MiniGame (S.MG), October 2014 Statement
S.MG incoming and outgoing
Incoming
Outgoing
Description
Value
Description
Value
--
--
Total
0
Total
0
S.MG assets
Account
01.10.2014
Net change
31.10.2014
Cash
8`743.62204311
0.63443748
8`742.98760563
Tangibles
2.64191610
0
0
Intangibles and goodwill
55.44370278
0.63443748
56.07814026
Total assets
8`799.06574689
S.MG liabilities
Account
01.10.2014
Net change
31.10.2014
Shareholder equity
8`799.06574689
0
8`799.06574689
Total liabilities
8`799.06574689
S.MG has a total of 88`096`605 authorised shares outstanding. The total assets per share implied value is thus 0.00009988 BTC. The cash+tangible assets per share implied value is thus 0.00009926 BTC.
S.MG realised no operating revenue this period, and is not expected to realise operating revenue next period. The P/E implied value per share is thus 0 BTC.
S.MG has Special Stock Warrants outstanding, as follows :
#
Fingerprint
Shares
BTC
Par
1
6160E1CAC8A3C52966FD76998A736F0E2FB7B452
88`096`605
8`809.6605
1
2
AE3A51FA6C038A5B4D3FE80FBD7C5558DD9EFA14
10`850`000
1`302.0
1.2
3
5015BD3D0AE659C8B8632F31CF2950F23C844002
192`307
25
1.3
T
99138912
10`136.6605
1.0224
Provisional statement, will be considered accepted within 24 hours. Make any observations or corrections below.
Miscellaneous
Hey, do you know what bunch of pseudo-entrepreneurs tried to replicate MiniGame's success recently ? These schmucks : As IPO Fails, Breakout Gaming Plan A Bait And Switch.
Do you know what they omitted to mention ? That they were trying to replicate Minigame's success.
Do you know how they attempted to misrepresent themselves instead ? As innovators! That's right, the old "firstbiggestlargest" kiss of noobdom.
Business as usual.
« MPEx (S.MPOE) October 2014 Statement
Jardin Botanico Carlos Thays - Buenos Aires »
Category: S.MG
Sunday, 02 November, Year 6 d.Tr.
MiniGame (S.MG), November 2014 Statement
S.MG incoming and outgoing
Incoming
Outgoing
Description
Value
Description
Value
Game server
0.72559366
--
Total
0
Total
0
S.MG assets
Account
01.11.2014
Net change
30.11.2014
Cash
8`742.98760563
0.72559366
8`742.262011962
Tangibles
2.64191610
0
0
Intangibles and goodwill
56.07814026
0.72559366
56.803733928
Total assets
8`799.06574689
S.MG liabilities
Account
01.11.2014
Net change
30.11.2014
Shareholder equity
8`799.06574689
0
8`799.06574689
Total liabilities
8`799.06574689
S.MG has a total of 88`096`605 authorised shares outstanding. The total assets per share implied value is thus 0.00009988 BTC. The cash+tangible assets per share implied value is thus 0.00009923 BTC.
S.MG realised no operating revenue this period, and is not expected to realise operating revenue next period. The P/E implied value per share is thus 0 BTC.
S.MG has Special Stock Warrants outstanding, as follows :
#
Fingerprint
Shares
BTC
Par
1
6160E1CAC8A3C52966FD76998A736F0E2FB7B452
88`096`605
8`809.6605
1
2
AE3A51FA6C038A5B4D3FE80FBD7C5558DD9EFA14
10`850`000
1`302.0
1.2
3
5015BD3D0AE659C8B8632F31CF2950F23C844002
192`307
25
1.3
T
99138912
10`136.6605
1.0224
Provisional statement, will be considered accepted within 24 hours. Make any observations or corrections below.
Miscellaneous
Without going into too much detail, the general schematic for work organisation in this project was as follows :
Research available offerings and select a tech platform on which to develop the game.i
Create a number of test versions as part and natural byproduct of studying, adjusting and expanding the platform to suit our needs.ii
Release a basically playable, early version of the game - to be constantly improved throughout its lifetime.iii
Declare the game "gold", have players pay to continue playing.iv
The move from point 2 to point 3 above was originally scheduled to happen either right before Thanksgiving or right before Christmas, these being traditionally the right times to be releasing games. Unfortunately, as it is always the case, development has run long, and it is obvious now we won't be making either target. Rather than push and rush things I prefer the slower strategy of missing the window entirely, and coming out with a product better polished for the wait in the lull of early 2015.v
Contrary to what you might expect, it was not coding that presents the largest impediment to keeping schedules in this project - under the enlightened leadership of my longtime CTO software work is proceeding apace, generally even ahead of storyline and plot work, parts which I can just suck out of my pen directly!
Artwork, however, is an utter disaster. I have been fortunate enough to retain an actual expert doing a lot of 2D supportvi, but other than being somewhat on the expensive side (which I do not nor would ever begrudge an actual expert), there's a sharp limit on just how much material one pair of hands can produce, and moreover, not all work is fit for or should be done by experts.vii
The middle market, the people who are reasonably skilled but looking for an opportunity to prove themselves, and especially in fields you would expect are exactly central to a young man's heart such as 3D modelling, are in a situation so sorry as to defy any description. Such is the nefarious influence of the inept socialist stateviii : why should the young man of moderate ability work himself to the bare bone to achieve moderate success, when he can just sit at home and play reddit all day long, "changing the world" with the magical power of magical thinking while Nanny Fed pays for the groceries ?
But, throwing one's hands up in the air out of indignant displeasure at a world that emphatically fails to conform to expectation, reasonable or otherwise, is not the way of the businessman. Consequently, I am taking specific measures to remedy this defect in the fabric of the universe, as follows :
This thing, printed in lush 300 dpi resolution on A4 self-adhesive paper will be placed this coming week by the entryway to thirty or so local artschools here in Buenos Aires. And if that doesn't yield me at least a couple 3D modelers, I'm going to start kidnapping kittens and young maidens. Fair warning.ix
Other than graphic artists, ~ which by the way we still need, hello young people looking to matter in the world of tomorrow, this is your roll call ~ we also still need dedicated package maintainers, especially for the Windows platform, as described back in April. This is a paid position, see there and get in touch.
———Completed late June 2013. [↩]First release, displaying a lot of basics for public scrutiny, such as you know, the general look of a map, basic performance, stuff like that, July 31st, 2013. Three ulterior versions, each increasingly more developed, released throughout 2013 and early 2014. [↩]The proper terminology is unclear, but I guess this would technically be the move from alpha to beta ? [↩]Obviously inasmuch as Eulora will work on a Bitcoin basis, it will at no point be a "free game" in the sense this is generally understood by the people Naggum doesn't like. Nevertheless, there's a huge difference between a 0 EV casino and a - EV casino : while some people make more than they spend and some people make less than they spend in both cases, the operators only show a profit in the second case.
While it may seem to the common man a tempting proposition to skim all in-game activities to show a profit, this is not how Eulora will be managed. Instead, all in-game activities will be secularily neutral EV, with fees being extracted through a disclosed, isolated mechanism. In practice this will consist of requiring that all characters either eat or die - as you recall death in Eulora is permanent. The minimum amount of basic food required per unit time as well as its cost are easy to set so as to emulate what seems a reasonable 15-20 dollar per month subscription fee. [↩]Which is why this report is early - since there's not going to be any material changes in the financials, I prefer to release the information as the decision is made, rather than simply sit on it. [↩]Let's do that whole sneak peek thing, shall we ?
First off, iconic views of the 12 unique plants and the 24 unique animals to be populating the enchantedly magical world of Eulora (first off, obviously more stuff will be added over time) :
And here's a colage of details :
So that's 12 static models + 24 animated models + 6 models for player characters, all coming up to a lot of artwork that needs to be done. [↩]There's a reason 90% by surface of the classical frescoes were not actually painted by the masters the work is traditionally attributed by, and that reason is that it doesn't nor should it take a genius to put a button on a jacket, or draw a chair in the background and some curlicue on the side. [↩]From the logs :
mircea_popescu
if the Treasury were forced to convert the $1.4 trillion in short-term bills (on which it now pays an average interest rate of 0.056 percent) into 30-year bonds at the average rate it is now paying on such bonds (4.919 percent) the interest on that $1.4 trillion in debt would increase 88-fold.
This is wreaking untold havoc on the entire known world, incidentally. It's not just the disruption it WILL cause as it unwinds. That's the small part. The big part is the disruption it has already caused, and it continues to cause each passing day. Like the stuff discussed above re USG agency Red Hat, fucking up linux. EXACTLY the situation of the giant ruining a chair. Linux is a nice comfortable chair. After Red Hat is done sitting in it, it will perhaps be still usable. Maybe. Like the woman that delivered a baby hippo will still make a good wife. Add to that all the idiots living off "free money" that was GIVEN to them ("usg is making up money and giving it to redhat to implement its policies ; whereby control economy is now called "do-ocracy"), while selling themselves on and trying to sell everyone else on how they're "making a positive impact". The sheer amount of plain idiocy being imported into the software of the world by this avenue far exceeds all the idiocy that could ever be imported into openssh or the kernel. Because people do this, there's idiots whose careers are entirely constructed out of "advising start-ups", like undata is keenly aware.
undata Painfully so.
decimation In my opinion, USG's crimes are not 'active' in the sense that they scheme with redhat for evil - USG's crime is that if failed to use the resources and human talent at its disposal to advance the art of computing at all.
mircea_popescu There's nothing more corrosive to a state, and a society, and ultimately a culture, than fake money. It's the curse of fucking doom, you don't even need enemies if you got that.
undata It makes people unable to think!
decimation A very small part of the US population has any idea what it really means to economically run a business (turn a profit), and that part isn't in power.
mircea_popescu It's like nobody bothers to wish ill on the cancer patient. That's why Russia and China are not even remotely interested in a large scale war. Just wait the sarcoma victim out.
decimation Heh China is happy to buy the paper actually.*
undata I have literally screamed "We need to make money!" at multiple jobs before setting out on my own.
---
*Think about this. Why is it that your enemy is encouraging your actions ? Think good and hard on this topic. Why ? Did you buy Russia's paper back when it was a contender ? Did you buy its paper when it briefly ceased being a contender, in the 90s ? Are you buying it now ? Well... ? I'm sure it's all because Putin doesn't understand how the world works, is it now. [↩]We are also looking at either buying or simply reusing extant material that comes under an adequate license.
What will never happen, never, ever, no matter what, come hell or high water, is us paying a first world salary to anon peeps belaboring under the delusion that they're "artists", and in so being they're entitled to live off their "work".
Art is not tech, where you can live off your actual, positive, provable skills. Art is art, you live off your name if you live off it at all, and this is how you make a name for yourself. Bite the bullet already, because notwithstanding the pipe dreams coming out of the TV set and the nutty ego trips your senator is more than happy to lay out on you if it'll get the vote, there isn't a way out nor is there ever going to be a way out.
If Kim could suck up when she was nobody, so can you. I don't care how great your ass is - it certainly isn't as great as hers - and sure as syrup nobody gives a shit how great you think your ass is. It ain't.
