entirely safe and fun

Plastic (link probably doesn’t work), participatory media pioneer and collaborative “my other blog” for hundreds of regular posters, is down again. Distinguished by the generally high quality of discussion compared to community sites such as slashdot, and the low incidence and visibility of trolls, plastic.com is, or maybe was, the cyberspace perch of choice for literate English-language users. But now it’s down with no signs of life. Sigh. I miss you, Plastic. Come back.

During previous downtimes, users gathered on the Plastic IRC server at chat.plastic.com to collectively bemoan the loss of their neighborhood bar/speakers’ corner, but now that’s down too. The most public gathering places left to us are the wikipedia Talk page for plastic.com (not much activity) and the blog “Waiting for Plastic” (not much activity there, either). With two availability lacunae in one month, the regulars seem demoralized. My most cherished hope in this regard is that the site will return soon, with minimal loss of good, regular users, but the site’s operator, Carl Steadman, is better known for top-notch product (the very late, intensely lamented suck.com springs to mind) than for working quickly.

It would be nice if Carl would make some kind of public statement in a Google-able location about the disposition of the site. Please, Carl? If you see this, could you please issue some kind of encyclical to guide the faithful?

In the meantime, I’ll be doing my one-legged Plastic Come Back dance.

update: chat.plastic.com is back up as of 14:00 or so. Dance must have worked.
20 June 2006 update: It appears that many have given up on Plastic in absence of any announcement from its management. The population has begun gathering again, reluctantly in many cases including mine, at www.treesandthings.com.
20 June 2006 update again: the Plastic IRC server is back up, with an announcement claiming that the site will be available again soon - soon enough, I hope.

So, I played with my friends John and Avri at the Team Pro Tour Qualifier. We did strictly OK, but I feel like I’m improving, and I really enjoyed myself. Part of the reason I had as much fun as I did was the deck I played - the Black-White Promise-Husk deck debuted by Michael Diezel at Pro Tour Honolulu. The deck is so good because of its ability to jump from the control role to the beatdown role from turn to turn, denying its opponents the ability to seize either of the Flores roles of Magic theory, and because of its nifty combo finish (feeding low-power creatures to Nantuko Husk, probably including four or more Promise of Bunrei tokens, and likely boosted by an Orzhov Pontiff, a.k.a. Battle Pope - more on him later).

The control side of the deck is built around card advantage generators like Dark Confidant (”Bob”), Battle Pope, Promise, and Plagued Rusalka. In particular, the interaction between Battle Pope and the Rusalka can act as a Plague Wind against most opponents. Equally critical, when in the control role against an aggro deck including protection-from-black creatures, is the interaction between the colorless Promise tokens and any sacrifice outlet, which keeps Jitte nonsense to a minimum while you wait to start your offense, clear your opponent’s side of the board, or find a Pithing Needle. Bob… well, it’s nice when he draws you extra cards, but most of the time he just attracts some kind of kill spell right away; it happened to my Bob squad so often at the tournament that I named the gambit (”the Bobeque”). He is, of course, pleased as punch to jump into the graveyard with reckless abandon if the life loss starts to hurt too much, since nearly a quarter of the deck consists of sacrifice effects, but honestly he never stuck around long enough to be a liability on that front for me.

The aggro side is built around efficient beaters like Isamaru and Kami of Ancient Law (”Koala”), high-quality fat like Ghost Council of Orzhova, and a versatile disruption suite of Castigate, Pithing Needle, and Mortify. Add the combo power of Nantuko “Ravager” Husk, Promise of Bunrei in the Thoughtcast role, and Battle Pope in roughly the DotV slot (as a reach extender by getting your guys in), and the dirty Affinity feel is definitely there.

Continue reading ‘Spring forth, Battle Pope!’ »

And now, an actual picture of my shredded meniscus.

Click the photo to enlarge. The torn bit is being depressed by the probe a little behind the focus plane on the left side of the field, and bits are floating around in the tear itself. Obviously, in need of repair.

