Rosio Pavoris

“Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our Dyspepsian dead.
In peace, there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger!
I see you stand like grayhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon such foundation
Cry ‘Dyspepsi — the choice of a new generation!’”

#radio-kol’s still not sorted, but KoL itself is back, with some new content.

#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.

I got kickbanned in #radio-kol by PVA, of all people. Because he’s an oblivious dickwad.

The power structure in #radio-kol needs to be looked at. Should’ve been looked at months ago. Once this is over, I’ll write up something for Fusilliban to take a look at. Who knows, he might actually do it. >.>

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.

Created a guestbook type thing for the KoL subdomain. Pretty easy to do, really, though I hope I remembered to strip all the tags that need stripping, and replace all the characters that need replacing.

I wonder how long it’ll be before someone breaks it. I think I only allowed a maximum of 10,000 messages to be stored, none larger than a kilobyte, so regular spam attacks can’t take it out, AFAICT.
MySQL injections might still work, though. I’ll need to read up on those.

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 (*shudder*).
What did people search for?

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

Bandwagon’d off of Roberts’s livejournal.

Hades Indeed, you are 83% erudite, 50% sensual, 87% martial, and 66% saturnine.

Simply put, Hades was a God of the Underworld, comparable to Midir of the Celts. After dying, a person entered the Underworld by first travelling through the groves of Persephone, onto the gates of Hades which were guarded by the three-headed dog Cerberus, a lot like the Norse “watchdog of hell”, Garm. Being the ruler of the Underworld, Hades was naturally the God of Death, but he was also the God of prosperity and wealth. He could be terrifying or generous depending on where one stood in his favour. The way one kept on his good side was by offering him black sheep. Hades didn’t get around much, preferring to stay home in the Underworld, a vast underground kingdom of caves and tunnels, with his wife Persephone to whom he was faithful. The Fifteen Gods These are the 15 categories of this test. If you score above average in � �all or none of the four variables: Dagda. � Erudite: Thoth. � Sensual: Frey. � Martial: Mars. � Saturnine: Mictlantecuhtli. �Erudite & Sensual: Amun. � Erudite & Martial: Odin. � Erudite & Saturnine: Anubis. � Sensual & Martial: Zeus. � Sensual & Saturnine: Cernunnos. � Martial & Saturnine: Loki. � Erudite, Sensual & Martial: Lug. � Erudite, Sensual & Saturnine: Coyote. � Erudite, Martial & Saturnine: Hades. � Sensual, Martial & Saturnine: Pan.

66% of me is produced through absorption of lead.

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 with the kanji, 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 £.