JonathanRyan.org

So I recently added Stumble to my browser…  and by recently, I mean yesterday.  I promptly spent four or five hours just clicking that little button and finding new corners of the internet.  Just yesterday, I bookmarked a dozen interesting new sites.  So, you know what that means.  Linkdump!

http://www.anxietyculture.com/contents.htm

This is all about counterculture and exposing the farce that is “normal” life.  As they say it:

“AC began as a magazine, in 1995, exploring the anxieties behind the smiling mask of “normal” society. It contains ideas and gimmicks for navigating the stressed, over-competitive, work-obsessed times we live in.

The website went online in 1998, intended as a cocktail of curious news, satire, outsider psychology and uplifting propaganda.”

http://nine.frenchboys.net/

I like generators.  So does the owner of this site.  They’re a wonderful tool for working around writer’s block.  Need a setting?  Generate one and elaborate upon it.  Need a name?  Generate one and use it at least as a placeholder so that one decision doesn’t take up hours of good writing time.  This one is a lot like Seventh Sanctum, and indeed inspired by it.

http://www.everyvideogame.com/

This is like an online version of an emulator and every rom you can find.  I don’t know what they have or what they’re missing, but I’ll certainly be exploring the games fairly soon.

http://home.austarnet.com.au/petersykes/topscifi/lists_short_stories.html

This is a top 100 list of great SF short stories.  I’m going to use it as a reading list.  I’m sad to admit I’ve only read 13 of them at last count.

http://blog-well.com/2008/03/04/100-resources-for-web-developers/

This is 100 resources for web developers.  Code scripts, testers, debugging tools, FTP clients, screenshot tools, code documentation, windows applets, converters, graphics tools…  it’s got a lot.  I think most of them are free, but not all of them.  It’ll be a useful resource for giving useful resources to people who do this kind of thing.

http://studenthacks.org/2008/03/04/resources/

Another 100-list, this time geared for those of us who are still students and don’t know how to abuse google to within an inch of our lives looking for that one trivial fact to make a paper stand out.  This has encyclopedias, journal archives, style guides, dictionaries, and all kinds of useful links.  If only I had found it back when I still had to write terribly boring papers…

http://psychoprogs.com/articles/101-writing-tips/

101 writing tips, written as illustrations of themselves.  I’ve always liked these, and this batch is the largest I’ve found so far.  Excerpts:

3. ASBMAETP: Acronyms Should Be Memorable And Easy To Pronounce, and SATAN: Select Acronyms That Are Non-offensive.

31. Injecting enthusiasm probably won’t do any harm.

65. If there’s a word on the tip of your tongue that you can’t quite pin down, use a cinnamon.

80. Double entendres will get you in the end.

http://www.bouldertherapist.com/html/humor/WordPlays/lexophiles.htm

Along the same lines, these are simple little phrases that use the english language in ways that are humorous.  Geared for people who love words.

4. A backward poet writes inverse.

14. Local Area Network in Australia : The LAN down under.

That’s all for now, but knowing myself and the internet, I’ll have a few hundred more by tomorrow.  Stumble is definitely a blessing and a curse.

jon@jon-desktop:~/greptest$ echo “test” > blah
jon@jon-desktop:~/greptest$ echo “foo” > “-v”
jon@jon-desktop:~/greptest$ grep foo *
test
jon@jon-desktop:~/greptest$ grep test *
jon@jon-desktop:~/greptest$ echo “foo” > bar
jon@jon-desktop:~/greptest$ grep test *
bar:foo
jon@jon-desktop:~/greptest$ grep foo *
blah:test

Now try fixing it.  -v is the verbose flag for pretty much anything.

I found this receipt today:

I have no memory of buying any of this, but I think it is the most amusing receipt I have ever seen.

Tonight Hal suggested I make a Pandora station of nothing but artists with foods in their names.  Here is the result: Food Radio

The bands:

A Taste Of Honey
An Emotional Fish
Artichoke
Black Grape
Blind Lemon Jefferson
Blue Oyster Cult
Bowling For Soup
Bread
Cake
Casper & The Cookies
Cherry Poppin’ Daddies
Chuck Berry
Cookie Galore
Cream
Electric Prunes
Fiona Apple
Goldie & the Gingerbreads
Green Jelly
Hall & Oates
Headless Chickens
Hot Tuna
Humble Pie
Jello
Jimmie’s Chicken Shack
Lamb
Lambchop
Lemon Jelly
Lemonheads
Marc Almond
Meat Loaf
Mint Royale
Moby Grape
My Friend The Chocolate Cake
Orange Juice
Papas Fritas
Peach
Peaches
Peaches & Herb
Potato Eaters
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Red Red Meat
Skankin’ Pickle
Smashing Pumpkins
Strawberry Alarm Clock
String Cheese Incident
The Apples In Stereo
The Appleseed Cast
The Chocolate Watchband
The Cranberries
The Flying Burrito Brothers
The Gourds
The Jam
The Lemon Drops
The Lemon Pipers
The Mighty Lemon Drops
The Notorious Cherry Bombs
The Pietasters
The Salads
The Soup Dragons
The Sugarcubes
Ultimate Spinach
Vanilla Fudge
Vanilla Ice
Virgin Prunes
Whole Wheat Bread

I read XKCD, a brilliant web comic, regularly. Recently I decided to write a simple simulation based on one of his older comics. Here is an excerpt showing exactly what I simulated:

I threw the simulation together in JavaScript rather quickly, so it isn’t at all elegant and nice looking. However, it is still a lot of fun to play with. Your character runs towards the mouse, and the simulation stops when you are caught. Refresh with F5 to start again.

