Plurp: Did I say that out loud?

Bigger!

2001.06.24 : 2001.06.30

Saturday, June 30, 2001
Blab. Reviving a previous meme, a reader who has seen the T220 lusts thus:
Oh Lord, won't you buy me that huge LCD?
My friends all have flat-screens; they're laughing at me
I want resolution that's too fine to see
Oh Lord, won't you buy me that huge LCD?
We suspect the reader is properly addressing the only entity in the universe with enough money to buy one.

Blab. Another of our army of stalkers writes:
HappyBirthdayToYou, HappyBirthdayToYou.........
Hehehehehehe................
Chocolate!
Sushi!
Mm
How do they know?

Blab. A reader sends birthday greetings, of a sort.
MAVA here,,, Happy Birthday, Dr. Plurp! Request: Could you give up Plurp for a while (you did it a little while back, for good reason , no? - and give us back Helen? I.e., forget Plurp & get back to the most important thing - your greatest fan & getting her back online.. We miss her online, and apprently you alone hold the key to her onlinness, although she, patient & balanced person that she is, would never complain. We are planning some sort of helicopter invasion of your terrace... to see if she is, in fact, still there in Plurpville somewhere. Your hopefully, MAVA
In the midst of trying to move the contents of two machines at once while keeping our day job, we had apparently monopolized the delight of doing so. This was selfish of us, and we realize now that we must share this pleasure.
We happily accept reader Mava's offer to:

Research and purchase a new computer for Helen.

Install all relevant software and get it working.

Migrate any important contents from her old machine to her new one.

Fix everything that breaks when you do.

Be available a24 hours a day as technical support when it breaks or just does something puzzling.

We appreciate the kind offer; it is one of the better birthday presents we've received. Helen's backup tape from her previous machine is now in the mail to you.
Was that you in the black helicopter that hovered over our terrace last night? We thought so.

Blab. Yet another of our groupies asks, in a husky voice:
So, can I blow your candle out?
How kind of you to offer, and it really is terribly flattering, but we are happily married and must, therefore, decline.

Blab. A reader elucidates a hitherto unknown facet of catology.
Actually, two is not the lower bound on cat-skinning. "More than one way" leaves open hope that a Grand Unified Cat-Skinning System could asymptotically approach the One True Way to Skin without ever being able to actually reach it.
With advanced sub-atomic-particle-smashing devices, we're now down to 1.00042 ways to skin a cat, which is amazing considering where we were just 20 years ago, wallowing in the ignorance of our 1.973-skinning ways.
Science marches on!
Fascinating. For all e > 0, there are more than (1 + e) ways to skin a cat.

Blab. A reader, concerned about the hide of Him Without Name, writes:
Hide! Christopher! Hide!!!
He seems content with sleeping instead.

Yo. Here's an interesting site devoted to text-dominant multiplayer interactive fiction (whew!). People invent game settings and episodes within those settings. Other folks play characters in the games. They're even working on a Lovecraft setting.

Plurp.
The blue dog
never had
birthdays

Friday, June 29, 2001
Blab. A reader with a twisted sense of literature writes:
Dr. Plurp:
I want to read the H. P. Lovecraft short stories. In which order do you recommend that I read them?
Sincerely,
N'yargehthmenyas-gah
Well, he was a pretty weird little guy, and his style of horror is either wonderfully different and engaging or amateurish, depending on your point of view.
He wrote a number of stories within his Cthulhu Mythos. These all take place in the same world context, though they vary widely in place and subject matter. You might read Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Perhaps more memorable is At The Mountains of Madness from the collection by the same name and also a Mythos story, as well as The Dunwich Horror (and just about every story in the collection by that name, particularly the story The Call of Cthulhu in that collection, which is also not a bad starting point, though not all of the stories are Mythos stories).
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placed island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
What interests me about Lovecraft's horror is that he doesn't depend on viscera, or on the supernatural per se. He simply notes that the comfort we feel in the universe is based on our ability to understand and explain it, and the possibility of something beyond our understanding, beyond explanation, is itself horrifying. It is not death or violence that Lovecraft evokes, and not merely the unknown, but the unknowable.
And, of course, the stories are all set in our own world, suggesting that horrifying events are just beyond the edge of our usual travels, with a certain conspiratorial element preventing us from seeing them too clearly. Heh.
He describes his theory of horror in Supernatural Horror in Literature.

