coroxout

Yeah, with the problem Amazon US (maybe elsewhere too?) has with fakes which get mixed in with the real stock at the distribution centre, and the problem I have on Amazon UK where no matter what household product I search for all the results are from brands I've never heard of, many of which are obviously Chinese from the name, or I'd guess are Chinese from the weird English or the mystery chunky quotation marks all over the description, it's not so easy to know any more.

I have a new rescue cat and I was going to buy some cat toys but after half an hour on Amazon I felt increasingly unsure that any of the products were safe for my cat to sink her teeth into, so I guess all the toys she's getting will be coming from the local pet megastore, the only pet shop left on this side of town.

I thought this link was going to be this article: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n07/jon-day/operation-columba

which is an interesting article about pigeon service in WWII from a different British literary review magazine, and the writer of the article turns out to be the author of the book reviewed here. Definitely interested to read the book, based on these two articles.

But my favourite pigeon-related link on the internet is this fun pigeon-breeding game from the University of Utah's genetics programme: https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/pigeons/pigeonetics/

Some fun updates on the "rock family trees" [0] idea but it might have been interesting to have more technical detail - for some of them it says what technologies are used, which is interesting to know, but I'd love to see links to a github or any blogs/interviews where the creators talk about the tech and any design decisions they made

(e.g. how do you represent lineup changes over time, how do you stop lines and names appearing on top of other names, any other concerns about readability when members have been in a lot of bands all over the map - for a hand-drawn example, the Louisville hardcore/post-rock scene map [1] looks lovely but is kind of hard to track the individuals in because they're all just so interconnected)

I liked the page though and will definitely click through to find out more about these later, so thanks!

[0] Pete Frame's Rock Family Trees: https://rockfamilytrees.co.uk [1] Louisville: https://www.paynomindtous.it/david-grubbs-squirrel-bait-tree... - zooming image at top and link to full jpg near the end

I've definitely noticed the rise in alcohol-free beers (normally only one or two per pub, but now usually prominently marked on the drinks list or blackboard), alcohol-free wines (only seen one once in a pub, but my local small supermarket has a couple of varieties - pleasant if rather sweet and Shloer-like) and "mocktails" in the pubs near me in the UK, and I hope the trend continues.

One of my favourite restaurants does delicious fruit-based cocktails, but has some mocktails and fruit smoothies which are just as delicious and half the price. However, I admit they are sugary and no doubt very calorific, so probably not good for regular drinking either, alas.

(And I'm afraid we tried Seedlip, which round here costs as much an alcoholic gin, and didn't enjoy it at all - but we liked the concept so if there's a market for it perhaps we'll like the next flavour or competitor...)

On one hand, I don't 100% miss those times unless I can have as much spare time as I did aged 14 to spend walking round a game without necessarily progressing.

(It helped that I only got a new commercial game every few months and maybe a couple of mostly short shareware games, so plenty of time to explore each one. Now I have a massive backlog of unplayed Steam games and still keep buying more.)

But not having hints and walkthroughs to fall back on definitely enhanced how much attention I paid to the game. I replayed various Lucasarts games from my teenage years recently and remembered a little bit from each section of each game, until I got halfway through Grim Fandango.

I knew I'd finished it before but the last two or three areas seemed completely unfamiliar, I think because I first bought it in the UHS Hints era, looked a hint up halfway through, and started leaning way too heavily on hints for the rest of the game.

I'd love that too - although I have to say I didn't really like the endings to MI2 or Thimbleweed Park, so I might love it even more if RG writes everything except the ending...

I think the site author comes from an interactive fiction background, so I suppose there were text adventures that did switchable playable characters and time travel before DotT [1], but I don't know of a graphic adventure that beat DotT to it. I found the interaction between the 3 timezones pretty innovative as a kid too and think he does the game a disservice here.

It also opens the game up in terms of how many puzzles you can be thinking about at once; if you're stuck in a traditional 1-protagonist game you might only have one or two things you think you need to do next, at least in a pretty linear game, but now you always have at least 3 things to work out at once...

