It's Wingnut Boilover Day

How do we stop the extremists in this country from thinking their opinion is the only one that matters?

Can we prevent the Eric Rudolphs and Timothy McVeighs of this country from bringing back the bad old days of lynchings and Red Scares?

When will the wingnuts stop shitting all over our shared national symbols? First the Minutemen and Michael Savage's laughable Paul Revere Society, now the reduction of one of the great symbols of humanity's right to consent to its government to a juvenile sex joke supporting greedy, ignorant cheapskates' right to be greedy, ignorant cheapskates.

I wore a flag sticker on my backpack for about a year after 9/11. When it became clear that things were returning to business as usual and that the right-wing hawks and lunatics had every intention of appropriating the flag and the symbols of our history for their own purposes, the sticker came off. We of the American Left need to take our symbols back and remind the people who are abusing them that back in the day, they'd probably have been Crown loyalists. Update: Teabaggers at the Hyannis Airport Rotary. I drove by screaming they were a disgrace to the flag and flipping them all the bird. They booed me. Heh. Not concerned. (Well, except for the part where they were causing a traffic jam worthy of August.)

AmazonFail update: I would categorize their response as barely adequate -- they have more or less admitted fault and mostly repaired the problem, but haven't explicitly apologized, nor have they been really clear about what happened. They will be watched, and have already lost a lot of customers to places like Powell's or AbeBooks. At this point, I think it's a judgement call as to whether to boycott or not. I have already made one of the purchases I was planning on making at Amazon at another location and though I will resume doing Vine reviews soon, there's a very good possibility I may do my self-bought reviews here or at Off Season for a while. Which is just as well, as many of my upcoming review choices probably should be at Off Season anyway, if only to get more traffic. Update: see Clay Shirky's analysis of the response to AmazonFail, which I thought was somewhat justified myself but bordered on a witch hunt.

Amazon, WTF?

Well, if it hasn't reached you yet, it will soon -- hundreds of books on GLBT, teen sexuality, and women's issues vanished from Amazon.com's sales ranking lists over the course of Easter Sunday. The blogosphere has, quite predictably and understandably, shit a brick over this, especially as the problem seems to have been outstanding since February.

Now I do not personally think this was a corporate decision, but Amazon customer reps have been sending out form letters calling it a "glitch" (after an initial round of form letters that would seem to indicate that they had no idea what was going on). They have yet to post anything on the front page, though at least a few people (including me) believe that the system was intentionally trolled during a time when most of Amazon's US staff was probably home for the Easter weekend, and at least one person is claiming responsibility (though his credibility is in grave doubt, based largely on his lack of programming mojo). (There is an ongoing Twitter discussion at #amazonfail.)

Amazon knows this has been a disaster for them; many people have canceled orders, and I myself sent a note saying that I would not only postpone any purchases I'm considering (I had a couple in mind, including the new Michael Ruhlman book and a deck of Spanish playing cards) but that as a Vine reviewer, I won't be submitting any content until it's resolved. I'm willing to grant them a presumption of innocence, but even if they are innocent, they're handling it poorly and deserve to lose massive amounts of money over it.

What I was doing with a deck of cards at a bar last night

The basic idea: solitaire hold 'em poker. I've been on a bit of a playing card kick lately and the idea of a newish sort of solitaire poker flitted through my head a while back. I'm not too sure of the value of this particular game, but here goes the basic rules I came up with:

Needed:
-1 deck of standard cards, jokers removed
-a handful of counters (I used 5, but 21 might be better)

1. Shuffle deck.
2. Deal out nine cards face down -- two for the player, two for the "house", five common cards.
3. Flip over player cards, then first three common cards. Decide whether to stay in; if not, pass a counter to the "house".
4. Flip over last two cards; stay in or pass counter.
5. Flip over house; winner gets a counter.
6. Player wins best-of-five.

My main concern in something like this is that it actually be sufficiently interesting as to be worth repeat plays. I've already come up with one refinement -- the "21 counters" game, where you start with 21 counters and push one into a pot for each stage of the deal (initial deal, flop, fourth street, river) if you wish to stay in, and pass the pot to the "house" if you don't. In this set, you win if you have over half your original chips after five hands. (Why five hands? 54 cards/9 cards per hand = 6 hands, but since there's no jokers there will be seven cards left at the bottom of the deck before reshuffling.) This particular ruleset can also be trivially converted into a blackjack-like banking game, but I'd bet someone somewhere has already come up with it.