As an aid to visualization, I’ve drawn a little diagram, left, of the top of the cartilage, as seen from above. It shows the line of the tear following the contour of the cartilage for most of its length (red). In the drawing, I’ve taken the liberty of lengthening and narrowing the whole shape of the meniscus - in reality, it’s closer to circular, as you can see in the photo, right. A normal meniscus (click to enlarge) looks like what it is: a smooth, padded surface that allows a joint to absorb shock and glide through its range of motion. This is my healthy medial meniscus, from the same knee. Ideally, by trimming away damaged tissue from my lateral meniscus and sewing together the two torn portions, it will be restored to a state more like this.

In other knee-related news, the cult classic capoeira kung-fu flick Only the Strong finally was released on DVD. Among other things, it provided the soundtrack to the “Zoom Zoom” Mazda ads, introduced Mark Dacascos to a wider (non-zero, I suppose) audience, and made the spectacular martial art of capoeira internationally visible, probably inspiring more people to wreck their knees than any other non-football movie.

I have some pretty nifty souvenirs from my knee arthroscopy, chief among which is a CD full of stuff including an MPEG video, which I have yet to watch but am definitely looking forward to (it’s the feel-good movie of the year!), and some photos of the work done on my knee. Here’s one I thought was especially cool:

Part of the problem was that my lateral meniscus - the cartilage that sits on top of the tibia and cups the lateral condyle of the femur - was shredded, as you can see near the arrow. Since the femur slides across the meniscus during knee flexions, every movement of my knee was attended by rather unpleasant sounds and occasionally unbearable pain. (edit 12 May 2006: But this picture is actually of the other side of the lateral femoral condyle-lateral aspect of tibia interface - it’s of bone and cartilage grown over the tunnel through which my ACL runs. Same complaint about every movement of the joint making awful sounds/pain applies to this injury, as well as to the meniscal tear off screen in this shot.) From the inside, the meniscus cartilage looks like it’s been TPed. The sharp-toothed tool there was used to give my knee a haircut and remove the overgrown bone. Now it just needs to get a job.

At any rate, I’m doing fine, hoping to be be back at work “for reals”, as the kids say these days, by the end of the week, and ready for the Team Constructed Pro Tour Qualifier this weekend. I’m not quite a big enough geek to schedule my surgery around a Magic tournament, so I’ll have to play through my injuries, like Curt Schilling in the ‘04 ALCS. Hopefully, not so much blood, though - it warps the cards.

So I’m getting arthroscopic knee surgery today. Last time I had one of these, I learned all kinds of cool things! For instance, a pair of achilles tendons from a cadaver, prepared for transplantation, showed up on my itemized bill at $1500. So now, if I need to buy cadaver connective tissues, I have some sense of the market for them. Tissue dealers are always trying to rip you off, but since my ACL allograft I’m an educated consumer, and now you are too. What fresh wonders await me? I am so psyched! I may even be pumped up, jazzed, or even enthused! This is definitely the coolest thing that’s happened to me on a recent Tuesday.

I’ve been going back over my comment spam a bit, and I noticed a few things that really disturbed me. Probably the strangest thing was the ubiquity of ads for the proton-pump inhibitor (stomach acid reducer) Prilosec. You expect to see online sales for drugs that people are embarassed to ask their doctors for, or drugs with recreational uses. Sure enough, the most commonly advertised drugs I’m seeing are C1alis and Via.gra, or substances with similar names, and perco-cet/VIC0DIN/fen+an yl/Lora%epam/etc. Most Internet sales are probably to abusers.

But almost every comment spam offers Prilosec. In the same spam as the tram/a-dol and the alpra%o1am. What’s the attraction?

“Yeah, man, when your heartburn goes away, it makes you feel real good. If you snort it, man, that’s a rush, like six hours later… wow. Your whole esophagus feels, like, you know, the fire is going out. Cosmic. One time, Phish were in town, maybe in ‘01? - and I got backstage, and ate, like, a spicy hummus pita off the sandwich tray… the one I took that morning, that was the best ‘Sec ever, and I was feeling it while they were jamming to ‘You Enjoy Myself’ for, like, an hour. Yeah, like, totally feeling it. Wow. The helping, friendly purple pill.”

“I was at this party in a warehouse in Pittsburgh, and I had been dancing for so long my glowsticks were fading. Also, I was getting kind of faint, so I scarfed a hot ham Primanti’s. But then I starting feeling pretty bad, and the music started to all sound the same. Then, this guy came over, and he gave me a purple pill, and wow! What a rush! Like right away, five or six hours, tops, I was dancing again, and I kept going for at least another hour before the sun came up. Now I always roll with a ‘Sec when I go out. Peace.”

“Prilosec was the technology of Control. In the Zone, only foods of the most dubious biological, even chemical, makeup could be found, and so all citizens had reached an arrangement with The Man about their gastric pH. Most, in exchange for their fix, lined up to submit to masochistic sex acts in the public pharmacies, where secret degradation junkies sat behind one-way mirrors, lipless white faces practically priapic at the parade of assholes arranged for their pleasure. The acid-reduction metabolism had replaced sex for them. I had started working a short con with Fruity Moe, painting Flutamides purple. Now, Fruity Moe had a prolapsed esophagus…”

I fixed the irritating bug in the Pressy theme that made my feeds unreadable from the footer of the main page without manual URL magling, so now those RSS feeds should be available. Sorry it took me so long to notice (I don’t keep tabs on the feed of my own blog). While I was at it, I upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2 as well, a security update of the mighty, many-bug-fixing 2.0.1 which I was also putting off upgrading to. ‘Twas a beautiful day in adminland, aside from the fact that I accidentally killed the last few comments in the spam-crushing rage I experienced earlier… sigh. Mono no aware and all that. The brevity of their existence can only increase its sweetness. Won’t happen again, though.

akismet is an excellent WordPress plugin is a Web-based service combined with a WordPress plugin that, with essentially no configuration from the blog administrator, automatically kills comment spam. I’ve had it up for a day now and it seems to be 100% effective, in that I was getting dozens of comment spam a day before, versus zero that have gotten through since, I brought up akismet. I’m impressed; this solution kicks a thousand kinds of ass. But installing it did have one little catch, and I had one other concern I wanted to get out of the way before going down this road.

The instructions on the official site, brief as they are, manage to be confusing. They instruct you to get an API key from the “My Account” page on your WordPress blog. But you don’t get an API key from the WordPress installation you’re adding akismet to - you have to sign up for a wordpress.com hosted blog (on this page) and get the key from the totally separate blog you create there, which blog you’ll presumably never use if you have your own.

The whole thing is kind of awkward and wasteful, and I wonder, just a little wistfully, why the akismet folks would put this hoop here for us to jump through. Isn’t there some kind of identifier computed as a secure hash on some combination of configuration options that could be used instead? Something like the MD5 of the blog’s name concatenated with a user-supplied password? Or a key managed within the framework of the akismet website, and associated with the blog that is actually running the akismet plugin? I can’t make sense of the current scheme, which encourages users to use the same API key for multiple blogs and is not especially useful as an identifier.

The only other thing that slightly bothers me about akismet is its opaqueness. This I have reconciled myself to. Just as with Google’s PageRank, akismet’s spamminess tests actually do benefit from security through obscurity. You only need to keep the algorithm from being gamed by would-be spammers until you change it again, not for the long term, and that’s precisely the kind of protection that obscurity grants. You get an additional period of time (a constant term added to the complexity), rather than having each period getting longer (some higher-order operation on the complexity) as you would by strengthening the algorithm or building its knowledge base/bias. Even that increment is useful in this setting, as opposed to being useless in (e.g.) crypto. For AI-related reasons, it is harder to improve comment-spam-fighting algorithms than it is to improve spamming techniques, so those extra days and weeks are important in buying time to improve the algorithm, or its bias, again. Hence, I’ve chosen to accept some unknowns in order to get function, rather than mess around with a really open solution that will certainly have greater vulnerabilities.

That said, I bet they’ve got some really cool stuff going on under the hood - a collection of hacks and sidecars and special-purpose classifiers that a biologist could recognize and love. I would love to get a look.