Aran

Originally Posted By: like tetris, but more visceral But I'm pretty sure Black Wombat was the initiator of News at 11. Don't be fooled by the M: ef and mef are the same person. She was ef here and mef on Polaris for reasons I don't know. —Alorael, who isn't clear on whether or not there's a mapping/guide group. If there is, Rache and Silverchat (silver harloe) belong on there. I suspect IPB refused two-letter PDNs, because fz also registered as fz+ on Polaris. Would Riibu be part of the mapping group, or is this a different generation? They were all distinguished by the Cartographer custom title, which incidentally caused me to confuse them all for the same person in the beginning. Edit: I suspect you've already read through the PPP beginning to end for this project, but this goodbyemilestone thread by Djur lists a few of the who's who at the time (-2003). Edit: Forgot that he was actually just switching accounts.

Originally Posted By: Jewels in Black One of the perks of administration; you can write your own cannon. (Kabooom! ) Aran is briefly surprised by the sudden outburst of hugs, but it's nice. "Er, yes. I'm studying it. Haven't taken much time to do anything else in a few years, really; also the reason I've been absent this long."

Arancaytar has so far been completely engrossed with his delicately chirping gadget, furiously typing and muttering about something called regechses. Or something like that. Finally satisfied with the device's operation, he looks up again and stares at the newcomers. Most of them are faces, old and new, that he is well-familiar with, seeing them on the forum every day. His memory of others is hazy, and seeing them triggers waves of nostalgia. And yet others are almost strangers, and yet seem to be oldbies themselves, having arrived during his own long absence. This drives home how many years have passed, and is faintly dizzying. One of these is using a computer, and over her shoulder Arancaytar notices a site he has not seen in a very long time... Originally Posted By: Mistb0rn "I'd completely forgotten about this until this morning. Oh, and if anyone knows of anywhere to find more books in this series, I'm interested." Arancaytar is momentarily flummoxed. "You... you want to read more of that?" he bursts out. Recovering somewhat, he explains that the series sadly exists in name only so far, and even its only book was never quite completed yet, despite several runs at a new version. Originally Posted By: MMXPERT I propose that the bus stops at the restaurant located in the end of the universe. Arancaytar: I could go for some food too. I've heard great things about Milliways. Will have heard. Willan pre-havening post-heard.

Oof, you're very right. I didn't see the other stuff, and digging deeper (references to Thule, news articles calling this the "White Nationalism Aryan Encyclopedia" etc.) shows that this is a pretty thinly veiled Nazi site. Sorry about that; clearly the first Google result isn't always a good one. The quotes on the article itself seem well-sourced, although it seems the article's point may have been just as likely to defend racism by reference to Lovecraft. Edit: But damn, it's entertaining to see Conservapedia and Metapedia accusing each other of nationalism.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan I think Tyran had HTML enabled on Shadow Vale at one point, and I made him reconsider after putting an animated gif inside blink tags inside marquee tags. So, so tempted. However, I notice that blink tags don't seem to affect images in the current version of Firefox.

I found a Lovecraft article on a wiki called Metapedia that quotes a lot of this stuff. Edit: That wiki appears to be kind of shitty; see below.

We were in touch on Facebook some years back, but I think he deleted his profile. Looking back, he's way more intelligent than I understood back when he was posting here. If that happened to him a lot, I can understand his issues; it can drive someone crazy.

Sucia Island went through my head more than once while walking. Also, Minecraft. The whole island is so three-dimensional. In the sense that you need a height-map to accurately gauge distances.

Arancaytar stumbles, bleary-eyed, onto the clearing holding an odd-shaped device. It buzzes. He presses a few buttons. It beeps. Then it crackles, fizzles, and emits a thin thread of smoke. Arancaytar: What in the-- damn, broken again. He gives it several whacks and it beeps again. Arancaytar: This can't be right. Oof. He has stumbled into the bus and walked right into someone. Arancaytar: Oh, hi, this is my prototype for the new hand-held piperbot; it goes beep when there's stuff. Been working on it for days now, or I think it's been days, I lost track. It keeps glitching for some reason; sees stuff that isn't there, shows a localized retrio-anachronicity monopole right around... he waves the device around, finally taking in his surroundings... er, what? He recognizes a vehicle that he has previously only seen in sketches from his own archives. It looks every bit as weird in reality. Arancaytar: Blimey! Where'd you get this from?

I only remember testing A4 (though I might have tried out one of the Geneforges and BoA), and while A4 worked, the mouse was so sluggish I gave up and got out my ancient Windows XP laptop. It might be possible to fix that, though.

Lovecraft was racist even for his time, mind you. His works are enjoyable all the same of course.

Quote: Which scenario is more dramatic: Kill Prize, Win Ogre or Phew for a Minute?

Way too many beautiful vacation pictures to pick from. However, a few of my favorites are in this album, and some extra favorites among those below: Steep coast. This is way more awesome than the craziest landscapes I've ever made in Terragen. Anemone. (Probably. We saw about five different purple flower species so I'm not sure I got this one right.) Goat kid taking a nap. (Adorability warning) Canyon.

