deathmtn

I just noticed that NPR does not edit out mouth crackle. My mind is a little blown. I guess I should think through whether I'm too aggressive about that stuff.

I forgot about the drumming at the end of Iron Man! It’s incredibly good tom tom work in case you also forgot. I urge you to review it!

Trump, remember, had 80m followers on Twitter and God knows how many on Facebook. Yet when he starts his own blog they didn’t flock to it. In fact they were nowhere to be seen. Indeed his blog, as reported Forbes, had “less traffic than pet adoption site Petfinder and food site Eat This Not That.” And he shuttered it because “low readership made him look small and irrelevant”. Which it did.

I can’t relate to Trump in any respect, except this one. People are incredibly loyal to social media.

Moody a dot f! I want this to happen here.

13 pull-ups, again crammed in before having to leave. I’m gonna say this is OK because I do have a lot to do.

esjay has been making Emojipress super slick lately. Those gradients! Plus, it now makes the favicon into whatever emoji you last made in it.

I lost an hour because Matomo, my non-invasive web analytics tool, was installed in a way that made it easy to read PHP files that let anyone get the MySQL password. So, I had to fix all that and change the password, which I didn't remember how to do. (Fortunately, that database has only web analytics information in it. Hackers could have destroyed valuable data about visits to smidgeo.com.)

This all is partly my fault, but also as Dan says, it's way too easy to configure PHP in an unsecure way. Unlike server apps in which you proxy API requests in the web server to a specific app, PHP generally has you just configure your web server to just execute php files. So, if someone knows you probably have a `popular-php-thing/reset.php`, they can just run that.

Further, Matomo puts secrets in PHP files in subdirectories of the directory they want you to be made available to the public. So, it's on you to say, OK, let people at `/piwik/` but not `/piwik/config`. Better choices could have been made here.

In conclusion, I don't like that I had to do something I didn't want to spend time on, but no, I can't think of a better alternative.

New Small Findings episode! Decibels! Gygax forcing Arneson to the margins! Dr. Wily! It’s all there. And despite the exclamation points, the delivery is rather sedate. Sorry! It’s what I had time for.

15-minute run, 13 pull-ups. Already too hot, which I guess is no surprise.

The guy said he had a good day yesterday, which is fortunate because we can’t really think of things to do on the weekends. He’s very clearly an indoor kid who hates hikes and even riding a bike. (I wasn’t even sure that was a real distinction before seeing this, despite having been an indoor kid myself, now that I think about it.) Indoor activities are still mostly cut off. I think the pandemic has messed with the indoor kids far more than the kids that like to play tag and kickball and shit.

We went to the pond (a thing I forced), read some books, and played Snipperclips. Then, he did a bunch of Lego stuff by himself. Which is cool, but the difference between this kind of day and those had by outdoor kids is that he’s not doing anything with friends. Then again, that child vaccine is probably going to happen in the next few months.

I just checked on the guy and tried to pull the covers off of his head because, even though I know logically, it’s fine, it looks like you get less air to breathe that way. I thought I woke him up.

He looked at me and said, “Tape?” I said, “You can just go back to sleep”. He said “OK”, then covered his head again.

It turns out to be really easy to route all your audio through a compressor in web audio: You just create a DynamicCompressorNode, connect it to the context destination, and have everything else go connect to the compressor node, even though MDN says it takes only one input.

Unfortunately, it doesn't solve the problem I had, but it's good to know for the future.

Immersion and role-playing in the 1970s.

"As a player, state what you (the character) are trying to do, and the referee (who knows the rules) will tell you what is actually happening," Greenwood explains. As late as 1981, Greenwood still knew well the roots of this practice in free Kriegsspiel, and was aware that that it had attracted controversy, as referee decisions could seem "arbitrary" to players. And indeed, this approach to role playing has always had its critics.

This was in an article titled “Players don’t need to know all the rules.”

I always assumed that they probably should, but it seems to work if they don’t, but after seeing this idea voiced (and voiced fifty years ago), I now think this is right. Why should they? Is it going to make it any more interesting? For most people, I think the answer is no.

I picked up donut holes from Mass Hole Donuts. They were good, but it was weird to get food from a place with a name that obliquely refers to anuses. Speaking of which, regardless of their fabled composition, grilled hot dogs are still amazing.

91% humidity outside, 56% inside. Keeping the windows closed. So far, we are winning against nature.