dsandler.org/wp

“Locked! Isn’t that always the way? Thou hateth adventure games.” Go
check out Thy
Dungeonman 2. (Sequel to the enormously popular Thy
Dungeonman. “Ye cannot get ye FLASK.” Oh, good times.)

“The point of this essay is not, therefore, just to beat up on the CUPS
people — it’s also to beat up on every other open-source designer who
does equally thoughtless things under the fond delusion that a
slick-looking UI is a well-designed UI. … This kind of crap is exactly
why Linux has had such trouble gaining traction among nontechnical users — and
it becomes less forgivable, not more, when it’s surrounded by a boatload of
GUI cotton candy that adds complexity without actually delivering friendliness
to the user.” ESR explodes all
over the Common Unix Printing System and OSS user interface.

“California ain’t so bad.
The people though, fall victim to a kind of provincial snobbery
unsurpassed by pretty much everyone except the French.” (If you glaze
over at all the text, scroll down to the second map—that’s where the
funny really begins.)

Amazing!

I have the front window open, and Albert spotted a
bird … so, as is his custom, he started chirping at it in his very
incongruously-high-pitched voice.

It responded!

He actually speaks bird!
(I always thought he was just shouting gibberish, the way
we do to them when we make mewling noises.)

Thank goodness for the Internet. Finally, we can get the skinny on Cool “Disco” Dan, a DC-area
graffiti master of the 1990s. (Some of his stuff is still
around, I guess, leaching through coats of whitewash and paint.)

Linked everywhere, and with good reason: it’s quite tasty. “Mario
Brothers,” a tragic story, in Flash:

Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3. Is there more coming?
“I have to know if the
princess is dead or simply in another castle!”

Snrk. (Unfortunately, some
are tasteless. That’s what happens when you get an entire Internet of people
in a room to tell their favorite jokes.)