Note: I wrote this in 2012. Maybe it’s kind of
amusing?
For some reason, everybody around here seems to think that adding
English characters, no matter how broken or meaningless, confers an
added sense of quality or superiority. I don’t really understand the
mindset here but it’s the only explanation I can come up with. It’s
certainly not to make the lives of our English-speaking population any
easier.
We were sharing songs in Chinese class with literary techniques, and
there were a bunch of songs, including mine, by this pretty famous
singer with the stage name
Fish Leong. Okay,
it’s kind of cute and it’s a translated homophonic Cantonese pun, so it
makes some sense, although I wonder what people would think the name
meant if mentioned without any context. There was this more obscure guy
a couple seasons back in the reality TV singing competition (see, no
original shows around here) whose name was Quack. smacks head
It’s also kind of cute if you only know that the word is the sound a
duck makes, which probably holds for most of the audience. But still, it
takes just five seconds to
put it into Wikipedia.
Oops?
It’s 2/22 and I have low standards.
This is a normal Slitherlink, except all the 2s have been given to you. Thus, empty squares cannot have exactly two edges around them. Of course it’s been done before (guess who?)
I appear to be drastically overshooting a monthly schedule :P
Not actually my first try, but I guess I don’t need to resort to 6x6s to fill up my quota just yet, do I?
Okay for the absolutely uninformed, this is a Fillomino (or see MellowMelon’s rule page).
I’ve switched to 32x32 pixel cells because they seem a reasonable size and it’s possible to express all pixel sizes as an exact floating-point fraction of the cell side so my image generator can be used in a general way to get perfect stroke thicknesses without worrying about any rounding errors no matter how obviously numerically insignificant they would be in this case.
Note: My 2012 self wrote this. It is preserved for
historical interest and amusement, and does not reflect my current
beliefs or attitudes.
Hardware:
The laptop I’m typing this on is over two years old. This is not a
lot by some measures, but weird spontaneous glitches are starting to
accumulate to the point where they’re getting on my nerves. The internet
card still needs an extra reset to start working half the time, and
occasionally warrants a full reboot, which costs five minutes. The USB
ports are loopy, some windows just show up black when they feel like it,
and there’s a steadily climbing whir in the background. I’m kind of
anticipating the moment the whole thing just drops dead.
Well, I’m not about to run out of computers to use (there’s a noisy
XP desktop that also barely works despite handling all our print jobs,
but also one spanking new eight-core CPU laptop, which Dad considered a
valuable enough investment (?)) but such a loss is still not something
to be dismissed lightly. And the externalized cost is far more important
and chilling. Who knows how many kids in the Congo had to mine coltan,
or how much conflict has occurred over the crude oil, or what awful
conditions those sweatshop-assembly workers are going through? Annie
Leonard’s words still resonate with me from when we were first shown the
video a year ago. Which is more recent than this laptop, so that doesn’t
mean that much. I think a couple months ago I would have absolutely no
second thoughts about getting a new one, though. Yup, I’m in a quandary
(ha ha vocabulary) on the balance between desensitization and compulsive
hoarding of stuff.
One puzzle a month! What a prolific schedule!
A Liar Slitherlink as created by MellowMelon (probably). Normal Slitherlink rules except exactly one clue in each row and column is false; you figure out which. But I bet you knew that already.
So, as triggered by my confrontation with the Chinese book report
(remember? whatever the answer is, it’s okay): a reflection on my
incompetence at dealing with two languages, and why this matters, or
not.
I can think in both languages. It’s a natural product of our school
environment. The two languages often have to complement each other; most
of the nerdy terms or globally relevant allusions are English-exclusive
(I couldn’t talk coherently about SOPA in any language other than
English!), but a lot of cultural and geographical staples around here
are Chinese only. And sometimes there are unexpected holes where an
innocuous-looking phrase simply has a few too many connotations to
translate perfectly (the example I always get stuck on, and have yet to
solve satisfactorily with anything short of a full sentence recasting,
is “appreciate”.)
There are two big elementary and middle school competitions around this part of the globe. Well, “big” according to “I’ve heard of it”, which is by no means an accurate measure of, well, anything. I don’t go out of my way to look for them any more, even though… hold on, am I still eligible? Whatever. But in any case, diverting any unnecessary energy from the olympiad-proof-training is probably not a good idea now.
I was like “Let’s make a 15x15!” and got confused by the graph lines and stopped early. Anyway, I think the steps aren’t so trivial now. I’m still too lazy to fix my generator, however.
yes, normal Nurikabe
I only just managed to make a 10x10 that’s not broken.
janko.at
applet
#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.