surveys for industrial equipment, pressures in the neighborhood of 5psig cause serious concern (www.mbindustries.com.php5-9.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com). When considering damage potential, it's critical to include the area over which a force is applied. 8psig can be just as scary as 80,000 psig (well, if said force is blowing a building over onto you, that is. Or a manway / manhole cover).
True, forces on the lid start to compare to the same force behind the bullet. The lid isn't the only thing in consideration. The BBs, the nails, the metal shards, the fine components of the bomb are much smaller area than the lid of the pressure cooker. 100 psig behind the BB, compared to 20,000psig behind the BB? The force behind the bomb components are much smaller compared to using a better delivery vehicle capable of higher pressures. This points to poor technical sophistication, and an amateur understanding.
The maximum velocity of components from a bomb is dependent on the pressures generated during bomb's explosion/combustion. If it's topping out at 100psig, that's a mere fraction of what it's capable of.
Methinks he probably means this thread. All the pinned images (that aren't special announcements, ala Sammich and Kitty), which appear in oldest-first order.
Where's my prize?! I translated Erik-thought into English first this time!
SCROLL TO IT JOSH.
Well, that's sort of a fun thing: I am. At least, I do the best job that I can, given the random content I'm displaying.
There are two display mechanisms on idkfa:
For classic mode, browser scrolling isn't an issue: you're only every displaying 1 thing, and that thing is at the top.
For full mode, this becomes a problem, as the contents of a post can change the geometry of the thread after a page has loaded. For instance: a thread full of dozens of hilarious, hand-picked GIFs that load slowly even over a broadband connection. Even though I can tell the browser "Go to this inline bookmark called thread_NNNN," the browser can only do so accurately at the time that I ask it (meaning, I can tell it to focus anywhere on the page, but that point can change according to user action, dynamic changes to page elements, or late-loading page elements changing the geometry of the page). So, I do scroll for you, but it only works well when there are relatively few page geometry changes after the initial page load.
If you look at the thread display page's HTML source, you'll see the following code (with actual commentary):
// Little hackish... but so is everything else.
Event.observe(
document,
'dom:loaded',
function() {
if( window.location.href.indexOf( '#thd_' ) == -1 ) {
window.location = window.location + '#thd_5043';
}
}
);
This script binds an event handler that triggers when the programmatic underpinnings of the rendered page are available for manipulation (the "dom:loaded" event). It says, "When the browser is ready to accept commands, scroll the user to the anchor element labeled "thd_5043". The problem with this is as I said above: slow loading content that is still loading long after the "dom:loaded" event. I could wait until after all elements are loaded on the page, but depending on your connection, or the size of my choice GIF meats, that might not be for 10+ seconds. By then, the user is already bored, navigated away, or has taken it upon themselves to scroll to the content they desired. I could potentially trigger this event both on the programmatic "ready" event and the "all done" event, but then the user would be subject to random scrolling at random times (particularly bad if you're trying to write a post).
My solution works well for what idkfa was designed for: textual content, loaded with minimal asynchronous elements, and relatively few images. That that thread consists entirely of slow-loading GIFs is a corner case that is difficult to account for without punishing the user.
so kaiden I showed you Automatic (www.automatic.com) and I showed you NetAtmo (www.netatmo.com) - I forgot to show you Thermodo (thermodo.com), another little iPhone gadget I ordered.
We already have the Nest (www.nest.com) and the Harmony Link (www.logitech.com). And I keep telling E that when we get her a new car, we're getting the Viper (www.viper.com) autostart.
And, I want to get the Craftsman Assurelink door opener (www.craftsman.com), but we'll see on that one. That one is a much lower priority than anything else.
I think we're finally starting to get to what Steve Jobs imagined when the iPhone first came out 6 years ago.
Edit: and I even forgot the Pebble (getpebble.com)I just got!
I'd certainly creep my neighbors out less if I didn't wait in my driveway every morning to watch my garage door close. However, I'm not sure how I feel about connecting my house to the Internet via resources I don't control.
Though... why aren't there Bluetooth garage door openers out there? Seriously.
A "hash" is a mathematical function that serves as a "one way" cipher, that is, "crypts" something such that you can't easily guess what it was without knowing its original contents. However, if you want to verify that the original contents and a new set of contents are identical, you can run both through a hashing algorithm, and if the results match, then you (likely) have identical matches.
An example of using hashing is in storing passwords. In a computer system, you never want to store a password in "plain text," as it would be trivial to recover and exploit such passwords. However, you still need to be able to verify passwords, and that is where the properties of hashes come in. For instance, in the case of idkfa, I only store the hash results (hashes) of the passwords you enter. When you log in to idkfa, I perform the same hashing algorithm on your entered password, and compare it to the hash result stored in the database. If those things match, then I can assume you entered the right password. It means I can "store" your password, but have a low likelihood that your password will be immediately compromised in the event the idkfa database is compromised.
So, the competition xkcd is running is to see how well different schools can break hashes. Though hashes are generally cryptographically strong, they are still subject to brute force attacks. This means that given enough computing power or storage space (for pre-computed hashes), you can crack hashes.
This was a pretty interesting game. And done I'm glad I found time to play.
I walked away from the game console feeling like I'd read a good book, or at least, felt the same anguish that I was departing from something great. It took its predecessor(s), and made better on the formula. The characters were engaging, and interesting, and I felt were ultimately impressive in terms of their hero arcs. As the Internet has been saying, Elizabeth is the best Disney princess yet.
Hearkening back to this thread, I feel like I've been given a little bit of hope that something can be made better when revisited, that creativity is not necessarily a finite resource, and that just because I can't imagine where something could go, doesn't mean it can't go anywhere.
SPOILERS TO FOLLOW
There are a few things I really, really enjoyed:
Criticisms:
If anyone wants to borrow my copy, I'd be happy to oblige.
The level design and story telling in this game far surpass anything else I've ever played. Maybe Portal / Portal 2 can give it a run for its money in the "clever" department, but I think it's a tie, honestly. When I found the "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" rip in the floating house next to the grave, I laughed out loud. When I discovered the torture scene sitting alone in my house at 11pm with all the lights off, I whimpered like a tiny scared puppy.
I need to replay it so I can try a few other things. Apparently, you can set a murder of crows on fire using a chain of your Vigors. I want to do that. Badly. Also, I somewhat regret not making more effective use of the "gear" that you pick up. I was, however, too engrossed in the plot and the story line to ever slow down to consider something so banal as character stat modification.
I didn't get that far last night since I've been exploring (COLLECT ALL THE THINGS! ALLOFTHEMNAO!) but I have to comment on your combat method. It's not brute force enough. This is probably why games like Resident Evil aren't fun for me. ("This isn't working because I haven't hit it with a big enough hammer yet").
OK I was totally wishywashy on the game until the ending. Totally worth it.
Naturally I spent all the time COLLECTING ALL THE THINGS. Finding all the voxophones and the kinetoscopes helped add to the storyline, so it was nice to have all of those bits wrapped up nicely.
I think the creators expected more elegance out of the Vigor integration into the combat system. My usual deal was the carbine and/or sniper rifle, never letting anyone get close to me, and then switching to shotgun or hand cannon when things got close. Only against beefy opponents or when I was in a rough scrape did I feel the need to use Vigors. And the Handymen or Sirens? I'd charge straight at them with Devils Kiss and shotgun/hand cannon blasting at the weak spot. I don't think you're supposed to do that. I don't think that's what they were intending. Like I said - I think I was supposed to be excited about the Vigors, but with weapons that powerful, I never found real use for them, and only kept looking for them for completion's sake.
I agree Josh, it would have been awesome to fight the Songbird. And yes, the combat system was slow.
Periodically I do rewatches of television shows I only watched in part. Typically I favor shows from my late elementary to high school years tha I often did not see al of and definitely didn't catch in order.
I went through all of Start Trek: Voyager, Buffy (except the last season, should really finish that) and most recently, Quantum Leap. I took a year long break from a grand re-watch for the Newbery, but I just started Sliders (streams on Netflix). I've watched the preview. I remember really liking this show, but losing the thread toward the end when I'd missed too many episodes and didn't know about that other group of sliders they were fighting (or a conspiracy or something).
Preview is slightly more hokey than I remembered, but worth the re-watch. Plus the mid 90s fashion - tons of flannel and oversize clothing everywhere!
I remember Sliders and Earth 2 being some of the earlier "pop" shows I enjoyed, however, mostly because we would go over to my best friend's family's house and watch them together. It was a weird time, considering I'd just moved schools was having a tough time getting along. I'd go over to their house, play Daggerfall or X-COM while the adults talked and made dinner. We would eat, and then watched those shows. I remember very specifically playing with Legos spread out over back of the rec room floor, frustrated that I couldn't find the right pieces because they'd shut out the lights to watch the show. Eventually I'd give up and just watch.
I'm going through all of the Star Trek series, since I saw many but not all episodes and am a completionist. So far I've completed TNG, DS9, and Enterprise. I'm half way through the original series, and am on Season 2 of voyager (which is so much better to watch if you're not sober). I haven't started the animated series yet.
I definitely want to hit up Quantum Leap at some point, but Sliders... that show got shitty before it died a slow, painful death. Don't think I can do that one. I want to watch Babylon 5, kind of. And numerous other shows.
Netflix might be what turns us into the lazy creatures from Wall-E.
I'm just going to leave this here, a blog with some of the best standalone episodes of the Star Trek series.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/03/26/star_trek_series_streaming_free_on_hulu_episodes_of_tng_voyager_enterprise.html (www.slate.com)
So I wrote a reply, hit preview and then closed without posting.
I've made it through the first season of Sliders, kinda. Blindly following the Netflix streaming order, I was most of the way through when I compared to wikipedia and noticed that they Netflix streaming was missing two episodes AND that it was in broadcast order and not in intended production order.
When I started using Netflix to stream Quantum Leap it was very obvious which episodes were not on streaming and you had to request a disk. Now the only way to see that is to physically compare the lists in separate windows. Netflix is clearly pushing everything toward streaming all the time, but it is quite irritating when they randomly leave episodes off. (I'm sure it's not random, I'm sure there's a reason they're missing 20% of the first season, but I don't know or care why. I'm just irritated.)
Now to decide if I go on to season 2, track down the remaining episodes of season1, or what not.
Sliders is a cool concept, but I doubt I'll make it farther than the 3rd season as that is where I (and most reviews) remember it going off the rails.
I have to tell someone.
At work, we use Oracle relational databases. Oracle databases, if you aren't familiar, are geared for very large, very complex operations, suited for massive companies storing decades worth of information. Oracle is at once revered for its reliability and reviled for its complexity and capability for obfuscation. It hails from the late 80's to early 90's, when computers were just coming out of their monolithic, batch processing days, where COBOL scripts ruled the world, and data management was very, very hard. It serves its purpose, but it takes an incredible amount of resources, both human and computer, to keep them running.
Oracle's proponents and experts are... consistently interesting people. In my experience, they are either older folks, having been elbows deep in Oracle's guts for decades, now cynical and war-worn, or younger people who are seeking professional legitimacy by putting "Oracle" on their resume.
Oracle veterans have the opinion that if something can be done on the database, it should be done on the database, given the performance gains from calculating things on the database rather than having to wait for network transfer, parsing, etc. Often, this is a reasonable policy, as the database can more easily and succinctly perform common types of calculations better than you would if you were to reinvent such a wheel. Oracle newbies adopt this premise wholesale with the promise of Oracle's superior performance and limited scope to make up for their lack of knowledge of the computing world. I know, because I have been the Oracle newbie.
However, I have the benefit of having seen the other sides of the fence. Database technology, or rather, "data persistence layers," have come a long way since Oracle was new. Forward thinking companies big enough to warrant the use of Oracle (like Google) now rarely use products like Oracle not only for their exorbitant licensing feeds and cost of operation, but also because data storage is an entirely different game now. Disk storage is cheap, computation is cheap, and large, monolithic hardware is expensive to maintain. Reliability and scalability are critical, and small, repeatable, easy to create and then throw away data fabrics are all the rage because the Internet demands it. It's no longer reasonable to have a single database server. There are just too many people. Too many smart phones.
The IT industry has been moving away from Oracle for a while now. However, much like the bank industry's dependence on COBOL programming, Oracle is still widely, pervasively used in older businesses, governments, and utilities, or really any place with money to burn, no necessity to expose themselves to the Internet at large, and a reluctance towards change. Which is where my current employers come in.
Oracle is culturally entrenched where I work. In a very early-90's setup, we have groups dedicated separately to project management, PC desktop support, network and server administration, applications programming (my group), and database administrators. For a 300+ person company, we're a relatively large IT shop, but we also support a fairly wide range of things. We're the IT department you wish you had when you call somebody at your corporate IT hotline and you get somebody a few thousand miles away. As such, people in our company are used to getting what they want from IT (much to my dismay), and frequently, the expensive, ridiculous, utility-geared software requires an Oracle database backend in order to lend some credibility to their otherwise janky and outdated programming sensibilities.
Additionally, when I say Oracle is "culturally entrenched," I mean figurative-nigh-literal trenches. Applications programmers and database administrators, while cut from the same cloth, continually compete for intellectual ownership of projects and intellectual superiority over one another. It comes part from our egos, but also due to Oracle's presence. It is a continual pain to configure, manage, and troubleshoot from a programming perspective, but it's too useful and reliable to give up. Many alternatives exists, but when you've already paid for the licenses, it's hard to let them go unused. Plus, Oracle's architecture and toolset promote a "everything goes into Oracle... and stays forever" mentality, given that the more effort that goes into writing things that interact with Oracle, the more effort one signs up for in the future to get more things to interact with Oracle. It's a vicious cycle.
That said, once things reach a working state, it tends to be that you can leave them alone for a long time.
Which is where the problem starts.
