I was reading blog posts on Vincent Baker's website*, and this thread got me wondering about a game where the action-of-play consists of what cloths you wear.

I don't have a lot of development to that idea, which is the big reason I'm posting about it here rather than commenting about it there. (Free to a good home, because I don't have one, and all that.) But like, is color significant? Tshirt versus button-down? What is the goal here, what kinds of actions are legal moves and what are just kind of irrelevant?

* they did Dogs in the Vineyard and Mobile Frame Zero, and also other tatterpigs that I'd have to look up to tell you anything about.

Don't get your hopes up

If you're reading this, it means I haven't been by my blog for a full year. I find it extremely unlikely that I'd do such a thing, unless I was doing it on purpose, in which case I imagine I would have disabled this thing.

Given that's the case, I'd like you to assume that I haven't been able to do something about it. In fact, go ahead and assume I'm dead.

Unless the post right before this is about me going away for a while. Then you should yell at me for being such an idiot.

Review: Frozen

I just watched Frozen the other night, and AAAHH!

Oh--I should get this out of the way early. I make no pretense of avoiding spoilers in my reviews.

Okay, the movie was merely okay. Maybe a six? (This brings to mind that I don't have a baseline for movies reviews. I'll have to fix that.) Not quite as good as I remember Tangled being, but I saw Tangled a while ago. Although it's possible I missed some early context that would have let me appreciate it more. But the music, gah, WEEEEEE!

Is Disney getting better at doing musicals, or am I at a temporal disadvantage of some sort for appreciating their older stuff--don't have context to appreciate it because I'm to young or like that? Or have I simply never heard it? Tangled and Frozen both had really good music.

But this is about Frozen, not Tangled.

Okay, first off, no villians. What? It's a Disney Musical with no villians. How weird is that? I guess there's a guy who's kind of a villian, but he's second-string stuff and more of a self-centered jerk than a real villian. (Although he acts really well, at least in-universe.)

Incidentally, kids: there's a moral about 'true love' and 'love at first sight' here. Pay attention to it.

For once, Disney has made a movie that approaches this 'true love' thing somewhat realistically. And I think they managed to double-subvert their romantic-movie conventions while they were at it.

Oh, Elsa's was the frozen heart healed by the act of true love, not Anna's. Just sayin'.

Final Verdict: A solid 6/10 for the movie itself--that was nothing much special, except maybe for Disney--but brought a 8/10 by the soundtrack. Though honestly, if you get the soundtrack, I recommend getting the movie; you should see them in context. I think the soundtrack is lurking at an above-nine "copy please" currently.

OpenId's big problem

If you really look at the comment box at the bottom of any of my posts, you'll find a whole bunch of ways to say "I'm a human". One of these is OpenID. I like OpenID, and its cousin OAuth, on general principle. People shouldn't have to be hooked up to some suspect overlord like facebook or google to participate, you know?

(On consideration, my "reasons" for not allowing "anonymous" comments may be suspect. Maybe I should allow that. But that's not related to my point.)

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror made a recent post about "install our apps" pop-ups. You know the kind:

One of the points he makes is that with so many apps, apps kinda need to be free. Otherwise, they're overpriced. But that brings us to this old privacy-freak adage:

When apps are free, you are the product.

OpenID and OAuth are intended to help solve this problem. And that, in a fit of paradoxical irony, is their problem. The very thing they're supposed to do, is the very thing the people who'd have to adopt it don't want.

Without huge, hyper-driven use demand, they're doomed.

Logging

All I really want is to save everything I ever see in my browser to disk somewhere so I can see it again as I first saw it if I want to, no matter what happens to the originating site or original file in the interim. If we conveniently ignore disk-space and copyright/'intellectual property' issues, is that really too much to ask?

Apparently, yes. It seems it really is.

Make like a tree this holiday season #showkindness @kohls

Firefox 25 raw first impressions

With all the brou-ha-ha about firefox 25, and all the unfortunate changes that were supposedly coming, I wasn't sure what to think.  So I snagged a copy to play around with, before updating all my devices.

Basically... I can't tell that anything changed.  Certainly nothing I care about, that I can see so far.  I haven't started a new profile yet, but I think many of the changes I'd already be patching around with other addons anyways.

When I first opened my old profile, I couldn't use the address bar.  At all.  Disabling the Omnibar and Background Tabs addons let it work again, and it still works after re-enabaling Omnibar.  I don't know if "just" disabling Background Tabs would have done the trick.

All my other addons seem to be working.  One of them is evidently stopping the 'hide forward button' so-called feature, I wish I knew which.  I _hate_ that 'feature'.  Maybe it's a setting somewhere in about:config instead.

The 'magic' stop/reload button behavior is still in evidence.

As far as I can tell, new toolbars are still an option.  I haven't tried anything even more exotic yet.

The addons 'Tree-Style Tabs' and 'Vertical Toolbar' still work fine, so far as I can see.

Well, that's enoug derping around on the internet for one day

Over on RationalWiki I stumbled across their page about "QuantumMAN". Not that I'm not endorsing RationalWiki. I don't know nearly enough about them to do so. A lot of their articles I've read have been completely reasonable "okay, really?" examples ranging from "eyeroll" to "facepalm". But QuantumMAN, assuming it's an accurate representation (a fair assumption to make as far as I'm concerned, given what gets mentioned), is actually painful to think about. Anyone with any knowledge of applied quantum mechanics, biology, or computers could tell you that there's no way in the universe for their claims to make sense. Even /r/VXjunkies is more plausible, likely due to the fact that they don't even try to be plausible.

How to: create a direct link to a facebook post

A note to self: to create the post direct link to a facebook post:

• - copy the link location of the 'share' url
• - isolate the &p[1]= entry
• - construct a new url pointing to facebook.com//posts/"&p[1]="
• - link to that new url

A before-and-after demonstration:

Before: https://www.facebook.com/ajax/sharer/?s=22&appid=25554907596&p%5B0%5D=1191901122&p%5B1%5D=10201227148779409&profile_id=100002507979499&share_source_type=unknown
After: https://www.facebook.com/RedheadedWriter/posts/10201227148779409

Teeaaam Rocket's slacking off again!...

In a total cop-out, my 'blog post' for today is drawer full of pennies.

...Well, and this note informing you of this fact.

...And the tips/howto/note-to-self about how to create a direct link to a facebook post that I'll be putting up shortly.

...

...Never mind, then.

I've actually rather enjoyed my post-every-day practice, and the tendency to use this blog for a dumping ground. I don't think I can keep up a post a day, but posting every even-numbered day would probably work.

And this is how misinformation gets started

So today, I discovered this nifty bit of music^pic (site content warning: ponies, random crap). I find that sheet music pretty awesome, even if it's an incredibly stupid gag.

Someone then linked to this youtube video:

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tds0qoxWVss)
-- Which, admittedly, is a pretty rad song.

Later on in the comments, someone noted that it "sounds like a boss battle". Well, it turns out that's because it is-- some poking around reveals that the song in the video is actually called "U.N. Owen Was Her?", and comes from a Japanese music/bullet hell game bonus boss. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iankyw47vqY)

But wait, that's not all!

The sheet music really is just a stupid gag. Any musician worth their instrument can tell you this upon close inspection -- my brother objects, for example, to the large groups of whole notes in a row and to the illegal gliss between the bottom two staves; but he also enjoyed the explosions and the "remove cattle from stage". With the help of google image search and this post, I was able to trace it to here:

(From whitetreaz.com)

Footnotes:

^pic