Stephan Sokolow @ssokolow@qoto.org

My fanfiction review TODO list is now fully transcribed from private to public, having been cleaned up quite a bit along the way.

http://blog.ssokolow.com/fanfiction-review-todo-list/

Given that the publicly visible list has doubled in size, anyone who's interested should look again.

How about another excellent song that seems to be known in too narrow a niche and drifts in and out of my memory?

The Charm of the Seer by Ayreon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JUCsb7HXqM

#music

For anyone following my blog for fanfiction reviews, please be aware that I added about 40 stories to the my Fanfiction Reviews TODO page last night and I'm about to add a bunch more.

(For those who missed the announcement, I've been tidying up and transcribing my private notes on what I want to review as, even without full reviews, they're still valuable as a list of interesting things to consider reading.)

http://blog.ssokolow.com/fanfiction-review-todo-list/

Another great song that I was reminded of:

Imago by Pain of Salvation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3dtoQ2lyAQ

The metaphor in the lyrics reminds me of Mado Kara Mieru from Christopher Tin's Calling All Dawns.

#music

I just discovered the Nightwish song "The Islander"... another case of "every metal band must have at least one soft song".

A beautiful celtic folk-ish song that I recommend everyone check out, even if they don't like Nightwish otherwise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--tFFz44zvc

(And the music video is beautiful too)

Today, I got nerd-sniped into writing a quick little tool for looking at binary data as pixels to identify patterns that might not show up in a hex dump.

https://github.com/ssokolow/pixmap_prober

...of course, I also read Alternate Universe fanfiction, so I suppose it's just stuff that's not clearly declaring itself to be AU where I feel an aversion to changing the characters before copyright runs out.

Random realization:

I have no problem with reinterpreting the look of characters like Dracula, but I have to squash and question an impulse to dislike things like Zendaya being cast for MJ in the more recent Spider-man movies.

I thought about it and I realized that, intuitively, it's all down to copyright. If the original work is still under copyright, I see it as too soon to break from the original creator's conception of the character.

...and another that I almost failed to re-identify.

Golden Brown by The Stranglers from 1981

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-GUjA67mdc

Just posting a nostalgic song from the 90s (Disarm by Smashing Pumpkins) so that maybe next time I'll remember that I did something unique with it.

For whatever reason, it loves to pop up in my memory just hazy enough that I can't search up the lyrics to remember its name.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1acEVmnVhI

...and I found the Anonymous article I was thinking of.

WIRED, November 2011: "Anonymous 101: Introduction to the Lulz"

https://www.wired.com/2011/11/anonymous-101/

Definitely an interesting read when an article not only gives an overview of 4chan's /b/ at the time, but draws a thread back to things like Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (published in parts from 1759 through 1767).

Another fun pull from years ago that I was just reminded of in conversation.

An article on the development of "because" as a preposition:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/english-has-a-new-preposition-because-internet/281601/

Now to see if I can track down that article on Anonymous that I remember.

I just came up with an amusing way to express my perspective on the individual responsibility to evolve English toward greater consistency when coining new speech:

"languages gonna language, but please think before you word"

...and another important blog from 2006 that I somehow missed the link to the first time I read "Why xkcd-style graphs are important":

https://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/12/dont_make_the_d.html

(If for no other reason, so it'll be here if I forget what I bookmarked it under.)

I just wrote a blog post about H.P. Lovecraft's writings.

http://blog.ssokolow.com/archives/2020/07/14/comparative-lovecraft-and-the-colour-out-of-space/

Here's my favourite turn of phrase:

"Out of the Aeons is good, but, like The Call of Cthulhu, the threat is too distant. All physical evidence of the problem lurked under the ocean for eons before surfacing, and then returned to the ocean. It's too easy to feel that it'll probably stay under the ocean for eons more before coming up for another ultimately ineffective burp of momentary crisis."

...also, something that's six years old, but still makes a good point that I intend to make use of in my blog:

https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/why_xkcd_style_graphs_are_important.html

xkcd-style sketchy rendering of computer-generated graphs is an important visual cue to drive home to humans (who "don't read") not to assume too much precision or accuracy out of a graph intended more to visualize patterns.

Done.

http://blog.ssokolow.com/archives/2020/07/13/a-verbal-middle-finger-to-wordpress/

...actually, that's a lot longer than I expected, so I think I'll tweak it a bit and post it to my blog.

I just need to vent for a moment.

The #1 thing a blog post editor should do is make sure you NEVER LOSE WORK... and the sooner I can find time to satisfy my obsessive dedication to never 404ing URLs while switching to a static generator, the better.

WordPress deserves an *award* for how readily it destroys your work.

Try to edit a table or a definition list in the raw HTML for lack of visual access to a desired feature and oops your manual tag-balancing? It garbles everything up on switching to the WYSIWYG view to preview your work without pushing it public.

Misunderstand what the buttons on the "Invalid HTML. What do you want to do?" popup mean? There's no Undo so you better hit Reload instead of Save.

Want to edit stuff naturally in the new Blocks editor? Good luck. The interaction between cursor motion and selection means that trying to select a paragraph of scratch text without reaching for the mouse will snap the selection to the entire block, including text outside your intended span.

I just *lost* a big edit to an old list post because, for reasons I can't even fathom, switching from TinyMCE to raw HTML reverted it to the saved version.

Wanna save? Better make sure you didn't leave the tab open too long or it'll get stuck on that "Saving" message that replaces the "Save Draft" button.

Wanna use the preview function but have your browser set to only allow new windows/tabs to be opened by an explicit middle-click or context-menu choice? Too bad. The Preview button can't be middle-clicked.

When I remember, I've taken to editing my blog posts by switching to HTML mode, copying them into Vim, and only copying them back once I think they're ready.

*chuckle* Just checking through a Rust crate for preliminary file accessibility checks that I want to do as a CLI argument validation step.

The UNIX/POSIX version is just an API wrapper around faccessat().

WinAPI makes doing the same thing so verbose and complicated that the author felt a code comment was necessary that says "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn".