The new title logo
The new avatar/profile logo
(from memory the image is copyright Blizzard Entertainment)
The new look will remain until I decide to change it.
- DS, from the Blue World
- DS, from the Blue World
Thursday, October 22, 2009
New Look DS-Ex
After an hour or two trying different templates and fonts, and messing around with pixels in MS Paint (!), I'm trying a new look for the site.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
DS-Ex ... what?
If you're wondering about the title, it's a pretty bad wordplay on:
a) Deus Ex Machina (lit. "god from the machine") which in essence is a plot-device used by authors too lazy to conclude their stories in an internally-consistent manner. I look forward to using it whenever I am too lazy to finish a post, while maintaining internal consistency with the nature of the blog.
b) DS, the shortened form of Darksentinel which is the username/nickname I most commonly use in my online interactions. 'Twas conceived in around 'oh three or 'oh four of the third millenium succeeding the birth of our lord.
DS Ex Machina: Darksentinel from the machine.
If you don't think it's that good, I'd like to point out that coming up with a good, original title for a blog is tricky. It's not like writing a new Mills&Boon book, which can be done in the form "His [adjective] [synonym of 'Mistress']". Or a Harry Potter clone, which can be of the "[First name] [Last name] and the [Adjective] [Noun]" variety.
a) Deus Ex Machina (lit. "god from the machine") which in essence is a plot-device used by authors too lazy to conclude their stories in an internally-consistent manner. I look forward to using it whenever I am too lazy to finish a post, while maintaining internal consistency with the nature of the blog.
b) DS, the shortened form of Darksentinel which is the username/nickname I most commonly use in my online interactions. 'Twas conceived in around 'oh three or 'oh four of the third millenium succeeding the birth of our lord.
DS Ex Machina: Darksentinel from the machine.
If you don't think it's that good, I'd like to point out that coming up with a good, original title for a blog is tricky. It's not like writing a new Mills&Boon book, which can be done in the form "His [adjective] [synonym of 'Mistress']". Or a Harry Potter clone, which can be of the "[First name] [Last name] and the [Adjective] [Noun]" variety.
New beginnings
There once was a blogger from Udder
Whose Madness eventually went under
But a blogger at heart
He went on to start
A new blog: DS Ex Machina
Hi. Welcome. And if you followed me from Udder Madness, welcome back.
This is my new blog, it will contain the usual set of rants and ravings, and long-winded non-sensical posts. It doesn't have a guiding theme, so I can write whatever the **** I want. Including the usual suspects of personal observations, whining, rants, original writing and anything else I feel like.
And of course some of my disclaimers from the first Udder Madness post are still relevant:
Expect rants. Expect very short posts. Expect me to possibly abandon this project very soon. Expect legumes. Expect men in coats to arrest me for being completely and utterly insane, and a threat to public health, the government, liberty and the nobility of the human spirit, and expect them to call me an idiot for leaving an obvious record.
Warning, blog may contain puns. May contain themes, language and rattlesnakes (kudos if you got the Bill Bryson reference), and also nuts, legumes, and small children.
I hope you'll join me for the ride!
This post was produced in a factory that also (mis)handles mathematical formulae.
Whose Madness eventually went under
But a blogger at heart
He went on to start
A new blog: DS Ex Machina
Hi. Welcome. And if you followed me from Udder Madness, welcome back.
This is my new blog, it will contain the usual set of rants and ravings, and long-winded non-sensical posts. It doesn't have a guiding theme, so I can write whatever the **** I want. Including the usual suspects of personal observations, whining, rants, original writing and anything else I feel like.
And of course some of my disclaimers from the first Udder Madness post are still relevant:
Expect rants. Expect very short posts. Expect me to possibly abandon this project very soon. Expect legumes. Expect men in coats to arrest me for being completely and utterly insane, and a threat to public health, the government, liberty and the nobility of the human spirit, and expect them to call me an idiot for leaving an obvious record.
Warning, blog may contain puns. May contain themes, language and rattlesnakes (kudos if you got the Bill Bryson reference), and also nuts, legumes, and small children.
I hope you'll join me for the ride!
This post was produced in a factory that also (mis)handles mathematical formulae.
[Historical] Hobos, vehicle mechanics and hubris
This is another non-WoW Udder Madness post that I really liked (slightly abridged). It contains a typical DS rant, deep and meaningful truths about humanity, and a rough idea of how my brain can work at times.
September 27, 2008.
Laptop still broken.
Sort of.
Comes up with random memory failures.
Firefox thinks there's already a copy of Firefox running (which is not responding), and Firefox, being Firefox, thus won't let me start running a new window of Firefox. No Firefox isn't currently running.
The D-Link router at home gives me issues, and I can't 'apt-get' a new internet browser.
I suppose I should try to get ASUS to repair this thing, but there aren't any other verifiable problems with it now, so it probably won't register as broken. Sort of like when your car starts making a funny noise, it makes the noise when you start it, when you drive it, when you wait at red lights, and when you drive through red lights. After a while, it even starts making the noise when the engine isn't running, and, ever so faintly, you can hear the noise disturbing your dreams. Quietly but surely. Like a playground bully from many years ago. But as soon as you take the car to a mechanic it runs completely smoothly. In fact it runs smoother than you've ever heard (or not heard, as the case may be) it run before, since it's a 4th-hand Japanese import you bought from a crazy exchange student during the early 90s. Your mechanic gives you a long look, scratches his head (or her head, as the case may be), charges you $150 for wasting his (her) time and goes back inside after watching you drive off with your teeth tightly clenched. As soon as the door closes behind them, you know what happens? Yep. Your car, ever so gently, starts making that noise again. It gets louder. You know if it persists you will lose sleep, get divorced, and watch your teenaged daughter marry an in-bred hobo from the deep south (i.e. Hamilton) with barely enough intellect to fleece the ACC and WINZ out of sufficient money to finance a coup in Haiti (for reference, a level one troll rogue with Arcane Intellect has sufficient intellect to achieve this). Your grand kids will resemble cane toads going under the lawnmower. You consider going back to that mechanic, since you got a tax return of $263.37 yesterday (true story, the cheque is sitting on my desk, so will only take a day or two to find). But then you notice that even as you think of the mechanic the noise subsides and your petrol indicator has an evil gleam in its bulb. You surrender and drive home. The noise will slowly drive you mad, but if you lay off the coffee your blood pressure won't cause the arteries in your eyes to rupture.
The morale of the story? Buy a German car. They make the same noise, but it comes with a much angrier-sounding accent (people always tell me that when I speak to my parents on the phone it makes me sound angry, although this may just be the fact I'm calling home; I know my mother sounds angry fairly often, but this is because she IS angry). If you can't afford a German car, you now have a hobo-in-law who can teach you how to acquire one, at no additional charge (make sure your immune system can cope with tuberculosis, and be prepared to babysit the grandchildren on Friday nights).
The mechanic in the example above exhibits a fairly common quality (especially where technology is concerned). Think of it as the Midas Touch without the avarice, the anti-kaput, the borked-in-reverse. It's an aura of FIXED! whereby any problem of a particular type (such as car noises) immediately disappears when in close proximity to a particular person (such as a mechanic). Another example of this phenomenon is the photocopier at my work (I work at a library): it will jam, turn off all displays, shred unsaved printed e-tickets, decapitate the customer involved and trigger the fire alarms. Yet if I walk up to it it settles down, if I press a few buttons it starts printing again without fail, and if I croon to it, it plays Greensleeves (needless to say I like that photocopier a lot, I think that over the space of three and a half years it has earned me $4.25 in pay rises, while the computers guarantee my continued employment - although if I lose my job anytime soon just remember: HUBRIS IS A BAD THING).
NB: One year on, and I still have the same job ^_^.
It is facts of life like these that you must get used to, and learn to deal with. Some things you can't change, and some shouldn't be changed anyway.
TLDR: if you don't want a hobo-in-law, become a mechanic.
September 27, 2008.
Laptop still broken.
Sort of.
Comes up with random memory failures.
Firefox thinks there's already a copy of Firefox running (which is not responding), and Firefox, being Firefox, thus won't let me start running a new window of Firefox. No Firefox isn't currently running.
The D-Link router at home gives me issues, and I can't 'apt-get' a new internet browser.
I suppose I should try to get ASUS to repair this thing, but there aren't any other verifiable problems with it now, so it probably won't register as broken. Sort of like when your car starts making a funny noise, it makes the noise when you start it, when you drive it, when you wait at red lights, and when you drive through red lights. After a while, it even starts making the noise when the engine isn't running, and, ever so faintly, you can hear the noise disturbing your dreams. Quietly but surely. Like a playground bully from many years ago. But as soon as you take the car to a mechanic it runs completely smoothly. In fact it runs smoother than you've ever heard (or not heard, as the case may be) it run before, since it's a 4th-hand Japanese import you bought from a crazy exchange student during the early 90s. Your mechanic gives you a long look, scratches his head (or her head, as the case may be), charges you $150 for wasting his (her) time and goes back inside after watching you drive off with your teeth tightly clenched. As soon as the door closes behind them, you know what happens? Yep. Your car, ever so gently, starts making that noise again. It gets louder. You know if it persists you will lose sleep, get divorced, and watch your teenaged daughter marry an in-bred hobo from the deep south (i.e. Hamilton) with barely enough intellect to fleece the ACC and WINZ out of sufficient money to finance a coup in Haiti (for reference, a level one troll rogue with Arcane Intellect has sufficient intellect to achieve this). Your grand kids will resemble cane toads going under the lawnmower. You consider going back to that mechanic, since you got a tax return of $263.37 yesterday (true story, the cheque is sitting on my desk, so will only take a day or two to find). But then you notice that even as you think of the mechanic the noise subsides and your petrol indicator has an evil gleam in its bulb. You surrender and drive home. The noise will slowly drive you mad, but if you lay off the coffee your blood pressure won't cause the arteries in your eyes to rupture.
