Tag search: "200805"

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MMORPG articles: Ideas and analysis on massively multiplayer online role-playing games. (18 May 2008)
Poetry: Some of these go back pretty far. (14 May 2008)
Cross Product: This is my first novel. It was originally posted as a series of articles in talk.bizarre during October 1999 - December 2000, and accordingly it's in the talk.bizarre genre: sort of fantasy/SFish. (14 May 2008)
Ephemera: Brief postings of short-term interest. (14 May 2008)
Travel index page: Notes from some of my trips. (13 May 2008)
Colour portal: Files related to my essay What Colour are your bits? and the ideas it raises. (13 May 2008)
Tarot and cartomancy: Index of tarot and other card divination topics. (13 May 2008)
Software: This page is an index to software I've written myself. (13 May 2008)
Template index page: Template index page. Nothing to see here, move along. (13 May 2008)
I'm redesigning my site: I'm making some major changes in my site design. The existing design is substantially the same one I've used for about seven years; during that time the Web has grown and changed and it's time for my site to change to meet it. I'm deleting a fair bit of old stuff that's no longer current or attracting readers, and I'm re-arranging the remaining material in the hope it will attract more readers, and to create good places to add the new material I'm planning. RSS feed logic is changing. Links will break. I'm going to add redirects where appropriate and possible, but it's unavoidable that some things will break and not get fixed. Please bear with me. (13 May 2008)
Astrology: Astrology and related subjects (12 May 2008)
Professional category: Academic and other professional stuff (12 May 2008)
Typesetting astrology with LaTeX: Resources for typesetting astrological documents with LaTeX. NEW: initial beta release of my "horoscop" package for typesetting wheel charts. (2 May 2008)
Simplified file holography: I did some more thinking about my holographic filesystem ideas and some reading on coding theory and I realized that most of the complexity of the system actually comes from the desire to make it work for read-write. If we design it more narrowly for read-only media like DVD-R discs, and tie less closely to the operating system's filesystem code, the result can be much more compatible and keep most of the advantages. The new idea is that instead of being a full filesystem, it would come as two utilities: one that appends extra redundant blocks to an existing filesystem image so that it will be more recoverable in the future, and another that performs the recovery. If no blocks in the main image are lost, then the filesystem can be read normally by software that doesn't know about the recovery scheme, just ignoring the extra data at the end. (21 March 2008)
Holographic Filesystem: In preparation for the end of this phase of my life and the start of the next, I've been digging through the files on the computer I mothballed several years ago when I bought my present one - looking at organizing them and archiving so that my old projects won't be lost. I've found that the hard drive on that machine has developed some bad blocks, and that reminded me of an idea I once had for an holographic filesystem. I've also been painfully reminded that I used to do a lot of cool things and I haven't done very many lately, so that it's time to start some interesting new projects, and this might be a good start for one. (18 March 2008)
Phantom invasion: I was watching television coverage of the war in some distant country. Which one was never mentioned but it seemed to be very hot and sandy. Even though it was a colour signal everything on the screen was yellowish tan. The mistress of the generalissimo at the head of one of the factions, had herself become an important figure in commanding troops and resolving what was going on. The television people had somehow gotten a camera into an important hideout of one of the factions and were broadcasting live video of her meeting with other officers. As I watched, the location suffered an attack and I saw them all grabbing weapons and running out the door. (8 March 2008)
Technical Analysis: The difference I can't plausibly deny. (6 March 2008)
Court gender and the Aquarian assumption: I've noticed an assumption that most esoteric systems seem to take for granted. It's so fundamental that it's hard to state and even harder to challenge, but one way of putting it might be that if things can be divided into a small number of categories, then those categories must be equal, balanced, and symmetrical. Equality, balance, and symmetry are taken as a description: people assume that things in the world really are equal, balanced, and symmetrical by nature. They're also taken as an prescription: causing things to be equal, balanced, and symmetrical is assumed to be a desirable goal or even the primary goal of the entire system. I'm going to call all of that the Aquarian assumption. You're not allowed to challenge the Aquarian assumption. You won't be told that you're not allowed to challenge it, because the assumption is so deeply engrained as to be unstated. If you work within an esoteric system you may find it difficult to formulate the thought of a challenge to the Aquarian assumption; or even difficult to think of the Aquarian assumption itself existing because the possibility of it not existing is so alien. Do fish believe in water? (25 February 2008)
