Rosio Pavoris a blog

#radio-kol is a trainwreck.

I’ve updated the KoL spoiler site a bit. I’m going to have to think of a better name eventually. YASS doesn’t sound like much.

And that’s all that has to be said about that.

#radio-kol is being flooded with KoL players both cool and HEAD-BURSTINGLY MORONIC, and I’ve been temporarily been given halfops again to deal with it.
Also hosting another instance of PJIRC here, for the bunch of tiny KoL chat surrogates that have popped up on ZiRC.

It’s kind of fun, actually.

People fail at particles; hilarity ensues.

Also, I might have been listening to TMBG Clock Radio a bit too much. Every time Verplancke-sensei mentions the word “particle”, I automatically add “man hates person man”. >.>

People fail at katakana; hilarity ensues.

Also, I had three hours of sleep last night, and I was already tired, and I had six hours of classes today, so I’m not exactly coherent.

People who somehow seem to have gotten the idea that nothing that happens online is to be taken seriously, and that RL is infinitely more important. Seriously, what the fuck?

I take everything that happens online about as seriously as I take RL (that is to say, not very), but people like that just annoy me. It annoys me even more that several of the people who feel that way are people who are otherwise pretty intelligent.

I had a dream about YellowSnowCone tonight. Dreamt that she made me a yellow snow cone, and it was delicious.

Pretty fucked up dream, really. I blame exhaustion.

My eyes hurt and my head hurts and my fingers hurt and I don’t feel like I’m getting enough oral sex for this accomplishment:

Linky.

That’s right, it’s done. Worked all day on it.
Rewrote the queries to make them suck less, too. Now in two separate files, after I realised how the first two searches were the exact same queries, and the third one was cluttering stuff up too much.

The ID searches seem to be errorless, but the name search still gives MySQL errors from time to time, when one of the locations has an apostrophe in it.

Edit: Never mind, the ID searches also have MySQL errors in the same instances. Only with them, it’s inside the blue box thing. I’ll rewrite that query to make it neater, I guess. Tomorrow.

Or possibly next week.

“364 items in the database. Highest item ID: #365″

So yeah. I’ve been spending ages adding items to the database, and I’m still only a fourth of the way through. Optimised the queries a bit, to reduce database size by 60-80%. And I added that thing that tells me how many items there are in the database.
Not much in the way of creativity here, just a lot of tedious data-transfer. Manually, in phpMyAdmin. Fun.

Anyway.

I’ve decided I’m going to ask a bunch of TMBG CDs for my birthday. Which and how many will depend on the budget, but Dial-A-Song is an obvious choice. John Henry, probably, and The Spine. State Songs has some cool songs, but that’s not technically TMBG, and I’d like to establish a basis for a collection. Here Come The ABCs has some cute novelty tracks. Flood is basically what people think of when they think of TMBG.
So yeah. Tough choice, if I do have to choose. And my mom’s concerned about ruining the surprise, but because their albums have so many redundant tracks, I can’t really let her decide which albums to get. I’ll probably just show her a collection of cool shirts somewhere, and the KoL store, and let the surprise part come from that.

Still loving the TMBG Clock Radio, though it makes me cringe to think what kind of bandwidth that consumes on their end. At 192 kbps, leaving it on 24/7 would consume over 2 GB per month, for a single user. Who the hell has several terabytes of dedicated bandwidth monthly to spend on free streaming audio?

楽しい (たのしい) !== 狸 (たぬき)

Raccoon parties indeed.

Why didn’t I know about TMBG Clock Radio yet? What kind of a half-assed TMBG fan am I?

It’s totally made of awesome. Check it out. Now.

Wrote a front page thing for kol.rotahall.org. I’ve got a lot of work to do on that, though.
I’ve been working with Rota Hall’s main CSS file too much. I take tons of classes for granted, and it’s a bitch to have to update and reupload the file every time I make a tiny change to it.
Incidentally, I have no idea how Jick makes KoL’s CSS work. AFAICT, it shouldn’t be looking as good as it does at all. His HTML/CSS code is worse than Merc’s.

Anyway.
Also wrote an item location search index type kind of thing. Eventually, it should be an adequate replacement for this outdated thing, but KoL has somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,300 items, and adding them all to the database manually is a pain in the ass. I’ve added 164 of them so far (items #1-165, sans #13).
Eventually, though, it’ll list item descriptions, effects, and images along with their drop locations, as well as what the items are actually used for. I wish I could delegate this kind of work to someone else, though, but alas.
I’m sure it’ll get done eventually. This list, outdated though it may be, has been a great help so far.

I posted the link to the trophies page on the Lothlorien forums, and it’s been well received, apparently.

Edit: I’ve updated the Content and Forums pages. I’ve removed the Community from both, and added the KoL spoiler site to Content.

Set up a new subdomain, kol.rotahall.org. It’ll hold a KoL spoiler site eventually, though only stuff you can’t really find on other spoiler sites.
Right now, all that’s there is a trophy list with trophy numbers. Not entirely complete, but AFAIK, nobody’s done this since a half-assed attempt the week trophies were first created.

Fame and fortune, here I come. >.>

KoL’s very first adult fanfic. AFAIK, at least. Pretty SFW, but it’s a start.

Going through my subdomain stat logs again. Six hits this month from search engines on cairnarvon.rotahall.org, all from MSN.
What did people search for?

