20 posts so far in my daily streak, ignoring the time I posted after midnight but including exactly one of this post and the commitment-starting post. You pick which one. The arithmetic works out either way. My last four posts have been made with less than two minutes to spare before midnight, and my last post in particular made it by just seven seconds. This is working as intended in that I’ve knocked out nine drafts that I’m pretty sure would have rotted in my draft folder for at least a few more months otherwise, and I’ve also jotted down more spontaneous thoughts and posted them instead of postponing them until they was too late to be applicable. But this is also a problem because I can’t spend every day procrastinating blogging and then frantically blogging before midnight — I have some serious programming work to do, and a talk to prepare for, and, of course, linear algebra homework!!!

I’m kind of stuck here so

(daily posting streak)

Facetious paintbrush dragon filler is best filler!

That’s the name of the text file that comes up in MacVim when I hit option-shift-Z. I use it for quick notes and editing stuff to later be pasted into webpage forms, especially complicated JavaScripty ones (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) that don’t play nice with Pentadactyl’s popout editor functionality. The keyboard shortcut is set in Quicksilver, although I was doing something similar even on Windows with AutoHotKey.

Over time I tend to hoard stuff here. Vim says it has more than 40,000 words and 300,000 characters. It contains seeds that never grow into blog posts, planned tweets I later abandon out of embarrassment, preemptively composed comments that never get posted, carefully written text I’m paranoid might get deleted by the Internet, and more. For today’s frivolous post (part of a daily post streak, standard disclaimers apply, etc.), here are some excerpted context-free highlights, like a personal extended game of “What’s in your Ctrl+V right now?”. The task of interpretation and/or guessing the context is left up to the reader. Have fun! See you tomorrow!

(Something something something daily posting streak something something standard disclaimers. My schedule is tighter than usual because IPSC is tonight and runs right up until midnight. Anyway, here’s my logic with posting this: given how long I’ve committed to posting, I’m probably going to have to dig deeply enough into my reserves to include it, and to be authentic I can’t edit the story more anyway, so I might as well do it now. (Also maybe this will pressure me into finishing and posting one of the real short stories in my blog draft folder, the same way I feel pressured to make a good puzzle after posting a bad one.) I’m not even going to reread my story because I don’t like cringing at my own writing without being able to edit it, but hopefully that makes it bad enough to be entertaining. If you didn’t know, this was for an MIT preorientation program application. Tell me if it’s bad to repost application stuff. I hope not.)

(Oops this introduction is about as long as the actual story now.)

1. Tell us a short story in the available space below. Your inspiration is only one word: nuclear. Go!

(Frivolous blog content, posted as part of a daily posting streak I have openly committed to; standard disclaimers apply)

Out of boredom and curiosity, I graphed how many emails colleges sent me, excluding the colleges I actually applied to. I am being extremely polite and just calling them emails. I’ve wanted to make this for a long time, but it wasn’t until I saw this post about an email experiment on waxy.org/links that I understood which tools I could use to quantify my emails. (And then I actually made it and procrastinated posting it here for two months. If you look at my GitHub page or activity you might have seen it already, though. Oops.)

I don’t think the results were expected. Other than saying that, I leave the interpretation up to the reader because I’m on a tight blogging schedule. Cool? Cool.

Step-by-step instructions:

(Frivolous blog content, posted as part of a daily posting streak I have openly committed to; standard disclaimers apply)

It is quite interesting that Wikipedia’s article on Ninety-nine (addition card game), plus many of the following search results (ignoring the identically-named trick-taking game that is guaranteed to show up), have the same basic idea but wildly differing assignment of special cards from the one I’m familiar with, which everybody I can recall having played with agrees on. (Admittedly I’ve only ever played this among Taiwanese friends.) The only special-card assignment method that came close was a certain person’s “stuff from my old blog” dumping post I bumped into very accidentally. (His 5 is our 4; our 5 skips to an arbitrary player. The post also clarifies that negative totals bounce back to zero, and includes a clause whereby players must state the running total after playing and lose if they’re wrong. Interesting.)

Anyway, yes, I am documenting the rules to a card game on this blog. I think this deserves to exist online.

These rules are not completely rigorous because I don’t know them completely rigorously. You can use common sense to reach a consensus in corner cases.

Use a normal deck of playing cards, or two or more identical decks if you want. Deal five cards to each player and set the rest aside to form a draw pile. Cards are played into a discard pile in the center. Players sit in an approximate circle and take turns along the circle, playing one card and then, usually, drawing one replacement card from the draw pile, so in normal 99, hands stay at five cards. When the draw pile runs out, shuffle the discard pile to become the new draw pile.

Parts of this (a majority of questions, I hope) are intended as satire. Other parts of this are silliness created to blow off steam from being coerced into spending nine unproductive hours. Still other parts exist simply because I wanted to have equally many questions per test. Also, 256th post w00t. (2019 edit: after the migration, this post count is wildly incorrect, but whatever.)

“Verbal Reasoning”

Directions: The questions in this test are multiple-choice. Each question has four possible choices. Read each question and decide which answer is the best answer. Find the row in your answer sheet that matches the number of the question. In that row, fill in the oval corresponding to the answer you selected.

#ifdef BORING_SELF_DEPRECATION

So obviously this isn’t a good parody and the song is ancient (under some “pop” definition, which is probably not a very discriminative label), at over four years. Just randomness that finds its way onto my iPod. And the words are not very creative, and there are even two lines that survive unscathed because they fit reasonably and I can’t think of anything better (and I don’t even know if this is supposed to be bad, I just want to ensure nobody expects otherwise).

#endif

Whatever, this has been sitting in my draft box for at least one month.

Arvorie has just spammed my email account with three emails, two of them talking about palindromes.

“What? The fat in your head?”

My latest hard cryptogram, used with a substitution cipher: