hermiene.net

Doodle is dead, and rightly so, but its spirit lives on at Llamaphobia! Yes, I'm pretentious enough to call it a full-fledged web comic. And look, I even made up for missing yesterday's strip by including it there. Yay! Thanks to relsqui for the comic's title and James Blair for hosting it.

I increased my Geometry Wars score from 23M to 24,937,870 and regained my rank at 27th place. Why is it that I can only increase my score a few million points at a time?

I'll miss today's comic, but only because I'm working on something sweet and awesome. And by the way, I have a buffer of comics, so it's not like I haven't been working (I have!). I also retroactively removed the two comics I have already made from my news posts. I realized that posting them like that is the first step down the slippery slope to a tumblelog (it's already bad enough that I refer to my site as a blog rather than a personal web site, which is what I'm trying to make it into).

More later.

Two new web comics added: Cyanide and Happiness and Kittybot. I swear, the crazy thing isn't that there are twenty-seven comics being linked to. It's that I actually follow them all.

I also read two books: Xenocide and Letter to a Christian Nation. The latter made me want to read its predecessor, The End of Faith, which I'll definitely buy on my next Amazon spree.

Doodles! Say hello to Doodles, our newest member. (Now dead, replaced by Llamaphobia.) I plan to post small doodles every Monday and every Friday, without fail. I'm not at all inspired by xkcd. No, sir!

I read a Dawkins essay called The Real Romance in the Stars, and a quote struck me:

"Note, accordingly, how little it means to say something like 'Uranus moves into Aquarius'. Aquarius is a miscellaneous set of stars all at different distances from us, which have no connection with each other except that they constitute a (meaningless) pattern when seen from a certain (not particularly special) place in the galaxy (here). A constellation is not an entity at all, not the kind of thing that Uranus, or anything else, can sensibly be said to 'move into'."

And indeed, it can't "move into Aquarius." Using the power of modern computers and a mountain of astronomical data, I have put together a little demonstration with the awesome program Celestia (I recommend you check out the effect for yourself in real-time 3D). Here is Uranus as viewed 100 kilometers from its surface. One can just make out the Aquarius constellation. (Click for larger versions.)

Zooming out to about a million kilometers, one can see the orbits of Uranus' many satellites.

At one astronomical unit (the distance between the Earth and the Sun) above the surface, the orbits of all its 27 satellites are visible. Some of the stars in the Aquarius constellation are visible.

At 120 AUs, the whole Solar System is visible, and Uranus' orbit is highlighted in red.

At one light year away from Uranus, our sun is still visible, but its planets are not.

At 50 light years out, we see the sphere that Celestia uses to draw constellation borders. It's completely irrelevant now, of course, so the next picture will have it removed.

At 300 light years out, the illusion of a constellation as a coherent entity completely breaks down, and one is left with imaginary (and ultimately meaningless) lines connecting the stars.

What can you learn from this? "Astrology is bunk" is a good lesson. "The charlatans who steal weak-minded people's money using astrology are fools" is another good lesson. Again, the effect is much better seen in real-time 3D. Go download Celestia.

I got a part-time job at the local water park! This translates into a positive stream of monetary units into my bank account. I spend most of my time at work telling grown men how to behave themselves ("Sir, please don't climb the slides"). The fun part is that they accept my authority over them because I have a shiny uniform and they don't. (The same applies to jocks. Revenge, if not sweet, is at least appreciable.)

Bad shit going down. NITH Stavanger is closing its doors next summer, so that means I will have to move to either Bergen or Oslo to attend the school. If I move (which seems the most realistic option) I'll move to Oslo. I hate things which unnecessarily complicates my life, but from what little I've seen of the city, I like it, so moving should only be mildly annoying.

I've read and linked to no fewer than three web comics: Sinfest (which I read a little bit of a long time ago, before I started linking to web comics), Gone With the Blastwave, and Dueling Analogs. I also linked to Airbase, something I should have done a long time ago considering I've bought all their music. I also linked to Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection (I've fallen completely in love with Net; thank, relsqui!). My Links page seems more and more like a virtual supermassive black hole, except instead of light, it sucks your time.