“how to make a doll out of a wooden spoon” and “power tools for wooden spoon making”.

So, like, people have been wondering what the point of kanji is, in written Japanese. Generally, inexperienced dimwits will tell you it’s a quick way to write something that’d otherwise be a buttload of characters.

While that can explain some of the really simple ones (like the 大 (oo) in 大きい (ookii; big), which saves, like, three strokes compared to the kana (おおきい), how does that explain those that are a fuckton more difficult to write than the kana?

Consider, for example, the verb 読む (yomu; to read). The kanji character 読 has fourteen (!) strokes, and is read as yo. The kana for this syllable is よ. That’s right, two strokes.

The reason for this is that the kanji character doesn’t just represent the sound, it also represents the meaning. Keep in mind that written Japanese does not have spaces between words, and that Japanese is much more limited in its number of sounds.
A text written entirely in hiragana would be next to impossible to read, plain and simple.

The current setup tends to be kanji for Japanese words, katakana for foreign words (which tend to have pronounciations radically different from Japanese, so the script draws extra attention to that), and hiragana for grammatical markup, including particles like は and を, but also verb conjugations (like, indeed, 読む; the む varies depending on the conjugation, while the base 読 remains untouched) and things.

So yeah. It does make sense.
Doesn’t mean they’re not intentionally making things harder for everyone by refusing to include furigana, though.

Man. I got, like, an hour of sleep last night. Dunno why. And we’ve got seven hours of classes on Mondays. Still, managed pretty decently.

Gabriël’s back. Turns out he didn’t quit, he was in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. Alcohol fucking poisoning. He’d never drunk alcohol before, and he decided to get as drunk as he possibly could some time last week, for whatever reason.
How… predictable.

KoL-wise, I ascended again today, after beating the NS as a hardcore Sauceror. I hate Myst classes. Nevertheless, I’m now a hardcore oxygenerian Sauceror. Muscle sign, because I’m hoping to get another one of the gravy fairies.
Speaking of familiars, I traded my Crimbo pants for three Mr Accessories today, and got an attention deficit demon. Was trying to sell my bottle of Cabernet for a while, but /villa is fucking poor, so the cymbal-playing monkey will have to wait until the end of this run.
Still waiting for Roberts to send me a high-res shirt design, so I can order a few of those, and donate to KoL in the process.

KoLondon seems to be coming together. I have roommates dealing with the booking of a room (sharing a room with five people; two under-aged guys, two girls, at least one of which is hot, and some guy from The Rye, IIRC), and apparently there’s some sort of discount going on for the Thalys in December (though that’s a moot point, mostly, as my parents are paying for this). I still need to do the actual booking of that, though I’d have to be sure when I’m coming back. Very probably on the Monday, as it stands.
And I need to remember to change money. Stupid £.

I renamed the Archives/Trash Compactor forum to Genizah. Enrichissez-vous!

(Yes, this was kind of inspired by Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, which I reviewed here. The term gevaisa came up in relation to golems at one point, and it looked promising, so I googled it. Doesn’t appear to mean anything, but it seems to be a bastardization of the term genizah.)

Turns out that some of you (my loyal readers) are using retardedly outdated versions of your browsers.

18.4% of you are using an old version of Firefox (i.e. lower than 1.0.7).
11.8% of you are using an outdated version of the Firefox beta (1.4 instead of 1.4.1).
0.8% of you are using Internet Explorer 5.0.

Upgrade, dammit. Or, if you don’t, I’d be interested in hearing why not.
/me points at the Comments link.

(Interestingly, the main domain got a few hits from someone using Windows Codename Longhorn (i.e. a leaked copy of Windows Vista) and Internet Explorer 7.0. Dunno who that is, and (s)he doesn’t read this blog, apparently, but well done. At this point, it’s impressive to use that still; once it’s actually released, I’ll probably ban you from the domain. :P)

I seem to have gotten over my bout of sickitude. Still tired as fuck, but my face is no longer leaking.

Went to class today. Conversation, I think it was supposed to be, though it ended up mainly as a bunch of monologues. The next batch of people is dropping off, looks like. We lost a lot of people when hiragana was introduced and kanji and katakana were threatened with, and now grammar is starting to pick up some speed. I’m still pretty much on top of things at this point.
Vienna wasn’t in class today. Hope she’s not one of the ones dropping off. Our Dutchie (Daniëlla) has either taken a Japanese course before at some point, or is studying way too much. If the latter, she’ll drown in a few months. That would suck.

Don’t think I mentioned this before, but I bought an MP3 player earlier this week. 1 GB USB flash drive, but it’s tiny, cheap, and a reasonably decent quality. Sony, too. This one, in fact. The lack of rechargable battery sucks, though.
But it works. And Leuven is a great deal less boring to walk through when there’s a soundtrack.

Not much is happening in KoL. I hit level 11 on my main, as a Sauceror. I expect to ascend in two or three days, if the RNG doesn’t screw me over entirely.
I finally got Gourdcore on Tabris. Took long enough, too (Turns Played (this run): 2,945; added somewhere in the neighborhood of three weeks, I think). I should set up a page listing the various trophies, instead of just the thread.

Going through some comic archives. This is so very true. I’ve never run into one in Tienen or Leuven, but they annoyed the fuck out of me in Ghent. But then, everything annoyed the fuck out of me in Ghent.

Also, Columbus Day isn’t a real holiday. Quit celebrating it.