Amazonfail

"As someone who has purchased or rated Finnegans Wake (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) by James Joyce or other books in the Joyce, James > Paperback category, you might like to know that Ulysses will be released on November 13, 2009."

Yes, Amazon. Except that I bought Ulysses at the same time. Same shipment even.

This, my friends, is why automated recommendation systems are made of all kinds of fail.

Trending Topics

I don't use twitter's web interface much, although given that my computer is too sad to properly run even a relatively lightweight third-party client like DestroyTwitter, and the recent release of lists, I might just use it more at home. And if you're anything like me (clearly you must be, because the world in which you exist is contained entirely within my own mind) you loathe the Trending Topics. I don't need to click any of them to know I hate them. I need only see them. And, sadly, Twitter has their little slot in the sidebar expanded by default.

Seeing things like, oh, #thingsdarkiessay, makes me weep not only for myself, but for humanity as a whole, that enough people would make that trend.

Solution: shut it out! If you run Firefox (and WTF are you doing with your life that you don't run Firefox, I mean COME ON), insert this handy little bit of code into the userContent.css file in your FF profile:

@-moz-document domain("twitter.com") {
  #trends { display: none ! important; }
}

That tells the div called trends to not display at all. Because really, I'm never going to expand the thing. I would never want to unless I was looking for some reason to off myself.

Note, however, that Twitter seemingly is always tweaking the page layout. Usually things that aren't consequential, but it remains that this may someday break.

New site coming

It took me until today to finally sit down and figure out what I wanted to do with a new website, and I'm not totally positive I've got it all figured out. Especially in terms of integrating the blog here.

My reasons for various solutions are more than I want to get into here right now, but suffice to say, I've got a few things to work out:

• Should I just forward to URL to the new domain with all content intact?
• Should I start a new blog specifically for the new site, and import the posts that I think are most important or applicable? (For instance, things like comic posts will have their own dedicated pages on the site, so having them there and on the blog is redundant.)
• Do I just point to the LJ and leave this blog completely out of the picture altogether? Not change a single thing?

Suffice to say, I'm looking for some actual feedback here. You people who read this know me and probably know well enough about why I'd be reticent to give a link to my blog to someone like, say, my mom or dad. With the new site, that's essentially what I'd be doing, so really, which solution would you as the readers prefer to see implemented?

Also note that while this stuff is being worked out, links to the old Geocities hosting are pretty much dead as of today, so comics and stories and other images I hosted there are broken here.

I return, old friend

After several months of using Chrome at home and Firefox at work, I'm back to Firefox for home AND work. Honestly, I just got so effing tired of all the stuttering Chrome does when loading pages. Sometimes I would need to wait a full minute for the browser to decide that yes, it did indeed want to register the scrolling I was trying to do even though the page was already fully loaded.

The kicker came several times today when the browser just completely locked up, at the mercy of its flash plug-in; or tonight, when the process-per-tab feature decided to lock three tabs together and then also lock up the whole browser, for no discernible reason.

So yeah, I would much rather deal with a stripped-down browser than can be slow to load, slow to close, and a memory hog, provided I can actually scroll steadily without waiting a minute for the browser to register my inputs. Or move from one tab to another without having to wait for the page to load itself back into memory even though it's taking up 15,000K in virtual memory. As the stable release of Chrome is right now, it gets a thumbs down from me for everyday dedicated use. I don't even want to know what the test versions act like.

Lech Walesa, who won the prize in 1983, questioned whether Obama deserved it now.
"So soon? Too early. He has no contribution so far. He is still at an early stage. He is only beginning to act," said former Polish President Lech Walesa, a 1983 Nobel Peace laureate.

Look at that goddamn sloppy editing. And from an AP story, no less. If they expect people to take them seriously, they need to put out top notch copy first.

The Real Mario Bros.

Sure, you may think you know the origin of Mario: Shigeru Miyamoto created Donkey Kong with a dude who was originally called Jumpman but was later renamed to Mario. But that would be wrong. See, Mario actually came first, but the technology required to make the game reality wasn't yet available. So Miyamoto held on to the idea until the time was right.

But where did he get the idea?

At the time, Nintendo only employed a few programmers, because they weren't the huge company they are now. Among them was, of course, Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto and his fellow programmers liked to end their days of designing and coding by knocking back a few Kirin lagers at the local watering hole. This particular bar was right across the street from a hotel popular with foreign tourists, and it wasn't too long before Miyamoto and his pals started to notice a couple of Italians who frequented the bar over a period of weeks. Both sported what the Japanese would consider ridiculous mustaches, and Miyamoto and company enjoyed telling each other jokes at the expense of the unsuspecting tourists.

The thing that you should understand as well is that just as Ivan is used by Americans to refer (often negatively) to Russians, "Mario" is used by the Japanese to deride Italians. It is a term dating back at least to WWII, as Italy was the first of the Axis powers to fall, allowing the Allies to sweep to victory.

One night, Miyamoto's joke involved pasting a fake mustache to his face—a mustache made to look like one of the Marios' mustaches. That fateful night was also the first time that one of his fellow programmers had procured some sheets of acid and magic mushrooms for them to use, claiming it would open their eyes the way it did for the Beatles (then making a comeback with recently released compilation albums in the wake of John Lennon's death) and allow them to create more vivid games.

Miyamoto, tripping balls on mushrooms and sporting a fake Italian mustache, began calling himself Mario and ran out into the alley behind the bar. His fellow programmers followed him. One of them (a nebbish fellow named Wataru Ueda, who did not last too much longer with the company, sadly), was the only one lucid enough to ask Miyamoto what he was trying to do. Ueda, much to Miyamoto's later delight, took notes on the strange occurrences that night. A few transcript samples will outline the direction their conversation took:

Ueda: Miyamoto-san, why are you hitting the wall like that?

Miyamoto: I am trying to release the gold coins inside!

=====

U: Miyamoto-san, why are you kicking that turtle?

M: So it can't harm me! Mitsushiro-san! [the programmer who has provided the drugs] Give me another mushroom!

U: Why? Haven't you had enough?

M: It will make me grow larger so I can defeat my enemies more easily!

=====

M: Ueda, help!

U: Miyamoto-san! What are you trying to do?

M: If I can get down this pipe, I will be able to warp straight to the ladies' restroom!

U: Miyamoto-san!

M: Forgiveness, please!

Going over these notes later, Miyamoto managed to piece together a story: a damsel in distress; her kidnapper: a malicious turle; her only hope: a Mario with a penchant for eating mushrooms. Where the fire flowers and invincibility stars came into the story are details lost to time, but what remains surely is the most important thing: the real origin of Super Mario.

Who's to say what might have happened in Mitsushiro had brought hashish, or marijuana, or even just cocaine? Chances are, Mario would never have been born, or at least not in a form we'd be familiar with. One thing is certain, however: we love Mario just how he is. Whether or not his origins are as wholesome or beloved as the games that came of that fateful, debauched night, that does not change the fact that when that fat wop smiles at us, we all smile back at him.

Look out, California's family-values conservatives--if you let gay marriage come back to CA, I might be tempted to expand those bounds and push to legalize a marriage to The Beatles: Rock Band.