Version 1 has momentum, and feels strange to control. It is possible to get the raptors to constantly circle around you, since they can’t turn fast enough once to get you they are up to speed.

Version 2 has much more agile raptors. They can turn and stop instantly, but still need to accelerate to get to speed in a new direction. This one proves for certain that RAPTORS ARE SCARY! My best time so far is 2.8 seconds.

Eventually, I would love to implement a version with floorplans using the rules from the last problem in the linked comic, but I doubt I’ll get around to playing with that for a long time.

There’s a place in Kalamazoo we like to go to.  I used to describe it to people by saying: “It’s like a bunch of computer students built a little shop for themselves to chill out in.  Electrical outlets all around the walls, wired in stereo system, tables all over, arcade machines in the back, all of that.  Then art students swooped in and took over, painting it green, covering the walls in art, and making it a coffee shop.”  While I doubt that particular origin story is true, the result is the same, and what you have is the Rocketstar, a small coffee shop and hangout for students across Kalamazoo.

One of the coolest things about the Rocketstar, aside from the atmosphere, is the selection of things to do that they offer.  Arcade machines in the back, a pool table, a stash of games in the front, and a collection of interesting ‘zines to flip through when you’re bored.  Not to mention the people.

My friends and I used to visit all the time just to hang out and chat over milkshakes.  Recently though, we often just go to hang out and play Scrabble.  Scrabble at the Rocketstar, however, is more of an art than a game.

Originally the Scrabble set they possessed was as normal as any to start off with.  Of course, over time in a place where it’s used fairly often, the occasional tile is lost.  Now and then, a new tile is found.  Sometimes someone would bring in extra tiles from home, and they got mixed in.  Sometimes someone would take a sharpie to a tile to change what letter it was.  This new tile set we started calling Rocket Scrabble.

Eventually the Rocket Scrabble tile set was tossed and a new set bought for the Rocketstar.  It lasted for all of a month, or something like that.  Jon and I were there a while back to play scrabble, and discovered we were short on tiles.  Quite short.  In fact,  while a normal Scrabble tile set contains 100 tiles, this one contained only 58.  We played an entire game before we realized just how short we were.  One thing we realized at the end was, it was e-less Scrabble.  Not a single E tile existed in the set.

It was surprisingly fun.

As an aside, here’s the tile set as it was after our game.

AAAA
B
DDD
FF
GGG
HH
IIIIIII
LLLL
NNNNN
OOOOOOOO
PP
Q
SSS
TTT
UUUU
VV
WW
X
Z

Today at work I’ve been reading a book online instead of working. It is Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge, and so far I haven’t been able to stay away from it for more than a few minutes. You can find a copy online here, but it is definitely on my list of books to buy. You can read about it on Amazon’s product page:

One of my favorite puzzle games is online at Random Good Stuff!  You can also get it for the DS, which is tempting even though I don’t have one.  I’d just have to steal my girlfriend’s.

Link

Over Dinner
Fiction by Hal Wierzbicki

Glasses clinked and plates clattered, adding to his tension. He wondered if he’d be able to do it tonight.

“So Mary-Anne at work was telling me about this great new show she saw on TV the other day, what was it, something about a lawyer and a cop solving crazy cases…“

He wasn’t listening. The waiter returned with their meals. It was the usual fare; a garden salad with Italian for her. A steak, medium rare, for him. He sawed off a piece of the meat, salted it, ate it. Before he swallowed, he went to work on a second bite. His knife slipped, grating across the plate. He cringed at the sound. She paused her monologue to sip at her tea and he savored the silence. A child shouted across the restaurant, repeating the same thing over and over. “I want the cake!” She started talking again, and he wished something as simple as dessert would shut her up.

“I want a divorce.” He said. She didn’t hear. He spoke too quietly. She never heard his thoughts anymore, not like she used to. He missed the days when body language told him more than her voice. How she did up her hair that day told him her mood, the tapping of her fingers betrayed to him her agitation. Thinking back now he wondered how she had turned into the woman who sat before him. She used to care about him, but it was all about her these days. Her job at the workout center, her friends, the things she did after work. He wondered if she remembered he had a life outside of her.

A waiter dropped a tray. Glasses shattered against the cold tile floor one after another. A hush came over the restaurant for a moment, everyone turning to see what had happened before dismissing it and resuming their meals. The waiter hurried out of sight. He chewed at a third bite, staring now at his plate. She continued to talk about her day.

“I want a divorce.” He said again, louder. She paused.

“Did you say something?”

He shook his head and cut off another bite. She continued her monologue, unaware that it was falling on deaf ears. He stared at the piece of meat on the end of his fork. Dull brown and dry. He put it down and stood. She looked up at him, and their eyes met. Her voice was silent at last, while her eyes asked the questions. For a moment, he remembered why he had married her in the first place. For the first time in months, her eyes actually saw him.

“Where are you going?” The first thing she had asked about him in days. He didn’t answer. Her voice cut through his memory, and he walked away.

 ~Finis

Author’s Note:   I don’t know how the formatting is going to turn out on the blog or on Facebook.  This is a second draft of a random piece of fiction I felt like posting to start getting my work out there.  If you’re reading this from the blog, feel free to leave a comment (C&C is welcomed), and if you’re reading this on Facebook…  Also feel free to leave me a comment, but be sure you do it in such a way I’ll find it, by which I mean not on Jon’s page.

Via Neatorama