transcendental petroglyphs

Sunday, March 3, 2002

Day 7 of TheBeard™:
comment ()  11:14:49 PM

We've been giving our cat antibiotics in pill form. He hates it. Now he flinches every time we pet him. I kinda think we should stop giving it to him. It's for an ingrown claw that has since healed. I'm sure he doesn't need it anymore.
comment ()  10:34:13 PM

The season premier of Six Feet Under was on tonight. You can never tell fantasy from reality on that show. For example, in tonight's episode, Nate, who has a dangerous vascular condition in his brain, was discussing the situation with a doctor who clearly couldn't care less. At one point Nate freaks out and goes for the doctor's throat. It could happen. But a second later we realize it's just Nate imagining doing that. A previous episode had the best use of this device I've seen. David is giving an inspirational talk at his church (he is a deacon there) when he deviates from his notes to say something from his heart. After saying something particularly poignant the church breaks out in applause. Followed by total silence. We realize that the applause were David's imagination. It was a joke, actually. A lesser show would have had the exact same situation and the exact same applause, but they would have been real. But for Six Feet Under that would be too conventional and too silly. And really not realistic. People don't applaud in church. Do they? It's been a very long time since I've been to church :)
comment ()  10:31:18 PM

I'm looking at the log for amianduri.com and I see that I'm under fierce attack. If I were an NT server I'd be in big trouble. Fortunately, I'm not, so the attacks fall harmlessly. I see that there are some really entries from people looking at Lua Plugin. That's cool.
comment ()  8:52:48 PM

I just released Lua Plugin v1.0 to the world. I struggled all day to get it ready. I wanted to add support for IO so that things like write() and read() would work. But without horrible hacks it will take a bit of work. The problem is that Lua uses standard IO to do its IO. In other words, it calls things like fputs() and fgets(). I kinda wish that it abstracted the IO model such that UNIX-style IO could just be one option. Then I could easily plug in my own IO handlers. But alas, it is not to be. So to do it right such that any Lua scripts will work correctly, I will need either to hack luaiolib.c, or, register my own IO functions on top of the existing functions. Either way, it is going to be a bit of work.
I also plan to release the source. I've never released the source to anything I've written. I always release free software, but not the source. The reason I release free software is because I can't imagine anybody would really want to pay for it and therefore the price becomes a barrier to use. Let's put it this way, there will be three kinds of people: (1) people who don't care and won't pay, (2) people who do care and still won't pay, and (3) people who do care and won't use it. So basically two-thirds of my potential customers are either going to use the product guiltily, or not use it at all. I don't want that. I want people to use it without worry. Also, I don't want to worry about support. If I take somebody's money, they have a reasonable expectation that I will support them. But I may get bored and stop working on the thing. I've done that a lot. I don't want them to come back to me and say "I paid you so you better support me." Making things free eliminates that problem.
comment ()  5:46:48 PM

I'm reading a writeup about Six Feet Under in TVTimes the TV insert of the Sunday edition of the LA Times. My favorite line (so far) is "Our extras casting director says she has a waiting list of people who want to be corpses".
But the real reason I'm making this post is to comment on the use of dysfunctional in the phrase dysfunctional family. The story claims that the Fisher's are dysfunctional. But every story about a TV family calls the family dysfunctional. What the heck does that mean? What is a functional family? I don't think they exist in real life or on TV.
comment ()  11:39:44 AM

One of my favorite Japanese animated series is called Onepiece. It's about this young man named Ruffi and his friends who have set out to become pirates. Each of the friends is good at something. One is a master swordsman, one is a woman who knows geography better than anyone, one is a great chief who has killer kicks. It's hard to imagine what Ruffi himself is good at. He just seems like a silly kid. But, in fact, he is the most powerful of them all. He ate a gomu-no-mi, which as far as I can tell, is a very powerful rubber-fruit. Eating it turned Ruffi into a rubber person. He can stretch his body very far in many directions, much like Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four. He is also amazingly strong.
The best thing about the series are the stories. They are subtle and rich. They reveal their surprises slowly over many episodes.
I'm betting Onepiece won't ever make it to the US.
comment ()  8:29:27 AM

It seems American's only like sci-fi Japanese animation. So you get Gundam and Tenchi-muyo. Stuff like that. But there's a lot more kinds of Japanese animation than that. It's kind of like when people say "I don't like Japanese food". I've spent enough time in Japan to know that the Japanese love food. There are more different kinds of food in Japan than a person good reasonably be excpected to try in a lifetime. So when someone says "I don't like Japanese food" they are almost certainly referring to Sushi. And I guess when they say they don't like Japanese animation, they are probably referring to the sci-fi stuff that gets shown here in the States.
comment ()  8:21:07 AM

I woke up to find a comment from Jonathon Delacour in reference to my post about going to be ealier. Jonathon asks what time I go to bed and I replied thusly:
"I go to bed at around midnight and get up at about 6am or 7am. I blog much more than I watch television. That television thing was a joke. As if switching from computer to television will help me go to bed earlier than blogging. But I did end up watching TV last night. I found out that there's a lot of Japanese animation that's been dubbed into English on American television. And I watched enough of the Hollow Man to know that it is a silly movie. More on that later."
comment ()  8:17:18 AM