Deth's Journal

Got the code basically updated to do the physical and psychological attractants. I also went to the extra trouble of making it nice to update if i need to add additional types.

Now to just generate a few hundred people, generate the attraction lists, and see how it goes. Fun Fun.

Messengers 2: The Scarecrow is pretty good, but has NO similarity to the first one.

Scarecrow movies only fit into a few categories. This one is interesting as it somewhat harkens to the idea of gods like Xipe Hotec. To much of a focus on christianity, though - and the wife is cute, but a real fucking drag, and the daughter i frankly wanted to see die.

The Messengers is pretty good. I recommend it. It's kind of predictable, but still good. And John Corbett! I haven't seen him since Northern Exposure, but he's truly a superb actor.

The work on worldsim is pretty damn tedious lately. Aside from the attraction work, i might be collaborating with someone on the social groups. Since right now the attraction code is just a giant slog, i'll talk a bit about social groupings.

How i envision it working would be something like:

1. Have a list of social groups

2. Compare their statistics to the social groups

3. Come up with a "similarity" list. Like their "70% Emo" or something, i dunno as yet.

The key difficulty is coming up with social groups and criteria for them that isn't to exclusive. There's obviously going to be more and less common social groups (with some possibly being quite rarefied), but most everyone should fit into one, even if it's a pretty bland one.

Once social group is assigned other things - from clothing styles to career choices - can be somewhat extrapolated.

A doomer makes an assumption and then bases their entire world view off that assumption. It's like sitting down to play checkers, and finding out that really and truly you are not playing checkers: you're playing out a script of a game of checkers. the second that you make a move not in the script, a doomer is apt to freak out and call you, basically, a cheater. You've invalidated one of their assumptions so now their entire concept is invalid, and they cannot stand that. saying something like "well, with TDP we could probably have the same general amount of oil for around 100$ a barrel even if the ground ran dry entirely" is like putting a quarter on the board and saying "and now 80% of the board turns into my pieces!" and cackling, at least to their world view.

I have to assume they don't like out of the box thinking because it could, in fact, make many of their life choices look silly, and make them look paranoid and obsessive. To hear most of them talk it boils down to "Oh you fools, you don't see the truth! Only i see the truth!" and then they go back to gnashing their teeth and wailing. Most of their arguments are straw men - they set up a situation, tailored to prove their point, and then tear into it with gusto.

From slashdot, the amusingly named "Vint Cert" said:

"Humanity, at the end of the day, could track everywhere you went, and then you could take that trace and give it to service, and say 'did I go anywhere known to be dangerous? Is there a biohazard? Is there an announcement of swine flu? Was there an outbreak there? Were there other substances that I should be worried about?' "

Here's the thing: this would do far more harm then good, even if it only gave 100% reliable, accurate data.

The problem is that most things are - wait for it - *not that dangerous to humans*. Most of the time what you worry about is chronic exposure, or acute exposure to a large dose of something. For example - a little bit of lead isn't a huge issue. It's when you're exposed to it day after day that it's a problem (say, from lead pipes or such). Anything truly awful is either going to give you a warning in advance (chlorine gas, for example, has a distinct odor) or you will be dead before you realize something's wrong (say, dimethyl mercury or some nerve gases).

This would provide basically zero protection in a pandemic, to, because of the fact that it would not only provide a false sense of security, but it would not serve any prophylactic purpose. Once you're already exposed, you're exposed, for good or ill.

The key thing that people who espouse these sorts of ideas seem to miss is that a lot of people are off the grid, for any given technology, and that it's easy to be lulled into a false sense of security. Just because something doesn't show you're in a "danger zone" it doesn't mean you're not; just because something says "this is very toxic" doesn't mean it *is*. Life is about measured risks, and a device like that would just make it that much harder to actually measure risk in any meaningful way.

The proponents inevitably say some stupid shit like "what if there's a bio-terror attack! Or a nerve gas attack!?" In that (very rare, very unlikely) case, your survival is in the hands of fate even if you have *perfect* knowledge of events.

Take the case of nerve gas: the best defense is to run away. Running away may be impossible. If it is impossible, you will die, most likely. Your phone can hit you an alert about it all you want, it will not save your life if you can't actually get away. In the sarin gas attack on the tokyo subway, they ran away and those who did often lived. A valuable lesson.