Blab. A reader alerts us to a Shopping Opportunity.
Cthulhu Fish Magnet and Elder Sign Window Decal

Cthulhu Fish Magnet! Cthulhu Fish Magnet! Woo-ha-ha-ha. That's so great!
It's hard to choose between these many fine products.

Though I think I like Cthulhu dreamed it the best.

Blab. A reader reminds us of that important socio-political maxim.
Jack-booted thugs intimidating the carrier of reports/ratios.
To which the standard reply is Don't shoot the messenger.

Blab. One of our many cyber-stalkers writes:
The "Beach" appendix to geographical name was tried for Grover Beach, which used to be Grover City. Both names still fail to entice me, mostly because of mental images involving hordes of furry blue puppets.
I'm pretty sure you know the place I'm talking of, since you mentioned Santa Maria (the city, not ship).
I grew up in Lompoc, and attended UCSB, so we've probably occupied the same space at some point (Earth-relative, of course). Huh.
-pTang
Grover City - now there's a blast from the past! Next we'll be reminiscing about Stork Tower and Coal Oil Point.
We bet the reader even knows how to pronounce Lompoc.

Blab. We were unaware that it was the topic of a popular song.
"From nine 'till five I have to spend my time at work
The job is very boring, I'm an office clerk
The only thing that helps me pass the time away
is knowing I'll be back at Dakota Beach some day"
Everybody sing!

Blab. In further news that may firmly embed this location into the firmament of Plurp, a reader writes:
Not-entirely-unrelated to "Dakota Beach", I offer Green Bay Watch.
An obvious misprint. It should have been Dakota Bay Watch.

Plop. Yeah, Friday's Plurp was late. So shoot me. It's been a long week.

Plurp.
The blue dog
awoke from a
recurring dream of
being a Cthulhu
fish magnet.

Thursday, June 28, 2001
Blab. Without actually mixing any memes at all, a reader reports:
Reader contributions implying activities of a crypto-fascist bootjack.
That was certainly the way it seemed to us.

Blab. From the other side of the political fence, a reader hops up and down, exclaiming:
Dear Dr. Plurp:
I'm not sure where you dug up that obscure, antiquainted screed you quoted: "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." Most religious fanatics do, indeed, hold their "truths" to be self-evident, and the word "Creator" not far after is a dead give-away.
A casual reading of this cult's writings expose exactly how crazy they are. Do you realize that following their deluded logic would lead to scaling down the Federal Government by ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE?? No society could possibly function that way. And think of the children!
Anyhow, fresh from our victory over cellphone drivers, we will now be focussing more on computer games, since that seems to be filling your mind with hateful right-wing thoughts.
We're here to help you.
-Jack B. Thug
That's reassuring. Now please go away.

Blab. A reader concerned with the renaming of North Dakota suggests:
Maybe they should go with "Dakota Beach"
We like it!

Blab. A reader unable to control itself while reading of our woes with HTML editors chortles:
snicker snicker snicker. Ooops!
Please report to the principal's office.

Blab. Addressing us in the proper manner, a reader asks:
Please, Your Godlike Masterfulness Sir, can I have a T220?
Of course not.

Blab. Yesterday, a reader submitted this enigmatic utterance from Red Rock Eater's digest:
"Back-seat entertainment systems aren't destroying any quality time; instead they are bringing out the inherent logic that already existed in the situation: the car as the technological reification of the atomized society, with everyone knitted into a welter of institutions that pick them up and haul them from one place to the next with no special concern for geography or relationships."
It was certainly a mystery to us! Today a kind reader with an affinity for milk cleared it up for us.
It just needed translating.
"the systems of the maintenance in distrugg of Zuruecksitzes the not not one hour of the quality; in the place of this they already load those that are of the logic modified for particular requirements, in the present duck of the situation: the automobile appreciates reification technological the company pulverized, also so that all the operation contracts the clutch the mechanisms of welterweight, of that one does the examinación to him and of one in the first station of the place of the work without the interest or special geography of the carrier of reports/ratios."
All better, see?
Graham
Ah - the present duck of the situation. Why didn't they say so in the first place?

Yo. It is widely established that two is a lower bound on the number of ways there are to skin a cat, but we are unable to find a reliable estimate of the actual number of ways, or even a convincing upper bound. This has been a subject of research in the past, but with similarly inconclusive results.
People seem to use this phrase as a rhetorical question, but we are interested in a real answer. Readers?

Yow. We know you were looking for Cthulhu plush dolls. Now, found via the new Google Image Search engine, you can have as many as you want. (Dave)
There sure are lots of Cthulhu images out there! Not as many of Azathoth, but the amazing thing is that there are any at all. Even a few of good old Shub-Niggurath for you goat fans, and Nyarlathotep too. And, ooh look, a whole set of Cthulhu miniatures for the mantelpiece.
We love the Web.