[1] I'm not a big IF buff, but I guess Infocom's "Suspended" (1983) is a classic game where you can control different "characters" at once, and I really loved "T-Zero" (1991), where you also open up 3 different timezones you can travel between at will, and changes in the past affect the present/future in a slightly DOTT-esque manner - although it's a very different game.

Suspended: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_(video_game)

T-Zero: https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=u8qqrwutdugkexpr or reviewed on filfre.net here: https://www.filfre.net/2017/12/the-text-adventures-of-1991/

Another stereotypically-opposite but actually possibly related pairing I find interesting: the OCD stereotype is "neat freaks" (not all that accurately, because hoarding is also compulsion-related, and many types of OCD operate on a different axis to neat/messy anyway), and the ADHD stereotype is messy and chaotic, but in a way they both centre around not being able to control what your mental runtime is spent on.

This sounds disturbingly familiar.

You try, but it ends badly repeatedly, sometimes unobtrusively, sometimes suddenly and catastrophically and in public, until the memories of those times plus fears of everyone's second-guessed reactions put you off doing anything; you go so long without succeeding at planning and discipline that even trying seems alien and scary; add the two together and you're well into "learned helplessness" territory.

As you say, sampling the space of behaviours and getting apparently random, mostly negative results back and wondering why your mental map of cause/effect and effort/outcome makes no sense whatsoever.

So... what does one do, when in broken-EF state for so long?

I guess they mean that most people can smell freshly sprayed cleaning products but think the products don't smell of much when still in the bottles.

The aisle has a faintly bleachy/detergenty smell to me, but not usually oppressive, more just pleasantly clean, I suppose.

But I have noticed my hands/sweat smell different when I have a cold, and sometimes a day or two before I feel ill. I usually only get close enough to notice it on my own body, but I have a couple of times entered someone else's room/office and smelt the same smell before hearing confirmation from their croaky voice, snuffling, or them just telling me they have a cold.

(And no, it's not the smell of cough sweets or lemon/honey-based cold remedies, but it might be partly the smell of damp tissues and stale phlegm and other such nice things. Subtle but sickly sweet.)

Obviously this is neither particularly useful nor a superpower, but I'm glad research is going on into more useful applications of similar phenomena.

It went down and lost control of its domain, eventually reappearing at a different TLD. A lot of people probably got lost in the move.

I miss mp3.com and still have a few favourite mp3s by other people saved on a hard disk somewhere (or so I thought - doesn't seem to be on this hard disk so I'll have to check for them tonight).

I wish I'd archived the band bios too, because now they're completely out of context, just some band names and song titles which aren't Googleable in anyway. If any of the bios listed the musicians' names it'd be interesting to see what they're up to now, 20 years later.

(Ouch, that really was 20 years ago.)

"We're constantly thinking about all of the stuff that's gone wrong with our applications previously, what new things could go wrong with them now"

I really feel this. I'm supposed to be half coding and half support but the support has expanded to fill all my time and I don't write anything more than 30-line kludges that only I will see any more.

That's partly just the nature of support always taking up all the time, but also I feel really paralysed when it comes to coding, because I just think of all the stupid corner cases I've been bitten by and how bad it felt to lose data or cause downtime or just look stupid.

And yes, the answer might be "write more test cases, code review" but that little voice in the back of my head goes "you thought you'd caught all the edge cases last time, and it still did a dumb thing you'd never thought of". I find it really demotivating, and start to put things off until I feel cleverer (which I never do), and then my lack of productivity depresses me, perhaps to the point you'd call "burnout" even.

Well, glad I'm not alone. Any tips on thinking my way around it welcome.

This is really cool, nice work (and sorry about your dog).

It reminds me that once upon a time the roguelike dev newsgroup had a "1k (source code) roguelike challenge".

The thread is here [1] and submissions are here in a slightly annoying format [2] but sadly I can't find the entry I remember, which I thought was in C and actually quite playable, if slightly at the mercy of the random number generator to make each new level solvable. Perhaps it was for a later iteration of the same challenge.

