Does This House Have A Basement?

While cleaning out my hard drive following a raft of unexplained blue screens (which resulted in a re-installed copy of Windows, and slightly less frequent blue screens…), I came across this document labelled Call of Cthulhu Survival Tips.  It's amusing enough to warrant re-posting here, although actually playing following these rules probably isn't a good idea.  (Unless, of course, you feel like playing a rather boring game.  Caution is rewarded, sheer cowardice probably just gives a keeper new ideas on how to toy with an investigator.)  The original author is unknown, otherwise credit would be provided.

I'll stop delaying and put up an all-original entry sometime before the end of the week.  I mean it this time.

 Continue reading Does This House Have A Basement?

The Hen

(From Fifty-One Tales, by Lord Dunsany.  Originally published by Elkin Matthews, London, 1915.)

All along the farmyard gables the swallows sat a-row, twittering uneasily to one another, telling of many things, but thinking only of Summer and the South, for Autumn was afoot and the North wind waiting.

And suddenly one day they were all quite gone. And everyone spoke of the swallows and the South.

"I think I shall go South myself next year," said a hen.

And the year wore on and the swallows came again, and the year wore on and they sat again on the gables, and all the poultry discussed the departure of the hen.

And very early one morning, the wind being from the North, the swallows all soared suddenly and felt the wind in their wings; and a strength came upon them and a strange old knowledge and a more than human faith, and flying high they left the smoke of our cities and small remembered eaves, and saw at last the huge and homeless sea, and steering by grey sea-currents went southward with the wind. And going South they went by glittering fog-banks and saw old islands lifting their heads above them; they saw the slow quests of the wandering ships, and divers seeking pearls, and lands at war, till there came in view the mountains that they sought and the sight of the peaks they knew; and they descended into an austral valley, and saw Summer sometimes sleeping and sometimes singing song.

"I think the wind is about right," said the hen; and she spread her wings and ran out of the poultry-yard. And she ran fluttering out on to the road and some way down it until she came to a garden.

At evening she came back panting.

And in the poultry-yard she told the poultry how she had gone South as far as the high road, and saw the great world's traffic going by, and came to lands where the potato grew, and saw the stubble upon which men live, and at the end of the road had found a garden, and there were roses in it—beautiful roses!—and the gardener himself was there with his braces on.

"How extremely interesting," the poultry said, "and what a really beautiful description!"

And the Winter wore away, and the bitter months went by, and the Spring of the year appeared, and the swallows came again.

"We have been to the South," they said, "and the valleys beyond the sea."

But the poultry would not agree that there was a sea in the South: "You should hear our hen," they said.

God D--- Mother F---ing Piece of F---ing S---

Anyone care to guess which government agency, with whom I spent all of the summer arguing over whether or not they had received forms I had personally handed to them (resulting in me having to borrow money from my parents and girlfriend in order to pay for groceries, let alone rent), has managed to lose my forms yet again?

There must be a line in their code or something:

if (studentname.equals("Andrew Gammell") {
	loseForms();
	denyReceivingForms();
	makeLifeMiserable();
}

The best part is that, according to their website, there is no reason why my student loan should be held up: Hold Reason(s) No.  Of course, their website also claims that I've never received a reassessment, despite the fact that I've got a copy of that letter right in front of me.

In summary:  There's a saying that goes "He couldn't find his own ass with a map."  That's definitely true for Student Aid, because they probably would have lost the map and then deny ever receiving it.

/not bitter in the least

The Sphinx At Gizeh

(From Fifty-One Tales, by Lord Dunsany.  Originally published by Elkin Matthews, London, 1915.)

I saw the other day the Sphinx's painted face.

She had painted her face in order to ogle Time.

And he has spared no other painted face in all the world but hers.

Delilah was younger than she, and Delilah is dust. Time hath loved nothing but this worthless painted face.

I do not care that she is ugly, nor that she has painted her face, so that she only lure his secret from Time.

Time dallies like a fool at her feet when he should be smiting cities.

