Cinderella

I like this version.

I'm almost done packing, the flight home is tomorrow. Heh, it's almost routine now.

Mirror, Mirror

The title text to this xkcd comic describes a famous trick question:

"When you look at words in a mirror, how come they're reversed left to right but not top to bottom? What's special about the horizontal axis?"

The answer is fairly obvious (they're reversed left to right because that's how you flipped the text around in order to face it towards the mirror), if slightly counter-intuitive, because it is easy to confuse the idea of a reflected image with a reversed image. It's also easy to prove that the premise of the question is incorrect - write a word on a sheet of paper, and then turn it top to bottom to face the mirror. Oh hey, the word is now upside-down, but not remotely flipped from left to right!

The question of what's special about the horizontal axis needs to be taken separately from the mirror. Or rather, why do we feel compelled to turn a sheet of paper or a book from left to right when turning it towards a mirror, rather than top to bottom, diagonally or any other angle out of the three hundred and sixty available? 

I thought it might something to do with the way we read horizontally, and therefore someone accustomed to reading top-to-bottom would turn the paper in that direction instead. My father contended that, since our feet are stuck to the ground by gravity, we are accustomed to move along the horizontal axis.  If you're in a dressing room and want to take a look at the back of your outfit, you twist yourself left or right about your waist - it never occurs to you to bend forward or backward until you can see your reflection, possibly because you're simply not flexible to do that anyway.

It's a bit funny though, how we don't even stop to think about such things. Or about astronauts in zero-gravity environments who might have a different perspective on things.

Taste

Today's xkcd.

I was so startled, I laughed until my stomach hurt. Thank you, xkcd!

Every library should have a secret room like that, for that sole purpose. Except that then those books would become very popular...with children, using them as the controls for an impromptu merry-go-round.

(Wonderella made me laugh out loud too, with the utterly unexpected ending.)

Aye Arr Ell

That title came out quite piratical.

Anyways, a few hours ago I was in foodcourt at a local mall and I saw a chap wearing a Hero of Heart hoodie walk by. I didn't stop to think too long about it, I just strode after him, caught up and asked, "Hey, are you a Homestuck fan?"

Turns out he was, and he seemed quite delighted to meet a fellow fan too. It's a funny thing, being a fan of an Internet series. If I saw someone wearing a Transformers T-shirt, or carrying a Fullmetal Alchemist comic, I'd think to myself, "Cool, this person likes one of the things I do," and leave it at that. But if it's something Internet-based, there's an added excitement, an immediate and reflexive thought of "Let's be friends!"

Furthermore, it seems that this particular person is Facebook friends with the husband of one of my real-life friends. How's that for six degrees?

Element Bending

Laughed. So. Hard.

Personally, I'd take up iron-bending, for the sake of being able to manipulate many common items and indirect power over magnetism. Carbon-bending's not so bad either, except it could get messy with organic materials. Silver, nickel and gold-bending would be useful if you wanted a steady job in the jewellery industry.

You know, I see good potential for a story here. A universe where everyone can control a few elements to the point where it's a commonplace part of everyday life. Then you'd have a few heroes who could perhaps have mastery over some of the more difficult (or short-lived) elements, and villains with specialist bending abilities... So many possibilities!

Fewer or Less?

I love this Wonderella comic because of:

a) Tiberius Shark pulling a McGyver
b) Wonderella casually shrugging off her apparently inescapable bonds.
c) It totally is a sippy cup!
d) The fact that the entire comic is about grammar.

Wonderella is a great comic, by the way. You want a good comic with a realistic female heroine? Here's one. (Emphasis on "realistic".)

P.S.: For the last two years I hadn't made a single blog post in September. What the heck?

Green Jelly Beans Linked to Acne!

This comic made me laugh out loud.

And then the alt-text killed me.

Thank you, xkcd. You have made my day.

Singles' Grumbling Day

I forgot about it. I also forgot about Discount Chocolate Day.

I did, however, find a recipe for chocolate-dipped fudge brownies. Yes. This is a thing which must be made, and subsequently eaten.

Homestuck is rocking so hard on two fronts. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly reference rocks almost as much as that sweet Bro versus Jack image which is right now lending some of its awesome to my desktop. Oh, and the music. THE MUSIC. I can't stop listening to it!

So anyway. Why did they take Pattern Fills out of PowerPoint 2007? And when they put it back in PowerPoint 2010, why did they take away the ability to adjust their transparency?
It's going to take a while to get used to this program.

I Just Had a Friendship Aneurysm

[shudder]











No wait, I have more to say.

