# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
#
# Usage:
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/users View list of users and latest twt date.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt View all twts.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/mentions?uri=:uri View all mentions for uri.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/conv/:hash View all twts for a conversation subject.
#
# Options:
# uri Filter to show a specific users twts.
# offset Start index for quey.
# limit Count of items to return (going back in time).
#
# twt range = 1 7126
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=http://www.lord-enki.net/twtxt.txt&offset=4126
# next = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=http://www.lord-enki.net/twtxt.txt&offset=4226
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=http://www.lord-enki.net/twtxt.txt&offset=4026
Bad idea of the day: Prevent any party from having representatives in more than 10% of the seats in congress or senate, including at the state level. If any party goes over 10% we redo the election in all affected areas.
You've heard about ghost kanji, but what about yokai kanji -- hapax legomemna that, if they don't occur enough times in the modern corpus, come to life and play tricks on us, drinking lamp oil & jumping backwards over corpses to ressurect them.
Band name of the day: the secret weapons
Band name of the day: homesick for nowhere
Band name of the day: dread risks
Band name of the day: conspiracy to riot
Band name of the day: the waiting mortuary
Band name of the day: safety coffin
Hot take: the primary function of a horror movie is not to be scary, but to be /creepy/. If you don't know the difference, watch better horror movies.
Slate is complaining that the witches in Suspiria (2018) aren't scary. Has the author seen Suspiria (1977)? It's a wonderful film but the scariest thing about it is the sound track.
Today is All Hallow's Day. Celebrate by having way too many disappointing sequels
Bunny-Girl Senpai is an interesting show. It seems to be going for a theme with the various arcs: each one seems to be about how communications media change our behavior & self-image by exerting social pressure with expectations.
In the grim dark future of 2019, all stores are halloween stores because every day is halloween.
Nasu announces a new entry in the Fate franchise, Fate/F For, starring a genderswapped Orson Welles who pummels enemies with a film camera on the end of a pole arm.
In one sense, 'the computer revolution is over' because the period of exponential growth behind the tech ended 10 years ago. In another sense, it hasn't begun: we have sheltered ourselves from the social and intellectual ramifications of computing. Documents are still simulations of paper, & capitalism still exists. So it's like that period where printing presses existed but everybody used a faux-calligraphic font.
'Do you prefer horror movies or comedy movies' is a good way of phrasing 'with what degree of intensity are you comfortable having your mental constructs challenged'. 'Hausu is my favorite movie' is a valid & illuminating response.
So, watching Halloween (1978) is free on shudder today, in case you want to. Not really sure why they only told current subscribers...
Periodic reminder: nothing has prepared us for The Strange Times
The holy trinity: Save Ferris, Kill Ziggy, and End User
Band name of the day: end user digest
Band name of the day: darker when wet
Band name of the day: skeleton jazz wizard
The Shining has apparently forever turned Midnight with the Stars and You into a 'horror song'. I'm sure some flapper ghosts are very unhappy with that categorization. They can't do anything about it, though: ghosts are weak.
A possible future: SSSS.Gridman's popularity causes a bunch of mecha-inspired toku adaptations to be greenlit & 'tokusatsu remake' becomes the new 'isekai light novel adaptation' for about 5 years.
Hot take: moral hazard is an information problem with its roots in systematic overconfidence & optimism bias. Either important domains of risk are ignored or the effectiveness of mitigations is overestimated.
Hot take: in the absence of full information, provide reasonable defaults that are easily overridden. Making users repeat normally-identical pieces of information several times just because they CAN differ in a corner case is bad design.
Hot take: any command that a user might want to use regularly should be short, memorable, and built-in; any command that a user might really NEED to use should be documented & included in the examples in built-in documentation.
I sort of can't believe this, considering Maven's bloat, but there appears to be no build-in command for taking a package name specified on the command line, searching maven-central for it, & installing the latest version from the command line...
Band name of the day: nameless food
Bad idea of the day: write poems, one a day, each on the back side of a tile, cementing it into place after you write it. your bathroom wall becomes a hidden book. tell no one.
Band name of the day: deformed malediction
How to get rich quick, apparently: rephrase the obvious as though it is the revolutionary for the benefit of the stupid, and pepper it with the wrong to drum up 'controversy'. (Worked for Peterson)
Band name of the day: telepathic impactive impingement
Shockwaves ep #119 has a great Song Exploder-style breakdown of the Ghostbusters theme song. Highly recommended.
Isn't it great that outlook just prevents people from emailing jar files to each other? Like, it's not as though people occasionally need to send each other internal proprietary jars that aren't conveniently hosted.
Band name of the day: acceptable meat creaminess
Band name of the day: Porcine encephalon
Hot take: the existence of entrepreneurship is an argument against rational economic actors, because most new businesses fail & the primary factor in that failure is luck.
Better metaphors for community management than 'social engineering': 'social gardening', 'social pickling', 'social brewing', 'social stewing', 'social mixtaping'
If Halloween 3 had been Halloween 2 (i.e., if Michael Meyers was a one-off & there was never the expectation set that he'd come back) we could have had a great yearly horror anthology series for the past 40 years.
Because of the use of 'rune' to refer to unicode codepoints in go, a fulthark transliteration program might have somewhat confusing source...
Is Panos Cosmatos a pen name? The guy who directed Beyond the Black Rainbow being literally named 'space bread' is a bit too perfect.
Band name of the day: crew expendable
It really pisses me off when people use 'infinite' to mean 'really big'. If something's actually infinite, adding more to it produces the same number (like in Hilbert's hotel)
Bad idea of the day: a database of maps of conceptual spaces that are drawn like maps of physical spaces (ex., xkcd's map of the internet & Knuppe's map of the fields of mathematics)
Bad idea of the day: a self-adhesive battery-powered white noise generator & speaker, which can be affixed to the microphone on your laptop