Get busy pouring your soul into tangible shape for very little money. Today. Right now. While you're still young and still can do it, while I'm still around and sorta looking. Maybe it comes to something. Do not delay, that's a luxury you can not in any shape or form afford. There's barely going to be enough bread in the future for have-beens, maybe. Nobody is making any sort of plans for the could-have-beens. [↩]
« King's Bounty, the iPad reboot
Qntra (S.QNTR) November 2014 Statement »
Category: S.MG
Sunday, 30 November, Year 6 d.Tr.
MiniGame (S.MG), July 2014 Statement
S.MG incoming and outgoing
Incoming
Outgoing
Description
Value
Description
Value
--
--
Total
0
Total
0
S.MG assets
Account
01.07.2014
Net change
31.07.2014
Cash
8`744.89091807
0
8`744.89091807
Tangibles
2.64191610
2.64191710
0i
Intangibles and goodwill
51.53291172
2.64191710
54.17482782
Total assets
8`799.06574689
S.MG liabilities
Account
01.07.2014
Net change
31.07.2014
Shareholder equity
8`799.06574689
0
8`799.06574689
Total liabilities
8`799.06574689
S.MG has a total of 88`096`605 authorised shares outstanding. The total assets per share implied value is thus 0.00009988 BTC. The cash+tangible assets per share implied value is thus 0.00009926 BTC.
S.MG realised no operating revenue this period, and is not expected to realise operating revenue next period. The P/E implied value per share is thus 0 BTC.
S.MG has Special Stock Warrants outstanding, as follows :
#
Fingerprint
Shares
BTC
Par
1
6160E1CAC8A3C52966FD76998A736F0E2FB7B452
88`096`605
8`809.6605
1
2
AE3A51FA6C038A5B4D3FE80FBD7C5558DD9EFA14
10`850`000
1`302.0
1.2
3
5015BD3D0AE659C8B8632F31CF2950F23C844002
192`307
25
1.3
T
99138912
10`136.6605
1.0224
Provisional statement, will be considered accepted within 24 hours. Make any observations or corrections below.
Miscellaneous
Starting work with a promising modeler guy :
mircea_popescu ok so Kernel_Killer : i want six player models. a tall muscular guy. a short kinda gnomey-looking, dubious cutthroat sorta fellow. a tallish lanky warlock looking guy. old, mostly bald, strange moustache or goatee or something. with a tall colar.
mircea_popescu a brunhilda looking chick. a vamp looking slut. a cute sorta middle of the road chick.
mircea_popescu how long do you need to make em and how much you'd be looking to get paid ?
Kernel_Killer I draw a lot of concepts before anything is modeled, so no worries there :)
Also working towards a further release, which will be the 5th alpha. Windows binaries slowly coming along. Still looking for more people.
———The one year's worth of server space was finally used up. We'll probably get it for cheaper now. [↩]
« Please take your pills.
Let's pretend... »
Category: S.MG
Monday, 04 August, Year 6 d.Tr.
MiniGame (S.MG), August 2014 Statement
S.MG incoming and outgoing
Incoming
Outgoing
Description
Value
Description
Value
--
--
Total
0
Total
0
S.MG assets
Account
01.08.2014
Net change
31.08.2014
Cash
8`744.89091807
0.63443748 i
8`744.25648059
Tangibles
2.64191610
0
0
Intangibles and goodwill
54.17482782
0.63443748
54.8092653
Total assets
8`799.06574689
S.MG liabilities
Account
01.08.2014
Net change
31.08.2014
Shareholder equity
8`799.06574689
0
8`799.06574689
Total liabilities
8`799.06574689
S.MG has a total of 88`096`605 authorised shares outstanding. The total assets per share implied value is thus 0.00009988 BTC. The cash+tangible assets per share implied value is thus 0.00009926 BTC.
S.MG realised no operating revenue this period, and is not expected to realise operating revenue next period. The P/E implied value per share is thus 0 BTC.
S.MG has Special Stock Warrants outstanding, as follows :
#
Fingerprint
Shares
BTC
Par
1
6160E1CAC8A3C52966FD76998A736F0E2FB7B452
88`096`605
8`809.6605
1
2
AE3A51FA6C038A5B4D3FE80FBD7C5558DD9EFA14
10`850`000
1`302.0
1.2
3
5015BD3D0AE659C8B8632F31CF2950F23C844002
192`307
25
1.3
T
99138912
10`136.6605
1.0224
Provisional statement, will be considered accepted within 24 hours. Make any observations or corrections below.
Miscellaneous
There are a number of very exciting updates regarding Eulora this month. First off, day/night cycles :
Second, (one of two of) the crafting prize(s) have been claimed : Making My Eulorian Cake and Eating It ; Boxy and His Leaky Bottle.
It took a rather determined statistician about four days or so to play through, which quite flatteringly for MiniGame is significantly longer than the useful life of the vast majority of the modern iPad game.ii Apparently at least some people enjoy playing Eulora to some degree, which has me tickled pink.iii
Thirdly, the harvesting part of the crafting systemiv is just about ready to go in. Here's a sneak peak at how it will work :
Player wanting to harvest a resource - say herbs - equips a special herbing tool and goes looking for herbs. At any arbitrary spot on the map, player can activate his tool. This decays it, making the attempt have a cost. If the player is in a herb zonev a roll is made. Based on his skillsvi, the quality of his tool and other considerationsvii, what he finds is decided. If he finds anything at all, a special buildable marker is put up on the map.
This marker will require some materials some worktime/skills to build up, but once completed the player can take whatever raw materials he found.viii. A small find will basically work out as a small chest, however hitting a large enough resource will actually allow you to build a large mine, which will have its very own map. That's right : you build your mine, you go into the mine. You allow other people to go into your mine if you wish. Your mine, with your name on it. And you can tax them for working your mine. Or you can sell your claim so someone else develops it. Excited yet ?
There's not just herbalism (for herbs), lumbering (for woods), mining (for various minerals). There's also archeology, which fundamentally works as a way for the players to introduce dungeons into the game. Find it, "built it"ix, fight whatever horrors may be guarding it, loot it, tell your grandkids. Excited yet ? The general idea being not for a NPC to tell you the same tired old tale about how rats invaded his basement / ghosts are in his mine / goblins stole his farm. Instead, have an actual player looking desperately for other players to kill the god damned slimes in his mine claim so he can start taking the god damned scheelite out, god damn it all to heck!
Excited... yet ? Good, because there will definitely be at least one more. But you see, it won't be in the game to begin with. It will have to be discovered, by players. Just like most of the better skills, and most of the better blueprints. Who knew research is a skill, and who knew the intelligence of your game character can and will shape the game world ? Heh.
Fourthly, because we're not quite done yet, even though this will be a little more arid, technological sort of discussion : we're considering using a completely new, never seen before in any computer game login scheme. Upon registering an account, the player is required to provide a PGP public key. On each login attempt, the server will send the client a base64 blob encrypted to the corresponding key, which the player is to decrypt (such as by copy/pasting into a gpg session) and feed the client the resulting base64 string. That's the login.
The way this works under the hood is that the client silently XORs all outgoing and incoming communications with the respective blob (moving on to properly saltedx hashesxi thereof at certain intervals). The computing cost for this is minimal while the security benefits quite significant, making me wonder why is it that absolutely nobody implements this - it's not like the tools haven't been available for decades.
As a rough timetable, I fully expect point III above to be implemented this Autumn, which will mark the move from Alpha to Beta for Euloraxii. I am somewhat hopeful that point IV can be implemented this year, marking the game's official release.
Aren't you excited ? :D
PS:
chetty actually better than automating it, make people learn about building trust
You know there's going to be a Gribble NPC don't you.
———The significant drop in server expenses reflects chiefly the strengthening of BTC, we're paying slightly more than we did a year ago. Also, more professional artwork has been commissioned, so there's going to be expenditure related to that in the future. [↩]We're still over a degree of magnitude into the hole here, but I've done the math and all the needed technical analysis to be reasonably hopeful that sometime in 2016 players will have spent more man-hours playing the game than engineers, coders and designers making it, and I seriously intend to see three degrees of magnitude in our favour. For great justice! [↩]And in a rather typical manner, it seems it's already chock full of gotchas, which makes me so proud :D [↩]As you might recall we made the strategical decision to implement crafting first, fighting will come later. [↩]Yeah, you'll have to map the map. [↩]Yeah you'll have to find out which. The good part is that you'll know you're getting experience in the ones you have. The bad part is that you're probably missing some and won't even know which. [↩]Time of day and day of year may play a role, perhaps. Other factors may also play a role, perhaps. I hope you'll be having a lot of fun figuring it all out. [↩]They will be raw materials, will need drying or tincturing or whatever to make them usable, but that's a different story. [↩]More like, dig it up and build access to it, but anyway.
[↩]Say by adding the client IP in there, auto-locking any session to the IP it was initiated on. [↩]I'm thinking SHA-3 (SHAKE256), with something like 8kb of output. Anyone wish to suggest an implementation / make comments ? [↩]Expect a full reset at that point, and expect to have to spend a little Bitcoin to acquire game cash from that point forward. [↩]
« Operation TerrorStorm (oneoneeleventy)
BitBet (S.BBET) August 2014 Statement »
Category: S.MG
Sunday, 31 August, Year 6 d.Tr.
Miller's Crossing
Miller's Crossingi is a story of a perfect world, which also happens to be the world I was born into - but apart from that coincidence (for which I am quite grateful, obviously) there's really no connection between the two.
Byrne plays an Irish consigliere, which makes no sense as the Irish didn't do it that way, and moreover he's ungodly young for that position. His boss is a complete idiot who gives himself the lie within five minutes and keeps a girlfriend on bad terms. The girlfriend in question (Marcia Gay Harden) is about as plain old unattractive as you can get, and carries a strange hairy bird's nest on her head at all times - all of which works great for the role. The bad terms are that her brother's to be protected. Her brother's a rotten faggot, the exact historical trope that gave manham artists a bad name. Now whether this is because they were faggots or because of the oppressive circumstances of faggotry at the time isn't anyone's concern - the main point is that people didn't piss on fags because people were "ignorant" or mean or whateverthehell. People pissed on fags because Bernie Bernbaum.
Jon Polito is absolutely fantastic as the eye-tee underlying of Byrne's boss that meanwhile got too big. In fact, the opening scene, a confrontation between the mick and the greaseball, with their respective shadows, covering matters of, hell, I'm not ashamed to say it, ethics, the jungle and anarchy is so good I had to replay it. You've not seen acting of this caliber since Nicole Kidman was pretending to like Tom Cruise (or, I guess, that chick with the legsii Michael Douglas). Anyway, he's upset that the girlfriend's brother is chiseling his fixes, and did I mention the girl's also doing Byrne ? Then there's car chases, dead bodies, machine gun fire, the chief of police and the mayor (which, incidentally, are working in absolutely the only manner they may ever be allowed to work - so if you're into a public career watch this film twice and get it well into your head!) and eventually everybody's dead, pretty much. Which works out to the advantage of the donkeys, who unlike the wops have multiple spare lives.
The dialogue's well thought out and flows, the whole story makes sense - the Coens! yet for some inexplicable reason this isn't universally recognised as the best work of their entire career - which it unreservedly is. I suspect the problem is purely ideological, much like junior high kids don't want to read the books on the reading list, government employees don't like to watch the mandatory instructional videos for their chosen career.