The Sultan's daughters: Today when I was supposed to be working on my thesis, I got sidetracked thinking about the Sultan and his daughters. I took a look around the Net and didn't immediately find anything about this in the literature, so there's some possibility it may even be an original research problem. I'm posting it here because I think it's interesting and to see if any readers have ideas on it. Let me know if you're aware of anything published about it or if you think there isn't any and want to be in on trying to actually do some real research. Posting in "software" because I don't really have a "math" category... but maybe I should. If it appears to be an open problem, I might even post a bounty on it. (20 October 2007)
The Ten Promises: I titled a recent comic strip Seventh Commandment as natural law because it's about a girl who claims that she didn't cheat on her boyfriend because (using a Meher Baba quote for support) all beings are one and infidelity is therefore impossible. The Seventh Commandment, of course, is from a different tradition entirely, but it's the one about adultery, so in that title I'm asking the question, what if it was a description of how the universe works instead of an imperative about how you ought to behave? I thought about that some more and realized that a similar question is worth asking about all the Ten Commandments, not just that one. (24 September 2007)
Condition variables in SDL: I recently had occasion to want to use condition variables in SDL. I know enough about concurrency to, for instance, know that condition variables were the things I wanted to use; and I've got most of a PhD in computer science and can certainly be expected to read and understand the original work by people like Hoare. However, I never did actually take a concurrency class, and knowing how these things are supposed to work from a computer science point of view doesn't necessarily prepare one for whatever weirdness might be built into SDL's particular implementation. So I went looking on the Web for tutorials and other information on using SDL condition variables in particular, and I discovered to my horror that it was all written by game programmers. So here are my notes on how to use condition variables in SDL, posted both for my own reference and for anyone else who might be in a similar situation. (3 September 2007)
Time travel chaos game: Okay, here's a game sketch. This idea is supposed to be a game that could live on a Web site somewhere, support a large number of players, but be fun to participate in even if you are brand new, or only connect occasionally, or if there are few or no other players. Kind of like Wikipedia - except that my idea would actually know it's a game, unlike Wikipedia which thinks it's an encyclopedia. I'm posting this here to make it harder for anyone to patent. (30 May 2007)
On games that don't suck: When the ever-amusing Jeff Vogel posted his piece about why he hates fantasy RPGs a couple weeks ago, I thought (because of the come-on at the end for what he'll talk about next time) that it was the first half of a two-parter, so I'd wait until the second half came out before commenting. It's been a while, though, and on re-reading it I now think that his next column is simply going to be another one in the ongoing series instead of specifically a second half for this column, so I'm going to go ahead and comment now. The thing is, Jeff's gripe is that fantasy RPGs are all about the levelling up. You start out sucky, most of the game is spent doing otherwise-pointless tasks in order to improve yourself, and it's tedious and boring and too much like real life. That got me thinking, well, what kind of game could we make that would be just the opposite? It would have to be a game where you start out really cool, with lots of power to do things, and then you progressively lose that and it becomes harder and harder and a big part of the object is simply to retain enough of your powers until the end of the game to be able to finish. After going through a few permutations of stuff like "role-play a hero who suffers from a debilitating, advancing illness," I realised that the problem has already been solved. One of the most popular computer games today exhibits just the properties I'm imagining. You probably already have a copy. It's notorious as an addictive time-waster. (25 February 2007)
Buried in bits: Almost ten years ago, I read a fascinating essay by George Gilder in Computer Underground Digest, reprinted from Forbes. He predicted that in The Future, technologies like the erbium doped fiber amplifier would cause bandwidth to grow faster than CPU power, and that that would eventually have drastic effects on how we do computing and networking. I'm not sure that prediction has really come true, but supposing it did, what would be the effect on the copyright wars? (16 January 2007)
How to concatenate PDFs without pain: In my work I recently had a situation where I needed to concatenate several PDF files into one big PDF file. That turns out to be a much harder problem than it sounds, and the Web isn't as helpful in solving it as should be the case. Here's a summary of what I've discovered on the subject, so that someone else who wants to append PDF files on a real computer won't have to go through what I went through. This page covers only software that will run under Linux and similar FLOSS environments. (9 January 2007)
Skippy the Scraper: Users' guide for RSS feeds provided on the Ansuz site. (20 September 2006)
On the astrology of Charon: The IAU is talking about changing its definition of "planet" - or, more correctly, actually creating a firm definition of "planet" in the first place because until now it hasn't really been all that clearly defined - and that has raised some interest in the astrology of the potential new planets. I'd like to emphasize, for readers who aren't familiar with how astrology works, that what the IAU decides doesn't really have any direct bearing on astrological practice; astrologers will follow their own traditions and the definitions used in astronomy aren't really part of those. That's why the old canard about the astrological signs not corresponding to the astronomical constellations, falls apart under examination - both are precisely and accurately defined ways of describing locations in the sky, but they aren't identical to each other because they were designed for completely different purposes. However, even though astrologers don't need the IAU to determine what will or won't be astrologically important, the recent public attention to relatively newly-discovered solar system bodies seems like a good opportunity to look at the astrology of new planets. (28 August 2006)
A really free OCR A font (Postscript and TrueType): A genuinely free version of this important font. (27 July 2006)
A free-for-noncommercial OCR B font (Postscript and TrueType): A version of this important font usable in the free world. (27 July 2006)
Postscript and PDF tricks for free software users: My PDF concatenation page is quite popular, and I recently had occasion (while publishing a book through Lulu) to need a couple of other hard-to-find Postscript and PDF-related techniques, so I'm recording them here in case they're useful to others. (22 June 2006)
Kookaburra coins: Don't be fooled!: I was pricing Australian silver Kookaburra coins on eBay recently, and I noticed something disturbing though not entirely unexpected: an awful lot of people are selling the bullion issue under a claim that it's the proof issue. My guess is that most of these people are misinformed rather than dishonest, but either way, buyers should beware. Many Web pages about these coins are confusing, outdated, and/or horribly designed, so I'm going to collect some information about them here for my own reference and anyone else's who may care. (28 April 2006)
Prolog bits and pieces: This page exists to collect some little bits of Prolog code I have lying around from various projects. They're designed to work with SWI-Prolog, but in most cases should be reasonably easy to adapt to other environments. (16 April 2006)
CQ Interplanetary: The woman had some kind of grievance against him which sounded similar to ours, involving credit card transactions; and she had written a poem about it, which she read. (23 February 2006)
How much does a sheet of paper weigh?: About 4.5 grams. So if you're mailing a letter that can be at most 50 grams, you should be able to include about 10 sheets of paper plus the envelope. Of course, the real answer depends on many variables. Explanation below. (14 February 2006)
The ugly woman: Many years ago I met a woman who was hired as a contractor by the place I worked at the time. My first impression of her was that she was extremely physically unattractive; but I thought about it a bit more because anyone who is extreme in any way is interesting, and I came to some realizations that seemed to me to be pretty important. (8 January 2006)
Rippy the Aggregator v0.13: A light-weight PHP script to display several RSS feeds on one page. (9 December 2005)
Sparrow Apples: He gathered several and stuck them into a foil-lined saddle bag anyway, though. (1 December 2005)
Quick-and-dirty astrological compatibility test: Check your compatibility with others based on Sun and Moon sign. (27 August 2005)
Astrological ephemeris for Charon: Web-based calculation of the position of Pluto's satellite or co-planet, Charon (27 August 2005)
XCCity (working title): Simulation game: build a city, much in the manner of SimCity or LinCity, and demonstrate the advanced features of Xconq material model 1. (4 August 2005)
Bishoujo v. Tentaku (working title): Sub-lethal tactical game: Busload of schoolgirls accidentally drives within range of a dimensional rift, and tentacled horrors pour out from the other side. The idea is to work in as many anime cliches as possible, though I haven't yet figured out just where giant robots will come into the scenario. (4 August 2005)
Ottawa 2001 (working title): Sub-lethal tactical game: The N17 anti-globalization protests of Ottawa, 2001. Police, peaceful protestors, the Black Block, tear gas, pepper spray, etc. Intended to be a reasonably accurate simulation, with input from interviews with people who were present, while still being a fun game; the hope would be that the rule set would be applicable to other similar events (real and imagined) in the late 20th/early 21st Centuries, by swapping out the map and the initial units. (4 August 2005)
SRE: Solar Regions Explorer: Interstellar strategic game: players explore the galaxy and eventually come into conflict with each other. Originated in a test case for advanced hacks of Xconq's terrain generator; evolved into the preferred test case for materials model 1. (4 August 2005)
AntarctiConq (working title): Operational-level game focused on exploring Antarctica - for oil or for magical power, riffing on H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness and similar works. (4 August 2005)
mskala's Xconq page: Xconq ("The School for Strategy") is a highly customizable hex-grid wargame and wargame engine. Game designers are supposed to be able to focus their attention on the rules of their particular game instead of on programming details, and it's supposed to be easy for users to create their own games, even without programming skill. It's been in development for close to 20 years, and there's still plenty more to do. I'm one of the semi-official developers. See the Xconq pages on sourceforge.net and xconq.org for more information. This page is for some Xconq-related material of my own, including speculative projects, half-baked ideas, and conceivably even fan fiction. I will generally check any code or games that I'm ready to share into the Sourceforge CVS and that will usually be fresher than this site. (4 August 2005)
Colour of bits rendered in orbit: Here's an interesting example of Colour: it's an image "rendered in orbit" using POV-Ray. POV-Ray is a free ray-tracing package, which generates pictures by simulating (a limited subset of) optics to compute what a given scene would look like. They created a scene file and ran it through POV-Ray to generate the image; the gimmick is that the copy of POV-Ray they used was running a computer that happened to be in space. It's pretty clear from the Web site that they're holding out this image as being in some way special because of having been rendered in space, but the question is, what's special about it? The output image is a deterministic function of the input scene file. So if I used a computer on the ground to render the same scene file, the output image would be bit for bit identical with the "rendered in space" version. Would it really be the rendered in space version? What's the difference between the two? The difference is Colour. (22 June 2005)
Stateless gaming: I had another of my late-night ideas this morning. We've spent a lot of time talking about how to manage property in MMORPGs. Many of the articles in my MMORPG category are on that theme. Some people don't like the idea of players being able to sell game property; on the other hand, the fact that it's impossible to prevent such sales suggests that rather than trying to catch and punish people who do it, game operators might do better to simply allow sales and try to design games that will continue to be fun when sales are occurring. I've written a bit on the technical aspects of a system to allow sales while reducing centralization; and I recently saw an interesting article considering the causes and effects of item sales in economic terms (note: I haven't read this article carefully and at first glance I think the assumptions it makes simplify the problem too much for the conclusions to be useful; but it's worth at least a skim). My rule is to challenge assumptions, though, and I've realised that there's still one assumption I haven't seen anyone challenge yet. (4 May 2005)
P2P in 6 lines of Ruby (uses library): Florian Gross has posted a 6-line P2P application in comp.lang.ruby. Enjoy this Google Groups link while it lasts. Although this is still cool, please note that it uses a library called "DRb", which apparently implements most of the intelligence for distributed applications. If we allow that, then the game becomes a test of library support rather than of programmer ingenuity; still an interesting question, but not the one I'm interested in. From a political point of view, this code doesn't prove that P2P is irrepressible so much as it proves that DRb is a piracy tool. (7 April 2005)
Schmolester - simple P2P in Guile Scheme: Michael L. Gran has posted Schmolester, a simple P2P program written in Scheme, based on MoleSter 0.0.2, and distributed under GPL. (7 April 2005)
Minimal P2P application: Dr. Edward Felten has posted the source code for TinyP2P, "a functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language." I have three thoughts. (7 April 2005)
MoleSter 0.0.4 - now 6 lines, 466 bytes: An attempt to write the world's smallest non-trivial file-sharing application in Perl. (2 April 2005)
The monster with ten thousand secrets: On thinking some more about the hash cash for virtual real estate idea, one possibility I imagined was that it could be applied to possession of items as well as real estate. I imagine a game something like Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD), which was very popular back in the BBS era. (21 March 2005)