Consider the type-in

When I was a kid, as most geeks over about the age of 25 will remember, computer magazines often included many, many type-in programs. I never had enough patience to type them in, but the installed base of many of these old programs, many in BASIC, with many games and productivity programs, had to have been huge back in the day. I've been looking (without a whole lot of success) for some of these old programs, but the magazines are hard to find and the books that collected them were usually cheaply-printed paperbacks. Some are floating around on the net (the Wikipedia article links to a few archives), but for the most part, except for the random shell scripts and the like that appear in magazines like MacLife and Linux Journal, the form is dead. (In fact, I do have one such program typed in somewhere, a WarioWare-style minigame from a series of kid's adventure books called Micro Adventures. It is a painfully difficult game under the best of circumstances, and porting it to Chipmunk Basic proved pointless, since there's no way to throttle down the execution speed.)

Now I'm not going to lie -- to a certain extent the form isn't necessary. Certainly the many tedious pages of machine code that marked such programs as SpeedScript (a favorite program of mine when the buffer lag on geoWrite started driving me batty) aren't welcomed anymore. But I still think there's value in the form -- for one thing, programming has passed back into the realm of the Priesthood (aka Eric Raymond's "cathedral"). Most people don't even realize that almost every computer OS comes with at least two programming languages already available by default (usually some sort of shell scripting as well as JavaScript), and almost every high school and college student has had to purchase a TI or HP graphing calculator at some point. And robotics, especially in the form of things like Lego Mindstorms and the iRobot Roomba, has become quite popular as a hobby since NASA's Mars explorations proved that a robot doesn't have to sing and dance to be interesting. (Sadly, kiddie computers like those made by VTech no longer include even basic programming functionality, and out of the major gaming consoles, only Sony even gives lip service towards supporting homebrew development, by allowing Linux on the PS3. Nintendo grudgingly allows it but does not support it, and Microsoft has a history of open hostility.)

All that being as it may, we're actually in pretty good shape as far as facilities are concerned if anyone wishes to bring this sort of magazine or book back on the market. As I said, JavaScript is probably a logical place to begin, as it's standard on all three major web browser engines. TICalc.org shows the amount of work that's done on graphing calculator platforms despite the unabashedly weird syntaxes of RPL and TI-BASIC. And we can't forget the ready availability of languages such as Perl, Python, and Lua (all of which can be readily interfaced to graphic toolkits like Tk), as well as special-purpose languages such as Inform; all of these products are open source software and readily obtained and installed on whatever platform you choose.

So will anyone do this? Although the format would have to change a little (less condensed listings, more comments), it would certainly help to train a new generation of hackers, and for those that don't wish to do the typing it would be trivial to get the pretyped versions. What say you sirs?

Tabloids in the culture wars: What's wrong with AMI?

You know, I think American Media Inc. has gone too far this time. They've always angled towards a distinctly right-wing audience (although the Weekly World News alone among all their papers discovered the value of not taking itself seriously), but they've gone over the deep end lately.

The Sun and the Enquirer don't seem to have had much to say so far, but the Globe for the last two weeks has been running with the long-discredited meme about Obama not being a native-born American, while the Examiner ran a breathless piece about "gay terrorists" being responsible for torching Sarah Palin's church in Alaska. I'm of two minds about this -- on the one hand, people are conditioned not to take AMI rags all that seriously (the Enquirer, sketchy as it is, is the only one worth a damn journalistically, and that isn't saying much), but on the other hand they have a huge and frequently gullible readership. Asking AMI to practice responsible journalism is perhaps a bit extreme, but at the same time it seems hard to justify printing outright fearmongering and hatred.

I'd suggest boycotting, but unlike my grandmother (who was a regular Enquirer reader, much to the bemusement of my mother), I don't think I've ever actually spent money on one. So I don't know...

The banished words list. Woo-hoo, let's start the year with some language snobbery.

Lake Superior State's Banished Words List

Oh boy. Yet another opportunity to grouse about words we're kind of tired of hearing and neologisms that we somehow don't think are necessary. Hell, I bet they think they're a bunch of mavericks, like William Safire. Eh, not so much.

On "The Christmas Shoes"

I had managed to go my entire life until last week never having heard that odious crapfest of a song. Despite my best efforts to avoid its creepy, manipulative, heart-cloggingly schmaltzy lyrics, I've had to hear it twice in the last week. I can only say this:

Take away the lyrics and the Christianity, and this is still an unbelievably shitty piece of late-90s MOR crap, missing only the obligatory gratuitous saxophone stings. If there were no words, this piece of shit song would still make me want to pound crucifixion nails into my ears just listening to the instrumental. It is a perfect shitstorm of crap and should be pulled from the airwaves and every copy microwaved to a sparkly polycarbonate cinder.

For brain bleach (albeit weak), an interesting mediocrity and the bizarre treatment of a well-established alt-music artist: a dance diva who is smoking hot despite having pronounced thighs and no waist to speak of. Also, from a few weeks ago, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon comments on the shafting of Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls by her label for having a supposedly less-than-perfect body. A tale of two record labels it seems.