Tea Leaves

My friend Zarf (of interactive fiction, and Boodler fame¹), recently released Mutagen, a small Javascript library for generating pseudorandom strings of text, according to a grammar. Because my entire purpose in life is to walk up to the huge forests Zarf plants and opine “Saaaaaay. That’s a really nice tree!” I of course immediately took his sample app and dropped it nearly unchanged as the ’subtitle header’ of Tea Leaves. You’ll get a new one each time you visit.

My divine role of King of Missing the Point shall forever go unchallenged!

Footnote 1: At least, he’s famous among the circle of people whose opinions I care about.

We’re upgrading the blog software here at Tea Leaves to clear out some lingering problems from old versions of Wordpress.  All permalinks and comments should be working properly, but until we get ourselves back up to speed, you’ll notice that the layout is a bit different and some links (notably Amazon.com links) may be broken.  We should be back to normal by this weekend.

The biggest problem with buying a car is that once you buy it, you have to stop shopping.

This is problematic for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that, having dropped so many thousands of dollars on a durable consumer good, suddenly other items seem a lot cheaper. So consumer electronics that, if you were sane, you’d dismiss as “too expensive” suddenly become little things to be casually picked up with pocket change.

This is happening to me now, because I’m looking for a GPS to use for Geocaching, even though I don’t really need one. (more…)

A few months ago, my Wii died the death, and I had to send it back to Nintendo for repair. When it came back, all of my data had disappeared, including several months full of Wii Fit user data.

Now, obviously I hadn’t been playing Wii Fit during the several weeks that it was in the shop. And losing the data sort of took the wind out of my sails, so I didn’t really start up again until this week. At which point I feel somewhat relieved that I don’t have the historical data, because believe me, I’m in a lot worse shape now than I was in October.

I’m definitely ready for winter to be over.

Psst? Anyone there?

It appears that after a bit of technical chaos and angst that we are back. In a slight breach of protocol I’m going to spend a bit of time sending a big raspberry to the “developers” who create the wonderful weblog publishing software that we spend so much of our time using.

(more…)

…it means that our transition to the new hosting service was successful. Here’s to another few years of game reviews, chowhounding, and bitterness!

I think one or two of the most recent comments on posts might have been lost. I’ll try to move them over later today. In the meantime, consider visiting our forums and commenting there instead, while things settle down here.

This week, on a whim, I bought a harmonica. It always seemed like a fun instrument to play, and you can get a quality instrument for just a few bucks.

There’s only one problem: I don’t know how to play the harmonica. I dug around a little on the net, and found a series of instructional materials on YouTube. As soon as I started watching one, I realized there was something crazy going on here:

The guy teaching the lessons was Adam Gussow, of Satan and Adam. (more…)

I will allow myself a brief comment on the little local blogging drama. I will keep it short and sweet, and anyone who doesn’t already know what I am talking about can safely ignore this.

My comment is “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

As something of a test, we’ve set up a web forum, here. If you’re a regular reader, please consider registering and trying it out.

We’re not sure whether this is something we want to support, but I figured it would be an interesting experiment to set it up and see if there’s enough of a community that’s interested in using it. The choice is yours.

I’ve been making real progress in the past year, giving away and donating books and DVDs, even finally getting rid of some of my most ancient and decrepit computers (somewhere, in a Goodwill building, are an IBM RT and a Decstation 3100. Good riddance.)

Tonight, I opened the door to The Room I Don’t Go Into for the purposes of throwing away a few things.

The Room I Don’t Go Into is worse than I remember. Apparently, in the course of cleaning up the house I might have, er, made it worse.

So, this weekend will require another Goodwill run. If I don’t update for a while, it probably means I’ve fallen in to The Room I Don’t Go Into and can’t find my way out.

Coming soon: I interviewed Mike Nelson from RiffTrax. As soon as I have it transcribed, I’ll post it here.