Their loss. See this with a girl, wait for the scene about an hour in where Verna proposes Tom do or don't do on the grounds that he loves her, say "heh, he doesn't care enough". If she protests dump her, she's too stupid for this life.
———1990, by Joel and Ethan Coen, with Gabriel Byrne, Jon Polito, John Turturro. [↩]This one :
From Allure. [↩]
« BitBet (S.BBET) July 2014 Statement
That ain't the Maslow pyramid, yo! »
Category: Trilematograf
Friday, 01 August, Year 6 d.Tr.
Me at its finest
In memory of Vragnaroda
* Joe (~Joe@unaffiliated/joe) has joined #bitcoin-assets
Joe Hi, I am looking for investment for a startup! :) Some friends over at bitcoin-otc said this might be the right channel to find potential investors!
mircea_popescu Sure, lurk for half year or so.
Joe Half year? I'm sorry, I don't understand.
jurov Have you read the MPOE-PR forum post on bitcoin enterprises?
Joe No I haven't. Can you please link me?
mircea_popescu See either La Firma or Pro idiotas, which obviously means, people who have ideas. Ie, idiots depending on which level you're working on. Which I don't know because you just dropped here and started talking randomly.
Joe Thanks mircea_popescu.
jurov https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=124441.0 I meant this, but above applies too.
Joe Not a bitcoin business. But a social network. Im looking for investment.
jurov As soon as you want bitcoin investment, it *is* one.
Joe Oh, I see. Ok. WOT account as in World of Tanks account? :/
jurov ;;gettrust ughlol
gribble WARNING: Currently not authenticated. Trust relationship from user jurov to user ughlol: Level 1: 0, Level 2: 0 via 0 connections. Graph: http://b-otc.com/stg?source=jurov&dest=ughlol | WoT data: http://b-otc.com/vrd?nick=ughlol | Rated since: never
jurov ^ No, this one.
Joe Oh I see. I'm on localbitcoins.com, I have quite some good rep there. And if you're worried about who I am, and if I'm a fraud, I'll give you my real name, and you can google me! :)
nubbins` You may find that the barrier to entry is significantly higher here than many, many other places.
Joe Wow mircea_popescu you wrote one scary-ass post.
mircea_popescu Yw.
Joe Oh, I see. And I have to trade through bitcoin-otc or something to get some rep, otherwise nobody will be interested in investing?
mircea_popescu Well ideally you want to be known. You're not currently known. How you resolve this problem is entirely up to you, but sure, WoT helps a lot.
Joe I'm not known here. But in the security world, at least in India, quite a bit.i
mircea_popescu Yes, but you're not trying to deal with the security world of India, are you ? So you'll have to somehow bridge these.
Joe I agree. But the real question seems to be identity. Because neither did you ask for my idea to judge. You obviously wonder where your investment will go to. And I understand that, I've seen many fraudsters as well.
jurov Just lurk and you'll certainly find out something to offer and gain rep. WoT is not meant for -otc trading only.
Joe Oh. I see.
chetty Sit on the actual idea while you get to understand how best to pitch it here.
Joe Now I understand why the rich get richer and poor get poorer! :)
mircea_popescu There is no such thing as "an idea".
Joe Of course there is. Imho. Nobody trusts in individuals with ideas anymore and that sucks :( Looks like I'll never get investment for anything. Have to do a stupid engineering degree and get a stupid job.
mircea_popescu Well a constructive approach is always more indicated.
Joe Constructive approach how?
mircea_popescu As in read those two things, do what you're told, take the time to do it well. Finance is a profession, not something happenstance like picking up a coin you found in the bus station.
Joe I can't understand how investors dont understand that a two man team can't make a very great app, not in the desired timeframe. They say that they'll invest when they see a prototype.
mircea_popescu Try understanding this part : nobody cares. The world isn't structured so as to make it possible for you to survive.
Joe Yeah. I agree :( And thats just so sad.
mircea_popescu Why is it sad ? I happen to think it's great.
Joe Its sad for people that want to do something but cant.
mircea_popescu Fuck them ?
Joe Im one of them! :)
mircea_popescu Tell me, do you like girls ?
Joe Yes, I do lol.
mircea_popescu Okay. Do you like girls generally or do you like pretty girls ?
Joe I like pretty girls...
mircea_popescu Me too.
Joe Haha.
mircea_popescu So here's the scoop : if we don't kill the ugly ones, they will slowly multiply and take over. We don't want that, so, unless she's pretty, she's screwed. (Otherwise, she's fucked).
Joe Omg. You're right.
mircea_popescu Which i suppose is very sad for the ugly girls, except nobody gives a shit what ugly girls think on any topic.
Joe Thats true. :O OMG
mircea_popescu So then there you go. Same applies.
Joe That makes so much sense.
mircea_popescu Yeah, it makes so much sense, because you told me you're from India and I knew how to construct it. If I didn't know that it'd have never made sense. Which is the fucking point here. We gotta know you in order for anything you say to make any sense. Which is why there's no such thing as "an idea".
Joe Yeah, you're right...
mircea_popescu (Ask all these other dudes who live in Western countries, the entire girl thing makes 0 sense to them, for instance.)
Joe Hmm. I wish I was born elsewhere, the economy in India sucks so bad. And Indian investors dont give a shit about anybody :( Thanks for enlightening me mircea_popescu. Honestly, I first thought you were some random guy full of ego and trolling me. I'm sorry about that.
mircea_popescu That's ok, you're not the first one.
———Does this sound at all familiar ? [↩]
« Google : exploring the bottomless pit of irrelevance, since 2004 or so.
"You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." »
Category: Trilterviuri
Friday, 14 March, Year 6 d.Tr.
Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinettei manages to cast the French Revolution, and by its proxy Revolution generally, as what it actually is : the monstrous rebellion of all that is base and despicable in mankind against all that is right, noble and just.ii Because with or without a god, an eternal life of the soul, the fiction of divine providence and all the rest of that jazz, in any practical differend scum will always prevail - nature thus works and in no other way.
And, as the story of the film recounts and as the story of the world confirms, that rebellion of the scum can only be followed by further division of the victorious scum, in scum-as-it-was and scummier-scum-than-before, which leads of course to a new revolution, which leads of course to a new low and further progress in scumminess, soon to be followed by scum-even-scummier-than-the-scummiest scum, and so again, ad infinitum. So nature works, always towards decay.
Amusingly enough, revolution always sees itself, and always casts itself as quite the contrary of all that, and amusingly enough in point of fact this is true, locally. Right ossifies, and noblesse obliges, and just confounds. Their company is unhealthy, they are abstractions unfit for the contact of people, and soon enough they who were in their right and noble and just become mere charicatures of what they used to be, clinging on to the memories, to the symbols, to the stories. Stories they are barely able to articulate, stories which in their rightful enunciation, in their just retelling seem outrageously out of place and unbearably perverted. All continuation ends in parody.
If you are old enough perhaps you will understand this : there is, somewhere, a woman you once loved whom now you barely know, there are somewhere children whom you once loved whom now you barely know, there are strewn all over the place things you loved, and were good at, and understood and which sung under your able hands. And now... you barely know.
And so in this sense, your very own death, as the overthrow, base, despicable, of all that once was right and noble and just is nothing but an act of justice, and most definitely in the right. You still have the promises, in writing, you still have the certificates, on the wall, you still have the pictures, to fill the growing night in your memories. And yet...
This is the way it goes.
Take solace, if you can, in the full, round knowledge of the plain, banal fact that if you understand what I'm talking of... why... you are already dead. It just so happens you don't know it yet.
You didn't know it, yet.
———The 1938 cannonical version, not the current monstrosity. By Van Dyke, With Norma Shearer, John Barrymore and Henry Stephenson (who plays Florimond de Mercy[-Argenteau, step-grandson of the famous general], not "de Mercey" as various websites misquote). [↩]To an incredible degree, no face in the crowd is cleanly shaven, no member of the public appears sober, dispasionate, you'd think Goya did the casting for this thing. Doubly remarkable an arrangement for a place which has always - and quite unreasonably, at that - glorified revolution. [↩]
« One for the ages : Why does Seinfeld continue to do ad work ?!
No Woman's Land II »
Category: Trilematograf
Friday, 03 January, Year 6 d.Tr.
List of what to do while you're awaiting drone attacks armed with extradition bombs and other weird forum shit :
1. Get reasonably well cooked ;
2. Take weird pictures of surroundings.
I'm just saying. Theoretically speaking.
I honestly think this is what my penis *feels* like.
That bit of Romanian reads `We don't have wifi. Speak among yourselves.`
As you can see this article is very tall.
« Obama-Clinton, or the end of the republic.
Fred Quimby and ancient evils »
Category: Zsilnic
Thursday, 03 April, Year 6 d.Tr.
Life's lemons, a list of steps
Step I. On September the 13th I wrote an article explaining why am I going to kill Reddit, and how.i
Step II. On September the 24th, I hear on irc that righteous indignators be leveling threats of DDoSing and other nefarious business! So upon reviewing the logs of Trilema it turns out that it had been in fact attacked! Twice!
The first attack came on the 19th, and it was piddly, probably a kid with his 500 strong botnet trying to bring down wordpress through reloading pages or something. As you can see it barely registered on the dial, but then again how's random derp to know half a GB is peanuts here at the core of the Internet, where The New York Times comes for inspiration and cribbing material ?
The second attack came on the 24th, in the shape of a Wordpress pingback amplified DDoSii. It also didn't do anything notable, Trilema was online throughout. The attacker was diligent however, using a somewhat lengthy (tens of thousands) list of vulnerable blogs, and reusing them rarely (less than once an hour). Practically speaking, the only actual effect of this was an inflation of apparent unique visitors as far as Awstats is concerned.
The third attack came on the 28th, in the wake of frustration, desperation and ridicule endured also on irc. This time fewer blogs (thousands) were used intensively (thousands of times each) making it reasonably easy to blockiii, and that was pretty much the last we've ever heard of this "Reddit police" thing/dorkery.
Step III. The following day I went on the counteroffensive. I created a one line fix for the vulnerability that allows this particular form of DDoS to happeniv, I created a static html page describing the problem and the fix, I extracted the list of blogs involved in the attack and I proceeded to send them a pingback notifying them of the problem, and in the same pass providing proof that it is in fact a problem. So they can fix it, and in the process learn a thing or two about Automattic (and hopefully the rest of the bezzle world).
I received tons of email, some from people thanking me, a majority from people completely confused as to anything and everything, beginning at "how to ask a meaningful question" or "what to do when something happens". The list's not done yet (I'm trying not to DDoS myself while doing it, obviously), but here's a nice illustration covering the second half of September :
Depicted in that screencap : first attack, no effect. Second attack, lots of visits (ie, different IPs), very few pages and proportionally even fewer hits (ie, the various resources loaded to compose a page). Third attack, fewer apparent visits (Awstats doesn't count banned/bot IPs, obviously), a shitton of pages and hits (because the few IPs that didn't hit often enough to get blocked hit again and again and again). Then once I started pinging people, a lot more hits than the sum of all the attacks, and while their behaviour isn't exactly in line with the average behaviour of the Trilema reader in terms of time spent on site, they're slowly getting there.
