I have a new version of the webcomic script up, a preview of the new version for Brian Carroll, it’s original inspiration. You can find it here.
SOS Brigade
I have no interest in ordinary humans. If there are any aliens, time travelers, or espers here, come join me.
It’s a simple enough premise: Crazy girl does crazy things. She starts a club, looking for things straight out of anime. And she gets them: Shortly, the club membership contains, predictably, an alien, a time traveler, and an esper. Only, poor Haruhi doesn’t necessarially realize it. Also, she herself is stranger than them all.
Perhaps what I like most about this series is it’s most controversial aspect: It’s very much anachronistic. It’s designed to be watched out of order. If you’re watching it in chronological order, it’s just not as good. Perhaps fun to do once you’ve seen it in it’s proper order, but not the way anyone should see it.
It bugs me, therefore, that it’s being released in chronological order. Certainly, it makes more sense that way. The best art doesn’t make sense. I’m a fan of absurdism, and this show provides it in droves: But the effect is lessened if you follow Kyons journey and know the secrets before the bizarre episodes (Funnilly enough, even though I refer to it as Kyon’s journey, Kyon’s numbering at the end of the episodes is the anachronistic, and Haruhi’s is the chronological).
If you get a chance, pick up the Limited Edition versions: The combination of the original-order episodes and the SOS-brigade armband you get in Vol 2 make it well worth it. And either way, try and watch it as it was intended by it’s creators. It’s better that way.
Rank and Phyle
It’s fairly obvious that you can pick your friends. Who you choose to be around is a definite choice: Though one that’s not been around for long. A mere hundred years ago, you couldn’t reasonably be expected to ever travel 100 miles away from where you were born. Your friends were limited to those within a few miles of where you lived. Now, it’s possible to go across the globe in a day, for prices that anyone can afford if they try. Further, it’s possible to know people across the globe, and communicate with them instantly, anytime, anywhere.
Who your friends are says a lot about your person. Your friends are generally the people like you. My friends, for example, are stereotypically Geeks. Uber-geeks, the social class of the geek heirarchy.
I belong to a Phyle. It’s not called that (Though, I think anyone among them would recognize that we are such). It’s more than simply a a group of friends: It’s less than a full nation, city, or even town. We are a diverse group, but we have the common ground of Gaming, of Computers, Of anime, electronics, physics, math, photography, and just about anything else geeky.
We could be considered a proto-phyle: It wasn’t specifically such that drew us together. We don’t have any particular laws or group logic (Except that the PS3 sucks, and some of us debate even that). However, given a topic, we generally come with a preconceived concensus. We think the same.
I joined this phyle a mere 5 months ago, though I had a foot in the door before then. I joined online: I came into the phyle’s domain, an IRC channel, and was rather quickly accepted. I considered many of the members friends before I met them in person. There’s a couple who I consider close friends whom I’ve met in person but once, briefly. Simply mentioning the phyle, and your association, gets you credit in my and other phyleist’s books. A couple days of conversation in a chatroom gains you more. A large amount of credit comes from simply having joined, and the process and selection are not hard.
More and more, geographical boundaries mean less and less. Your friends, and your phyle, can exist without ever needing to meet. At the same time, locale still matters, and still will for the forseeable future. Moving out to Seattle, to the center of the Phyle, certainly didn’t hurt. Late night dennys runs, parties, and random outings are still major social events, even as well connected as we are via the internet.
Things have changed. The Phyle is not any social structure that has existed before: The members are eclectic, and bound by ideals rather than geography. However, we still try and carve out geographical continuity, and the old methods of interaction are still just as valid.
Doo Dah News.
I love Lore Sjoberg.
It doesn’t make cents
So, there’s this new Bank of America “Keep the Change” thing they keep advertising on the radio and TV. If there were ever a case of bad math, this would be it. They promise to relieve you of lost change by rounding your credit card transactions up to the nearest dollar. First off: unless you ask for cash back, you don’t get change from a credit card transaction. The merchants can specify cents, and DO. Then, they tell you of all the money you can “save” by doing this, as if that money would otherwise be lost. That’s misleading: Your total money stays the same. You are “Saving” in the sense that your money is in your savings account, rather than more readily spendable, but you’re not “Saving” in the sense that you’re spending less money. It’s stupid, and misleading, and had they advertised it as what it is (A spending control mechanism), rather than what it isn’t (A way to get extra money), it would have been much less offensive to those with a simple sense of math.
On PHP design
I’m many things, but the part I want to talk about tonight is my coder. I’ve been coding for more than half my life: When I was 8, I started writing some basic LOGO programs in an extracurricular activity called Wiz Kids. (One of my best friends to this day, Donkey Kong, I met through the program, though we weren’t in the same session). My dad showed me some Perl back before web 1.0. I have a degree and a half in Computer Science, though I’m not certain what good either of those do me.
But I can code, and I do enjoy it. I just suck at it. Case in point: I just dug out a set of PHP scripts I wrote for a friend who has a webcomic. They’re not horrible, but I see so many things I could have done better. I’m fairly certain it’s actually secure code (which means something, in php), but the design is all wrong: It’s written as an application that you drop a layout into, rather than as a set of scripts you drop into a layout.
I’m gonna fix that, eventually. But, for the moment, here‘s the code. It’s used in only two sites, one of which is Brian Carroll’s Instant Classic Genrezvous Point. It’s an interesting exercise, but needs to be reworked. Still, not bad for a couple days of PHP coding without any real direction.