MMORPG economy problem solved?: So, this afternoon on the bus I was thinking about some of the MMORPG economic problems raised by James Grimmelmann in his law review article. Look, the problem is that players accumulate too much value, right? There's a lack of "drains" in the economy. You need to come up with some way of reducing players' accumulated wealth. Grimmelmann talks about how games try to get players to give up their wealth by selling them superfluous things like hair dye. But there's an easier way. Players have too much stuff? So why not just take some of it away? Problem solved! To be more precise, what I propose is an MMORPG with a tax system. As far as I know, no current system implements that on a significant scale. (11 March 2005)
World of Burgercraft: What if your local fast food joint was run like World of Warcraft? The original forum posting of this cautionary tale seems to have been deleted, but since it seems to have been intended for public consumption, I'll mirror it below. This is direct cut-and-paste, so the spelling errors are from the original; note, too, that I'm pretty sure "$!$%roach" was "cockroach" until an overenthusiastic profanity filter attempted to remove the "cock" from it. Which just makes the whole thing funnier, of course. (10 March 2005)
Livejournal friends betray trust; film at 11: Some comments on the legality and morality of a public archive of private Livejournal postings. (6 March 2005)
John he said: John he said you never gotta stop dreaming, all a comfort my mind. (2 March 2005)
Almost every time: You said you trusted me always (2 March 2005)
Quadra 403: With your blue skin and yellow teeth, smiling like a paper shredder. (28 February 2005)
uP2P - 6 lines, 436 bytes, sh and netcat: Prof. Pascal Felber, of the Institut d'informatique, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland, forwarded me this link to his uP2P file-sharing program - currently 6 lines totalling 436 bytes, implemented in sh with the networking done by netcat. (23 February 2005)
Synthetic Statehood: I recently had occasion to take another look at the Ceejbot blog, run by talk.bizarre alumna C.J. Silverio (and possibly other people, too; the way it's set up isn't 100% clear to me). Lots of interesting stuff in there, and I think I'll be adding it to my Rippy configuration, but the article that caught my attention today was the link to Terranova's commentary on the WoW Naked Gnome Protest. (3 February 2005)
Hash cash for virtual real estate: I've been thinking a bit more recently about peer-to-peer MMORPG systems à la Kosmos Online. Here are some thoughts on that. (20 January 2005)
The secret sub: The tragic toll of dictionary replacement. (1 January 2005)
They don't like geneticists: The mani is actually supposed to go right across the Solar disc as viewed from Earth, and you bet the client will be watching it with a telescope, so there's no possibility of fudging it. (30 November 2004)
Race: I wonder why the Turtle thinks this is so important? (21 October 2004)
Zero of Queens: It was a brilliant and beautiful game concept, and extremely popular. (17 October 2004)
Colour, social beings, and undecidability: Okay, it's been about two months since I posted my piece about colourful bits, and I really should have posted a follow-up before now, but better late than never. First of all, here are ten other places that carried the story, in no particular order: (9 August 2004)
Counting coup: So kill me with a feather. (21 June 2004)
What Colour are your bits?: There's a classic adventure game called Paranoia which is set in an extremely ~~repressive~~ Utopian futuristic world run by The Computer, who is Your Friend. Looking at a recent LawMeme posting and related discussion, it occurred to me that the concept of colour-coded security clearances in Paranoia provides a good metaphor for a lot of copyright and intellectual freedom issues, and it may illuminate why we sometimes have difficulty communicating and understanding the ideologies in these areas. (10 June 2004)
Omnia basis vestri a nobis habeo estis: Ab Anno Domini MMCI, Bellum inciabaris. (10 February 2004)
LawMeme covers virtual property: This article from James Grimmelmann in LawMeme is absolutely fascinating, and I recommend you read it carefully. It's all about the legal and social questions raised by the concept of "property" in online communities, as discussed at the State of Play conference. We've all been thinking about "intellectual property" in meatspace, but the existence of systems like MMORPGs creates a whole parallel set of "virtual property" issues which are sort of like "intellectual property", sort of not, and interact with intellectual and real property in complicated ways. Attempts to solve virtual property issues may have consequences for intellectual and real property issues as well. (3 December 2003)
Pink and gold: If a bag of fleem, even an almost-full one, was all he lost in this move, it would be his best move to date. (1 December 2003)
Peer-to-peer storytelling: I used to be part of a project, spearheaded by Nicholas "Mordred" Vining who writes Braincrash, called Kosmos Online. The idea of KO was to build a massively multiplayer online role-playing game similar in general nature to systems like Everquest, but with some important differences: KO was to be open-source, KO was to be peer-to-peer with little or no central authority, and KO was to be immune to cheating. Well, in recent weeks Nicholas has been talking about resurrecting KO in some form, and I've thought about it a bit. Here's my proposal (likely long and technical) for a system which might be cool. It's not meant to be the same thing that KO was intended to be, but it's inspired by some of the ideas I had while working on KO. (23 April 2003)