All told? I don't like it. you wanna be safe in a pandemic, avoid people as best you can and have good hygiene. You wanna avoid toxic chemicals? Learn about them and then avoid them, as best you can. Accept that there is no way to eliminate all risks, and just behave responsibly and don't do stupid things. Just like some people win the lottery, some people die of mercury poisoning. That's the breaks.

I cannot express, in words, how much i love women. I do not just love them in a romantic sense, or a sexual sense, but in a very nearly spiritual way; if i did not worship my ancestors, I would surely worship them instead, building altars to their greatness and writing poems to their power.

There are so many things to love about them. How they look when they are terrified, their eyes wide and their lips quivering. How they look when they are sad, their body wilted like a flower in the sun, their heads bowed as if in prayer to the gods of sorrow. How they look when their in pain, tensed as if to spring away, a rabbit from the trap. How they look when their nervous, eyes darting, hands twitching, their long slender fingers writhing. I love how they smell, how their skin is so often sticky, as though they sweat sugar and bleed corn syrup. To rake my nails across a girl's skin is a joy without compare, feeling it pull and stretch; the ocean before a ship, a bright red-pink wake. To cut one is without description; how does one describe heaven?

But most of all i love their brutal practicality, their incredible common sense. Any problem i have ever had in my life, a girl has been able to present the solution. Any difficulty i have faced, they know the answer. They have a particular aptitude for understanding how people think, and for how to handle difficult situations. It is awe inspiring. Some men may take inspiration in a leaping tiger or a running deer or a finely tuned race car; for me, it's a girl solving a problem.

Anyway, i was just reflecting on how awesome that gift of common sense is, and thought i should write on it.

Friday the 13th Part 5 is a bizarre film. I recommend it as a matter of course, but it merits further discussion.

The cinematography is spectacular for a film from the 1980's, looking the equal of films made 10 years later, and better then some of them. No expense was spared, no short cuts taken. The acting is pretty reasonable considering the plot.

On the one hand, it's a Jason flick, with all the classic Jason Tropes. On the other, it's clearly not meant to be a Jason film, and all the parts that show Jason feel very tacked on. It's sort of like a slasher film, that someone decided to stick the name on and then add some extra scenes that were Jason-esque.

The entire setup of the film is kind of odd. There's a fair bit of nudity, including a couple lingering shots of one girl naked, and another totally gratuitous scene of nudity from someone who'd later be in the SUPERB Slumber Party Massacre part 2; you see her rack there, to. Classy. Most of the actresses after this didn't have great careers and disappeared pretty fast.

The death scenes are Jason to the core. Lots of machete action. There's one in particular i have issue with.

The scene is simple. Jason slices a guy across the chest, knocking him to the ground, cutting open his shirt, and leaving a nasty gash. My problem is that to get that type of cut, you'd have to be *unbelievably* lucky. Think about it: 99% of machete hits are going to be chops to the body that stick in. The actual "edge" of the machete that could cut someone like that is vanishingly small - maybe a half inch to an inch length-wise. You'd be more likely to stick it in him then anything, with how deep being set by how strong you are and what you hit. It bothered me, a lot.

Skeleton Crew is pretty good, lots of gore. Confused storyline. I recommend it, cautiously.

I've been working on organizing my DVD's better.

All the "loose" ones are in a large binder now, but unsorted.

My basic goal is to put all of them on a book case, perhaps if there's room with some objects of art, so as to spruce up that corner of the bedroom and make stuff easier to deal with. The inspiration was that you'd open our one dresser drawer and there'd be literally like 70 dvd's int here, some poorly labeled, some unlabeled.

yet to do:

1. Sort DVD's by type (ie, Movie, Adult, Series, collection, type of movie)

2. Decide on the final layout for the book case

3. Get some book ends

4. get more cases

5. Actually copy some more stuff to DVD.

Some collections I'm eager to do:

1. Sell Your Sex Tape

2. Facial Abuse

3. The Complete, Definitive Sweet Victoria - A Career Overview and Selected Analysis and Commentary

4. Latina Abuse

5. Dare Ring

6. Misty Mundae - From Vampire Strangler to Sick Girl, her Complete Works

7. Buffy Seasons (Complete)

8. Angel Seasons (Complete)

9. Six Feet Under (Complete)

10. Xena - Warrior Princess (Complete)

11. Neon Genesis Evangelion (complete with movies)

12. Cowboy Bebop (Complete with movie)

Of these the hardest is probably the SV content which will need converting and selecting through to find the best and most complete versions, and Sell your sex tape which is so massive (over 250 gigs!) that it's almost epic how massive it is.

Once it's all done, it'll be pretty damn awesome though. I'm pretty sure that

The Mad is a zombie-horror flick with lots of comedy, some of it absurdist. I didn't mind it at all, and found it a kind of cute movie. I recommend it.

Traits that are physically attractive so far as worldSim is concerned:

Age
Height
Weight
Face Shape
Hair Color
Eye Color


Psychologically attractive:

Personality Trait
Intelligence
Sensitivity
Dominance
Emotional Stability
Warmth
Liveliness
Rule Consciousness
SOcial Boldness
Vigilance
Abstractedness
Privateness
Apprehension
Openness to change
Self Reliance
Perfectionism
Tension

As we can see, there's a great unbalance between physical and psychological attractants, but this is acceptable for our case.

I played some PGR4 with cagey the other day on xbox live, and the overall impression is very favorable. It was a lot of fun and went really smoothly once we figured out how to work it. It was actually kind of thrilling, and very fast-paced.

I liked it a lot.

Reeker is a pretty good film. I recommend it strongly. There's no nudity, but a fair bit of other awesome stuff.

Well, having gotten the attraction system finally working in a way that makes SOME kind of sense, i now have to actually do the part that figures out if there is any mutual attraction. This is so far eluding me on how to do.

I'm thinking something like (in pseudo code):

"where (OUR ID) = Subject_ID and AttractantDiff_Percent > 0 and Person_ID IN (SELECT Subject_ID FROM Attractants WHERE Person_ID= (OUR ID) And AttractantDiff_Percent > 0)

that would be somewhat what it would look like, overall, i think.

Lets code that bad boy up and see what we get. using the ID of 28, we get:
Full Name - Percent Attracted
Lena Ella Long - 1%
Dave Jamie Fitzgerald - 2%
Kayo Ida Morgan - 3%
Nettie Rochelle Pate - 3%
Alonzo Wilbert Hunt - 4%
Howard Mickey Petty - 4%
Ricky Curt Fulton - 7%
Moses Dewayne Boyer - 10%
Angel Emanuel Rivera - 10%
Goldie Michelle Berg - 10%
Anna Lori Mayo - 11%
Megan Brooke Reed - 12%
Dora Debora Haynes - 14%
Kristina Katrina Palmer - 14%
Sheri Irma Herman - 15%
Jason Bret Ramos - 15%
Robyn Therese Wiley - 16%
Maria Betty Head - 20%
Timmy Wallace Foley - 21%
Alma Angelica Meyer - 25%
Anthony Emmett Whitney - 25%
Daisy Pearl Mcfadden - 26%
Laurel Colleen Duran - 26%
Scott Maurice Compton - 29%
Faye Candy Horne - 31%
Jackie Jay Slater - 37%
Danny Elbert Newman - 38%
Amaterasu Kyo Yamaguchi - 42%
Leona Elizabeth Wooten - 49%
Eva Carmen Molina - 50%
Shelia Madeline Humphrey - 65%
Naomi Miriam Charles - 68%

The final code to do this ended up looking like:

Query = "SELECT Person.Full_Name, round(Attractants.AttractantDiff_Percent, 2)*100 as Percent FROM Attractants, Person WHERE Person.ID=Person_ID AND Subject_ID = " & Person_ID & " AND Person_ID IN (SELECT Subject_ID FROM Attractants WHERE Person_ID=" & Person_ID & " AND AttractantDiff_Percent > 0) AND AttractantDiff_Percent > 0 ORDER BY AttractantDiff_Percent"

Ain't ya'll glad you aren't programmers? Yea, i thought so. What's DOUBLE awesome is that this is only part of the equation - i still need to find out the *most compatible* people, this just gets me a list of compatible people. Sick, huh?

Just for the giggles, ID #28 is only 3% attracted to Naomi; so it's a case of unrequited love, most likely, until i add in a bonus for being attracted to someone.

Backwoods is a pretty shitty flick. It's all about this cult kidnapping and breeding chicks, but it never actually shows this. I don't really recommend it.

The wonderful song "Kryptonite" by 3 Doors down has a line I've always enjoyed, that goes something like "You took for granted all the times i never let you down". It's true; people remember a slight far better then they do a favor, and they bias their memory of favors to make them seem less important over time (assuming they receive the favor, of course - the giver magnifies the importance). This was brought home today by beloved telling me how her family disapproves of a decision i made recently.

I could attack the character of her family, but frankly it's like playing baseball against a quadriplegic to point out their many and varied character flaws. instead, i'm just going to point out a few little cases where i like to think i failed to let them down and made the right choice.

When heather had sepsis, i took her to the hospital. Her family was a thousand miles away, barely reachable by phone, and i took her to the hospital three times until they admitted her and took care of her. Once she was in i called, i brought her cheese burgers, and i told her it was all going to be ok. I didn't see her father hopping a plane, i didn't see her sister driving here, i didn't see shit from anyone but me and my family.

When heather needed to go get her mother from idaho, i supported her doing so and encouraged her to go on literally 18 hours notice. I didn't once try to stop her, i didn't once try to tell her it was a bad idea. When a four-day trip turned into 2 weeks, i did not complain in the least because i knew how much it meant to her. I didn't see her father buying her mother a plane ticket, i didn't see her sister volunteering to go pick her mother up.

When heather needed to to go alabama and get her mother, i helped her do it and encouraged her, again, to do what she had to do to ensure her own piece of mind. Once again, i saw no one in her family lifting a fucking finger to do anything but make comforting sounds over a telephone over the entire thing.

We had her mother stay here for over a month as i recall, living in my living room. I didn't expect anything of her, and heather drove her literally everywhere. I didn't see her father saying "oh, here, let me send you a couple grand to help out" or "oh, I'll pay for a nurse". Her sister? don't get me fucking started. Her aunts? Yea, more comforting noises, there. Real helpful, i gather the one spends a few hundred dollars a month taking care of a dog, but sending money - or god forbid, visiting - is out of the question. When we barely had enough money to pay our bills, we took care of her mother, no problem, no complaints.

When heather got sick, i supported her pursuing every treatment available to alleviate her suffering and getting back into life. I supported her going on percocet, i supported her going on duragesic. I supported her through that long year of her sleeping all the time and being miserable and being barely functional. I drove her to appointments, i made sure she was still breathing at night, i made sure she didn't burn herself to death when her cigarettes would fall on the bed. I took care of her when no one else was able or wanted to. I didn't see anyone swooping in to help her except me and my family.

When she detox'd off the duragesic, i was there. I was there when she talked about wanting to die, when her panic attacks were so bad she'd just sit and shake. I was there when we went to the shrink and he told us he could do nothing, when we went to the doctor and he didn't do anything, when she cried and yelled and got upset. I was there when she finally got back to normal enough to be able to be alone for 10 minutes. I didn't see her family helping out there; they were to busy with their own lives, i suppose, to worry about us.

Over and over and over again I've made the sacrifices to make things ok that her family refuses to make. I've done it again and again and the only credit i get is a bunch of assholes second guessing me and telling me how to live my life. It must be nice, being able to sit around with people taking care of you and then telling them what to do. I must be real nice making ONE three day visit in 4 fucking years to see your daughter and then judging what's best for her.

Yea, I'm not perfect. I do horrible things sometimes, i know that, and I'm sorry for it. But when i lay down at night, on the topic of my beloved heather, i sleep easy. Because i know while i ain't perfect, I've done more for her then any of them do. A few gifts here and there, a few kind actions, do not make up for the day in and day out that i am with her, doing my best to keep her happy and safe. it's insulting as hell for them to look at me and find me wanting, like they are some platonic ideal and I'm just some asshole. To hell with that.

April Fool's Day is very derivative and not a very good movie. It's twists are obvious (though not predictable), and the action is lame. However, it's not horrible and i tentatively recommend it.

My Little Eye has it's ups and it's downs. I recommend it.

There's some nudity, and up until the last perhaps 1/3rd of the movie, the story is actually decent. But from there it kind of derails, pretty badly.

There's only a few scenes i had any problem with, and their all fairly minor in the scheme of things.

Transmorphers: Fall of Man - jesus does this movie ever fucking suck. Don't see it.

It's a shitty rip off of a shitty rip off of a movie. It's got nothing in it worth seeing for anything but the unintentional humor value. Isn't even any nudity.