It's...it's just like those children's shows. Those shows for extremely yourng children. Those extremely saccharine cartoons dripping with sugar and treacle and sing-along-songs and pure undiluted sweetness.

[shudder]

Flat Major

Or, the apparent result of dropping a piano on a military base. The complementary riddle concerning the release of a piano down a mineshaft (flat minor) is a little more subtle, but requires the first to aid its setup.

I'm not sure if I've ever mentioned MS Paint Adventures. If I haven't, it is a grave injustice because it deserves to be mentioned. Repeatedly. I have never seen another webcomic - I use the term loosely, because "webcomic" does not properly describe MS Paint Adventures - create such a sense of epic scale so successfully. Part of it may be that readers are able to influence the story by making suggestions for character actions, so there is a very real investment in characters. The other part consists of the grand-scale animations, which are staggering in their length and complexity. Things happen in this story, and they are BIG.

Now if I haven't mentioned Alice is Dead before, this is because I didn't know of it previously. This is also a grave injustice, though an unintentional one. There are currently two episodes of the game, and while the puzzles aren't too hard, the writing is riveting and the art, beautifully detailed. The world of Alice is Dead is twisted version of Wonderland, and one can't help but want to know how deep the rabbit hole goes. So to speak.

I've been cleaning up the corners in my life, quite literally. There comes a time when one must sit down and go through the belongings which were once valued, now not so much. I have twenty years worth of collected material, most of it junk, to sort through. It is inevitable when pursuing such an occupation that there are a few surprises. For one, I discovered a large number of fancy pens, most of them still working well, including a lovely Sheaffer. I also found some old, old things I've forgotten about - photographs, papers, drawings, even cash - hidden away like a squirrel might hide its nuts. With the same effect.

One of the interesting surprises came when I was searching through a folder of art constructed by myself primarily between the ages of one and five, and which proved very difficult to prune down. I found an old, old drawing of a bird by myself at around the age of four, with the wobbly lines and patchy colours typical of a hand lacking dexterity. It was recognisably a Kakapo.

Clearly the drawing had been copied from a photograph - I doubt that at that age I could even pronounce "Kakapo" properly. But the main features had been preserved, so that my twenty-one-year-old self was capable of recognising it at a glance. There is a lesson here somewhere.

My father is finally retiring his seven-year-old IBM ThinkPad, a model which I maintain was the best work laptop ever made. I remember playing Lego Robohunter on that thing, and taking my first wobbly steps into the Internet. I remember using it as a backup computer when mine failed repeatedly, and then again when mine failed for good. I remember the day when it finally could no longer function without a constant power supply, its battery not nearly as durable as the computer itself.

I think I will miss it. When something has been nearby for so long - especially something with so intimate an association as a laptop - it leaves a mark. Suddenly the things you thought would always be there clearly and firmly demonstrate that all things are tentative.

Change is inevitable.

Except from vending machines.

Nerd Eyes

Is it nerdy that when I looked at the placeholder image for Sarah Zero today, I immediately spotted the disassembled Bordakh?

Yeah, I thought so.

Incidentally, I also see some Tanma bits in there.

Update XX: Cool, Useful or Plain Funny

So, one of my friends recently picked up a 1 terabyte hard drive for about $200. That's 20 cents per gigabyte, people. And to think that a few years ago, a 1GB hard drive would have cost $100. Meanwhile, Seagate promises over thirty thousand times that capacity in a mere two years.
Computers are moving altogether too fast these days.

I've been trying to figure out for some time what makes things funny...It's sometimes incomprehensible, how some things make us go "ha-ha" while others get nothing more than a bored stare...
Anyway, today's xkcd was undeniably funny, though if it was because of the entirely everyday manner in which the character failed to escape, or because of the subversion of what I expected would happen, I cannot say.

Something which does seem to be almost universally funny are mistakes. Other people's mistakes. CakeWrecks is dedicated to the professionally-made cakes which follow instructions too closely, are incredibly creepy, do not look remotely edible, or are simply... beyond words.
I spent a few days browsing the archives. I don't think I've laughed so many times in my life.

This amused me. Not the vehicles themselves - they are clearly M3G mobile bridges - but rather the various suggestions concerning Decepticons (that one navy gunboat was getting lonely, apparently), Allied Troop Carriers, Universal Soldiers, aliens...

It's been a while since I found a nice time-waster... Cursor10 is a neat little game. You have 650... well, they're clearly not seconds, so I'll call them "units of time." You have 650 time-units to reach the sixteenth floor, and ten cursors to help you accomplish this. If you run out of time, you control the next cursor out of your ten while the previous one simultaneously copies every single action you made it do when you had control of it. In essence, you have to "programme" the ten cursors to reach the end. A very original idea for a game, and fun to play too.