Originally Posted By: Goldenking Also, for amusement, I've been reading H.P.Lovecraft. Reading his work before has given me some interesting dreams, alright, especially "At the Mountains of Madness." [...] Lastly, for enrichment, I've been reading Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. Some aspects of his thought fascinate me (the focus on becoming greater), while others (misogyny!) appall me. So it makes for a very interesting read. That happened to me with Lovecraft's racism when I picked some of his stuff up again. I went... "crap how did I not notice that before."

Originally Posted By: The best men are mysterious. I'm still using a calref.co.cc emails though because tbh google apps is a pain and all my college stuff goes there and god forbid I try to change the email on my gpg keys. Shouldn't you be able to add or revoke identities on your gpg keys just fine? I had to do that after switching colleges. Still, I know email changes are an absolute PITA. I learned that having a gmail address forwarding to another risks randomly dropping false-positives into the first's spam folder without being forwarded, so you have to check both anyway.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan While I haven't played Myst 4, I have watched a few Myst 4 videos, and I think the actors in Myst 4 are hilariously bad. I mean, Ubisoft probably should have just used the Millers again instead. Click to reveal.. Admittedly, from the looks of things, some of them are bad actors playing characters who are bad at acting. So it's tough to say for sure. On a related note, anyone here play Myst 5? At first glance, the non-pre-rendered environments and non-FMV cutscenes are a bit of a turn-off. I... am... Sirrus. And I will not be DEFEATEEEEEED! (And yes, a This Is Sparta mashup is on Youtube.) The Myst 5 graphics turned me off as well. While the environments are basically okay (on good computers, not much photorealism is lost by switching from rendered to 3D), the artificial characters are awful. They're on the far side of the uncanny valley (not creepy, but very obviously fake). FMV was way better.

I forgot your Polaris gimmick... you set your postcount to some negative number, didn't you?

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Everyone who wants to see a Spiderweb Crack Pairing Thread, raise your hands/appendages/whatever. Again?

Hulu seems to think I'm outside the United States. (It's right, of course, I just wish it didn't notice.)

Originally Posted By: BMA I like the idea of the in-mind interface. Maybe a chip could be planted in your brain, so that closing your eyes for a second triggers a control panel's appearance in front of you. Which can then be used for turning the television on. Meanwhile in Soviet Russia, television controls chip in your brain.

It's a different thing; it's just news that are related. In any case, woah. I know Notch is very cool, but I'm still surprised to see him giving Spidweb a shout-out.

Originally Posted By: Mysterious Man Ah yes... my adventure with Lady J. She had thekavern.net... I think I had the forums... they were called Phoenix or something. And yes, I am member number 5... who joined about 4-5 years after the board opened. For some reason, my memory mashes up Phoenix with the early Polaris. But that might have been because Polaris was on thekavern.net as well for a time...

Originally Posted By: uǝʍoɹ I like how my name makes such a hash of things when upside down. uǝʍoɹ is rather catchy. Unless the file broke in transit, that's the fault of your browser, because I specifically made sure your and Øther's name are properly encoded to UTF-8 in the text file. (By now I think I've spent more time on getting character encoding right than any other part of the PPP. UBB handles it awfully. In fact I was just wrestling with the apostrophes in #4475's signature, which are converted to garbage by my parser. Your name is another test case, but an easier one because it consists of character entities.) Edit: Ironically enough, my troubles with member #4475 appear to be caused by my own browser. Windows-1252 codepoint 0x92 (’) is correctly transliterated to Unicode codepoint U+2019 in my UTF-8 conversion (which, by the way, only works because I ignore UBB's assurance that it serves charset ISO-8859-1 and read it as Windows-1252 in the first place), or 0xe28099 in UTF-8 code (the template is 1110....10......10...... for codepoints between U+0800 and U+FFFF). I see the result as gibberish only because my browser uses the wrong charset. Edit: Now my parser breaks on the "uǝʍoɹ". You broke my Unicode handling by complaining about my Unicode handling. Edit2: I have now learned way more than I care to about Unicode, UTF-8, Windows-1252, iconv, and the very sophisticated way UBB ensures charset validity. (It doesn't.)

Just read Treasure Island. Having discovered that I can run a Kindle reader in Wine, and that Amazon distributes classical literature for free, I have about a dozen books I've always meant to read on my computer. Other things on my to-read list are Anathem and The Diamond Age.

Originally Posted By: Dantius I still think it'd be pretty cool to see a list of the top one or two hundred posters so I could get more reliable data than just the top ten + the few active people with high postcounts that haven't made the cut. Easy enough. Endeavor's down (and years out of date anyway) but the new one is integrated into PPP5 and the prototype works. Here's a dump of the top 200. (Edit: No, I'm not starting the monthly rankings again; don't look at me like that. )