The Plan

The Plan

In the beginning, there was a plan,
And then came the assumptions,
And the assumptions were without form,
And the plan without substance,

And the darkness was upon the face of the workers,
And they spoke among themselves saying,
“It is a crock of shit and it stinks.”

And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said,
“It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell.”

And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying,
“It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong,
Such that none may abide by it.”

And the Managers went unto their Directors saying,
“It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength.”

And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another,
“It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong.”

And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them,
“It promotes growth, and it is very powerful.”

And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him,
“This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor
Of the company With very powerful effects.”

And the President looked upon the Plan
And saw that it was good,
And the Plan became Policy.

And this, my friend, is how shit happens.

- From an old email sent around in the early 2000s.

No Free Napkins

Once upon a time, I was on my way to work in the morning. I was catching the tram to the CBD.

I hadn’t felt awesome before I left home, but as I sat on the tram i started feeling worse and worse. In particular, my nose started running. And I didn’t have any tissues with me. No good.

At a certain point, in the CBD but still not quite at work, I had to do something because my runny nose was becoming unmanageable. So, spotting a 7-11, I jumped off the tram. In a hurry.

With no time to fuck around, I ran into the 7-11 and headed for the pies and sausage rolls, looking for napkins. There weren’t any. Instead, there was a sign saying that napkins were available at the counter. So I ran to the counter.

“I need some napkins please”, I said.

The cashier handed me one tiny napkin. Nowhere near enough for the massive torrent of mucus I’d been holding back for about 15 minutes by that point.

“I need more than that, I have to blow my nose”, I managed to get out without leaking anything anywhere.

With an expression conveying very clearly exactly how few fucks he gave, the cashier refused.

“No, only one. You can buy tissues”, he said.

“I don’t have time for that, give me more napkins”, I said.

“No”, came the reply, continuing to be accompanied by the aforementioned expression.

So I blew my nose on the napkin he had given me.

Met with roughly a megalitre of mucous at high pressure, the flimsy and insubstantial napkin disintegrated, sending pieces of wet napkin and most of the megalitre of snot all over the cashier’s counter and all over the chewing gum and chocolate bars in front of it. This procedure left me holding half of an inadequate-for-blowing-ones-nose napkin which was dangling and dripping many ropes of horrible semi-liquid stuff. Once the procedure was complete, every subtle movement of my hand caused an exponential jiggling in the awful thing I was holding, and that jiggling then caused a hundred fresh droplets to rain down onto the counter in a hundred interesting new trajectories.

As I turned and left the store, taking care to put what hadn’t dripped onto the counter, products, and floor into the bin, I said:

“Next time, don’t be a cunt”

Nice work, youtube!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand this is what happens when you have people who don’t understand the technology work on one layer of abstraction, using inefficient frameworks to build things that could be built better with just a little skill and hard work, with no incentive or curiosity to care about any of the thousand other layers of abstraction:

youtube.com is literally more than 50% invalid HTML.

Nice work!

I’m guessing their unit tests don’t include running the output through a HTML validator.

The Register’s Totally Unbiased Journalism

I’ve been reading The Register for close to 20 years now. Certainly well over 15.

They have been getting less and less impartial, and thus worse and worse at journalism, over the years.

And today I found out that their comment moderation is also totally fair and unbiased. For instance, check out this totally offensive post that they censored:
Totally innocuous comment mentioning that their journalism isn't very impartial censored by their moderators
As you can see, I was totally out of line and very offensive here.

To add to this hilarity, it turns out that the person moderating comments on the article is the same guy who wrote it. Totally fair and not at all a recipe for a little fiefdom of echo chambers.

And as if that wasn’t enough, this comment was censored in such a way that there is no visible mention on the website that a post has been censored. Usually on their site, any moderated post will be replaced with a message saying “this post was removed by a moderator”. So it turns out that not only do they censor any even mildly critical viewpoints, they do it using a special censorship mode that they have implemented, so that nobody can tell that they’re basically nazis.

And that was the day that I stopped reading the register. Chris Williams, their editor in chief, is a little hitler wannabe.

HOWTO: Worship Cthulhu

Awesome yahoo answers Q&A

Normally I’d link to the source of this, but friends don’t let friends access Yahoo Answers, so no link today. I’m sure you’ll find it if you try. Instead, here’s the HTML version for your copypasta convenience:

Click to expand

Start by reading any Cthulhu Mythos book that you can get hold of.

Although there’s not much chance of getting access to a ‘Necronomicon’ or a ‘De Vermis Mysteriis’, you can occasionally find a used copy of something like the ‘Ponape Scripture’ (1907 edition) or ‘Cthulhu in the Necronomicon’ in one of the more exotic antiquarian bookshops off the Charing Cross Road.

Works such as this will provide a good grounding in the Mythos and may encourage you to advance in your attempts to worship the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods. However, they may also turn your mind and encourage you to do something less positive, such as eat your cat or gouge your own eyes out with a screwdriver.

Assuming that you wish to start worshipping Cthulhu, your next move should be to find a location close to the sea where you can establish your shrine.

If you can find a place close to a site of known Deep One activity then so much the better, as this species have been worshipping Cthulhu for millenia and may be able to assist you. The area around Walberswick and Southwold on the coast of Suffolk, close to the sunken town of Dunwich, would be a good choice. It is possible that other like-minded individuals might choose to move to such an area, so keep your eyes open for other eccentric types who might wander around the coast at night and gibber in strange languages, or who have the prominent eyes or webbed fingers indicating the Deep One taint caused by interbreeding with these creatures. Mind you, this is East Anglia, so not every web-handed gibbering idiot is necessarily a servant of Cthulhu.

Assuming that you’ve found a good location, you should attempt to conduct rituals to Cthulhu (as outlined in most good Mythos books). Although the exact form of these varies, you should be able to manage with about a dozen flickering black candles, a few blasphemous statues of Cthuloid entities, a set of ceremonial robes embroidered with strange symbols, a sacrificial dagger, and at least one human victim. How you get these together is your problem.

Having either made contact with the Deep Ones or communed with Cthulhu who may send his commands through evil dreams, you can get down to the business of becoming a true, hard-core, zero-SAN, cultist of Cthulhu.

Obviously there is a price to be paid for membership of this exclusive organisations. But, assuming you don’t mind spending the remainder of your life in thrall to mindless alien gods, permanently smelling of fish, gripped by catastrophic mental illness (and having to restrain yourself from shouting ‘Cthulhu fthagn!!’ at regular intervals) and with the risk that anti-Cthulhu vigilantes could arrive at any minute and slaughter you and everyone else in your cult with automatic weapons, it’s not that bad a choice.

Really.