[1] https://rec.games.roguelike.development.narkive.com/3tm7xGpn... [2] https://sites.google.com/site/1024brl/

Nice to see Space Debris as a selected demosong. A few other favourites:

Oldschool classics:

heatbeat/rebels - street jungle https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.m...

Banana/TeK - Echoing aka demosong.nst from the Sound Blaster 2 disk https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.m...

4mat/anarchy - 4mat's madness (manic chiptune) https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.m...

Game music:

Nation XII featuring John Foxx - theme from Gods (gods17/into the wonderful) https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.s...

Allister Brimble - px.bladswede remix! (theme from Project-X) https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.m...

More techno-ish styles from the mid/late 90s:

vim!/mono - call me persephone (shimmeringly creaky mo'wax-style trip hop) https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.m...

twilight/mono - inevitable (junglish rave breaks subside into orbital-esque arpeggios) https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.m...

randall / suburban bass - in complete darkness (jungle/happy hardcore) https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.m...

superna0+dreamfish+thefoxii/mono - tri buta gaz (intensely minimal acid techno) https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.m...

dune/orange (later brothomstates on Warp Records) - mark a.j. pisses off (idm/techno, distorted kicks all over the place) https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.m...

Yep, I miss the Mono netlabel: http://www.simoncarless.com/monotonik-a-net-label-1996-200/

Buzz was around in 1999 (I think - I first used it in 2000/2001) but circa 2001 the coder had a hard disk crash and lost his code, and finally resumed work on it in 2008 from a much older codebase or possibly from scratch. I assume that's part of why the changelog starts in 2008.

I miss the 1998-era softsynth with built-in tracker Analogic, later called AXS (or was it the other way round?). http://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=11012&page=1

This is relevant to my interests: I live a few minutes' walk outside the delivery radius for my town, and the nearest identifiable location within the radius is a pub car park.

I've heard of people getting deliveries to the middle of the park in summer, or even to a boat waiting beside a road bridge...

I sadly concur, as someone who did fine at Computing A-Level with no work, found Further Maths difficult and was lucky to get a B with extra tuition and some juggling of module results to maximise my two final grades, and dropped out of a CS degree.

I liked coding for fun but really had almost no idea what CS was when I applied. So maybe the US system would have been better for me in that I could have dipped into a bunch of 101 courses and changed my major.

In the UK system, most people don't go to other subjects' lectures and if you don't like what you're doing, you have to apply from scratch. There's usually no way to change course at the same university or even get any kind of help or advice about finding an alternative elsewhere.

One of these years I'll work out what I should have studied and do that instead... actually, I probably won't, now it costs £30k+. I'm glad there are MOOCs so I can satisfy my urge to sign up for random things, watch one week's worth of lessons, and then never go back again, all for free.

"Ted Nelson kept all his junk mail, for some reason"

I'm glad he did, I love the design on a lot of these!

Reminds me of the story of the John Johnson collection of "printed ephemera" at a library in my town: https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/johnson/about

The way I've heard it, he was in Egypt studying the writing on papyrus fragments which had been excavated from a seam of ancient landfill, and he reflected on how much he'd learned about the real day-to-day lives of ancient Egypt from what had been thrown away as scrap paper millennia before, and wondered what people were doing in our age to preserve the modern-day equivalents.

(Or modern-day-ish - this was the 1920s)

I love archive.org and have "lost" many an evening flicking through some early-80s computer magazines or consumer electronics catalogues.

I'd love to agree, had this not happened just a year ago: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/26/uk-governmen...

Yes, that's what I meant, thanks, and I was thinking particularly of the 2nd game - though on closer inspection I think UW2's walls are all only 45 degree and 90 degree just like the 1st game, except the UW2 map is higher res and a lot better at mixing them up so it's less obvious. So Doom does win there after all, but I didn't notice as a kid. Wolfenstein's are all 90 degree bends, I think.