Time never wearies of her silly smile.

There are temples all about her that he has forgotten to spoil.

I saw an old man go by, and Time never touched him.

Time that has carried away the seven gates of Thebes!

She has tried to bind him with ropes of eternal sand, she had hoped to oppress him with the Pyramids.

He lies there in the sand with his foolish hair all spread about her paws.

If she ever finds his secret we will put out his eyes, so that he shall find no more our beautiful things—there are lovely gates in Florence that I fear he will carry away.

We have tried to bind him with song and with old customs, but they only held him for a little while, and he has always smitten us and mocked us.

When he is blind he shall dance to us and make sport.

Great clumsy Time shall stumble and dance, who liked to kill little children, and can hurt even the daisies no longer.

Then shall our children laugh at him who slew Babylon's winged bulls, and smote great numbers of the gods and fairies—when he is shorn of his hours and his years.

We will shut him up in the Pyramid of Cheops, in the great chamber where the sarcophagus is. Thence we will lead him out when we give our feasts. He shall ripen our corn for us and do menial work.

We will kiss thy painted face, O Sphinx, if thou wilt betray to us Time.

And yet I fear that in his ultimate anguish he may take hold blindly of the world and the moon, and slowly pull down upon him the House of Man.

Brain Dead Security Design

I always have a terminal open to this server, and when it's not in use it's set to tail -f /var/log/apache/access.log.  (For the non-*nix people:  that means that it's watching the server access logs, and printing out each new line that gets added to it.)  There's a point to this, and how it relates to the title, but I 3figured I should get the basic background info out of the way.

Anyways, as mentioned, the terminal spits out the server log when not in use.  Every now and then I glance at it, or more importantly, I glance at the refer field.  The weekly analog reports tell me what the most popular refers have been overall, but they fail to tell me where people are currently coming to the site from.  (Odd tidbit, re analog: the MSN robot is the second most common user agent reported.  It makes sense, as I see it crawling the site at least once a day.  However, there has never been a single referal to any page or file on this site via the MSN search engine.)

Getting back on track:  I occassionally glance at the referer field.  If I see a site I don't recognise, I'll copy the entry and visit it so as to satisfy my curiousity.  The most common unrecognised referals come from forums.  Certain pictures (especially, for some odd reason, the battery one) seem to be popular candidates for being posted in forums; so generally that's what I end up seeing when I paste in the URL.  Anyways, as of late the Hollow Chocolate Bunnies scan has been showing up in my logs quite a bit.  Seems some forum has posted it on a page, and I keep getting hits from it.  So I did what I normally did: I pasted in the URL, and took a look to see where it was being posted.  Thing is, once the page loaded, I noticed something:  "You are logged in as username", where username was an actual username.  "Hrmmm… That's odd," I thought, so I scrolled up an pasted every single URL from that site that I could find.  End result: 10 URLs, 4 of which logged me in as someone. (With full access to their accounts.  Only thing it didn't look like I could change was the password, as it required the old one.)

Now, this was, to put it mildly, odd.  I followed a URL, which could be in thousands of server logs, and got into someone's forum account.  (Note:  At no point did I mess with anyone's account.  I was curious as to why this was happening, but not malignant.)  However, a quick glance at the user preference pages showed me what was the cause of this, and also one of the most brain-dead security designs I've ever seen.

From the looks of it, the site stores two bits of login information: one is a cookie, containing the login info, and the other is a "login certificate" which is contained in the URL itself.  Normally a login certificate is assigned to only one IP (which makes sense), but the user can also turn off that option.  Now, the question I have is this: why do they even need a login certificate if they're using cookies?  (Also: why should a cookie-based authentication system care about the IP address?)  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the point of a cookie was to preserve state across sessions, meaning that the user's IP address might change.  Why should the cookie be tied to an IP?  Especially if the cookie itself doesn't appear to be all that useful (since I managed to login as someone else without any cookies being sent or accepted from that site).  Or, more simply:  seriously, wtf?

Touchingly Pathetic

I plan on finally finishing that entry that I promised (you know, back towards the end of December) sometime later in the week.  I mean it this time.

On a totally random tangent:  my copies of Found finally came in.

For anyone who's never heard of it (likely most people), it's a magazine made up entirely of things that people find—love letters, notebooks, photographs, &c—all scanned and assembled in a black and white magazine.  The publishing schedule is sporadic, to say the least (Issue 1 came out in 2001, issue 2 in 2002, issue 3 in March of 2004), but it's interesting.  They've got a website with tons of samples, and they've even released book.  (I've heard rumours that the book is in colour, but I've never actually seen it.  Chapters was listing it in one of their recommended books list around Christmas;  oddly enough, there is no longer any trace of it on the Chapters web site.)

And, for the curious: yes, they do receive lots of adult orientated submissions.

The Death of Pan

(From Fifty-One Tales, by Lord Dunsany.  Originally published by Elkin Matthews, London, 1915.)

When travellers from London entered Arcady they lamented one to another the death of Pan.

And anon they saw him lying stiff and still.

Horned Pan was still and the dew was on his fur; he had not the look of a live animal. And then they said, "It is true that Pan is dead."

And, standing melancholy by that huge prone body, they looked for long at memorable Pan.

And evening came and a small star appeared.

And presently from a hamlet of some Arcadian valley, with a sound of idle song, Arcadian maidens came.

And, when they saw there, suddenly in the twilight, that old recumbent god, they stopped in their running and whispered among themselves. "How silly he looks," they said, and thereat they laughed a little.

And at the sound of their laughter Pan leaped up and the gravel flew from his hooves.

And, for as long as the travellers stood and listened, the crags and the hill-tops of Arcady rang with the sounds of pursuit.

Well, There's Spam, Egg, Sausage, And Spam. That's Not Got Much Spam In It.

This following link is for those who don't regularly check Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse:  If you're getting comment spam, the fastest way to get more comment spam is to fail to remove it.

In other words, what I'm trying to say is:  clean up your damn comments! (If you don't already do so.)

Also: apologies on the triple-post the other day.  The one at 18:00 was a test of MT3's scheduled posting feature that I had set the week before and completely forgotten about. (Suffice to say, it was a success.)

Charon

(From Fifty-One Tales, by Lord Dunsany.  Originally published by Elkin Matthews, London, 1915.)

Charon leaned forward and rowed. All things were one with his weariness.

It was not with him a matter of years or of centuries, but of wide floods of time, and an old heaviness and a pain in the arms that had become for him part of the scheme that the gods had made and was of a piece with Eternity.

If the gods had even sent him a contrary wind it would have divided all time in his memory into two equal slabs.

So grey were all things always where he was that if any radiance lingered a moment among the dead, on the face of such a queen perhaps as Cleopatra, his eyes could not have perceived it.

It was strange that the dead nowadays were coming in such numbers. They were coming in thousands where they used to come in fifties. It was neither Charon's duty nor his wont to ponder in his grey soul why these things might be. Charon leaned forward and rowed.

Then no one came for a while. It was not usual for the gods to send no one down from Earth for such a space. But the gods knew best.

Then one man came alone. And the little shade sat shivering on a lonely bench and the great boat pushed off. Only one passenger: the gods knew best. And great and weary Charon rowed on and on beside the little, silent, shivering ghost.

And the sound of the river was like a mighty sigh that Grief in the beginning had sighed among her sisters, and that could not die like the echoes of human sorrow failing on earthly hills, but was as old as time and the pain in Charon's arms.

Then the boat from the slow, grey river loomed up to the coast of Dis and the little, silent shade still shivering stepped ashore, and Charon turned the boat to go wearily back to the world. Then the little shadow spoke, that had been a man.

"I am the last," he said.

No one had ever made Charon smile before, no one before had ever made him weep.

And That Shows That There Are Three Hundred And Sixty-Four Days When You Might Get Un-Birthday Presents

In keeping with my habit of listing meaningless dates:  today I am one century old in Mercurian years.  You'll have to speak up, sonny, I'm getting a bit hard of hearing in my old age.

TMI

Since sometime last night, my on-again/off-again locking jaw has decided that it wants to be on-again in a very big way.  As such, I've been unable to open my mouth more than a small amount—not even enough to fit my index finger in (it won't make it past the 2^nd knuckle).  This of course means that my food intake has been limited to things I either don't have to chew or can consume via a straw.  The latter is prefered, as spoons are surprisingly deep, especially when there's something on it.

I think it's also officially time that I see a doctor about this.

The Department of Redundancy and Repitiion

Quick!  What's wrong with this picture?  Well, ok, not wrong, but just strange (and you don't have to be quick either, I've got nothing better to do).

Here's a hint:  take a look at the labels on the lines, and then follow the lines back to what they're pointing at.  That's right, they say the same thing as the labels on the machine.  It's not like the image in the manual is hard to read either; it's essentially a bunch of 8" 1/2 x 11" sheets that have been stapled in the middle and then folded in half, and the picture takes up an entire page.  As far as I can tell, the French manual must have been written first (the first half of the manual is in French, and the second half is in English), and then someone simply went through and copied it into English, regardless of how ridiculous the image would be.

All said, that image is a perfect summary of just how useful the manual for my breadmachine is.  There were three main parts when I unpacked it:  the breadmaker itself (with bread pan), the kneading bar, and another metal bar.  I'm still not sure what the second metal bar is for, as it's not mentioned anywhere in the manual.  It seems to make bread fine without it though, so it must not be that important.

HugeURL

Pop quiz time:  where do you think the following URL leads to?

http://hugeurl.com/?NWRiMDhiOWVjMmY3ZDY1OThlZGY2MzQwMmQ2ZDIz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If you guessed "right back here", then you're correct.  Think of it as a humourous response to the overuse and abuse of TinyURL addresses.  There's even a CPAN module, for all the Perl junkies out there.

This entry is filler, and is a stop-gap until I finally work up the motivation to complete the entry I promised last week.

The Assignation

(From Fifty-One Tales, by Lord Dunsany.  Originally published by Elkin Matthews, London, 1915.)

Fame singing in the highways, and trifling as she sang, with sordid adventurers, passed the poet by.

And still the poet made for her little chaplets of song, to deck her forehead in the courts of Time: and still she wore instead the worthless garlands, that boisterous citizens flung to her in the ways, made out of perishable things.

And after a while whenever these garlands died the poet came to her with his chaplets of song; and still she laughed at him and wore the worthless wreaths, though they always died at evening.

And one day in his bitterness the poet rebuked her, and said to her: "Lovely Fame, even in the highways and the byways you have not foreborne to laugh and shout and jest with worthless men, and I have toiled for you and dreamed of you and you mock me and pass me by."

And Fame turned her back on him and walked away, but in departing she looked over her shoulder and smiled at him as she had not smiled before, and, almost speaking in a whisper, said:

"I will meet you in the graveyard at the back of the Workhouse in a hundred years."

My Project For 2005

I'm pretty sure that I've previously mentioned my obsession with the works of Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, and the fact that most it is now lamentably out of print.  As such, I've come up with a project for 2005:

I've decided to post one story from his 1915 short-story collection Fifty-One Tales on every Sunday of this year (especially fitting, since there are 51 Sundays in 2005).  The stories are rather short (generally about 200 to 250 words), and were originally written between 1909 and 1915 (with the majority completed by 1913), a period that's usually considered to be part of Dunsany's prime.  They are your typical Dunsany stories, showing an obsession with the ravages of time, a pessimistic view as to the fate of humanity, and a habit of anthromorphising various things (Fame, Time, the winds, &c.).

Since I'm also lazy, I'll be using the Project Gutenberg e-text as my source, rather than typing in all 138 pages from my copy.

The following is a list of the stories, as well as the date on which they will be posted:

 Continue reading My Project For 2005