The Betacantrips Travelogue

Seen via JWZ, this list of supercuts.

My favorites are the Red Dwarf, every "smeg" reference and Every Famicon (NES) Game Title Screen. It’s completely fascinating how much you can glean from just this kind of cross-section: for example, Lister says "smeg" more than any other character; Holly says it only once, and Cat only a few times; the most common "smeg-" compounds are "smeg-head" and "smeg-for-brains"; "smeg" is said in despair/panic as well as ecstatic joy ("fan-smegging-tastic!").

Via Suzanne: check out these awesome cupcakes.

Every year, we throw a big, game party to ring in the new year. This year (2010) is our house’s 100-year birthday, so we celebrated with cupcakes… … and the cupcakes were a game. Here they are in random order – see how many you can guess! Mouse over the question mark to reveal the answer.

The goal is to guess as many of the games depicted by cupcakes as you can. Some of these are amazingly evocative, either through amazingly photographic reproduction, or by hitting on strongly quintessential themes.

Seen on Marjorie’s chiptune photography blog Chiptography: Vote Space.

Have I mentioned Future, and It Doesn’t Work recently? You really ought to listen to it.

Wonderful quotable line from this strip.

Seen on JWZ: exactly what it says on the tin.

Exercise 4-13. Write a function reverse(s) which reverses the string s by turning the mind inside out, converting madness into reality and opening the door to allow the Old Ones to creep forth once more from their sunken crypt beyond time.

On CNN: an article about the NORAD Santa Tracker.

"NORAD uses four high-tech systems to track Santa — radar, satellites, Santa Cams and fighter jets," reads the NORAD Santa Web site. "Tracking Santa starts with the NORAD radar system called the North Warning System. This powerful radar system consists of 47 installations strung across the northern border of North America. On Christmas Eve, NORAD monitors the radar systems continuously for indications that Santa Claus has left the North Pole.

I luuurrrvve A Softer World: episode 512.

I had a discussion with someone lately about nerdiness. She’s from Korea where video gaming is like an official sport. It’s totally weird to me that in Korea you can’t get girls if you can’t play video games. Anyhow here’s some brilliant writing about being a nerd from Sumana:

Evidently I have the capacity to continuously raise the standard for what makes a real obsessed fan of, say, Star Trek or Cryptonomicon or whatever. I read the Memory Alpha wiki (Star Trek compendium), but I don’t contribute to it; I only know a word or two of Klingon; I haven’t *memorized* more than, say, ten lines of Cryptonomicon. So I can always say, "oh, I’m just a regular person who happens to like this thing, there are OTHER PEOPLE who are really obsessed." But that’s just No True Scotsman in reverse. These goalposts must be made of new space-age alloys, they’re so easy to move!

For those of us who are fans of A Softer World: a book!

Are you looking for the perfect Christmas gift for someone you want to confuse with about 300 mixed signals?

The second Softer World book is here. It is called Second Best isn’t so Bad and you can buy it right now if you like! 244 full colour pages (even the black and white images are printed in glorious full colour, for no reason at all! We are all about excess.) and at the end of the book there’s a collection of the original black and white photocopy versions of A Softer World that we made in an all night copy shop with a stack of photos and an old typewriter. This section is called "Not bad for a first try."

Also, the first Softer World book, Truth and Beauty Bombs is up for sale on the Topatoco site as well! Buy them separate, or together for a discount! What kind of crazy world is this!?

(also, we included all the alt texts. How? IT IS A MYSTERY!)

Seen via LWN, this quote about the Java methodology:

Google is forking existing FOSS code bits for Chromium like a rabbit makes babies: frequently, and usually, without much thought. Rather than leverage the existing APIs from upstream projects like icu, libjingle, and sqlite (just to name a few), they simply fork a point in time of that code and hack their API to shreds for chromium to use. This is akin to much of the Java methodology, which I can sum up as ‘I’d like to use this third-party code, but my application is too special to use it as is, so I covered it with Bedazzler Jewels and Neon Underlighting, then bury my blinged out copy in my application.’. A fair amount of the upstream Chromium devs seem to have Java backgrounds, which may explain this behavior, but it does not excuse it. This behavior should be a last resort, not a first instinct.

Preach it!