Both Doom and UW2 were essentially still a 2d map but in UW2 I remember going down a descending corridor and swimming under a bridge I'd previously walked over and being amazed. There's another level full of aerial paths which cross over each other too, and a level where you flick a switch and flood the map and open up some walkways above the flooded area iirc. I don't know how it represented these over-under areas internally but even if no more 2d than Doom (though you could look up and down a bit) it was a nice trick.

Then again, Doom has similar tricks - teleports set up to act like lifts, where the top of the tower looks out apparently over where you've already been (actually a facsimile to get round the 2d addressing).

But yes, Doom did win out for speed and sheer frantic joy/terror. I couldn't convert any friends to Ultima but Doom won everyone who saw it over instantly...

"The year of 1993 was a magical one ... The engine was revolutionary in that it represented a type of world that no one had seen on a computer screen before. Angled walls and halls that darken in the distance."

(obligatory old-man-shouts-at-cloud post) pfft, nobody who hadn't already played Ultima Underworld II, released in Jan 1993, maybe

but seriously, great game (both of them!), and always interesting to read about

I was just reminiscing with a friend about 3d landscape generator/modeller VistaPro last week, and here it is, along with a great many other nostalgia-inducing things. Thanks!

You've been downvoted but I laughed because this is exactly the inner monologue I have whenever I try to start a Dreaded Task.

"I don't know where to start! Well, I could start with document A, but then I'd need some information from document B, which requires document C, but I can't do C until I've done A -- oh no, a loop! I can't see how to get round this at all; maybe my head will be clearer tomorrow. Time for a break.

(NB the "loops" often aren't really 100% circular, but seem insurmountable in my head; this is the point where talking to someone is invaluable, if I can get past the usually correct suspicion I'm going to sound stupid for making a big deal about a block which seems totally trivial and non-blocking when I try to put it into words)

...Also, didn't I already work on document B? But I can't remember where I got to, or where I put my notes, or what they mean..."

I do suspect I might have AD(H)D but I live in a country where adult ADHD is not really recognised, so I guess I'll have to do the best I can using some of the good tips posted here instead.

So does the free photo backup hosting which comes with Amazon Prime, iirc.

A friend who's a (mostly) retired semi-pro photographer has all his photos automatically uploaded there, so that clause worried me a bit.

I am suddenly nostalgic for the Googlewhack fad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlewhack

"A Googlewhack is a contest for finding a Google search query consisting of exactly two words without quotation marks that returns exactly one hit. A Googlewhack must consist of two actual words found in a dictionary.

Published googlewhacks are short-lived, since when published to a web site, the new number of hits will become at least two, one to the original hit found, and one to the publishing site."

The markup flags up abbreviations. I'm not quite clear on the distinctions between the different tags but it looks like "ex" is for expansions/excluded letters and "sl" is something to do with superscript letters, or thereabouts.

See here for more on early modern "secretary hand" abbreviations: https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/conventions.html#co...

In my experience the books tend to have some pages which are always shown in the preview, some pages which appear never to be viewable in preview mode, and some pages which you may be able to preview if you have not reached your limit.

So after 100 days you'll probably still have 100 incomplete books.

Thank you for the study.

That's exactly my worry: not that it causes inflation, but that if everyone is given a sum to cover the cost of accommodation then accommodation prices will just get pushed up to beyond the reach of UBI. As I say, I like the idea of UBI a lot, so will be very glad if that doesn't happen, and interested to read (later on) this and any other studies on this topic!

In addition to the contradictions already highlighted by many posters, I don't like the way the only economist they've quoted is Patrick Minford.

Not because he says UBI won't work (I'm on the fence about this, because I'd love it to work, but I don't see how you can stop it triggering inflation to the point that the UBI sum becomes useless to live on - but I'm no economist), but because he's really quite far out of the mainstream of economists and it's as if they've picked him solely because he's the only big name pro-Brexit economist - and I'm sick of the BBC dragging pro-Brexit commentators on to speak unopposed regardless of whether they know anything about the subject or how out-there their views are.

Some prior references on Minford: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/brexit-minford-economi... https://www.economist.com/news/britain/21727078-patrick-minf...