atevans.com

“ Laundry staff—the Laundry is what we call the organization, not a description of what it does—are sometimes exposed to mind-blasting horrors in the course of our business. I’m not just talking about the usual PowerPoint presentations and self-assessment sessions to which any bureaucracy is prone: they’re more like the mythical Worse Things that happen at Sea (especially in the vicinity of drowned alien cities occupied by tentacled terrors).

— Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Stories / Down on the Farm by Charles Stross and Craig Phillips

“ Millions of copies will be sold of a book written by someone who can’t write, intended for an audience that doesn’t read, about the thoughts of a person who doesn’t think. God is dead.

— Review: Going Rogue by Sarah Palin

“

HTML is a language of sufficient complexity that it cannot be parsed by regular expressions. Even Jon Skeet cannot parse HTML using regular expressions. Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide. The

cannot hold it is too late. The force of regex and HTML together in the same conceptual space will destroy your mind like so much watery putty. If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes.

— RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags - Stack Overflow

Playfish VP Tonight

From the VP of Playfish tonight:

Most people go to a store to buy games. They pay SIXTY DOLLARS for these games, which they then go home and play. They play on consoles which cost THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS. Mostly, they sit at home and play these games alone in their basement. They might play them online - they might be killing 13-year-olds in Halo. We’re trying to make games accessible.

Thanks for the condescension, bro. I’m gonna go play Dragon Age for a few hours now. Call me when you’ve got Modern Warfare 2 in a web browser.

sahil:

Some joker once said, “I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it.”

» PANDORA’S BOX

funny pictures of cats with captions

PANDORA’S BOX It was filled with Ferrets.

Picture by: ferret Caption by: wildcard8033 via Poster Builder

» Recaption This!

» View All Captions

» Fighting Fantasy Game Books

Of all the various Choose Your Own Adventure-type books, the Fighting Fantasy series, created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, was by far and away my favorite. I read/played them all,…

From Anthony

For the record, Jack Harkness and the crew of Torchwood are possibly the most ineffective characters in scifi, along with the Heroes groups. Also, possibly the most Wangsty.

“ A blow-by-blow breakdown of the young president’s first year reveals that today’s frustration stems not from a lack of policy so much as a lack of common ground. The myth of the American center looms in this, the second part of a week-long series on our country since the 2008 election.

— Obama Timeline - John H. Richardson’s Timeline of Obama’s First Year - Esquire

Flickr - WHAT THE FUCK?!

From Yahoo / Flickr’s helpful-delpful help page:

I have a free account. Some of my photos aren’t showing up. Why?

On a free account, Flickr limits the number of photos displayed. If you have fewer than 200 photos, we display them all. If you have more than 200 photos, only the most recent 200 are displayed. Your photos are not removed from Flickr, only from the list of your photos. If you blogged a photo and it no longer appears in your list, it will still appear on your blog, and the photo’s Flickr page will still work just fine. If some of your photos aren’t showing up, don’t panic! Just upload some fresh ones. Or upgrade to a Pro Account.

Note: If your free account is inactive for 90 consecutive days, it will be deleted.

So, here’s the deal - I’ve been a Flickr Pro user for 4 years now. I have tens of gigabytes of photos backed up to this site. When I first got a pro account, long before the Yahoo buyout, Flickr promised me my browsing / downloading of my own photos would always be unlimited. If my pro account ever lapsed, I could still browse and download my photos as much as I wanted, but my uploads would be throttled. That’s why I signed up for Flickr in the first place.

Now, only because my pro account lapsed, with no notification from Yahoo / Flickr, I find more than 90% of my photos to be inaccessable. I wanted to use one for a meeting this morning, and I can’t. All I can browse are my photos from Fanime, which aren’t very inspiring.

This is inexcusable. One of Flickr’s avowed purposes is as a backup site, but now I can’t trust them to make my pictures accessable when I need them. If I wanted to email an old friend a photo of my road trip from last year, how could I, now? I’d have to pay Yahoo more money than I already have, just to get access to the photos I’ve already uploaded to the site.

I’m immediately moving all my photos to Picasa Web Albums, and perhaps my own server as a backup, and Yahoo / Flickr will not get another dime. I’ll delete my account within the week.

Yahoo has completely ruined Flickr. Fuck you, Yahoo!

“ After the ‘Four Leaf Clover’ mission, money in GTA IV essentially serves an entirely symbolic purpose: once you become wealthy, you realise there’s nothing worth spending the money on. From a gameplay perspective, it’s irritating, but put into a symbolic context, one could summarize that it serves as a comment on Nico’s drive and desire to achieve the ‘American Dream’ through wealth.

— In Defence of Grand Theft Auto IV, Part One: My City Screams | Gamer Limit

Rev Rant - via Destructoid

Best comment: “When will film have its ‘Super Mario World?’”

Darude: Highlights

Tech-trance remix of “Run So Far Away”
“Hello - my name is Darude, and I think I’m from Finland.”
VJ Video of a hot chick firing an AR15 in slow motion. No idea why.
Darude flipping around signs showing the lyrics to “In the Darkness” - it’s like a sing-along!
Darude making the thumbs-up, thumbs-sideways, thumbs-down gestures to ask the crowd if we were enjoying ourselves.
Signs with smiley-faces, hearts, and the word “Thanks!” It was a conversation with the DJ.
Dropping some classic tunes - early-2000’s stuff, “Music” - the 12” version from Rush, and yes, Sandstorm. He closed out with the last, just for lulz.

Darude was a helluva time. ‘bout to head out to Lovevolution - can’t wait to see what they’ve got in store! And Pendulum tonight - OMFG!

Rev Rant on grinding

Destructoid.com - For Gamers. By Gamers.

» The Billion Dollar Gram | Information Is Beautiful

A billion here, billion there - eventually, it adds up to real money. Via Daring Fireball

other places

atevans.com

Playfish VP Tonight

Flickr - WHAT THE FUCK?!

Darude: Highlights