Yo. Also found (somehow!) with the Google Image Search facility, this set of advertisements. At least we think they're real advertisements. Or...?

Yo. And, of course, these.

Yo. Looking for blue suede shoes?

Zoom. Driving home last night, waiting at a stop light in The City, three young women cross in front of me. One, a short-haired Puerto Rican woman with a thick Bronx accent says, in a loud voice,
bow-DO-ni-a ... that's a beautiful car!

Plurp. Yes, the license plate is "BOWDONIA". The term originated one day many years ago in our previous apartment. We were having it replastered and painted and, as is the way in such projects, there was a lengthy span of time between the time the bedroom ceiling was stripped and the time when it was replastered and painted.
During that time, there were random spots of old paint that didn't quite get scraped off the ceiling.
One morning we were lying in bed, staring up at one of these blotches, and I claimed that it was not, in fact, a paint blotch. No, it was a faraway view of the nation-continent of Bowdonia (Bowden being Helen's last name). There was the capital city, in a protected bay on the south. There was a mountain, around which trading routes wound circuitously. There was a broad plain of fertile soil where the best food was grown.
And on and on, the nation-continent of Bowdonia taking shape in our imaginations, the nation-continent where Queen Helen reigned supreme.
So, when we got this lovely little Miata a couple of years ago, the choice of license plate was obvious.

Yow. Animal noises for Ella. Pretty dang funny (if only briefly)! Lots more stuff there too. Go play. (Beth)

Yak. Friend John at work.
I have organizational vertigo.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was incapable of
saving the
world

Wednesday, June 27, 2001
Blab. A reader makes two surprising admissions.
Can't sleep. Clowns will eat me.
We feel sorry for our reader, but take solace that there will at least be some well fed bozos out there soon. (Or else this is an Alice Cooper entry in our Best Music of All Time contest. It's so hard to tell!)

Blab. A reader asks a question. Two questions.
Last week's Plurp seems to be missing. Is this a game? What's the prize for finding it?
And therein lies a tale. We've moved to this great new T21 laptop (the one on which we can play Thief II), right? And everything works, right?
Wrong. We thought we was all set last night. We posted Monday's Plurp, albeit a day late, and was starting to edit Tuesday's. Then All Hell^TM broke loose. Netscape Composer 6.0 starting adding lines when we pressed Delete. It wouldn't justify lines. Everything was screwy!
In the process, we "updated" last week's Plurp, and mistakenly overlaid it with this week's. Argh.
Ian suggested this morning that Netscape Composer 6.0 (my new Web editor) couldn't figure out the markup in the files we created with Netscape Composer 4.7 (my previous Web editor). Inconceivable! How could the Netscape folks be so incredibly stupid to ship a new version of their editor that can't read files from the previous version?
Practice, practice, practice.
So we have now regressed to Netscape 4.7, repaired all the files that Netscape 6.0 damaged, and replaced the corrupted and overwritten files on my Web server. We think. Did we mention that we hate computers?
We appreciate the reader's guess that this might be a game. It is very much in the spirit of utter silliness that we try to foster here in Plurp, and we'll certainly consider playing self-conscious Weblog games in the future.
As always, the pleasure of playing is the prize.
In the meantime, readers are requested to recommend a good WYSIWYG Web editor for us to use. Those of you who use Notepad can just sit there smugly and try to refrain from snickering.

Blab. A correspondent finds a word puzzle on the Web.
From a recent article in Red Rock Eater's digest,
"Back-seat entertainment systems aren't destroying any quality time; instead they are bringing out the inherent logic that already existed in the situation: the car as the technological reification of the atomized society, with everyone knitted into a welter of institutions that pick them up and haul them from one place to the next with no special concern for geography or relationships."
I'm not completely sure what that sentence means.
We have no idea what this sentence might mean. Readers are encouraged to submit their own creative explanations.

Yow. Following some obscure Web link or other, we stumbled upon the answer to an old question of ours: Where did the following enticing imagery come from?
We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?
And the answer (silly us) is Goblin Market, by Christina Rossetti, which you really must go read in its entirety. How marvelous!
(We were unable to find it previously because we remembered it incorrectly as Do not look at goblin men ... and Google couldn't figure out what we were looking for.)