I've read Ender's Game and Engines of Creation. The next update should see several more books.

"I'm a lean, mean pattern recognition machine."

I've only solved one more Euler problem, but I've increased my Geometry Wars and Mutant Storm scores! I increased my Geometry Wars score from 22M to 23M, getting me one rank up to 27. Next time I'm aiming for 80M. I will get there. My Mutant Storm score (single player adventure mode) is now 7,972,660. I visited Niels-Henrik's place and we managed to get our two player adventure mode score to 8,902,120 despite not playing seriously. There's much potential in that one.

Seen the Episode 2 trailers? For all I care, the 21st century will start when I get my hands on that awe-inducing game. Everything Valve touches becomes pure, undiluted gold.

"The more I see, the more I do."

I solved a bunch of Euler problems, a lot of them with BigInteger. It's a bit like biking uphill backwards, chased by angry goats, only your brakes don't work and your gears are covered in syrup. But I managed.

Music with good lyrics is still elusive, but I managed to hunt down a few! Artists, make more songs with awesome lyrics. Best regards, Hermiene.

Alexander K. Schrøder made SVG versions of some of my PNG insignia. Go vector!

"I am happiest when my lasers hit things."

My site is now 70% less pretentious! I removed a ton of Big Quotes (quotes by Important People) from my random quotes list and repopulated it with obscure ones. I'm in a whimsical quotation mood, you see. I also fixed my favicon. Before, I had two files, favicon.ico and favicon.png. I had done something wrong when I made the .ico one; it discarded transparency information from the source file. This new one keeps transparency information, so the favicon should appear nice everywhere.

I've linked to True Launch Bar. It's an awesome little tool, and my desktop looks shinier because of it.

I've only solved one more Project Euler problem. There are a few of them that I know how to solve conceptually, but all of them require manipulation of Really, Really Big Numbers. Java's BigInteger class handles arbitrary-length numbers, but it's a pain to work with. To add a number to a BigInteger object, for instance, you have to go obj.add(obj2), where obj2 is also a BigInteger. God forbid Java should support operator overloading so that one could go obj + 5. Sigh.

"Just because you are unique does not mean you are useful."

I've solved more Project Euler problems.

"A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them."

I've solved a few more Project Euler problems and read Ringworld.

A friend at school showed me operator overloading in C++. It's so cool because it lets you use arithmetic operators for whatever you want to, not restricted to arithmetic expressions. What does it mean to multiply a string by an integer, for instance? You could say, "concatenate this string n times with itself" so that "abc" * 3 results in "abcabcabc". Or it could mean, "produce the next three characters in the sequence and concatenate it", resulting in "abcdef". This might be illogical, but the point is that the behavior is entirely up to you. A more realistic example would be that of adding items to an inventory in an RPG (incidentally the example I was shown). Instead of doing something like Inventory.add(sword, shield, arrows) you could go Inventory += sword + shield + arrows. It would be so neat if Java supported operator overloading.

Java does support method and constructor overloading, which make things more powerful. It also has explicit constructor invocation, which is totally awesome.

I'm a web comics junkie, I know! Now, before you start scheming that intervention, check out Simulated Comic Product, Soup, and The Pretentious History of Everything, which are now linked to. I've also linked to Jim Wisniewski, who promptly became a Wilburer. (The first one in a long time. Who's next?)

"We don't like it when the city pigeons break wings. When the pigeons break wings, then we can't get down."

I've read Stranger in a Strange Land, and I implemented the Sieve of Eratosthenes. That's not a big achievement, but it's a small victory. I want to learn lots more about algorithms; they look pretty.

"I like your tactics. They are similar to mine."

My Geometry Wars record has made two jumps: The first was to 13M, and my current score is 22,084,965, making me the 28th best player in the world. Whooo! I'm slowly climbing the leaderboard; I'll be happy to reach top ten.

I'm doing Project Euler again, and this time I have a section for it for bragging. Yeah, I realize there's not much there to brag about. Yet.