Chasing: latent mysogyny what did you barter for nothing to legislate chasing the clam (15 March 2003)
Kludge International: The FAA would take away his certification if he didn't have a fully operational coffee shop on the premises at all times. (1 March 2003)
Quand l'ignorance r�igne, la vie est perdue: Report from FROST.BOB III, the Winter 2003 talk.bizarre gathering. (15 February 2003)
Names of the letters of the alphabet: Most of us seldom have occasion to need them, but every so often, it becomes necessary to write down the actual names of letters of the alphabet as opposed to the letters themselves. For instance, what do you write if you're marking up a manuscript for technical publishing and you want to indicate that a given symbol is the numeral 0 as opposed to the letter O? Well, you can circle it and say "this is a zero". But what is the word for the letter? We have words for all the numerals; for the letters of the Greek alphabet ("alpha", "beta", "gamma", and so on); for pretty much all the other characters in ASCII; what about the Latin alphabet as used in English? (English actually has a couple letters Latin doesn't, but I'm pretty sure it's still called the "Latin" alphabet.) (6 January 2003)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter I: A pushy dame attempts to hire Flank. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter II: A trip to the laundromat ends in violence. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter III: Flank tries to get some sleep. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter IV: A visit to the mall; trouble with the cash card. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter V: Seeking professional help. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter VI: The Happy Hacker goes to work. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter VII: The pushy dame pushes further. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter VIII: Catgirls and wizards and nuns, oh, my! (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter IX: Flank starts investigations at the hentai studio. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter X: Questioning the Junior Squid Wrangler. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XI: Questioning the Senior Squid Wrangler. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XII: Paying the pro. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XIII: Flanks thinks hard about the investigation. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XIV: Questioning another witness. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XV: More witness-questioning. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XVI: A visit to the police station. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XVII: Drinking with the yakuza. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XVIII: Start of the tarot reading. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XIX: Conclusion of the tarot reading. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XX: An encounter with the wildlife. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XXI: Flank narrowly escapes a one-way trip into orbit. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XXII: Flank goes back to the studio and is mistaken for a pervert. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XXIII: Flank breaks into the wrong dressing room and gets in trouble again. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XXIV: A clue is found. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XXVII: "If I had to breathe that would sure get in the way of my career." (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XXVIII: Kitsuko attempts to defend the moral value of the pornography industry. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XXIX: Flank is beaten and marooned, and help arrives from an unexpected source. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XXX: Flank finds a door to match his key. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XXXI: Processing the surveillance evidence. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XXXII: Flank prepares to reveal the solution. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XXXIII: The solution to the mystery. (1 December 2002)
The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter XXXIV: Tying up a few loose ends. (1 December 2002)
The sing-song of unknown Kadath: They were grey and they were rubbery and dined upon corpses. (11 August 2002)
PLEASE DO NO RAPE THE BAR: Report from AKT Boston: Blame it on Chris (28 July 2002)
Found not found: good morning class not found (20 June 2002)
Henry and Eliza: Henry's gaze slid hungrily down the curves of Eliza's naked silicone body. His five grand had been well spent, oh yes. (7 June 2002)
Row of pins: The film loop stops repeating and I see her wrist pulled out of my hands, she's pulling her wrist from my hands, and the record ends. (17 April 2002)
Supermarket: Find the sucker who got nineteen and a third, and prepare him for the ordeals. (6 April 2002)
Unicorn poem #2: And while I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony. (3 April 2002)
The chase game: Come on! Don't waste time! Single file! One at a time! Remember, single file only! (26 February 2002)