In conclusion : not only "Reddit police" fails miserably at its stated goal, but this has been by far the best exposure Trilema ever got to this dayv.
And if you're in an accounting mood : it took me a coupla hours' worth of derping with awk and sed to extract the list, five minutes to save a html copy of the article and the whole shebang's been running in bash ever since (and no, it's not done yet - not nearly done yet).
So, how much do you pay your preferred selection of swindlers per click ? 10 cents ? Because the ~200k uniques I'm seeing over here so far would then put my hour's work well over 20 Bitcoin (which is just about right, which is kinda why I've bothered with this in the first place), and I can guarantee in any format you prefer that this is better traffic than whatever crap doubleclick, facebook, reddit, gawker or whoever else is selling you. Way better.
I said it before, but it bears repeating : Today is the International Day of Remembering How Mircea Popescu Is Better Than Me and related observances.
———I have a history doing that kind of thing, perhaps of most interest to this crowd being the untimely death of Reddit's own coin, the Doge. Or else the death of Reddit's own retard, Andreas Derpenstockulous, Grand Shill of Allthescams. Or other things. [↩]If you're curious about the details, there's an amply documented, very detailed field report available. [↩]DDoS nullroutes work kinda like shadowbanning : the attacker figures he's successful, the rest of the interwebs dunno wtf he's on about nor do they care. [↩]Something that has been reported in the "tech" media back in April and has otherwise been known for years.
And yet... nobody over at Shittenweg's "Code is Prostitution" Palace has so far managed to fix that steaming pile of doo-doo they sing lieds over. They claim it's fixed, of course, but if you review the logs of the attack you'll notice virtually all the blogs involved are 3.x and 4.0, releases after the one where the issue was supposedly fixed. [↩]For comparison, back in March when I was all over the "tech" press with the OpenBSD story, the traffic bump was about a tenth this. Think about it : the combined might of the oh-so-important "media" is barely a tenth of a lemonade! [↩]
« MPEx (S.MPOE) September 2014 Statement
Here's a great SF premise »
Category: Meta psihoza
Thursday, 02 October, Year 6 d.Tr.
Let's pretend...
Let's pretend that you are truly rich and successful, not as compared to your peers or immediate social circle but absolutely. You are a Kissinger of our time, you are one of those few with direct access to the corridors of power. You're Tom Reagan in Miller's Crossing, perhaps minus the fat lip : even if you don't directly make the big decisions, nevertheless you were there when they were made. There, in the room. You know the people making them intimately, you saw their lip quiver as they said it, you know how much whiskey they had that night. You're just one of them, come and go as you please.
How would your life go, then ?
Well, today, it would go like so :
mircea_popescu ;;ticker
gribble Bitstamp BTCUSD ticker | Best bid: 590.41, Best ask: 590.55, Bid-ask spread: 0.14000, Last trade: 590.55, 24 hour volume: 3551.13147998, 24 hour low: 581.8, 24 hour high: 595.7, 24 hour vwap: 587.842223463
mircea_popescu This is liek teh largest battle of our times.
ThickAsThieves You mean the congested price?
mircea_popescu Yeah.
ThickAsThieves We're in between two very old trendlines. It'll have to resolve this month.
mircea_popescu The gambit being that if they manage to get Bitcoin price to behave like gold price, Bitcoin will essentially behave like gold, and fail in its mission, even though it in principle could have succeeded. Much like gold had succeeded for a long long time.
ThickAsThieves But gold is already "adopted". Bitcoin would eat at that and grow.
mircea_popescu The beauty of this being that they aren't going to succeed, but letting them try is so god damned productive and enriching.
mike_c I have a gut feel about why you are right, but I'd love to hear you expound on it a bit. If nefarious forces are shoveling money at BTC to suppress price, why will this fail? Bitcoin is currently small. You think they just won't be able to keep it up and eventually price will explode?
mircea_popescu I'm writing it up.
mike_c Ah, good.
Doesn't make all that much sense, does it. Let's then pretend further. Let us pretend you are not merely rich and successful, but also privileged. Quite, quite privileged. When the other kids had to take the bus to school your very own chauffeur drove your very own Rolls Royce, and during lunch break as all the kids your age shoved themselves in a rough cafeteria you sat down at Chez Victor, across the room from the Minister of Commerce. Suppose everyone called you Master since you were about three, to the point that pretty young things doing it today sort-of teary eyed barely even registers. What would you do then ?
Why, you'd go ask granpa, of course. "Gramps, what does it all mean ?", taking advantage of the convenient happenstance that you're the only tween in the known universe that may directly address the ex prime minister with a curt "Gramps", while the man's wearing just his longjohns. And he'd tell you.
You see son, the way gold works is that all of it is being held by governments. Because gold is physical, and being physical and valuable means it has to be guarded. Only governments have the means to properly store gold, as they've managed to weasel themselves into the position where they only may shoot someone on sight.i Because of this, all the sellers of gold and all the buyers of gold are governments. In this situation, keeping the price of gold at any arbitrary level you wish is a trivial task, merely borrow from one government and sell in the market. It'll end up with another government, from which you can borrow it again, and sell again. You can in fact borrow every ounce of gold not ten times, and not ten thousand times : an infinity of times. Gold held in this manner will never run out, for the purpose of suppressing the market in gold. And so also for this reason, gold price will never tell the shameful story of your profilgacy, of your ineffectual expenditure. Which isn't the important part. The important part is that gold will never allow a third party to leverage these into their own power and unhinge you from your seat.
The gold standard used to be the primary means through which the aristocracy got rid of weak or stupid monarchy, which is how the Magna Charta got to be in the first place, which is how German liberty existed for so long in the first place against the miserable pretensions of European Unionism put forth by the HRE. But no more any of that, without the ability to hold your gold and defend it.
Bitcoin is like gold, except it doesn't need any defending. It defends itself quite naturally. Bitcoin is like gold however in that it will definitely allow a third party - any interested third party in fact, an infinity of them if it comes to it - leverage the inept idiocy of the powers that be against them, and use it as leverage to unseat them. It not only will, it presently does.
Six weeks ago I let the public know what we had been doing for eight or so. This is why the enemy wants people it controls to hold Bitcoinii and this is why the enemy allied units are all net sellers of Bitcoin, not holders. They may be advertised as holders, for the obvious reason (id est, that if a major holder publicly sells perhaps the downdraft may be larger than his actual impact - god knows that when I move the entire world wants to move with me) but that's about all.
So let's examine how this thing works in practice. There's 10k unmet demand on the market. What could happen ?
mircea_popescu ;;market buy 10000
gribble Bitstamp | A market order to buy 10000 bitcoins right now would take 6302846.6123 USD and would take the last price up to 665.0500 USD, resulting in an average price of 630.2847 USD/BTC. | Data vintage: 118.0073 seconds
That's no good. So you borrow 10k Bitcoin and sell it, to meet that demand. All is well. For how long ? Your friends can't be buying it, if they were buying it they'd actually offset your borrow. So they're slowly running out. Half hour, or half day, or half week later, again. And you get to all along live in fear that one day there's going to be a
mircea_popescu ;;market buy 500000
gribble Bitstamp | This order would exceed the size of the order book. You would buy 18670.792 bitcoins, for a total of 18722522.1011 USD and take the price to 99999.9900. | Data vintage: 0.0322 seconds
All it takes is for you to miss your 10k window TWICE and there it goes, all over 99 thousand. Mission Failed.
All it takes is to miss twice. Can you feel the sweat yet ? Do you know yet why all the dumbass "give us your Bitcoin" schemes seem to be able to attract an infinity of good press, endless claims of financial backing and generally speaking all the trappings of power ? It's simple, really : the second time the talk artists "in power" fail to come up with the rent for that apartment in the tower of power they currently occupy, schllllt goes the guillotine blade. The second time. Most urban poor people live in more forgiving conditions than this.
I hope you're appreciating the shit these poor people have to put up with just for a few more minutes of the charade. I know plenty of people that are quite happy with all the piles of worthless paper they're paying for the privilege. How long will it last ?
Bitcoin is not like gold in that one fundamental way that it is secure to hold. Claimed insecurity, a manufactured general impression of insecurity are not the same, nor can they actually substitute for genuine insecurity.iii As a result, the lords will hold it, and as a further result the king has to fellate the lords. Not the other way around, emphatically not the other way around. So, are you getting good enough blowjobs ? Make sure you do, missing out the actual party because you were too busy swimming in words and phrases is the surest way to end up a bitter old man. Have fun now!
There you have it, now you're one in the know. The most closely guarded secrets, the stupid shit dispensed on a "need to know basis", as if it were holy fucking bonbons or something - there you have it, have fun with it. The difference between actual power and the pretense to power is that actual power does not actually need, nor really want, all the infantile feminine covetous secretive whispery bullshit. I don't need to pay and threaten people to keep quiet, I conduct business in a logged public channel. I don't live in fear of one day someone telling someone else what I said about whom and what I did to what. They do. They do, and in spite of any entreaties, in spite of any fences, in spite of any threats and shitfits and anything else, I still know everything that's worth knowing going on over yonder walled fence.
It's not that information wants to be free. It's that people want good masters, and the universe was not made to be ruled over by women, or in womanly ways. It's that while day follows night as soon as night follows day, nevertheless as long as the Sun is in the sky it doesn't matter if the moon also shows up. Not like it's going to go all dark suddenly, because o lo! the moon. That's all, really : daybreak, time to pack it and go home.
———This is actually quite very important. A hundred years ago, owners of valuable stuff had the right to shoot people messing with it, which led to things such as the (legitimate) shooting of striking workers, if they got sabotage-y. Naive social theorists a la Webber restated the social contract in terms of a "monopoly on violence", either willingly or unknowingly ignoring the point that once one gets a monopoly on violence, immediately that same one becomes the only repositor of gold as the underpinning of currency, because no one else can any longer properly hold it. This implication leads directly to the corrupt, inflationary bureaucratic state of today, but who among you then saw through the smoke ?
This is why you need elites, incidentally, and this is why you need masters. As great democracy may be to choose what women should wear and how often to have porridge, it's god damned awful at any seeing through whatsoever. Smoke or an infinitesimally thin layer of colored plastic or oil spread over water : whatever it is, democracy can't see through. [↩]And so this is why its moles in the self-identified "Bitcoin core dev team" have been working overtime to try and make Bitcoin holdings ultimately controllable by their ultimate masters. And so this is why my publicly announcing that the SR stash will go to someone pliable caused such an embarrassment over at Fort Meade to the degree they can't even announce the "auction" winner anymore. Oh, "they never said they will", right ? Herp. If they weren't going to they'd never have made such a big deal of the supposed "auction" in the first place, it was supposed to be a tool in this arsenal and it backfired miserably. It backfired miserably because I said so, think for a minute what that implies about the power differential on the field. The actual field, such as it is. Who throws monkey wrenches in whose hopes and aspirations ? So who's the boss ? [↩]It would have almost worked, maybe, had Hearn's melding of heartbleed into Bitcoin actually stuck. Nobody expected then that their refusal to publicly behead him will actually yield a bullet straight into the head of their most beloved puppy. And it was so cute, too! [↩]
« MiniGame (S.MG), July 2014 Statement
WarOfLife (S.WOL), July 2014 Statement »
Category: Zsilnic
Monday, 04 August, Year 6 d.Tr.