A Project
Orange Ya Glad? is something I thought up a while ago, but am only starting to code now. It’s blatantly based on Apples to Apples, except on the web. It’s obviously not as good as the real thing, but I’m hoping that with the ability to create custom decks out of tags it’ll be worth playing, once I write the code 🙂
Dumpnet drafts, and societal models
Attached at the end of this post will be some drafts of the Dumpnet protocol and specification. There’s some good ideas in them, and a kernel of truth in the idea presented there of Ant Routing. However, these drafts are crap for a number of reasons, both technical and societal.
A perfect society wouldn’t need the DUMPNET. A perfect society would have distinct similarities to a surveillance society: Cameras, records, logs would be everywhere. The difference would be that while a surveillance society would keep those records to those in power, a perfect society would keep them open to anyone.
Granted, this probably wouldn’t work for any number of reasons, but it’s a nice hope. A society where security procedures and anonymity are unnecessary is simply a dream, because there will always be a fringe who attempt to work outside the system.
Where is the DUMPNET necessary, then? Really, it’s current design is for a dystopian society. It allows perfect anonymity. Nobody can prove which packets you sent, or just routed, without careful examination of your computer. The design is paranoid. More along the lines of a cyberpunk world. Not practical in any way.
Not everyone shares my idea of a perfect world. I know some people who would love to live in said dystopia cyberpunk world. Even in our world, they live and value privacy as if they were living in that world. It’s not a bad attitude to take, all things considered. It serves them suprisingly well, if not the best socailly.
Most of those friends are people who I would consider “Hacker” friends. It’s not coincidental. Technological people tend to have higher concerns for issue like privacy. Perhaps because we better understand exactly how much data is being collected, and how it’s used.
I like the idea of the darknet. I like both the idea of freedom and the community that surrounds it. I like the idea of creating a service that can be used to make the world better. I like the access, the intrigue, and mystery that surrounds it.
I’m re-writing the spec. It was written as both a layer 3 and 4 protocol, but really, what’s important is the layer 3.
DUMPTRUNK Server Routing Protocol.
Programs that operate over the DUMPNET supply the DUMPTRUNK node with a Public key on which to listen. They are then allowed to send packets to the DUMPNET, as permitted by server policy, and all incoming messages with a DEST matching their key are routed to them.
To send a packet, the DUMPNET programs simply send a basic encapsulation of the packet to the DUMPTRUNK node along their connection to it. This should be essentially a full packet, with ID at 0. It should already include DEST, TTL, SRC, ID, and DATA, and data should be pre-encrypted. DEST should not be hashed.
The DUMPTRUNK node hashes DEST, lowers TTL according to policy, hashes SRC with it’s own private key if non-zero, sets ID
A packet, be it ANT or DATA, is received via a connection. The DEST hash is checked against the public keys registered with this DUMPTRUNK routing node. If it does not match, the ID is checked with the “Recent ID” table. If that returns a match, the packet is dropped. Zero should always be on the “Recent ID” table.
If there is no match on the “Recent ID” table, SRC is hashed with the DUMPTRUNK node’s private key and TTL is modified, appropriately. The new SRC is added to the public key table, along with the interface upon which it was received. (Unix Model note: If designed properly, there needs be no differentiation between a registered program and a linked node within the routing table. It’s just an opened filehandle.) It is then forwarded to each other node that is connected.
If the DEST matches one of them, it is determined whether it is an ANT or DATA packet, by the value of ID. The SRC and DATA are then passed on to the program that “owns” the public key.
DUMPNET Ant Packet specification:
An ant packet is used to set up a connection. It consists of the following information
DEST: A hash of a public key specifying destination.
TTL: A number, counting down the number of hops left to go for a given packet before it should be destroyed. TTL is one of the more flexible parts of DUMPNET. It should be randomized at the sender’s end, and at each node. There must be a general downward trend, but a 50% chance of reducing by one hop, a 40% chance of reducing by two, and a 10% chance of increasing by one helps mask the network architecture. Each DUMPNET routing node software MAY handle this differently.
SRC: An identifier, essentially a repeated crypt of a public key used in linking packets.
??? ID: An identifier, unchanged from node to node, to reduce traffic by preventing broadcast collision.
DATA: A further message, encrypted, with the same public key as used to generate DEST.
Dumpnet Packet Specification:
DEST: the SRC of the ant that was received to create the connection.
TTL: As above
SRC: Zero. There’s no need for a backtrace in this occurance.
??? ID: An identifier, unchanged from node to node, to reduce traffic by preventing broadcast collision. Note that, since the DEST should be a direct path, this should be 0. Perhaps this should be omitted for packets with a SRC of zero?
U-Stor-it
I’ve got a bunch of stuff in an “Uncle Bob’s Self Storage” up in Rochester, NY. As I was checking in when I got the unit, I asked if anyone had ever tried to live in one, as in “Snow Crash” (And a story by Aido in City Limits). The clerk said no, but recounted another tale to me.
There was a 40-something man, who rented one of the units big enough to store a car in. He didn’t keep anything in there, let it sit empty. But, every day, he would drive to the storage lot, open up his unit, drive his car in and eat his lunch.
I guess some people just need privacy.
I’m fine without being final
A lot of people thought the ending to Pirates III was detracted from by the scene in which Barbarossa and Jack head towards the fountain of youth. It lessened the finality of the movie.
Who cares? The movie, despite being the third and final in the series, wasn’t supposed to be final. Jack Sparrow wasn’t simply going to end his piracy. The scene left an opening, both for another movie (unlikely, but possible), and in the viewer’s imagination. Instead of sitting still for the end of the movie, in the viewers mind leaving the theater, Jack is already headed out for destinations unknown. Thar be adventure in these waters, rather than doldrums.