Yo. Geeks take note.
They were known as "nerds" and "geeks" in high school.
It turns out that [...] geeks are rich. Forty-four percent say they have household incomes of $75,000 or more, and 40 percent graduated from college.
So, nyah!

Yow. This is cool. IBM just announced the highest resolution computer display ever. And it's an LCD.
The T220 has a screen that shows 12 times more detail than current monitors [...]. It has 200 pixels an inch and more than 9 million pixels in total on its 22.2-inch screen.
That's a 3840 x 2400 display, for those of you keeping track. Golly.

Plop. Ian just completed a time-consuming project on his Web site. Rather than adding content to his site, he spent his time rewriting its HTML structure to conform to fussy new standards, separating content from presentation and such. At the end of this arduous labor, two things resulted.

If you use a version of Netscape earlier than version 6, or a version of Internet Explorer earlier than version 5, his site is pretty much broken. The content is there, but it looks like it was written in 1990.

If you use a newer browser, the site looks almost identical to the way it did before.

You might wonder why Ian would spend so much time breaking his site on some browsers while providing no enhancement on others. But Ian's a smart guy and we're sure there's a good reason. In any event, we look forward to the day when he can create more content.

Plurp. The people of North Dakota want to drop the North part and be just plain Dakota.
Supporters insist the plan would help alter the state's image as a frigid, treeless prairie.
This would follow in the fine tradition of West Covina (there is no East Covina), South Pasadena and North America.

Plurp.
The blue dog
focused more on
presentation than
content

Tuesday, June 26, 2001
Blab. A reader with little experience in the joys of rubber band cuisine asks:
How can a rubber band be stale, anyway?
Simple. Leave it out in the sun too long. Try it; you'll see what we mean.

Blab. A reader, entranced with our seamy past, writes:
You were a DVD player? Do tell more!
In fact, I have never been a DVD player. Not even once.

Blab. A reader addresses an issue of some importance.
Dear Dr. Plurp
A web-site author of my distant acquaintance seems to have been so enthralled by a computer game (not a full game, mind you, just a DEMO) that he is neglecting more important duties. Is an intervention called for? Or maybe Federal legislation? What is to be done? Think of the children!
-Concerned Citizen
Dear reader,
Are you deranged? Are you some crypto-facist bootjack? Some obsessive compulsive control freak who cannot tolerate normal, fun loving behavior in others? Are you really intent on painting the entire world your same uniform shade of dark gray so as to obscure the last speck of human joy from the face of the Earth?
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. [Emphasis added.]
Does that answer your question?

Blab. A reader, no doubt fearful for my safety, asks:
No posts on Monday?!?
Last night was supposed to be the Big Test of my new computer. Having loaded it up with several tons of software, configured all the communications gorp and gotten my email working, I decided to be brave. I took only the new computer home. I figured if I could survive one night doing all the usual stuff, that I was all set.
Guess what? Some of the bits didn't work. In particular, I couldn't FTP stuff up to my Web site. So, for the first time since I started Plurp, I had a computer but didn't post Plurp. I had to do it from work today.
Fortunately the eagles seem to have been distracted by geekish.
Did I mention that I hate computers?

Blab. A reader contribution self-referentially mentions reader contributions.
Reader contributions self-referentially mentioning reader contributions..
Like we said ...

Plurp.
The blue dog
didn't exactly hate
computers

Monday, June 25, 2001
Blab. Having done nothing with reader contributions over the weekend, we have quite a few to display for you, including this one. In the aftermath of our D&D confession, a reader entreats:
In the off chance that just a little bit of encouragement will stir you to providing an online version of the Sorcery Manual, I am hereby providing you with said little bit of encouragement. And then some.
Yes, we were afraid this would happen. Sigh. We'll put it on our List of Many Things.

Blab. A reader suggests an utterly implausible theory.
Hey, wait a second. Dave had the caption "Not a search box" beneath his non-search box before you posted your Friday Plurp. He must have inside information, or else you two are the same person. *I* have never seen you two together, which I find to be very compelling evidence. Do I get a prize for being the first to uncover this dark secret?
Yes you do! Could you just look at the top of this silvery pen-thing for a moment and ...

Blab. A reader compels us to do what we already feel compelled to do.
You really MUST get the full version of Thief II. The only issue is whether you have enough time to pour into playing it. As you know, it will suck you in to the detriment of the rest of your life.
Shame that Looking Glass is dead.
Sadly, it doesn't seem to matter if we have time to spend on this or not. The ancient lizard part of our brain is hard-wired to lust after the next great gaming experience. We are sucked in before having the chance to think about making a decision. It's frightening, actually.
We hadn't heard that Looking Glass died. That is too bad!
Interestingly, Eidos is still working on the Thief series. The claim is that Thief III will be based on the Unreal engine. Cool!