Let's invent a new game!
It all started as all good things start these days : on irc.i
cads Hey guys, are you familiar with the multi-armed bandit problem?
mircea_popescu Yes.
moiety I thought most bandits had multiple arms.
mircea_popescu It's a formulation of the explore/exploit dilemma.
cads moiety: A one armed bandit is a slot machine, while the multi-armed bandit problem considers the best play in a situation with multiple slot machines with uncertain odds.
mircea_popescu Like suppose you're naked outdoors circa 4500 bc, and very hungry. You find a bush with berries. How long do you spend grazing and when do you leave looking for more bushes ?
moiety When you have collected them all from the first.
mircea_popescu Yes well, it gets more complicated than that.
moiety I know sorry I couldn't resist.
mircea_popescu God forbid someone marries you.
moiety I think we can all safely assume thats not going to happen.
mircea_popescu Attn all present JPM bankers: the girl won't leave till she's bled you dry!
moiety LOL!
mircea_popescu heheii.
asciilifeform Re: multi-armed bandit: http://lalandlab.st-andrews.ac.uk/tournaments/tournament1/sociallearning.html This is old news; 2nd tournament is mostly done now, too.
mircea_popescu Basically the appeal of Civ was exactly this.
asciilifeform Contest inspired by Axelrod's prisoner's dilemma tournament.
mircea_popescu You know this inspires me ? One could formalise the problem with strings.
asciilifeform They sorta did.
moiety That's just along the road from me!
mircea_popescu Hear me out : you define actual words in the dictionary as "good stuff", and each player gets a selection of poems to complete. Words themselves are worth points, filled lines are worth more points, filled poems even more. Then you give everyone strings, and they can read one char at a time for a cost. Or skip the string, for a larger cost. Obviously player can only eat a word if the whole word has been read.
asciilifeform This sound like fun, but the contest was a robot-writing one rather than between players directly. The final reports are worth reading.
mircea_popescu Yes yes! You have to write the scripts for this, I was just describing what your bot is supposed to do. Well not your "your". One's.
asciilifeform What's the goal? To reproduce the poem before the other players?
mircea_popescu Get most moneyz. The key here, of course, being that the strings are not all created equal. Each string has its own per-character entropy, from epsilon to 8-epsilon.
asciilifeform 'Read one character at a time'
Thursday, 20 February, Year 6 d.Tr.
Let's clarify some things
One :
Two :
Three :
The first thing we are to clarify is that I sometimes dump information on various hashtags idiots follow so that those idiots may hear of it.
The second thing we are to clarify is that such generosity on my part is not to be misconstrued as a blanket license to create a post on reddit which fails to mention where you got your information from, and then come back and dump it on twitter way later as if you heard about it on reddit. I understand this is how you steal images and whatever else you steal on the web, but the only reason that works is because you are small and insignificant.
So the third thing we are to clarify is that for as long as you continue eating my shit in the closet, you will never amount to anything. Specifically, you will never be either big or significant. This doesn't only go for the poser behind @Bitcoin. This goes for the posers behind the Bitcoin Foundation, and generally the large population of peasants who imagine that by breaking off a clump of town wall and running with it back to their god forsaken village they will somehow one day grow it into a town. This is not how towns grow into towns, ye retards.
Towns grow into towns by cultivating their relationships with their metropole, not by running off with some brick / shred of the holy veil / piece of wood from the cross. Can you strain your ganglions posing as brains to the degree you get it ? Hm ?
It really isn't all that hard.
PS. And it is really nubbins that noticed it in the first place!
« Orlov is wrong, and other stories.
Bitcoin was written by the retarded, part II »
Category: Meta psihoza
Monday, 24 February, Year 6 d.Tr.
Let me tell you a few words about this usability business
Many moons ago, back when computing power was still rare and therefore expensive, or vice-versai, there existed a program which ran for a day or five and output a visual model of a complicated object, which visual model could then be printed, or drawn and hung up on the wall. The existence of both the software in question and the hardware it ran on was for its time and place a great accomplishment, and there was much rejoicing.
After the rejoicing however came the observation that the utility of this accomplishment is really only as great as the sum use it's put to, and so an effort to make it usable began in earnest, and carried on diligently. I will not bother you with all the details save one : originally, the program output the model whole. Soon enough it was observed that this is not necessary for all applications, and moreover omitting the smallest bits significantly speeds things up. So a bit was added to the interface, allowing the operator to enter into the soup a tolerance size past which he didn't care about how things looked. It seemed sensible at the time (tm) for this to be a volume, like all other volumes involved in the whole shebang. And so it was a volume.
The way computers worked at the time, they were much too holy to be touched with people who did anything else with their lives but touch computers (and really it was best form if you wore a white coat and thick rimmed glasses!) and so an operator had to get a slip listing these three, along with whatever other specifications and put it all in. Programmers back then were math people, and everyone hates typing, and so it came to pass that for unexplained reasons (tm) the volume was entered as a length, on the general concept that any length's a cube and anyone can do Cardano by hand (can you ?).
Obviously for that slip to exist an end user somewhere had to fill it up. Now it turns out at this juncture that humans are pretty awful at evaluating volume. In most cases what they do is try and multiply together three estimates of length, which are usually not terribly accurate relatively - and for that matter not often given in the same units of measure - then root this thing, and then be wrong. So a very bright guy came up with a very bright solution : take out the "volume" and put in weight. That's right, not even "mass", to the horror of the few theoretical physicists working in the building. Instead of asking the user if it's okay to omit anything smaller than a breadbox ; and instead of asking the user roughly the equivalent of modeling a breadbox in his head, how about just ask him what's the largest weight he can drop on his foot at that scale and not care.
Now that, my dear friends, is was usability. Not is, because such seems scarcely a thing of this world anymore, where one takes a theoretically ideal but practically awkward interface and turns it into a practically more convenient thing that is still an exact homologue. What's a thing of the world these days is misrepresenting usability as user comfort, and trying hard to insulate the user from any functionality of the underlying code that he may hurt his fluffy, innocent hopes and aspirations upon.
So now let's take a short break and consider a different matter. It goes like so : The niggers (defined as : any human beings of skin darker than fair) of 1`500 AD were a destitute, worthless savage bunch inhabiting a shithole continent. Some heart bleeding liberals of the 16th and following centuries went to the trouble of buying poor young African boys that were being held in slavery by their kinsmen in said shithole, taking them across the seas to the Americas at great risk and expense - yet free of charge! - and in conditions similar to standard business practice at the time. Often, in fact, in the very same ships that carried their own kinsmen, perfectly white, poor folk. These transported niggers were held to work among the civilised folk, with tools of such an advanced nature that never in their life would they have ever seen such marvels of technology had they continued in the shithole of their birth, and in due time acquired at least some semblance and form of human civilisation. Some were even taught letters, or given the extreme unction and so bearing the greatly superior white man's offspring. All this ensured that the black folk in question survive, and strictly for the reason of this generous transportation are black people today still a thing. If it weren't for this very generous, selfless act of their benefactors, it is beyond probable that black skin would be in about as much currency today as red skin is - you'd know all about it, from books.
Does the foregoing paragraph offend you ? Why is that ? It is both correct and historically accurate, after a fashion. That fashion being pandering, of course, which is exactly what you are doing when you misrepresent "usability" as "comfortability", chiefly understood as "no user should ever find out more about how stupid he is through interacting with our program than he knew aforehand".
So next time you wish to say something about "usability" understood as GUI-derpitude, bear in mind that what my eyes see of your comment is exactly "niggers... destitute... shithole... civilised... unction... survive... generous transporation... selfless act... benefactors".
You dig ?
———As a point of formal ability (as the concept of form is discussed say here), you should be able to establish which statement is correct. So, should I have said "rare and therefore expensive" ? Or should I rather have said "expensive and therefore rare" ? Which is it ?
Note that inasmuch as you believe form is a thing, you may not cop out of that dilemma, neither pretending it doesn't matter, nor pretending it's "relative" (I have yet to see an apple in nature which came in a "relative" shape : if you regard it from upside it's a cube, if you're underneath however it's a tetrahedron), nor pretending "they're both right" as is currently fashionable (not that the other two weren't fashionable in their time) and so on.
So there you go : form is not a thing because if it were, this article could have never been written, its author never able to progress past its opening sentence much in the manner of Flaubert getting stuck on temperature. And since we're on the topic : perhaps the explanation for some of your very own articles not existing is related. [↩]
« MPEx (S.MPOE) August 2014 Statement
The Human Stain »
Category: Gandesc, deci gandesc
Wednesday, 03 September, Year 6 d.Tr.
Let me give you ideas
This time I have two.
Idea one. The shoplift shop. Outfit a shop like a self-serve 7/11, fill the shelves with crap, have a guy sorta idly walk around now and again while spending most of his time on a chair and a coupla people behind a desk in a corner. Desk which remarkably supports no cash register whatsoever. In fact, there isn't a cash register to be had anywhere in the place.
So how people pay ? They don't. To get stuff out of your shoplift shop they have to... steal it. Obviously if the attendants catch on the thief gets humiliated and made to drop his goodies, but otherwise if you make it past the door, that's it.
You could sell tickets to this thing, say 20 bucks a pop (or whatever, 19.95) and run it essentially on the principle of an all-you-can-eat buffet for cheap plastic colored crap and cheap trills. In exchange for the ticket, your customer receives a firm promise he won't be prosecuted for theft, and the right to take home whatever he may manage to carry out on their person.
Contrary to how it may superficialy seem, this is easily +EV for you. PVC is something like five bux a kilo and you can make a lot of volume out of a kilo of PVC. Just make sure your entry fee is large enough to repel would be invader bums (the MPEx model) and you should be turning a slight profit (plus a lot of milfs trying to relive their the best years of their life, back in highschool).
Idea two. This one is quite antisocial (har har) and patently obvious, so it's really a poor reflection on the collective intelligence and assembled creativity of scammers as a group during the past five centuries or so.
What you do is you sell a special pill which increases the effectiveness of any other pill. What do you mean this can't be done ? Of course it can, here's the case of Mary from Worchestershire. What do you mean it'll be illegal in five minutes flat ? OF COURSE it would be, assholes in power don't want people to save on their medical bills - and how expensive medicine is "of late"! What do you mean it's fucking dangerous ? So is getting out of bed in the morning, what of it ? So the doctors will hate it ? Point in motherfucking case!
You may think this is about as fucking stupid as colloidal silver - but then again colloidal silver is still being sold, isn't it.
So there you have it, now go "revolutionize" your environment whydontcha.
« F.DERP July - August 2014 Combined Statement
The perfect pitch »
Category: Gandesc, deci gandesc
Saturday, 06 September, Year 6 d.Tr.
Les veinards
Les veinardsi is a delightful French comedy of the moresii variety.
And so : the girl wins (through asking her two masters all the hard questions) some sort of Jeopardy! by mail competition. The prize ? A fur coat. Which the husband wants to borrow for the wife to wear to impress his friends. And so he does. And on it goes.