Trapped 5 is a vastly superior puzzle game to its predecessors, and well-crafted. The best part is that it is not possible to get a Game Over, which removes a lot of potential frustration. Other puzzle-game creators, take note.

And finally, something useful. If you've never checked that your desktop clock was synchronising correctly with an Internet time server, it may not actually have been doing so... Recently, I checked mine and found, to my utter horror, that it was four minutes slow. To think I had considered it accurate.
Anyway, I was unable to fix the synchronisation by changing the server or opening a port through my firewall, so I got hold of this nifty piece of software. It's a very small program, and can be set to automatically synchronise the desktop clock with any Internet time server. Worth the minuscule bandwidth cost required to download it.

And now, have a pretty picture. Ta and later.

(Edited on 21 October 2008 for a broken link.)

Update XV: Hello, I'm from the Internet

Perhaps someday the future xkcd envisions will come to be, and the internet will be considered an actual, legitimate location. We've already got communities, universities, shops, restaurants, arcades, cinemas, search engines to transport us between them, laws to regulate behaviour... All we're missing are the toilets.

On the subject of xkcd, it's been changing the internet again. Try Googling "died in a blogging accident" now, and you'll get something in the region of 294,000 results. That's a sharp rise from the original 2 results when the comic was published.
See? Anyone can leave a mark on the internet. Without resorting to vandalism of Wikipedia pages.

iPod vs. The Cassette pits what is arguably the most popular mp3 player worldwide against what was once the most popular music storage device worldwide... and finds the iPod lacking. It's actually quite surprising how many advantages the cassette has, in spite of its age. Probably explains why the cassette's larger cousin, the video tape, outlasted the laser disc and is still in use today.

The scientists over at Bio-Rad decided to show their appreciation for the Polymerase Chain Reaction, the technique which revolutionised molecular biology when it was first developed in 1983, with The PCR Song. It's strangely catchy, and entirely tongue-in-cheek. My class loves the scene at the end when they bring in the thermal cycler.

It seems that this blog is the top Google return for "toothpick vampire", and scores pretty high for "Bionicle going downhill." I'm rather suprised by the first, considering I didn't actually say much on the topic. As for the second...
...I thought I made it pretty clear I don't think Bionicle is going downhill. Oh well.

Finally, I haven't done a meme in a while, and Websnark had an interesting one. The idea is to complete the sentence "In my world, superheroes..." any way you like. And so:

In my world, superheroes aren't afraid of who they are.
In my world, superheroes do normal things too.
In my world, superheroes know that the local laws of physics make absolutely no sense, and they don't care.
In my world, superheroes don't need to be young to be relevant.
In my world, superheroes choose modest outfits. (Seriously...)
In my world, superheroes don't think self-sacrifice is the best solution, but they'll do it if they have to.
In my world, superheroes don't keep getting new backstories all the time.
In my world, superheroes are nevertheless capable of undergoing character development.
In my world, superheroes never do wrong to benefit themselves.
In my world, superheroes never do right to benefit themselves either. They do right because that's what they believe in.
In my world, superheroes are never evil or cruel on purpose.
In my world, superheroes are, first and foremost, heroes.

...I hate it when newer comic-book writers make old favourites turn angsty or do terrible things. They're heroes, and while it is perfectly acceptable for them to be conflicted sometimes, they still should remain heroes at the end of the day. They're supposed to give us hope - how can we have hope in heroes who are worse than ourselves?

Anyway, that's all from me for now. Til next time.

Update XII: At Least it's Not an Oxymoron

So... I guess I should post something, huh?

Time hasn't been very spare with me lately. (When is it ever, really?) Another of those crunch-time moments is coming up soon. Part of it is voluntary, but... You know, "voluntary" is a loaded word. No one ever does anything for no reason. There's always honor, or morals, or... something. And those things are as compelling, if not more so, as a paycheck.

It occurs to me that I love to help people - in a way, do voluntary work. And it doesn't have to be important stuff - I've put aside my homework before to help someone finish a computer game. I've always thought that this was because I love challenges, but now... I'm starting to wonder if it is a form of self-validation. That I'm afraid I'm of no real use to anyone, and I have to continuously work for others to prove my place in the world.

That's would certainly explain why my failures cost so much emotionally.

Okay, so... we were watching MythBusters yesterday. (Well, my father and brother was watching. My drawing table has a decent view of the television, so I glanced up every now and then.) There was this one myth about Western movies, where one guy hitches up the window grille of a jail cell to a horse and pulls the bars out for his companion can escape. So the MythBusters people built up an old-style jail cell wall with railroad ties, the way they used to be built, put in a window grille, tied a rope from the grille to a horse and tried to pull it off.

The thing is, they were doing it entirely wrong. See, their idea was that you have to break part of the wall to get out the bars, so they tied the rope in a loop around all the bars. (That got them nowhere - even a truck they used to replace the horse started to pull the entire wall along with the grille.) But in Westerns, the rope is always tied around the middle bar only. The idea here is to bend the bars, so their width reduces and the entire grille can be pulled out easily, with little to no damage to the wall. The show entirely missed that out.

Now I'm not saying that tying the rope to the middle bar would have guaranteed that the grille could be pulled out. I'm saying there would have been a better chance of doing so. Besides, that would have been more authentic to the myth which the show was trying to test in the first place. I guess what I mean is that MythBusters is just a commercial programme, and its findings should not be taken to represent the whole truth.

In other news... this doesn't surprise me. I mean it does a little, but not by much. Half of us never check food labels anyway, and when there are fewer people doing something, there are fewer who can bring up issues with them, so it does make sense that food labels are not written in a manner consumers can understand.
(Note that the study size was quite small, so I would take its findings with a pinch of salt in any case.)

Now this, on the other hand, is mind-boggling. Also, reason #255 not to believe dieticians.

Webcomics round-up:

Friday's Megatokyo is an exercise in hilarity. Not just mild amusement, but full-blown, full-page comedy. And that's great.

El Goonish Shive gets a severe case of plot twist.

In Sluggy Freelance...
...
Darn! Why didn't I figure that out earlier!

I was happy to see Star Cross'd Destiny start up again. I hate it when stories die away... so much lost potential. Also, no ending. A start and no end - that's like someone disappearing and you don't ever find out what happened. No closure.
Anyway, SXD started up again, and we're finally back to where we left off. It should be interesting to see how this plays out.

Till next time.

Forms, Forms, Forms

For those still not in the know, I'm winging off to Australia in late February to complete my university education. And you know what that means?

FORMS.

Course applications. Housing applications. Tuition grant deferment applications. Visa applications. Application applications. Address, full name, various telephone numbers ten times over. The fields I'm never sure how to answer. The fields I can't answer because I lack the necessary information. And I'm supposed to believe that some day, somehow, all these forms will be complete?

That's a lot of faith there.

I wish I had the ability to fast-forward past these weeks of anxiety to the point of time when everything will be nicely wrapped up. Then again, if I were cheating I might as well fast-forward to when I'm dead. There isn't much point to life if you don't live it.

Anyway! School restarted yesterday, with the same class as last semester. I was hoping we'd finally get a classroom with windows facing outside... no such luck. The only advantage, as far as I can see, is that we have a clear view of the lift lobby, and can keep tabs on everyone arriving at our floor.

Speaking of lifts, the lift logic in this block is worse than ever. I'm on the sixth floor, and all lifts already at the seventh or fifth floors refuse to respond. It's always the first-floor lifts which take the call. Always.

Stupid lifts.

But our classroom is otherwise quite nice - it's a new room, opened up only this semester for our use. Thus the carpet is pristine, the walls are pure white and the chair cushions are springy. Also, they lack curry stains. And... other stains. Um, right.

The best news, though, has to be that the last experiment for my Final Year Project is scheduled for tomorrow. Once that's done there'll be one whole ton of stress off my shoulders. Ahh, freedom. I can almost taste it.

...Enough of that. For now, a roundup of some of the more interesting recent webcomic updates:

• In Something Positive, Davan once again proves he's the master of the witty comeback.
• Sluggy Freelance gets out of draggy mode with a plot twist. (Phase 2? Perhaps!) Also, Riff's shoulder angels continue to amuse, even while highlighting that a notion of right or wrong depends on perspective.
• Exterminatus Now is, for the first time, serious.
  And it's still funny.
• The latest Lil Formers strip makes me wonder what sort of person would want to lick a robot in the first place. Do they even have a flavour?
• In No Need for Bushido, Yori shows that he can be competent, not just by hurting Ryoku but also by successfully applying Cho's advice. Good on him!

And finally, a random fact of the day: I dislike bananas, but love banana cake.

Till next time.

Update X: Ten, I'm Telling You!

Been too long, eh?

1) I absolutely hate critics who don't know what they are talking about.

2) Turns out that knowing how to do something and actually doing it are two entirely different things.

3) Some people never understand instructions unless they are pasted in a visible place in 72-point font and incorporate generous amounts of profanity in the sentence structure.

4) Scaring people is easier when they aren't paying attention.

5) The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley. Especially when they depend on the cooperation of other mice and men (see #3).

6) BZP's forums have been down for over a week now. I hope it doesn't last.

7) The current Sluggy arc ends with a difficult choice and a generous dose of ion cannon.

8) Pirate is in a dilemma.

9) The Gmail crew pulls more funny stuff. I thought this was one of the better submissions, and this one's wonderfully animated. Also, Lego!
This one is just cute.

10) I hate shoes which are not sneakers. Actually, I pretty much hate any shoe which has a bad effect on my feet.
I refuse to endure damage to my feet for the sake of aethetics.

11) This post had a lot of junk code, so I HTML'd it to death.

12) I'm Ratchet, apparently.

And my cursor is acting up. I'm off.

Update IX: Crunch Time

A lot of things are suddenly coming together for these few weeks - well, pretty much until August, so I probably won't be around for a while. For now, some quick updates:

- Yesterday Star Movies was showing Jurassic Park, so I watched the first part just for the heck of it.
The verdict? Even after fourteen years, the movie still is great. In an age where Bill Nighy looks like he was born with tentacles on his face, the dinosaurs remain as visually convincing as ever

- The Transformers movie was well-received by my classmates, even those who didn't originally know that Transformers can morph into vehicles. Or anything else about them, for that matter.
One friend has a crush on Optimus Prime. Or maybe just his eyes. It's a little difficult to tell.

- I think I broke my PowerPoint. It's running slower than before.

- History is important and should not be erased. That includes the awful art which was all you were capable of three years ago.
... I'll never get why so many webcomic artists feel the need to reboot their work. Wait a couple of years and they'll be even better - and then what? Another reboot?

- As usual, xkcd totally gets it.

- I wish people would stop IM-ing me nonsense in the middle of class.

- Even though I have an entire category dedicated to Bionicle, there are only three entries in it. This must change.

- I need sleep.

Update VIII: Randomness

As if all the updates weren't random. Anyway, I've taken a short break off my PowerPoint monster to live a little and do some blog updating.

There are currently only two words in the English Language which end in "gry" (unless you count some pretty archaic words which hardly anyone has heard of). It's pretty typical that some have made a joke out of it.

Sandwich-makers are probably one of the greatest inventions ever (next to the microwave oven). If I can, I bring one along with me when/if I go overseas next year.

On Friday, Sluggy Freelance had the most awesome plot twist since the Blacksoul = Obsidian Teknokon = Bun Bun revelation. The speccers are already buzzing, and I can't wait to see how this plays out.
Also, Torg does something smart. It's always great when he does that.

And... I'm off to slay some more of the monster.

Misguided Good

Today's Order of the Stick... No, you know what? This calls for a quote.

"...a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly... stupid."

Gaaah! Miko!

I want to feel sorry for her, I really do. But it's hard to feel sorry for someone who can't snap out of her own little world and realise that she is, in actual fact, not always right. Even though her action was bad more through timing that actual evilness, there's a fairly high probability that she would never understand how bad smashing that sapphire was even if it was pointed out to her. She hasn't even got that redeeming feature. Plus from what we've seen so far, it's not even certain that her reasons for breaking the sapphire were sound in the first place.

I suppose then that I'm angry at her not for her mistake, but because she'd probably do it again if given a chance, without so much as thinking it through.

Anyway, Burlew gets kudos for creating such compelling panels. If you think about it, the outcome was predictable (honestly, if the bad guys died that would be the end of the comic), but by triggering this predictable outcome through a set of infuriating events, he involved readers in the story and made them feel genuine emotion at the result.

And that's brilliant.

To change the subject completely, the current Dominic Deegan storyline, while somewhat contrived at points, remains whole-hearted and charming. After the heavily-emotional storylines preceding this one, the light-heartedness is rather a relief.

But I'd really like to know if Dominic is being genuinely pleasant, or whether he foresaw the whole thing.

What She Said

From the Thursday edition of The Amazing Super Zeroes:


"Well, ever since we got upgrades in our powers, I've been getting these splitting headaches. I only just realized that this was due to me hearing thousands of voices at once."

"For whatever reason, they seem to have subsided, though I doubt it will last for long. Also, Emo is making a lot of noise and it reverberates throughout the entire building. What's up with that? It seems like he never leaves the training room, he just stays in there, blowing up just when I start to go to sleep. Is he in trouble? And I saw Rosetta on the way down... what is up with her new outfit? It's a bit skanky."

"Is Kid around? Somehow, he seems to be able to understand me. Maybe he could translate all this."


Huh. No way, Allie.