Blab. Perhaps jealous of our immersion in the world of Thief II, a reader who spends far too much time in Taco Bell writes:
Hey, what about "feed the Chihuahua and watch him explode?" Now THERE'S a good game!
Sadly, the reader fails to provide a URL, so we were on the verge of dismissing this as an unsubstantiated rumor when, even more sadly, we ran headlong into this.
Pretty stupid, IMHO, but your mileage may vary.

Blab. A fan of the bizarre writes:
For your edification, amusement or sheer stupefication.
From which we learn:
A Maryland man punched and kicked Cookie Monster at a crowded Sesame Street theme park outside Philadelphia, after the character declined to pose for a photo with his 3-year-old daughter, police say.
Those crazy people from Maryland! Could you kindly put restraints on them before taking them out in public? Thank you.

Blab. At 7 AM EDT, a somnabulist who must be from the West Coast, or an innumerate from the East Coast, writes:
4:00 am, and all's well!
We suggest you try counting your chickens before they hatch.

Blab. A reader, ever curious about our internal mental states, asks:
Feeling tookish?
Us? No.

Blab. A reader suggests an entry in the Best Music of All Time contest.
Alla Hornpipe from Water Music!
Yes - quite wonderful.

Blab. A reader after our own musical taste writes:
Beethoven's Ninth, thanks for asking. With Mahler's Second ("Resurrection") and Dvorak's Ninth ("From the New World") not too far behind. But you didn't ask just about classical music, so I'll round out my top five with the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" and the Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin'"
An excellent set of selections! We have such tasty readers!

Blab. A reader's subconscious mixes the memes.
I saw "Miata" in boldface and for a second thought you had created a new category for Mia sightings.
Ironically, this is itself a Mia sighting. How very odd.

Blab. A reader interrupts our brief prose dream with this.
Uzbekistan wouldn't launch their missles at us. Not with Uzbekistani chess players here.
Good to know! Maybe we will have that dessert after all.
Unless they're actually spotters. Argh.

Blab. Our regular meme mixer returns with this.
Fundamental spells for divining reader contributions.
That's actually not a fundamental spell, but rather an arcane combination of seventeen fundamental spells (like Read Mail, and Mail Forwarding). Our Sorcery level is not sufficiently high to permit us to embody this process into an artifact.

Plurp.
I rise from a stool at the bar to leave. A man, balding and in a cheap suit, turns to me, his arm out.
Man: Steve White?
Me: Yes ...
Man: Let me give you my business card.
Taking it, I notice that it is shoddily made, thermographed rather than engraved, and cut very obliquely.
Me: That's not a business card. That's the label off a Cracker Jack box.
Man: But tomorrow ...
Me: Tomorrow, my dear sir, you will still be eating Cracker Jacks.
Readers in the Dream Interpretation Department are invited to get to work on that one.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was certain this
would be the
winning entry

Sunday, June 24, 2001
Plurp. Thief II is a first person role-playing game set in a Medieval city in which you, the thief, sneak around, hide in dark corners, break into buildings, pick pockets and generally skulk about doing things you oughtn't. I only have the demo now, though I fear that I am mere days away from enriching the authors with an actual purchase.
In the demo, you are to sneak over to a particular building in a city and steal some documents. The twist is, you have to scurry over the rooftops, as you will surely be hunted down by the town's vigilant police if you so much as set foot in the streets themselves.
So, you find yourself clambering up roofs, balancing along tiny ledges, and running up to the edges of buildings to see if there's any way to cross the chasm to the next building. That means you're always looking off the edges of things to the street below, usually far below.
If you have a mild case of acrophobia, as I do, the effect is very unsettling. Quite a number of times I have felt my muscles contract in fear and I've had to remind myself that it's just pixels.
Games are getting really good.

Plurp.
What's for dessert?
No dessert tonight, I'm afraid.
Oh?
No time, dear. Uzbekistan already launched its missiles. The first ones are expected to hit here in, um ... three minutes.
Ah. Pity.
More asparagus?
Yes, please.

Plop. We note with sadness the passing of geekish who, having moved to Tampa on April 26, failed to update her weblog since then. We can only imagine the horror she felt as the eagles descended.

Plurp.
The blue dog
didn't have time
to look at
reader contributions

Top

Earlier entries Later entries