I've linked to Pure Pwnage and Ask A Ninja. I also killed PHP Alacrity. It never really went anywhere, and the code was anyway ugly.

Java annoyance! Specifically, its lack of nextChar() in the Scanner class. It has similar methods for int (nextInt()), float (nextFloat()), and boolean (nextBoolean()); is full primitive types coverage too much to ask for? On September 25 I claimed that in Java, methods are called functions; that was wrong. Mea Culpa. Apparently subroutines in classes are methods and subroutines elsewhere are functions. And then there's that whole thing about distinguishing between functions (which return values) and procedures (which do not). Thankfully Java doesn't do that. In any case, I prefer the term function; it describes the structure very well, and if further clarification is needed I'll qualify it as necessary, thank you very much.

I rewrote About Me. It's shorter now, but also denser. I'll write about miscellanea later.

Even made me a new banner. Thanks! It looks awesome.

My Ceometry Wars score has been increased three times. The first was an increase by about a thousand points, which didn't even earn me a better rank. (Consulting this list of enemies, you'll find that 1000 points is ten Green Squares at 1x multiplier, or one Green Square at 10x multiplier.) Then, I played a very good round at Even's with his awesome (and HD) projector; I got just over 6.5M points, and not on my profile. Joy. But lo, things got better: I eventually managed 9,200,060 points, which lands me just under rank 100. It seems that my break (however brief) paid off.

I've completely ditched fenixs85@hotmail.com and I'm now only using havard.skjaeveland@gmail.com (both for regular E-mail and MSN). Death to anachronisms.

Java programming has started for real, and I now think I have a pretty clear understanding of what OOP really is, though I'm sure there's a lot of black magic to be unlocked. I've noticed that a few of my classmates (those who haven't done any sort of programming before) are having trouble understanding methods (or functions, as they're really called). I think I know why: We're taught about classes and object before going into the syntax and uses of functions. How is one supposed to grok methods when one doesn't understand what a method call is?

I'm still working on site stuff, though not as rapidly as I'd wanted to. In any case, I've linked to XPize and there's the new Fictional heroes section of the Random page.

Life is a juggling competition. At least, mine is.

Between getting set up at NITH, improving my TrackMania records (both Sunrise and Nations), and playing, uh, Sokoban, my days recently have consisted mostly of trying to beat my XBLA records (in particular those of Mutant Storm and Geometry Wars). My thumbs are almost bleeding, so for now I'm satisfied with them and will take a break from them. Mentioning it makes this semi-official.

I also feel sort of bad, now. I was supposed to work a whole lot on the site, which I haven't done due to aforementioned distractions. I'm sorry. I will shape up, really.

My Wing Chun training has started up again after a few months' hiatus (we use a school's gymnasium and have to follow their schedule), and starting up again is awesome. I finally feel like a non-newbie! To be sure I don't yet know anything particularly cool, but what I do know I feel that I can master. I think I'm also starting to get the hang of feeling the opponent's motions when in contact, which I'm told is important as one progresses to the more advanced stuff. I need lots more training with this, to be sure, but I at least understand it conceptually now.

Whooo! I beat my Adventure Mode record in Mutant Storm Reloaded by just over a million points. It's now 6,922,900.

I went through all the single player levels in Mutant Storm Reloaded's Tally Mode and improved several of them. My new score is 20,342,880, which places me around place 60. I tried and tried and tried, but neither my Mutant Storm Reloaded Adventure Mode high score nor the Geometry Wars one has been beaten. Why are those games so damned hard? If my bragging annoys you, please recall my shameless braggard policy.

I cleaned up the Links page a good deal by removing the Internet radios section (I don't listen to them anymore) and rewriting a lot of stale things. I also added Sokoban++ (a puzzle game), War§ow (a first-person shooter), and Dinosaur comic (a comic about, surprisingly, dinosaurs). I think Links is becoming a pretty comprehensive archive of cool and interesting links. Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about my other pages.

I've started my first week at NITH (the Norwegian School of Information Technology). I'm eager to start doing real programming, which starts next week.

I've gathered a few new music quotes and added an Antiquity section to my Quotes page. My Links page's Gaming section gains even more weight: Enigma (a huge puzzle game) and Warning Forever (a manic 2D shooter).

As if anyone actually cares, I'm ridiculously close to the six million mark in Geometry Wars: 5,993,910. This places me among the two hundred best in the world. Before you accuse me of being a shameless braggard, remember, I already admit to this.

I recently changed my nickname from Håvard (which is derived from an old Norse name and which is my real name) to Hermiene (which is an old German female name and which is not my real name). By a funny coincidence, a Harry Potter character happens to have a name that is not similar to Hermiene at all: Hermione. Get it? This is not a reference to Harry Potter. Admittedly the fact that my facial appearance is close to that of Daniel Radcliffe does make the correlation seem stronger, but the truth is that I didn't even know of Hermione until people started harrassing me about it. (If you want to know what it's really a reference to, contact me.) Until next time: Learn the subtleties of spelling.

Scant five days have passed, and lo! An update.

Part of what prompted me to update is that my Geometry Wars score is 4,848,820, very close to five million, and this needs celebrating. (Some people celebrate by eating a cake. I celebrate by updating my site.) Also, a new section has appeared on the Random page: Xbox Live Arcade scores. I'm just a shameless braggard. The numbers don't really mean much by themselves if you haven't played the games. The important thing, rank, is omitted for obvious reasons (it changes, and I can't be bothered to update it every time someone climbs over me).

The other part of what prompted this update is Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture, which everyone interested in freedom, culture, and copyright should read. Some parts of it are dryly written and in Lawyerese, unfortunately, but that's not important.

Parts of my site's visible and invisible architecture need an overhaul. I'll get working on that next.

This concludes the first of many timely updates.

Greetings, fellow netizens. I return from meatspace bearing lots of news.

My parents generously invited me to move back in with them, and I accepted. Living away is really fun, but I can't afford to now that I'm done with my civilian service, which paid for my apartment. I'm not really a fan of burning bridges nor of invocations to the Devil, but I suspect Satan played a role in putting me there. Drafts are idiotic in the first place. If a nation can't muster the patriotism among its citizenry necessary to defend it, it doesn't deserve a standing army, and an alternative to military service is really no alternative at all.

Religion bashing time again! This time it's the creationists' turn. A meme I've only recently seen (but one which I suspect has been in circulation for some time) got my attention and it goes like this: Evolution is a dangerous philosophy (philosophy?) because Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot used it to justify their atrocities. It's completely irrelevant! It's like blaming the theory of gravity for murders committed by pushing people off high places. In other words, totally nonsensical. Watching creationists debate biologists is somewhat akin to watching a paraplegic compete in the Olympics. Ken Miller is my new hero.

Moving home involved the end of the trial period, if you will, of 1080i 360 gaming, so I bought my own 360. Here's a cool thing: When you retrieve your gamertag you also get to download everything you've paid for again. This is the way it should be, but it's neat that it's actually implemented. The only regression is SD, and SD sucks.

I bought and framed three prints from deviantART: Apollo, Pepper by the window, and Scythe Dancer. I love 'em.

I pulled myself together and fixed the sorry state of my music's metadata. Every file now has shiny ID3v2.4 metadata attached to it, and I used foobar2000 to do it.

My Links page has had enough stuff added to it to make a neutron star envious. The most noteworthy updates are in the Gaming section: 3D Logic (thanks Joakim Næss Lea), TrackMania Nations (thanks again Joakim Næss Lea), Gridlock, Tiltilation, Neverball, Hamsterball, and Narbacular Drop. There's a link to foobar2000 too, naturally. In the Reference material section there's Unwords (a dictionary of invented words) and The Phrontistery (at which you can learn what rhochrematics and grammatolatry are). The Online comics section has seen two updates: xkcd and Dungeons and Denizens (thanks Alexander).

Books have been read. The Satanic Bible, Accelerando, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Alchemist, and the Rama series, to be exact.

I also played and finished Prey, a game that makes you feel like you're walking through an Escher painting. It's very good, but it contains almost zero puzzles! Oh, the potential.

Yes, my updates will be more timely from now on.

Even coaxed me into buying Trackmania Sunrise Extreme (well, he was more of a catalyst than an instigator since I'd already been blown away by the demo) and I am sold. It's like Stunts, Wipeout, and Rollcage had a baby, only the baby was a ninja high on crack. On fire. Running through a hospital (which is on fire), wielding dual katanas and a wakizashi from its prehensile tail, slaying evil samurai-nurses. Something like that. The point I am clumsily trying to get across is that the game kicks utter ass. I love untraditional racers. I'm sure Gran Turismo and its ilk are cool if you're a professional driver in the Carrera Panamericana obsessed with automotive mechanics (or even an adolescent gamer with the same inclinations), but realistic racers have never been my thing.

I hereby declare myself to be operating under Crocker's Rules. I have been doing so, implicitly, for as long as I can remember, but now it's explicit.

Blasting geometric figures to their constituent edges in a blaze of polychromatic glory upon a malleable blue grid floating in the black void of space may be more fun than it sounds. So yes, I've been playing a certain amount of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved lately. Some would say an insane amount. Others would say an appalling amount. I would say copious or ample or not enough. This game is just too challenging and fun to put down once you've tried it. Niels-Henrik (Aemanther) and I (Vossil) have also played Mutant Storm Reloaded's Tally mode something fierce, and are (at the time of writing) at 21st and 22nd place on the Xbox Live leaderboards, respectively. This means that we are the 21st and 22nd best players in the world. It's only an obscure arcade game, but who cares? :-P

Here's something I can do without: Reflexive idle European anti-Americanism. What I mean by this is Europeans who are idly and reflexively anti-American. I'm talking about you people who, whenever something, anything, about the US (or even vaguely related to it) is brought up, reflexively recoil in disgust and blurt out how much the US sucks, without specifying exactly what. Is it their foreign policy? Their president? The general citizenry? The culture? Their laws? Stop leaving me guessing like this, please, and just say what you mean without falling back on your reflexive anti-Americanism. Also realize that the US isn't a monolithic entity, and maybe you would sound less like a God damned idiot.

Let me take a moment to laugh at religious idiots: Ha ha ha! In particular, I want to laugh at Christian doomsayers relating to Tuesday: Ha ha ha! This Tuesday will be 2006-06-06, and the Rapture is near; all true Christians will transcend the flesh, ascend to Heaven, and have eternal joy by God's side, leaving non-believers behind. Let's just forget about the unfortunate fact that 1906-06-06 didn't happen. Or 1992-10-28 as predicted by Korean Christians. Or 1998-05-31 as predicted by Marilyn Agee. Here are my predictions for next Tuesday: Our planet will continue to orbit our local star, religionists will continue to believe weird things, and I will continue to mock idiots whenever the opportunity presents itself.

I've made a new and improved back end for my site. This means I can now manage key parts of my site (like adding, modifying, and deleting news posts) from anywhere in the world. (Well, anywhere with a computer and Internet connectivity, but this is a given.) It's also a lot more clean this time around. In other site-related news, I've linked to Google Earth Hacks from under my Google Earth link.

I applied to and was accepted into NITH. Woohoo!

Worked some more on the Gaming Glossary page and did a thorough typo-sweep across my site. Many were killed.

I should mention that Niels-Henrik bought an Xbox 360 some time ago. Coupled with his awesome projector, it's capable of 1080i. These two wonderful pieces of electronics are both his, but I'm given more or less unlimited access to it so long as he's not playing. What a sleek console! I especially like Xbox Live Arcade, games on which I've been playing an insane amount of lately. Xbox Live Arcade is like an emulator; you download trial versions of small games (even some coin-op classics like Smash TV) and can pay a trivial amount of money for the full game. The cost/entertainment ratio is insanely low. Games I've bought are Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved (you're a ship that shoots hoards of hostile geometric figures, all with different properties), Marble Blast Ultra (you're a marble that collects gems and avoids danger), Mutant Storm Reloaded (you're a ship on drugs shooting... mutants, I think), Wik and the Fable of Souls (you're a frog-man that saves little green creatures), and Bejeweled 2 (which should be familiar to anyone with an Internet connection). Upcoming games include Pac-Man and Sonic the Hedgehog. You know what would rock? Rayman HD, yeah.

I don't play much multiplayer except Marble Blast Ultra, but if anyone wants to play with me my gamertag is Vossil. I'd really like to try Halo 2 co-op.

My Links page has seen some updates. I was again bitten by the imaginary Half-Life bug, looked at the mods section, thought "Eeew", played through them, culled bad ones, added a good one (Visitors), rewrote it all, and took screenshots. The Exploration section, which is a celebration of virtual exploration, is also new. In addition I replaced dictionary.com's link with a link to Hyperdictionary because of dictionary.com's obnoxious ads. And because of Hyperdictionary's "hyper" qualifier, naturally.

Added an Invented words and phrases section to my Random page (it's actually been there for some time). Niels-Henrik is very literate and we have a lot of fun with words. It may be a little esoteric, but hey, it's called Random for a reason, isn't it?

Wing Chun is so fun. Training is hard, but not physically hard. The hard part is coordinating your movement, both with regards to yourself and your sparring partner. A neat thing about Wing Chun is that it's a so-called soft martial art, as opposed to a hard one (such as Karate). As such, getting hit in the face is like getting hit by kittens. Not that I have ever had a feline youngster impact me, but if that event were ever to take place, I am sure that the two would be roughly equal. And to think, I've not even touched the cool stuff, the stuff the advanced guys are doing.

Fuh-hay-nally finished reading the PvP archive in its entirety and linked to it. There's just so much.

These past days have been spent almost exclusively playing The Ur-Quan Masters. It's a port of the 1992 game Star Control 2, a space exploration/adventure/combat game. It's so freaking good. The dialog is rock solid, the controls are good, and even though there's a fair bit of grinding for minerals (at least in the beginning), it's totally rewarded by the sheer number of different species you meet and the tasks they give you.

I've read Starship Troopers. More are coming very soon, I promise.

Finished a little writeup of the Deus Ex series.

Behold my new Gaming Glossary page! You may consider it a companion to the Games page. As I say on the page itself, I'd really, really, really like to be corrected in all errors, minor or major; I'd hate to be the author of a poor glossary. (More example images for the definitions will appear.)

I bought and finished Tomb Raider: Legend. It actually stays true to the series while making gameplay more intuitive (especially after the flop that was Angel of Darkness). Miss Croft's movements are very Prince of Persia-ish, but then again, the areas she needs to traverse do require the moves. I love games that celebrate 3D space (curvaceous 3D space, yeah). There are also a heap of unlockables in the game, including outfits. I'm a sucker for virtual dolls, I guess.

Celestia is sort of a computerized orrery. Or an astronomy tool. Or perhaps an orbital plotter. I think I'll go with the umbrella term "cool". Be sure to download objects from The Celestia Motherlode for a more accurate and complete view of our beautiful universe.

I've linked to Hybridized (an insanely huge collection of free DJ mixes) and Press Start to Play (a web comic).

I finished two writeups for my Games page: Max Payne and Half-Life.

I fixed a couple of embarrassing typos on the Books page (and wrote a short summary of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), wrote a little about my political views, and threw together a little writeup of the Prince of Persia series. I think I'll finish writing about all the games I have in the pipeline before I start taking anymore screenshots from them (I get horrible framerates).

My StepMania skills are now probably better than they have any right to be. As an example, P8107 is no longer a challenge, and I can AA Lawn Wake IX. Proof:

Allow me to state again that you must play Ninja Gaiden (preferably the Black version). The controls are so responsive, the enemies so cleverly designed, the moves and combos so well balanced, and the weapons so well differentiated that you feel like you are Ryu. Did I mention that the game is insanely hard? Just keep at it; study the combos, the enemies' movement, and definitely try out all the weapons. And remember: Reverse Wind, Flying Bird Flip, and Block are your best friends.