Eight knights of the dragon: Maybe the eight knights of the dragon had real flesh and blood like you and me. (20 February 2002)
The Martian opinion: Normally, he'd have been greeted with boos and thrown drinking glasses, but right now everyone wanted to hear the Martian opinion on the Human's rash claims. (29 December 2001)
Chopsticks: He is convinced that the health effects of his machine can only be positive. (8 December 2001)
Public Health Backgrounder #713: What Every Human Should Know About SEX WITH THE UNDEAD. (7 October 2001)
My window is on the ceiling; all I can see is the sky: Strange things happen when the full moon draws near. (29 September 2001)
The importance of open-source drivers: hermaphrodite parasite space worm (5 May 2001)
Ramen: One night at the convenience store. (30 March 2001)
Table d'Hote: Report from FROST.BOB II, the Winter 2001 talk.bizarre gathering. (6 February 2001)
The Other channels: the unnumbered ones that they don't list in TV Guide. (26 January 2001)
Sealtress of Time: I hope you can help me; I'm looking for a song. (14 January 2001)
Cross Product, chapter 1: Freedom and intelligence: A dream about witchcraft and radio astronomy. (21 December 2000)
Cross Product, chapter 2: Distance and heritage: Some fairy tales. (21 December 2000)
Cross Product, chapter 3: Tired light: I've got a Twinkie with your name on it, boy. (21 December 2000)
Cross Product, chapter 4: Green and yellow: You're likely to be found a week later face-down in a vat of liquid helium or something. (21 December 2000)
Cross Product, chapter 5: Line coverage: You did used to be a geographer, right? (21 December 2000)
Cross Product, chapter 6: The lead badge: No shackles or restraints of any kind... (21 December 2000)
Cross Product, chapter 7: No place for you: Get out of my menbane patch! (21 December 2000)
Cross Product, chapter 8: Tetrachromat women: We'd never get funding if it's a no boys allowed club, especially not when there will probably be two or three color-blind men born per tetrachromat woman. (21 December 2000)
Cross Product, chapter 9: Jugging for cats: 'What is in these?' 'Miracle Whip and ketchup.' 'Oh.' (21 December 2000)
Cross Product, chapter 10: Yes means no: I'd like to live in your world, I really would. It sounds like a nice place. But over there is something more like reality. Or less, I can't tell anymore. (21 December 2000)
Cross Product, chapter 11: Whiteshade simple: I will make for you a poultice of wolf dock and covet my neighbour. (21 December 2000)
Cross Product, chapter 12: Crimson and pearl: She had chipped black toenail polish. (21 December 2000)
Cross Product, chapter 13: Every possible Universe: Some fairy tales. (21 December 2000)
Cross Product, chapter 14: In a midnight choir: What part of the entire Universe dost thou not understand? (21 December 2000)
Cross Product, chapter 15: The eleutherophobe: Remember that time - with the girl - Cepheid variable - I knew - and how I kept my mouth shut? Well, what about that? (21 December 2000)
The Reverend John Pickett and the damage done: Welcome, everyone, to the God Is Dead Church. (9 December 2000)
Rootbeerman don't care: Rootbeerman has never in his whole entire life eaten anything that had wheat germ or tahini in it. (28 April 2000)
Yon and Tinu: Not everyone who lives in the forest is human. (23 April 2000)
Template Regular Page: This is a template page for convenient maintenance and testing. Nothing to see here, move along. (1 April 2000)
A dream of connectedness: Graph theory games, with Napolean and Conway. (2 January 2000)
Caves of Golorp v0.0.1: A Roguelike game written in Prolog (1 January 2000)
Memorial haiku: Haiku in memory of recently-dead historical figures (1 January 2000)
Madam Chair: My life as a student government beatnik. (7 December 1999)
Heaven and Hell memorial haiku: My take on the latest announcement from the Vatican. (8 August 1999)
Like I expected, only more so: Report from BAST.BOB, the Summer 1999 talk.bizarre gathering. (20 July 1999)
Kansas City Standard Blues: A blues story, featuring outdated communications technology. (26 April 1999)
Her Majesty the Queen in Rite of Unicorn: Fantasy poem, in more ways than one. (7 March 1999)
He lei nalu ho`okahi: A soliton wreath: science fiction about dying languages and network protocols. (1 December 1998)
Voices: Snipped from the internal dialogue. (1 September 1998)
Notes War: A war story about groupware. (10 April 1998)
The Tin Pest: Free verse: the eternal degradation of shiny things. (4 December 1997)
Coathanger: A transcribed dream. (1 December 1997)
Chains: It can be more ordinary than you think. (27 August 1997)
Mistakenly thought to be djinn: A short story explaining the true origins of the Necronomicon. (3 July 1997)
Re: Pentacle Spread: Yet another Stupid Wiccan Trick. (7 April 1997)
Light and Speed: SF short story about superluminal travel and a suicide cult. (2 February 1997)
Freezing spirits of Air: An SF/fantasy short story about magic and cryonics. (4 April 1996)
Hexagram 20: The blue Mercedes died, turning into a shoe. (27 March 1995)
Bubblegum: I love that music (15 March 1995)
Should Old Acquaintance be Forgot?: I hate politics. (9 March 1995)
The Frog's Dream: A whimsical sonnet (7 February 1995)
The Floating Cats: The floating cats remember. (24 January 1995)