The morale of the story? Buy a German car. They make the same noise, but it comes with a much angrier-sounding accent (people always tell me that when I speak to my parents on the phone it makes me sound angry, although this may just be the fact I'm calling home; I know my mother sounds angry fairly often, but this is because she IS angry). If you can't afford a German car, you now have a hobo-in-law who can teach you how to acquire one, at no additional charge (make sure your immune system can cope with tuberculosis, and be prepared to babysit the grandchildren on Friday nights).
The mechanic in the example above exhibits a fairly common quality (especially where technology is concerned). Think of it as the Midas Touch without the avarice, the anti-kaput, the borked-in-reverse. It's an aura of FIXED! whereby any problem of a particular type (such as car noises) immediately disappears when in close proximity to a particular person (such as a mechanic). Another example of this phenomenon is the photocopier at my work (I work at a library): it will jam, turn off all displays, shred unsaved printed e-tickets, decapitate the customer involved and trigger the fire alarms. Yet if I walk up to it it settles down, if I press a few buttons it starts printing again without fail, and if I croon to it, it plays Greensleeves (needless to say I like that photocopier a lot, I think that over the space of three and a half years it has earned me $4.25 in pay rises, while the computers guarantee my continued employment - although if I lose my job anytime soon just remember: HUBRIS IS A BAD THING).
NB: One year on, and I still have the same job ^_^.
It is facts of life like these that you must get used to, and learn to deal with. Some things you can't change, and some shouldn't be changed anyway.
TLDR: if you don't want a hobo-in-law, become a mechanic.
[Historical] Exdad and Lol
This is one of my favourite non-WoW posts from Udder Madness. Reposted here because I can.
September 6, 2008.
I have just been asked whether 'exdad' is a word that is legal for use in Scrabble. I do not think it is. Wikipedia does not know it. Google only knows it 1400 times. Therefore it is not a word. Arguably we can change this by creating it, using it in a niche that makes it completely indispensable to modern humanity, ..., profit (like how 'Muggle' is now in the OED). As such, I present 'exdad' (extremely distressing acronym destruction), which is a term used for acronyms that no longer accurately describe their subject (object).
A prime example of an exdad is the acronym 'lol'. Just to refresh everyone's memory, lol stands for "Laughing Out Loud" (and not "Lots Of Love", "Lay Of [the] Land", "Licentious Orgasm Laws", or simply the word "lol"). It is now used in various contexts, such as "just joking", "haha", "coincidence happens" and "I have no other comment to make". Lol. It has been overused to the point where it has produced the derivative "I lol'd IRL" (I laughed out loud in real life), which is a pretty lol statement if you think about it.
Does this actually bug me? Not at all. What does bug me is the fact that when I think about it, I realise how fucked up my language sometimes has gotten over the last few years. I tend to start a sentence where I make a point with "but yeah,...", I use "lol" a lot, I think "lol" a lot. And irl I must remember to lolirl, not just say "lol". Lol. I frequently type stuff like "lofl", and "loflk", and "loflkwtf?" (the insertion of a random 'f' into run-of-the-mill acronym makes stuff more lofl). And various other idiosyncrasies.
But yeah, one statement I do like is "just for lols" (or "just for luls"). That one sometimes makes me lolirl. Lul.
Final point, use the term 'exdad'. Please. Just for luls.
September 6, 2008.
I have just been asked whether 'exdad' is a word that is legal for use in Scrabble. I do not think it is. Wikipedia does not know it. Google only knows it 1400 times. Therefore it is not a word. Arguably we can change this by creating it, using it in a niche that makes it completely indispensable to modern humanity, ..., profit (like how 'Muggle' is now in the OED). As such, I present 'exdad' (extremely distressing acronym destruction), which is a term used for acronyms that no longer accurately describe their subject (object).
A prime example of an exdad is the acronym 'lol'. Just to refresh everyone's memory, lol stands for "Laughing Out Loud" (and not "Lots Of Love", "Lay Of [the] Land", "Licentious Orgasm Laws", or simply the word "lol"). It is now used in various contexts, such as "just joking", "haha", "coincidence happens" and "I have no other comment to make". Lol. It has been overused to the point where it has produced the derivative "I lol'd IRL" (I laughed out loud in real life), which is a pretty lol statement if you think about it.
Does this actually bug me? Not at all. What does bug me is the fact that when I think about it, I realise how fucked up my language sometimes has gotten over the last few years. I tend to start a sentence where I make a point with "but yeah,...", I use "lol" a lot, I think "lol" a lot. And irl I must remember to lolirl, not just say "lol". Lol. I frequently type stuff like "lofl", and "loflk", and "loflkwtf?" (the insertion of a random 'f' into run-of-the-mill acronym makes stuff more lofl). And various other idiosyncrasies.
But yeah, one statement I do like is "just for lols" (or "just for luls"). That one sometimes makes me lolirl. Lul.
Final point, use the term 'exdad'. Please. Just for luls.
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