One of our engineers has been with the utility for a long, long time, a very smart guy with a dangerous level of knowledge when it comes to programming and databases. He has ownership of a number of pieces of software, some critical to managing equipment failures and doing analysis of those failures over time.
The product we started with was merely a "collector" application. It collected data, and provided rudimentary reporting and analysis tools to see how pieces of equipment were performing (or ultimately failing). We'll call this system Alpha.
A second product came along, which was another "collector," whose job was to aggregate data from multiple sources, including those from Alpha. It offered a number of nice analysis features that Alpha didn't, as well as provided the ability to "join" disparate data sources together. We'll call this system Beta.
System Alpha and system Beta needed to talk to each other. Beta knew how to talk to and get information out of Alpha, but Alpha didn't know anything about Beta. Alpha was already home to a number of interesting reporting features, but couldn't talk to Beta to make use of its additional capabilities.
This is when our engineer started making development requests to the IT department.
The requests were for additional reporting features that took information from both Alpha and Beta, and made it available in Alpha. However, inevitably, these features would then need to be made available back in Beta in order to do the same kind of analysis for the folks who only had access to Beta.
This process repeated for at least a decade.
As the requests, and implementation of them became increasingly complicated, the less people understood the full breadth of the system that was being put into place. Additionally, the requests would be handled differently between the applications programmers and the database administrators, and implemented by a different person each time. At least two generations of database administrators cycled through, and all but one of the application programmers remain (who had only worked on cursory modifications, and wasn't part of the original development).
Then I came along. And they dropped a binder on my desk. And told me to "start upgrading."
The best way to demonstrate this accreted clusterfuck is through an example of a pattern I've been discovering with some of the reports:
It is fucking nuts. Things to take away:
The example above is just one case among potentially dozens. This spaghetti mess is something that, rather than revisiting or redoing, they would just tweak to solve their immediate problem, and then walk away for as long as possible. Or as long as it took for them to find another job, or retire.
What bothers me is that among numerous IT professionals, knowing full well the ramifications of their inaction, have chosen to pass the buck for as long as possible without acknowledging the depth of the problem. It is only now that I'm being forced to upgrade one of the dependent systems has the inevitable come to pass. My choices are now limited to breaking business-critical functionality as a result of the upgrade and hindering our engineering departments, or somehow continuing the cycle of abuse.
I have to tell someone. Because it's a goddamn mess. And so that perhaps, if ever you have the ability to make such a decision, stray away from Oracle: the thing that allows great power, but also unspeakable evil.
Because my Internet addiction requires automated tools to support, having Google announce that their Reader application is going down come July was annoying. Where appropriate, Reader is largely how I stay on stop of things that I care to stay on top of, and catch up with things that I miss. I treated it as my "choice meats" of the Internet, giving cognitive surplus first to my feeds, then to having the rest of the Internt wash over me like warm surf.
But anyhow. A tool is a tool. And it's time to migrate.
I'm currently looking at The Old Reader (theoldreader.com) to see how it matches up. I'm not sure I like that I can't group my feeds into tags/folders, but maybe I shouldn't have 100 feeds to clutter the screen to begin with (paired down from 140, I'll have you know). I enjoy that it has the "sharing" feature Google Reader had prior to Google Plus migration. If enough people were on there, I would feel slightly less guilty about littering somebody's inbox with horrible shit (imgur.com).
Or, you know, go play outside or something. Or shorten your URLs for Twitter.
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Since January 29, 2006 you have read a total of 69,065 items.
Were you on twitter yesterday? Because twitter exploded. I'm hearing different ideas for replacements.
Article on replacements (reviews.cnet.com)
Mostly I'm hearing about feedly (www.feedly.com) which has an iPad app which would be interesting.
Yesterday most of the possible replacements seemed to be having server trouble with all the google reader refugees.
What I love about google reader is that since I use google mail, it is one click over. It isn't a separate log in and system.
Years ago I used bloglines which seems to be stupid and local focused now.
I tried last month to convince David to use an RSS feed, but no luck. For me it is essential. I read several blogs (librarian, management, knitting) that post erratically. I also use it for my webcomics. The reader knows how far "behind" I am on any given item without me guessing.
This bugs me a lot. Let me know what you think of the old reader. I may let the early adopter refugees test out the waters for the first week or two and see what the consensus seems to be.
Their status page speaks to their "lack of updates" issue being another symptom of their influx of folks. Also, finally figured out how to do folders, which makes the management of my feeds a good deal better. I also like their feature where they show "dead feeds," either that have dropped off the face of the Internet, or that haven't updated in more than a year.
As an alarming number of my friend-folk are bearing children these days, I felt compelled to share this (www.joesdaily.com) with you poor sad breeders. May it bring light to you in your dark, sleepless days.
Also, I wish my childhood photos looked that awesome.