I've started training Wing Chun Kung Fu, a martial art, and I really like it (see Little Idea Wing Chun). What sets it apart from other martial arts, apparently, is that it's close-range, focuses more on efficient techniques than aesthetics, and is supposed to be learned quickly (although I have no illusions about it being any easier because of that). In our training sessions we're divided into two groups: novices (of which I am naturally a part), and intermediate. It's wickedly fun watching the intermediates spar.

I'm still learning C++, but it's going to take some time before I can make anything useful in it. Here's a thing I don't understand: why is function prototyping and function defining done in two separate steps and not in one? For now, I've filed this little conundrum under Things That Will Make Sense in Context Later.

You should really, really, really play Ninja Gaiden (the 2004 Xbox version, not the 1988 NES one, of course). This game's combat system is so advanced, it's ridiculous. Everything just feels so right. You have to play it for some time to get into the controls, because button mashing absolutely does not work in this game. But once you've "mastered" (or become proficient with — the amount of things you can make Ryu, the protagonist ninja, do seems to have no end) the controls, you will most positively kick ass. Until the next boss, of course.

Speaking of ninjas, The Adventures of Dr McNinja is well worth a read.

In book news, I've read Hackers & Painters and Inversions. (Should I offload book-related news to the Books page? I'm a little skeptical to the idea of per-page news.)

I changed the styles a little bit to make things easier on the eyes. For instance, the underlining on headings is gone.

I added four new links to the Links page: Angry Zen Masters (a web comic), VGMix (a web site dedicated to remixes of video game songs), Loading-Ready-Run (incredibly funny sketches), and Ronald Fedkiw's simulations (amazing simulations of cloth and liquids, among some other things). In addition, all the links under the Online comics section now have images.

Go read Jeff Bigler's Tact Filters. It's so very true. Also go read John Walker's Trek's End, a sweet science fiction short story.

I've read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 2061: Odyssey Three, and 3001: The Final Odyssey.

Happy Winter-een-mas!

Perhaps monthly updates are a bad idea. I'll try to make it bi-monthly, at least.

I've added two new links to the Links page: Falling Sand Game, a fun but not overly realistic particle simulator for sand, water, salt, and other stuff, and Planarity, an insanely fun and addictive graph game. (I'm on level 12, but some of my friends, who shall remain nameless, are on higher levels than that.) I also added some more things of minute interest to the Random page.

Behold the new Parkour page! There isn't much content yet, but as with everything, I plan to fix this with time (in this case, I plan to practice more parkour as weather permits).

I only watched one anime series since the last update: Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid. I think it's an incredible improvement from the first season.

I continue to read books, of course, and I've finished Flatland, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and 2010: Odyssey Two.

Last weekend Even and I did a 24-marathon where we watched the entire first season. I really like this series. Here's what I've learned from it:

• You never have to say "good bye" or "talk to you later" when hanging up a phone. It's always implicit from context when a telephone conversation is to end.
• Females are laughably easy to abduct.
• Everyone has a goal they work actively towards, and you can be sure that their goals run perpendicular to your goals at least half the time.
• If you think you have the situation under control, think again. Even the most fool-proof plan will have at least one unexpected consequence when executed.
• Cameramen will film you from different angles, from the most awkward positions (like from the inside of a toilet stall). Oh, and tripods are non-existent.
• Kiefer Sutherland is a badass. And he has a damned sexy voice.
• If someone acts even a tiny bit suspiciously, that person is guilty of something. Otherwise, everyone behaves perfectly rationally and you need not suspect them of anything.

Allerca is my personal lord and savior (I'm allergic to cats). 2007 can't get here soon enough.

"Sweet little bumble bee,
I know what you want from me.
Dub-i-dub-i-du da-da,
dub-i-dub-i-du da-da.
Sweet little bumble bee,
more than just a fantasy.
Dub-i-dub-i-du da-da,
dub-i-dub-i-du da-da."