Anna and the Bunches

Most of the tech community has heard about Lambdaconf by now, thanks to the decision to give Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, a speaker slot there. Their ultimate decision uses the phrase “professional ethics” a lot. It’s hard to miss the parallels with GamerGate. There’s a lot that’s already been said about this. The topic is pretty tired already; I’m late to the game. And moreover, the point that the De Goes is “so far off base he’s not even wrong” is a valid one.

Every couple of years I move this blog to a new hosting platform, and almost as often to a new domain. But I’ve managed to keep all of the content with each move. So welcome to my new blog, powered by Jekyll, and formerly powered by Blogger, Wordpress, (first self-run, then wordpress.com-hosted) and Livejournal. It can be found here at annabunch.es, and could formerly be found at stringofbits.net, and before that slashsplat.

I play a lot of Elite: Dangerous. And while I use a reasonably nice HOTAS, I’ve long wanted a flight panel: a bank of toggle switches with LED indicators that would act as a USB joystick. I can only find one company selling such a thing, and their solution leaves exposed wiring. (a no-no when you live with cats) Also, their website looks like it is from the 90s and just feels kind of sketchy.

I’ve had a fun time getting kodi to work with my new remote on an Intel NUC. So, in case you’re in a similar situation, here’s what worked for me! These instructions are for Fedora 22 and the hardware I linked to in this paragraph, but a lot of the instructions should be applicable in slightly different situations as well. Update your Intel NUC to the latest bios. At least on the RYH line, they fixed some problems with the IR receiver in a recent update.

All day yesterday, I watched my husband trying to log into FF XIV on the PS4. All day, the PSN sign in servers remained down. They’re still listed as offline now. Xbox Live has been back up since yesterday afternoon. So what’s taking Sony so long? Keeping production servers online is a large part of what I do professionally, so… I know this problem domain pretty well. And I’ve seen a lot of… speculation that is deeply misinformed.

I’ve moved over to Blogger instead of Wordpress for hosting this blog. Why? Because I’m administrating three other blogs, and they are all on blogger. Frankly, this was just easier. Hopefully, you didn’t notice the move. The conversion tool I used seems to have worked tolerably well; I may have lost a few comments, but such is life. As for the long, long silence, well… that may have been noticed, at least by one or two people.

The Angels Take Manhattan is about endings. Not the end of the world, or the universe, or time, like past epic stories have been about. It is about regular human endings, about saying goodbye and the things in life that keep us from the people we love. It is about leaving Neverland, finding that Peter won’t be coming back for you after all, even though he might want to.The theme of endings is played with from the opening on: the Doctor tearing out the last page of his book and declaring “I hate endings” is paid off at the end of the story with Amy’s line “You and me, on the last page”.

So, Denny’s new Middle Earth-themed menu / Hobbit tie-in has resulted in the following billboard:It is written in Cirth, Tolkien’s version of runes. It is a bit hard to read, and seems to mix and match a bit between the Angerthas Daeron and the Angerthas Moria.My first attempt at a rough transcription rendered this:dh* brekfast richū ov mid*l erth awökwLooking at this, that second character (the first one I’ve marked with an asterisk) may have been intended as an ’e’.

What The Power of Three is trying to do is clever - hide a drama about the relationship between the Ponds and the Doctor inside a straightforward episode of Doctor Who (in this case, it happens to be in the ‘aliens invade earth’ genre of Doctor Who stories). Unfortunately, that drama never really gets time to find itself; instead, the episode spends a bit too long developing the alien invasion story, and not long enough exploring the drama.

This post is spoiler free! Just kidding. Spoiler Warning.One of the stock modes of operation of Doctor Who is, of course, the collision of genres and genre elements. Sometimes this simply takes the form of colliding Doctor Who itself into another genre. Other times, the Doctor wanders in on two genres in the act of colliding.A Town Called Mercy is, of course, a Western. It is also a space opera. The two are blended fantastically, with the warring aliens taking on roles out of a traditional Western, with the outlaw and the target of his anger.