On it goes ? On it goes. Since it's too dificult to get two girls that share a cock but not the bed to efficiently share wardrobes... Tho' he does try, for instance the "only one" pair of shoes that goes with the mink in the wife's 300 pair collection was gifted by her to the maid upon the happy occasion of the latter's mink acquisition as described above. But now if the wife is to wear the mink out of the house, she needs the shoes back, and so she has to ask for them, for she won't go barefoot. Except, she says, that won't work anyway, as the girl's destroyed the shoes already with her great feet (which is quite the insult in the chinese society of the post-war French). And so they quarrel yet again, and in the words of the good gentleman, "Tres bien! Tu l'aurais voulu!" and so he goes outside the house with the maid.
Which of course poses its own problems, as the sweet girl isn't trained for this purpose, and so she says the wrong thing and does the wrong thing and her "husband" dutifully points out to her to "not talk all the time" after the second thing she's said. Somehow this is so perfectly natural in the context (of mores!) that it passes unnoticed.iii
Do you know what the man above has just said ? He's said "she's very lively", by means of an excuse wrapped in a compliment wrapped in... something apparently very bitter.
The dinner goes splendidly well, as the client appreciates the girl's constant torpedoing of her husband's attempts to talk business, and so a friendly invitation is proffered. Which the husband can not, of course, in any way deflect. So he is now to call his wife (you remember her, the woman left at home with no shoes and no mink) to tell her to...
Well to...
Uhm... to degaje as they say, to go take a stroll or better yet catch a film at the Cinema while he fucks I mean... enfin, sees to the business at hand. With his client. And his... uhm... yeah.
The wife doth protest, and the husband doth end the conversation with a sharp "do what you're told"iv. So who do you think opens the door ?
Why, the maid, of course.
There's about half dozen of them, enjoy.
———1963, by Jean Girault, with Francois Perrier (!), Jacqueline Monsigny, Mireille Darc. [↩]The middle class businessman has a wife, who is his peer : educated, idle, obnoxious. He also has a... shall we say soubrette. A younger woman, of lower social extraction, very eager, very pert, just as coinceited, stubborn, ambitions, what shall you call it. Proud.
The soubrette loves him, and will do things for him. The wife, idem. In different ways and different things, of course, but still, idem. They don't exactly hate each other, but they can't quite stand each other all too well, either. So what exactly are the limits of who says what to whom when and who "has to" and who "hasn't to" what when where and why ? There you go, mores. [↩]The gentleman he is trying to impress, let it be said in passing, is also married. His older wife has long cracked and she is now taking refuge in drink. It wasn't a very woman-friendly time or place, la belle France, la France d'amour &tout ca. [↩]In characteristic French fashion, there's a lot of manhandling and generally dragging the women about as a plot device. I do mean literally, grab her wrist and go, she'll fall in step eventually. This is inaugurated with the maid, proceeds in due course to the wife and eventually the client is repositioned around in the same manner. [↩]
« S.NSA, December 2013 Statement
Website thou art lol »
Category: Trilematograf
Saturday, 04 January, Year 6 d.Tr.
La Serenissima and personal sovereignty
The touch off is a discussion on irc. Of course. It went like so :
mircea_popescu You know this multisig thing is tempting conceptually, much like multi addressesi seem the only way to go. However, in practice, one quickly discovers that value accumulates, and a signature or a BTC address is more like a domain name than even a domain name.
BigBitz Multisig is nice.
mircea_popescu I didn't mean the power ranger derpage. I just meant, one having multiple GPG signatures.
BigBitz Subkeys you mean?
los_pantalones Nah, new pubkey. I have a personal one, attached to my activities outside of work and one for work porpoises.
mircea_popescu Maybe that's the right way to go and I'm just seeing the particular effects of my very peculiar personality, where I have no problem receiving slut selfies on office@.ii
los_pantalones I don't technically own the trust i earn working for this company, I think would be the argument they would make.
mircea_popescu Why not ? Fuck them lol. Of course you do. The very point of personal sovereignty is that you do, not they.
los_pantalones Yes yes, but when i'm acting on their behalf am I acting as a sovereign entity?
mircea_popescu Yes. Always. In the immortal words of Poppy, "and on this issue there can be no debate!"
The point here is that identity is strictly, without exception, always, a personal matter. A corporation may have no identity, outside of what it derives from its owners.iii
On one hand, it is already well established law that we will not accept agency excuses : if you do anything whatsoever we don't like, it will not matter if you did it for a government, be it represented as a corporation or anything else. Instead, you will hang for it, much like the nazis hung for their criminal activity. Nobody cared that it was perfectly legitimate, law abiding activity at the time, and nobody will care in your case. No immunity, be it issued by whatever fiat government will help you any more than the fiat currency it issued will help you. So in this approach, if the person can not hide behind the corporation, what sense would it make to allow the pretense of corporate identity ?
On the other hand, I will (and have) negrated people when they shared their WoT credentials. This is the correct approach. In this context, what exact sense does it make to allow the pretense of corporate identity ? Suppose employee works for company, establishes trust, leaves company. Would you now expect a different person being allocated that trust, and benefiting from it on the grounds that "it belongs to the company" ? How is this different from you know, dedicated scammers buying WoT accounts for the purpose of scamming ?
All this dovetails neatly into our general understanding of sovereignty as a personal matter personally invested. If you can't have a government other than as a person who benefits from the investment of other persons, why would you need, or what could you possibly want from a corporation that works like the dog vomitiv of yore ?
And besides : this policy will serve us well, in that it offers a much better deal to talented, competent people than the fiat world does. As such, they have an incentive to work with us, rather than with them. As such, we will prevail, at which point people will probably clamor for the relaxation of this rule, which I'll oppose as a bad idea if I'll still be around by then, which will tempt them to vilify me as either senile if I'll be old enough or else a wrecker that's lost sight of the best interests of the Reaction.v Which... you know, whatever.
So for these reasons : La Serenissima does not recognise nor will ever enforce any sort of claim of any entity that purports to impinge on the sovereignty of persons. No entity may claim rights to person's identity under this rule, and if they try to they're being the enemy and should be treated like the enemy. For all intents and purposes identity is allodial property of the person therein represented, and no convention may touch it.vi
———Old topic. See pretty much all the derpage coming out of the Power Rangers proposing, see Why exactly reusing Bitcoin addresses strengthens Bitcoin user anonimity and , How to process Bitcoin payments cheaply and easily, The discreet escort, or how Bitcoin makes prostitution unprosecutable etc for the counters. [↩]Yes, I do. All the damned time. What are you waifing for ? [↩]Yes, this reverses fifteen centuries of legal precedent considering corporations persons, just like natural persons. This is not happenstance, but quite deliberate, and more importantly : quite necessary. Quite unavoidable, in fact. Much like the old style contract has outlived its practical usefulness for very strong theoretical reasons, just so the old style corporation has outlived its time and is now being replaced by the MPEx-style corporation.
The theoretical reasons in question are that a fictitious person is indistinguishable from any other fictitious person, and as such incapable of being trusted. This is why fictitious persons require the expensive, bulky and ultimately unsustainable fiat-style legal system in the first place : they basically are scammers, by their very nature, all the time. This stands in opposition with people, who may be scammers - no matter how many times this potentiality actualises, the fundamental difference remains substantial.
If you think about it, the above paragraph neatly explains why the early first line defense arrayed by the socialists against Bitcoin was "people scam" : they may not have understood it themselves, but their current implementation of their dysfunctional nonsense requires an implementation of the totalitarian government, just like any historical attempt at running the socialist utopia did. Their current implementation of the totalitarian government relies on fictitious persons of the nature and structure of fiat corporations, ie, little droplet copies of itself. This way it can control everything while still "plausibly" denying it, for some values of plausibility. In allowing me to observe that this governmental-corporation fictitious person is obsolete, Bitcoin threatens (yet again, yet another way) the very foundation of even theoretical possibility of their wet dream. Hence the attempt to show that people are the same as fictitious entities, "practically". As if that does something. Keep looking at "really small empirical values of 4" and "really large empirical values of 3" until who knows, maybe you end up with Global Warming and functioning Worldwide Socialism. An unsurprising mistake to make, I agree, but not less a mistake for that excuse.
The other fundamental reason is that people eat, corporations do not. This significant problem has been patched over in various ways. Syndicalism is fundamentally an attempt to even the tables, because otherwise the needless corporation can run a very painful wedge against the needy people : either take this or starve. Modern taxation at its lowest, earliest basis is exactly the same : create a minimum cost for staying in business, through reporting requirements, that'll approximate the need to eat for corporations. Minimum wage works towards the same exact purpose, which is why all the libertarian critique showing how it fails to reach "its intended goals" but merely makes it even harder for poor people to find work is so ineffectual : whatever they think the "intended goals" may be, the actual intended goal is to raise the cost for corporationfood, and that it definitely does. Obviously we can't survive in a world drowned in runaway red tape introduced for the otherwise legitimate purpose of making the corporations actually work like the people-equivalent law has misrepresented them as. Nevertheless, this entire set is not really enough : for five centuries all these have been major problems and yet society struggled with them and kept the corporation. What finally kills it is above : the needs and expectations of Bitcoin and WoT people. [↩]It's a slime mold. [↩]This ain't a revolution, yo, and we ain't revolutionaries. We're they who eat revolutionaries. [↩]You may be tempted to think o hey, m-of-n identities are such a brilliant idea, what if our five friends made a collective identity!
It's not a brilliant idea, because the strength of a chain is the strength of its weakest link. You are basically reimplementing the disaster of commons for absolutely no reason other than ostensibly boredom. Do something productive with your time instead. [↩]
« PetaMeta
My life is hard, but unfair. So is yours. »
Category: Bitcoin
Friday, 15 August, Year 6 d.Tr.
La Florida and other places
So I was hanging out with some people who, knowing I'm new around, helpfully proceeded to explain the specifics of the security elements embedded in the Argentinian Peso, and how to check for false bills. This ran into a number of practical problems.
The first problem being that the bills are not of particularly good quality, which makes false positives quite common, even for the actual specialist departments of their many banksi. The second problem is that bills coming in at least two major versions, the list of what's what is lengthy. The third problem is that the largest bill on the street, the 100 peso, is worth just about eight dollars. How much effort are you willing to expend to detect forgeries, eight dollars at a time ? Mining Bitcoin by hand suddenly becomes an attractive prospect, there's what, 150`000 pesos in a block.
But finally, the actual problem is the approach. In this particular situation, you do not actually wish to establish some sort of objective reality as to whether the actual bills you're receiving are false or not, for the very sound fundamental reason that such a reality does not in fact exist : all bills are false, in the same way for the same reasons. They're all printed by some people, and all you are interested in is holding the bills faked by the right set of fakers. This information, being conventional in nature, can not ever be objectively verified. What can however be verified is what your source knows about the bills he's passing you, and that is exactly where you address the problem. If you regularly buy from the same guy, he has absolutely zero interest to stiff you if he can help it, as he'd be just killing his own revenue stream. By aligning his interests to yours, you can control a problem towards which less intelligent people expend significant resources for much worse results. This is the art and craft of management.
Intermission
Did you ever do business with a muppet who had bought his AGENDA on time ?
That's right, ladies and gents, I've found it : Buenos Aires' very own Luxor Center For Businessmen. Where dynamicii aspirational young men acquire the tools requisite for putting forth the pretense that they are something they're not. I guess #bitcoin-assets better start selling ratings on credit or else we're pretty much defunct (according to defunct brains clogging Earth for no good reason).
End of our Intermission
So I visit with my peso broker, drop some hundred dollar bills on him, and while he's shoveling clumps of the local fiat (soon to be as valuable as the dollar, by the way) I check out his stash of dollars. You know what he has there ? Three piles of one dollar bills, one smaller pile of fives. Do you know why ?
Take a moment and think why.
They save in dollars over here, you see. The average worker in this country, trying to protect the fruits of his labour from the idiocy of his compatriots ; the average parent, trying to create a tiny bit of a future for his offspring that's different from living in the shithole resulting from the aggregation of all the opportunities the laziness of his compatriots afford, all these people save. One belaboured dollar at a time. And when a need hits them, they sell part or perhaps all of that clump of solidified brow sweat. Dollar bills.
The great sadness in the collapse of the US are not the few million worthless fuckwits who chose to fritter their time away pointlessly, discussing wholly imaginary nonsubjects such as "rape" and "discrimination" and "global warming" and so oniii, in their own terms. I feel not the slightest bit of compassion for Jane Smith in Palo Alto, who might have to start sucking cock for a living whether she wants to or not, because her imaginary "history of feminism" degree is useless. I have not the faintest whisper of empathy for John Brown in Queens, who might have to polish the shoes of Taliban investors in Manhattan for a shaworma a day because all his ideas about singing-songwriting and never being punched were misplaced. I couldn't care less for all the pretend CEOs and in-their-own-mind university professors and faux-journalists and web designers and what the hell else that are about to meet the business end of the grinder all over the 50 contiguous states.
I do feel quite sorry indeed however for the few billion human beings living in third hand countries, immersed in third hand cultures, surrounded by the shit of their own failure amassed over the millennia. From India to Peru, countless, untold multitudes who, unable either individually or in groups of their own choosing to match the glory and the splendour of [meanwhile defunct] white culture, nevertheless try to participate. One dollar at a time, and in that dollar an investment not merely of whatever scarce resources and mostly worthless labour they've expended, but of hope and of trust. Of hope and trust, in the unshakable power of the spawn of Europe, in the far seeing wisdom of the fair skinned folk, in their ultimate benevolence and fundamental representativity as the better fraction of the entire species.
That's your Argentinian, your Benghali, your Taliban or Columbian buying a dollar : the simple submission, the nude declaration that while he himself can't be all that people can be, and can't see all that people can see, you... you are, and you will be.
The disappointment of this hope - illusory, of course, like all hope ever is - that's the sad part of the collapse - inevitable, as all collapse ever is - of the last remnant of the colonial empire of Europeiv. Sure, on its ruins other things, great things will come to be, that's how it works. But for the five centuries between Odoacer and Cluny, the pitch of despair of the Franks and the Goths and whatever other barbarians by far and quite widely exceeded the bitterness of actual Roman Romans (ie, from Rome). By about the same factors, by the same degrees of magnitude.
So no, when I despise you for the despicable waste that you are, it's not just because you can't walk up to a woman and slap her butt, it's not just because you can't throw a punch or take a punch, it's not just because you suck. It's because of what your sucking means, and that's a helluvalot more than merely being a failed individual, unable on his own account to ensure for himself a decent burial.
———If you've never seen what a cash only economy looks like, you should definitely visit. Any given morning there's more armored trucks on the street of the financial district than there are buses. And at twenty tons a pop, the armored trucks definitely burn more gas. [↩]Forget about dynamic, there's no such thing in this corner of the world. The average Argentine could not find his way out of a paper bag if the paper bag was open and he were outside of it.
Any problem they may encounter will be evenly dealt any one out of a deck consisting of exactly three strategies. The first one is denial. Your Argentinian will deny anything whatsoever, including his own existence, no matter how ludicrous that denial may be on the face. You ring the doorbell of a rental agency, which has ample advertisements for various places to rent all over town. The schmuck on the other side won't open the door. They'll go "yes". You go "hello". They go "yes". I know this is stupid, but it's really not my fault, I'm just doing ethnography work here. You go "wouldja open the door" ? They go "what's this about". You go "urmom" in your head, but otherwise explain you're looking to rent a few places. At which point he says, brace yourself, "we don't do that here." That's it, that's his wage's worth.
The second one is absolute minimum effort. You email to a few agencies explaining what you're looking for. They reply, via email, saying that they have some stuff like that on their website. Leaving aside that their website doesn't actually work, have you ever heard of someone sending contacts to the website ? In the entire rest of the world, people use the website to obtain contacts. In Argentina, people use it to lose contacts. Because why bother, right, it's not like the country is fucking starving or anything.
The third one is "what would Jose Armando / Angelina Bubulina do", or whoever their "just liek in the First World" role models are. So they'll serve you a sort of pretend-US or pretend-EU as it may have reached them through the dubious offices of Mexican telenovellas and bad reporting done by you know, Brad Edwards.
That's it. That's all. You can either get some derp in denial, some derp in manana mode, or some derp in "professional" as seen by his aunt on Oprah mode. I have no idea what the fuck were the Nazis doing here, but I dare say exile to Argentina was probably a worse fate for the remnants of the Third Reich than any sort of punishment the Allies could have come up with. [↩]The quotes are there not to indicate that such subjects could never be serious, but merely to point out that in the way they're treated by these people, they couldn't be less serious. [↩]The notion that the US is its own country... heh. Not in any sense worth the mention. [↩]
« Check your privilege
F.MPIF, May 2014 Statement »
Category: La pas prin lume
Sunday, 01 June, Year 6 d.Tr.
La firma
* Loaded log from Tue Jan 20
Joe Hello Mircea, I wrote you in twitter and you give me this way to contcat with you. I am Joei, I am 28 years, programmer, I have wife and newborn son. I am from city of Rybinsk, Yaroslavl region (400 kM north of Moscow).ii
Me Hello.
Joe I am programming and my goal to create own projects to earn for my young family. First goal it is car, because at russian winters frosts is veru hard without car with children.
Me Interesting way to go about it.
Joe I have some ideas for developing Android apps and one service for my city. Population of Rybinsk city is about 250 000 peoples and currently I got idea to start 3D printing at our city, I decide to buy 3D printer and start printing details for peoples needs at separate office. Currently I employeer at IT company and develops Android iMonitoring application. But I want start own business to avoid salary trap. (Current my salary is $900 and I cant't accumulate for car). With this salary I should work about 4 years to buy car.
Me Yes but listen, it's rarely the case that people succeed because they need to or want to. Generally people succeed when they have a good idea and are good at implementing it. So perhaps you're starting from the other end.
Joe And I decide ask you Mircea to help me to buy 3D printer, because I have no any start capital and single my hope to ask paoples like you.
Me Well yes, but I doubt this will ever work.
Joe I found you name at one note where wos described that you helping to OpenBSD
Me But you're not openbsd.
Joe Yes, it is true :) I am programmer that want start own business.
Me That's openbsd about 20 years ago. So you see... this conversation is 20 years early :)iii
* Loaded log from Tue Jan 21
Joe Mircea hello, so you decide as I understood that 3D printering is doubtfull business for city? Our city have one university, and some big factories.
Me No, I decided that your model where you imagine perfect strangers will finance your ideas is doubtful for reality.
Joe Yes, I understood you, in my situation I should take credit or works long time and then invest myself money. I thinking about this. I think I wrote this message from some my despair. And it is desperate step.
Me See, Bitcoin works in a very special way. For instance : I said on irc that "openbsd has been financed". This is all it is, a line from irc. This was enough for someone to write a blog reporting it, and it was enough for the slashdot editors to put it on the front page, and on and on. The question, of course, is why is it enough ? Why is it enough for openbsd to need some money in order to get it, why is it enough for me to say they got it for people to believe they got it ? This is the importance of names. In business the name, la firma, is all that matters. And if you wish to be in business, which is what taking credit means, and not working for a salary means, you must have a name. So far, Joe says nothing to me. Maybe one day it will, and that day we can talk business. But until that day, all you can do is work to make your name worth something in the eyes of people who matter.
Joe Ok, thanks, I will work.
Me Gl!
Incidentally, have you seen La Strada ?
———Obviously, his name isn't Joe, but we'll just call him that anyway. [↩]You are probably cringing at the stylistics of what you strictly associate with a certain sort of expectant brides (extremely well depicted for the silver screen by Nicole Kidman). Nevertheless, that unfortunate historical accident aside, I would daresay I much prefer this Eastern style to the very vapid, very useless and very boring Western equivalent. No, you are not creative. It's just not what you are. No, you're not an evanghelist, or a whatever other trendy bullshit. At least "father" or "poor" is a thing to be, much unlike "social media guru", which pointedly isn't a thing to be in the first place. But let's not digress. [↩]Holy shit, it's been twenty years. Do you even hear what I am writing at you here ? Twenty years! Do you even comprehend how old, how utterly ancient, how old we've become ? When did it happen ? [↩]
« It all depends on what power means.
The banality of evil »
Category: Trilterviuri
Tuesday, 21 January, Year 6 d.Tr.
Kink High
Suppose there's somewhere in Orange County, Florida a certain Kink High, where adolescents spend a lot of their time cutting class and doing all sorts of campyi shit. There's a dozen girls and eight or so dozen boys, and all they fucking do all day is group kink. Weird, huh.
So what do they do ?
Well... actually, it varies. For instance, one year they got into the entire bukkake thing for some reason, so all the girls did all day was lick and suck and gargle. They spent all their days covered in sticky film, cause for weeks on end it never even got to dry. You know how if you don't wash it off your tits right away it dries there and then holds your skin together when you try to move ? Well, they never got to that, because it never actually dried. Because more kept splashing in. How's that for a companion to your breakfast cereal!
Why this, you may ask ? "Why not!". "Because it's there". "That's what all the other people are doing". "Blablabla". "Whatever". Seriously now, what fucking difference does it matter, and more importantly : what makes you believe "why" is even meaningful in this context ? Just because you used to ask meaningful questions and they started with why is no guarantee that any future strings you may form that start with the four character string "Why " are also valid questions. Forgeddaboutit.ii
Next year, they spend all their time doing what some guy on the webs called "devotional sex" for no reason whatsoever, seeing how it's quite exactly the normaliii mode of human sexuality 1820 - 1970, and it desperately needs names, especially from dudes on the web. Cause you know, a dude on the web invented everything there is, and named it all. Seriously, now.
So basically, all the boys do what the girls tell them to do, sexually speaking (which is what Kink High is all about) and enjoy the complete lack of control. Which yes, is enjoyable, for most men some of the time and for some men most of the time and so on and so forth. Certainly a lot less energetically demanding, spending all day long licking a clit, than doing the entire ejaculation business - which perhaps'd make this more likely a pleasant and convenient sexual Schelling point for the population of Kink Golf Club than for the highly energetic, poorly controlled teenaged population of Kink High. Nevertheless, for the sake of argument, let this pass.
Now, suppose you get transferred to Kink High, but you know for a fact you won't be spending much time there. Maybe a year if you're lucky. So now... what if you really like spluttering cum on girls, but they did that last year, and you really hate the slimy clit yet you're stuck because apparently that's what they've decided to do ? Hasn't all your excitement at finally getting to go there suddenly turned into anger, via frustration ?
I guess it has. So now you know how the old Republicans feel.
Shocked ? Don't be. Consider : there's about a black guy for every eight or so white guys in the US, and gals idem. A year ago they were playing the very kinky game of chains and massah. Today however they're playing the equally very kinky game of "emancipation" and "check your privilege" and whatnot.
There's nothing objectively wrong with either of these, nor to any other. Sure, it's a little weird to spend all your waking hours plastered in manjuice. It's equally weird to spend all your time chasing a little nubbin with your tongue. It's all weird, everything people do as a group behaviour turns out to be weird, upon consideration. Even the word "weird" is actually pretty weird, if you repeat it to yourself a few dozen times. Weird. Weird. weirdweirdweird wtf is this ? Why "weird" ? What does it even mean ?!
It means nothing at all, it's just what people do.
So now. Want to explain how it's "more natural" that they should play kink 1 which you share rather than kink 2 which you do not ? Well... derp. Want to explain how "it's God's will" that they should ? It has been so ordained ? Etcblablabla whatever ?
The problem here is not that you have absolutely no grounds upon which to establish your alleged reasons and explanations. The problem here is that you have no mechanism with which to do so, and that because language is not employed for the purpose you imagine it employed.
Specifically, what I mean is this : have you ever said "I'd pay a fortune for a spare tire" ? Suppose right then and there the Grand Wazoo came out of thin air with a spare tire and charged your bank account a fortune. Leaving aside the fact that the word you yourself used is quite obviously meaningless, your intent through speech was not in fact to enter into a contract. So no, language is not employed for the purpose you imagine whenever convenient it is being employed.
The guy going "o honey you're the hottest chick I ever saw", the gal going "o baby you're sooo biiiiggg" are not signing fucking contracts, of either the old or the new kind. They are merely audibly stimulating their sexual partner(s), and so their communication is strictly to be judged by the effect on those partners : if it arouses them further it's good. If it does not it's stupid and wasteful, and if it cuts it for them it's quite taboo.
This is why you get repressed if you say "nigger", and this is why I do not : you are cutting it for your partners, it's not arousing them to hear that word. Use a different one, such as a lot of verbiage about how you wish to play subservient to some black guy. Make a blog about how you're recently married and you and your girl want a baby very much, however you've thought about it a lot and since you're both white you don't feel it'd be fair for her to have your baby, and besides you don't feel as adequate or worthy to impregnate her as a black guy would be, so you would like a donor and promise to raise the brownie resultant with the utmost care and love (and also, greatly look forward to all the humiliation evil people will lay upon you for having had the courage to be made a cuckold to better people), you'll get ten billion likes. Make a blog about how you pick up black girls and black girls only in various nightclubs and then humiliate them for being filthy nigger sluts and make them go around in chains and get tattoos describing in detail what filthy scum they are ? Have them on their knees when you go to a restaurant, and have them call you Massah ? You'll get the police called on you.
A, and why I do not ? Why, because I don't share your partners. Herp.
Stop whining about how Kink High is into some kink you don't like this year. Nobody cares that your entire stay in the world is maybe one year, and that practically means you either live isolated or else partake in things you don't enjoy. Kink High ain't changing, and while you could conceivably butcher the lot of them I posit to you it'd be kind of a waste.
Find a different high.
———Double entendre, bitch! [↩]Triple entendre, ho! [↩]This is a term of art. [↩]
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Category: Cocietate si Sultura
Saturday, 01 February, Year 6 d.Tr.
King's Bounty, the iPad reboot
King's Bounty is an ancient NWCi franchise rebooted by Nivalii for the tablet market. In this function it works splendily, incredibly well. It is in fact the first and as far as I know only game yet that makes the tablet market actually exist.iii
The basics you're familiar with from the old PC King's Bounties are present : 5 creature slots, hex grid battlefield, army count limits based on your leadership, quest-driven progression, scroll based player casting. Even the neutral item is there.iv
The points of excellence of the original franchise, which is to say gorgeous graphics and excellent writing quality of the questlines is preserved. There's no talking rockv, of course, but you still actually want to read the text - in stark contrast with the vast majority of games even for the PC, and each and every other tablet gamevi out there.
Here's a list of innovations that make this a great game in its current setting :
Army tiering. Four "domains" so to speakvii are split into three tiers. The central slot in your army may carry any tier unit, the two slots next to it tier 1 or 2, and finally the two outermost slots tier 1 exclusively. This adds untold, unexpected flavours to the strategy involved in deploying troops effectively.
Excellent implementation of ERPSviii. The game uses five categoriesix and their interplay with unit domains and tiers is well thought out - that old "interplay of fulls and hollows" that underpins all good games that ever were, or ever will be.
Very strict limits on unit acquisition. Most low tier units can be acquired from the various towns you visit, paying gold. The cost for one is roughly speaking the loot you get in any one quest, and you need hundreds of them. Mid and high tier units are rare, and that means RARE! Which means that when you do manage to get some, you feel like a million bucks. I tell you, my second Emerald Dragon was two grams of endorphins right there.
Clever morale system. Unit morale moves from +3 to -3. Units at -3 can not be used in battle, units over 0 get 10% deployment bonus (you can use more of them). Morale replenishes slowly over time (about one an hour I think) and there's a rare item (bread) which allows you to reset any unit to +3 (the lower the tier, the less bread needed), which I imagine is one avenue they expect to pay for the serversx. This approach gives a great benefit to the flexible strategist, because if you only keep "your army", ie, five units, then you can play about a battle an hour, on average. If however you keep a stable of various units, you can practically speaking play as much as you want - in fact I've not yet encountered the situation where I felt like playing but couldn't because "stamina"xi.
Well thought-out quest system. All sideline quests are repeatable once a day. This gives you an incentive to advance the quest line (more quests to do each day), and gives you an excellent way to use your incomplete stacksxii. The payments, mostly craft resources and small stacks of low level units (saving you thus 1000s in gold) are exactly what they should be : plenty enough to keep you interested.
Splendid PVP. King's Bounty : Legends has by far the best PVP system I have ever seen. It's implemented as two different lines, Raids and Duels. Raids consist of attacking a randomly chosen player's garnison (which is a special set of army he has to specifically provision), which is controlled by the AI. If you win, you get a set amount of gold, plus a fraction of his total stores.xiii Duels consist of fighting player-controlled enemies, and the payouts are quite significant (PVP-only craft reagents, lots of gold, various other goodies) and not too strictly related to victory. The way it works out, you want to return time and again, and the achievements in the battlefield against other players are both satisfying and a great driver of PvE, exactly as it should be.
Interesting crafting system. Often you will find yourself fighting battles not for money, but for wooden sticks, Alchemist Jars and so on. The best part is that later items often take as an ingredient a couple earlier items, so nothing's really wasted. Also, crafted artefacts make the best donation to the guild by very far, and you can craft scrolls, runes and various licenses and even bread. It's very simple but quite well done in my estimation.
Together they amount to an impressive pile of win. It's difficult to capture just how well player experience can work into words, but let me just say you really have no good excuse to not try this finely multi-balanced clockwork of a game.
PS. As a bonus, it got me rapidly regaining conversance in junior high math, because really, are 5/17 Paladins more or less than 29 / 108 spiders ? So, if your junior is bright but not interested in fractions because "whatever" or "they're stupid", you might as well introduce him to iPad King's Bounty. I'm ready to bet that a month later you'll be struggling to keep up.
———New World Computing, founded in the 80s by God's Own Gift to Gaming, Jon Van Caneghem (plus his wife Michaela, and Mark Caldwell), the mother and father of everything ever worth playing, including Heroes and so on.
It was bought in 1994 by soon-to-be-bankrupt contender in the console wars of the 90s 3DO, and promptly buried (with the best intentions, of course). Most of its franchises met the sad fate of Ubisoft reboots (including Heroes, which suffered mightily in the hands of Nival itself as "Heroes V"). [↩]Moscow outfit of one Sergey Orlovskiy. Met some success originally as the makers of Allods (Rage of Mages outside the Russian speaking world), went through a dark period in the late 90s/early 00s, but with the founder back at the helm (in a very Apple-ish turn of events) maybe it's set for greatness. Speaking of which, anyone want to sell me warrants or some other form of exposure to Nival's equity for Bitcoin ? [↩]What I mean is, you know how qntra competition doesn't actually exist, because if there's something worth knowing you'll read it on the logs, or in qntra, whereas random shit Wired, Wall Street Journal, CoinSomething etc publish is just stupid and wrong ?
Or, you know how Africa doesn't exist, because if you want something, be it good food, or gorgeous women, or good Opera or whatever else you'll just go to Europe and forget about the ringworm infested shithole ? Or if you want empty space and minimal government and good food and gorgeous women etc you go to Argentina ?
Or, much more on point, how the Xbox never actually happened ?
Well, just so : if you want good games you sure as hell aren't going to look for them in the AppStore, among "SlotsWizard" and "Kings of Kingdom". Really, the list of iPad apps that are outrageously stupid, pointless, retarded and in any case a terrible waste of whatever meagre resources got thrown into their production would probably be worthy of another MST3K. Wading through the AppStore is like wading through a spam folder that was magically animated into code by a demented earthworm or something.
For the tablets to matter as a gaming platform, they need great games. And that does not mean "downgraded ports of good games from other platforms". King's Bounty is certainly an example of a great game, I would say the tablet reboot is actually better than the original franchise (and a different game, obviously). [↩]You recall, the statue of random blessing, the spire of lightning, the beehive... [↩]The reason I even found this thing is because I was looking for a write-out of the Speaking Stone questline in Castle Kronberg - still after all these years sticking in my memory as one of the best written quests of all time. Apparently such a thing does not exist on the Internet, so if you have a copy of King's Bounty do me the favour of firing it up, taking that thing down and leaving it here as a comment ? Thank you! [↩]Most of which are made by Chinese and Indian sweatshops, incidentally - the exact cause quests went to shit in mainstream gaming too. Those dudes can't write and apparently don't even understand they should. [↩]Knight, Inferno, Elves and Dungeon, roughly speaking - which somehow gives me the hope that further types may be added down the road, even if this is a 2011 release. [↩]Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, that thing where fire beats wood etc. [↩]Healers, Mages, Defenders, Attackers, Archers, Healers. Each unit gets a large bonus attacking the one immediately following, and a smaller bonus attacking the one after that, so you generally want to engage Healers with Archers etc. [↩]It's a sound approach in my oppinion, so much so that it's what Eulora was going to use to work an equivalent of the subscription cost into the gameplay. Like there, here too that food is actually craftable, from items found by the player as part of his adventures. [↩]The fucking bane of tablet games, they're all built by the intellectually lazy on incognizant ripoffs of the old Utopia system. Which... whatever, you don't really need a tablet for that you know ? [↩]Suppose you could deploy seven Paladins, but only own two. Obviously if you try a battle your level with 2/7 sort of deployment you will get smoked. Nevertheless, back in starting village, the couple men in shining armor are more than enough to cut down through legions of lowly zombies and winged earthworms. They make a very satisfying splosh! hoe sound as they mow them down, too. [↩]Imagine my glee when, barely level 12, I hit a level 50 that had failed to properly provision his garrison and took him for ~50k. Oh happy days! [↩]
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Category: Trolloludens
Friday, 28 November, Year 6 d.Tr.