o Emotional Manipulation In Fundraising By onfundraising.blogspot.com Published On :: Tue, 13 May 2008 02:15:00 +0000 BethDunn just wrote a great post about mail fundraisng appeals and two schools of thought that are applied to them throughout the industry.On the one hand there is the practical appeal to a donor's sense of logic and decency. On the other hand, there are the emotional appeals dripping with manipulation sent out to shock or shame a donor into action.While On Fundraising's primary focus is telephone fundraising, this subject matter is relevant to On Fundraising for two reasons.Mail appeals and phone appeals are generally part of the same campaign. Sometimes a donor is called first, other times they'll get a mailer and then a follow up call.Increasingly donors are savvy enough and self-aware enough to take strong offense at the manipulative tone of fundraising letters. We live in an age where almost any information is available to those who want to find it. Todays activist donors do just that.Donor's often know more about a subject than the front line people raising money for it. As well they should. So sending out these mail broadsides is certainly no good way to show respect for a donor's intellect or for their prior support.The second reason this issue applies to On Fundraising, is that many telefundraisers mirror or amplify the sentiments expressed by these letters in a misguided attempt to manipulate donors into reactionary giving based solely on emotion. This works for now, however donors are self-aware and savvy enough to know when they're being manipulated. Surprisingly enough, they don't like it.Todays donors aren't simply tithing blindly in the hopes that some good will come of it. More and more, donors support organizations as active participants in an effort to improve our world. How does a person like this feel when they receive a dunning letter dripping with sensationalized woe? Like a patsy.All in all, these medieval scare tactics don't belong in modern fundraising. Yes psychology has its place in fundraising, but too often psychology is a euphemism for manipulation. Fundraisers who are good at their jobs are masters of speech, language, and persuasion. Its better to convince someone to give than to trick them into it .http://smalldots.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/the-model-of-a-modern-major-fundraising-letter/ Full Article advanced fund rasing techinques draising ethical fundraising fundraising letters
o Battle Of The Sexes (who gives more?) By onfundraising.blogspot.com Published On :: Tue, 13 May 2008 15:30:00 +0000 Good fundraisers typically stick with what works in a fund raising campaign choosing not to ask to many questions about why it works. While intuitively, many fundraisers know that women tend to make more donations in a given campaign or series of campaigns and perhaps if the fundraiser is intuitive enough, that men who give, generally tend to give higher amounts overall.It’s not always easy to understand why this is so, and therefore for a fundraiser to take full advantage of this information.Many studies have been done on philanthropy; fewer have been done on telephone fund raising, however the research on this subject is not insignificant. Two studies that we will highlight here at onfundraising are one commissioned by the Share Group Inc on fund raising and direct mail campaigns, and the other is “The Effects of Race, Gender, and Marital Status on Giving and Volunteering in Indiana” as published in the Nonprofit and voluntary Sector Quartley, in 2006 while report focuses on Indiana, much of the reporting is general in nature and therefore suitable for this post. The study’s main purpose was to examine whether factors like race, age, education or marital status make a difference to philanthropy of volunteering.Both studies are available on line, and are linked to at the bottom of this article.In 2006, Share Group. Inc, of Massachusetts participated in a comprehensive study on donor characteristics .Among other things this study quantifies some of the major difference between male and female donors; something that many people knew intuitively but lacked the hard data to validate. The study also measured donor contributions by age, and gave some general insights into what age group is the most supportive of charitable organizations.According to the study, when contacted, women are more likely to support a charity campaign than men.This data corresponds with past studies on philanthropic giving, but is limited to telephone fund raising The data indicates the women generally are more likely to donate to fund raising efforts and are also more likely to leave bequests to charitable organizations. The research indicates that woman as a whole are more likely to donate than men are.However, the study found that based on the statistical evidence, men who do give to a campaign are likely to make larger contributions than female donors. This information as well is corroborated by independent research.The study observes that the optimal donor age is fifty years old. Contributions tend to dwindle as donors reach retirement age. Donors ages sixty five to seventy five were most receptive to and renewal of support campaigns.Interestingly for fund raisers, the study found that female callers secure pledges less often than male callers, but the average size of the pledges female fundraisers secure is larger than their male counterparts.In general, women according to the research in both studies, are more likely give a larger contribution than they have previously given (upgrade). Men who could be convinced to upgrade generally upgraded at higher percentage versus female donors.Breaking down the data further showed that when it comes to the actual giving of money, single women give twice as much as single men. These results are consistent with what has been published in the past. Furthermore, single women are more likely than men to give to a variety of charities and philanthropic efforts. A not so surprising finding was that married men also were 2-3 times more likely to give as much as single men or single women. However, the amount of money donated by single men was found to be far greater than that of married couples. When the race factor is assessed for donation, there is little or no difference. Whites, Blacks and other minorities are no more or less likely to give relative to each other. The one obvious finding is that donations are significantly increased when the donor is educated, earns a higher income, and is older. This finding was again observed in all ethnic groups. The Indiana study also looked at another aspect of giving-volunteering. The results are not much different to the philanthropic study. Again, single females are more likely to volunteer their time when compared to single men. Infact single females are more likely to volunteer for many more hours (>146 per year) than single men. The one surprising finding is that there is no difference in volunteering between married couples and single individuals when it comes to volunteering. It would be expected that married couples would have less time due to their familial obligations but this is not so. Race did not reveal any differences in volunteering- Blacks, Whites and other minorities were just as likely to volunteer.Volunteering was found to decrease when the levels of income and education were low. In fact, there was a sharp drop in volunteering levels for those with less than a high school education relative to the general population, and this was seen across all age groups.However, increased income did not correlate with the numbers of hours volunteered. Individuals with low income were just as likely to volunteer for longer durations of time and vice versa.The one curious observation from the study is that when individuals were asked if they had volunteered in the past, women were more likely to recall this act. Minorities could not recall if they had volunteered. Why someone can’t remember a dignified act like volunteering is a mystery- perhaps an error in how the questionnaire was set up or comprehension difficulty. The writers of the Indiana study surmised that often minorities do volunteer work without formally characterizing it as such.Most of the results of these studies are also supported by many previous national surveys which have also found that education and higher income are the strongest and most consistent predictors of philanthropic activity.Why single women volunteer more is not fully understood but it is speculated that because single women have less social and financial means, they compensate this by giving more of their time as volunteers while at the same time establishing their social networks.These studies provide some insight into differences in donors by sex, marital status, race and income. Both men and women are motivated to give to charity for different reasons therefore when communicating with donors, fundraisers are advised to take this into effect and structure their solicitations accordingly.We can take from these studies the fact that most Americans do give to charity in one way or another. Fund raisers can best serve the causes they work for buy understanding the broad characteristics of donors and structuring their donation requests accordingly. Full Article
o Asking High; the art of the proper fundraising ask. By onfundraising.blogspot.com Published On :: Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:00:00 +0000 When asking for a pledge, the fundraiser has many informational advantages over the donor. Simply asking for the proper amount ensures that a donor will consider giving at the level you request. Starting out with a sufficiently high donation request amount allows you to find your donors preferred level of giving as rather than targeting the amount which is the lowest possible amount that a donor can possibly give to your campaign.If a donor could give more to their charity, they probably would. When donors who maintain a strict charitable budget and give a fixed amount annually hear requests for support that are above the amount which they are willing to give, they let fundraisers know just how much they are willing to give and when they intend to give it. In the rare event that a donor is offended by large or additional requests, a skilled fundraiser can apologize for the offense and leave the donor feeling good about the level of support which they do give.There is no downside to “asking high”.Becoming a better fundraiser is a continuing process. There is always more to learn and more skills to master.The conclusion to this article will be posted here in the coming days. Full Article
o Donor asks. By onfundraising.blogspot.com Published On :: Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:20:00 +0000 Part of connecting with donors is tailoring your ask to the specific donor with whom you are speaking. Specific donor asks take many factors into account, but the most obvious ways of making a donor specific ask remain the same regardless of who You are speaking with.Some things to take into account are:• Sex. The differences between male and female donors has been extensively covered here. Suffice it to say that exceptional fundraisers will attempt to master these differences and make them a part of their fundraising asks.• Age. Quite simply donors interest in an issue varies by age and experience level. Tailoring your ask to the interests of your donors age group ensures that at least your donor will listen.• Interest Level This subject has also been touched on in other posts. Some donors are more receptive than others. When soliciting telephone philanthropy, there is no need to to engage in a long, drawn out donation request if the donor has already indicated a deep interest. Additionally, it is unwise to attempt to ignore the negative signs given by donor expresses reluctance.There are an endless number of potentially successful strategies to employ when making your donor ask. The keys to successful telephone fundraising are creativity and responsiveness. Full Article
o Fundraising by Phone is for every Non-Profit: The Basics of Telephone fundraising. By onfundraising.blogspot.com Published On :: Wed, 15 Feb 2012 07:00:00 +0000 An increasing number of charities and nonprofit groups are electing to solicit donations through Telefundraising campaigns. Despite having different goals and needs, disparate organizations find that Telefundraising is an effective use of resources . For many groups, the option of telefundraisng makes sense. For large groups with vast amounts of members, telephone fundraising provides an effective means of outreach. Charities withsignificant fundraising budgets see impressive returns from telephone fundraising efforts. Large organizations are results oriented, this is why they continue to support Telefundraising campaigns. Small non-profits use telephone fundraising efforts as ameans to gain support for little upfront investment.While wide-scale print and media campaigns are often beyond the reach of small organizations, phonecampaigns can be executed in an extremely cost effective manner. Adjustments to telephone campaigns are virtually instantaneous, while other types of fundraising efforts need much more planning to alter. Organizations of any size can quickly realize significant benefits from telephone campaigns. The relative low cost of phone fundraising campaigns is an attractive feature, regardless of organizational size. Paired with simple initial equipment requirements, this makes raising money by phone an easy choice for most non-profits. Raising money is not the only goal of telephone solicitation campaigns. Contacts that end without a donation can still prove to be useful. Basing success on donations alone, overlooks other possible benefits to an organization. Receiving a call from an organization helps to personalize the charity to its donors. Phone calls keep organizations on the minds of their supporters. These calls provide donors with the latest information on the cause they support. Well informed donors provide more frequent support. Donation calls properly made, can be an important source of feedback for an organization as well. Donors use telefundraisng contacts as an opportunity to sound-off about their feelings about an organization. Organizations can take these valuable insights, and use them to tweak their efforts. Solicitation calls can provide much more than donations alone. Fully grasping this truth greatly improves campaign results.Positive campaign results are limited only by the imaginations of the organizations which run them. Calling campaigns are always an effective solicitation method. For the best possible outcomes, additional factors should be considered as well. Holidays represent an excellent time for telephone fundraising efforts. This time of year is when many donors are most receptive to giving.Wise non-profits leverage the holidays to increase their rate of success. Topical campaigns have increase significance to givers. These campaigns can be combined with additional media efforts. By closely monitoring the news cycle, it is possible to create campaigns that take advantage of current news, and require no additional effort to spark media interest. Close attention to relevant news is useful, but not essential to telephone fundraising. Calling campaigns that are well structured can drive their own press coverage. Press coverage is useful in some cases, but not an absolute requirement for all calling campaigns. Implementing a successful telephone campaign is not substantially different than other types of solicitation methods. Good Telefundraising applys traditional fundraising methods to the phone. The benefits of applying telephone fundraising are obvious. Telephone campaigns are an excellent way to overcome the problem of donor fatigue. Combined with other strategies, Telefundraising can strengthen listing campaigns. Fundraising by phone can produce results in and of itself. Carried out properly, there is no application where telephone fundraising campaigns cannot be attempted with positive outcome.Effective fundraising campaigns require detailed planning. Phone fundraising and other solicitation efforts should be designed to work in harmony. Fundraising by telephone requires serious preparation. Calling efforts should be well managed and adequately staffed. The results of telephone campaigns are based largely on the dedication of the organizations which run them. Pound for pound, telephone fundraising delivers better results than other fundraising techniques. The advantages of telephone fundraising fluctuate across organizations, but remain significant. While income is an important factor, it is not the only way to evaluate the performance of a fundraising effort. Phone campaigns can be implemented with minimal staff requirements. Well managed small teams can out performs much larger groups . Small teams are capable of delivering large gains. Changes to phone fundraising campaigns can be implemented without halting the camapaign. Important updates can be quickly integrated. News and current events can be incorporated into the campaigns virtually instantly.Comparable fundraising methods need significant time to alter. Speaking directly with prospects ensures valid contact. Direct contact with donors is assured with calling campaigns. Full Article
o What Kind of Fundraiser Are You? By onfundraising.blogspot.com Published On :: Tue, 28 May 2013 16:13:00 +0000 Fundraisers come in all varieties. From aggressive to docile, from passionate to indifferent, there are many ways to bring money into a non-profit or political campaign. Just what is the best method of fundraising? The best method is the one that brings in the most money for the cause. There is only one caveat; donors must be respected at all times. While fundraising happens in call centers, fundraising isn't a typical call center job. Most call centers don't require the depth of experience that fundraiser call center jobs require. A fund raiser can be expected to have a solid grasp of political, social and environmental issues. A telephone fundraiser can spend the morning trying to elect certain politicians and the afternoon trying to protect natural resources The best telefundraisers have flexible minds and are gifted speakers. Passion helps a lot but is certainly not the only way to get a donor to contribute. Knowing the issues you're calling about, even if you aren't as passionate about them as others, goes a long way to building credibility with donors. Rapport building is just as important, Donors give to people they like, Get to know your donors and they'll respond, The next tip is counter-intuitive Ask high. Most callers, and especially new callers, think donors will be insulted by large requests. In fact high asks have the opposite effect, Many donors are actually flattered to receive a large request, In other cases donors find these request to be humorous given their personal financial situation. Humor builds rapport and rapport secures donations. The best fundraiser to be is the fundraiser that is most effective with the donor that's currently on the line. Be versatile The more fundraising styles in your portfolio, the more money you'll raise. Thank you for reading this. Please leave your comments below and check back often for new posts all about the world of telephone fundraising. Full Article advanced fund rasing techinques ethical fundraising philanthropy online tele-marketing
o Elements of a Great Fundraising Script. By onfundraising.blogspot.com Published On :: Fri, 31 May 2013 10:49:00 +0000 Some call centers are very strict about fundraisers reading directly from a script. Other call centers advise fundraisers to stick to the script, but add additional details when the call requires these extras. Still other fundraising call centers allow fundraisers a great deal of freedom as long as the fundraiser stays within the general parameters of the fundraising campaign. Each strategy has its own merits, however there are some common elements that should be included in all fundraising calls. Getting a foot in the door. The first step in most calls is the greeting. Usually the fundraiser identifies their self and the group which they are calling on behalf of. This step should be gotten through quickly but not rushed. The realities of the campaign will dictate how the fundraiser proceeds with the introduction. In some cases the introduction can be delayed until after the a basic description of the organization and its funding need is made. Promise to be brief with your call and stick to this promise./ Expressing gratitude. The next step is to thank the donor. Whether its a simple thank you for taking the call or a more elaborate thank you for past contributions and supporting the cause, this is an important step. Sincere and elaborate thank yous let the donor know that their help is appreciated. Thank yous also tend to extend the call; people rarely hang up on callers while the caller is praising their support and reaffirming their decision to support the cause. Additionally, the longer a donor stays on the phone, the more likely they are to make a contribution. The reason for the call. Next, quickly go into some of the current issues faced by the organization and what is being done about these issues. Don't skimp on the details but don't speak in a monotonous way either. Express some real interest in the cause. Listen for cues from the donor during this and all stages. If they agree with something you're saying; elaborate on the subject. Build rapport. Remember; men and women process information differently. Read other posts on this site to find out which language to use for each kind of donor. Alternatively, if the donor indicates that they're busy; acknowledge that. Repeat that you'll be brief or just get right into your first donation request. Going for the donation. The first ask. Given the reasons stated above make a solid ask for a minimum of 3 times highest past gift. Be assertive and let the donor respond. Don't laugh, don't whine. If the need is real, the request should be real as well. Defend your request if required to; don't just lower it. Defending the amount of the first ask gives instant credibility to the importance of the issue, In fact, state that the reason you're requesting a large donation is because of the serious nature of the issue, Only then begin to lower the amount that your'e requesting. A second attempt. The second ask. Quickly elaborate on the need. Acknowledge that the donor isn't able to give 3 times their highest past donation. Considering the need, ask for 2 times the past donation. Again defend your request. The more legitimate you sound, the more likely the donor is to give you money. For many fundraisers lowering ask amounts deteriorates into desperation. Although this is a negotiation the need is legitimates and as a fundraiser you want to get the highest possible donation, One more try. The third and, not necessarily, final ask, This is where the fundraiser asks the donor to meet the level of their last contribution. This is obviously the level that the donor has been comfortable giving at in the past. Again stress the need and elaborate on the potential consequences of not reaching an adequate level of funding for the campaign in question. Taking no for an answer. If stopping here, without securing a donation, take the time to sincerely thank the donor once more. This establishes that you, the fundraiser and the organization, respect the donor no matter what they can or cannot give at the moment. This also helps to reinforce an attitude of respect and gratitude which should be extended to all donors at all times. The forth ask and so on. Many times a donor who can't match a previous donation will express regret that they simply cant afford the same amount. If applicable, ask for an even lower amount down to the minimum level of donation that can be taken on a specific campaign. Remind the donor and yourself that every donation, no matter what size, counts. After all in most fundraising campaigns, the many small donations greatly out number the amount of money which is generated by the larger ones. Get it on a credit card. The credit card ask. Credit card donations fulfill instantly. There are no pledge cards to send out. Obviously securing a donation on a credit card is favorable to a mailed in pledge card. Credit cards on the phone are favorable to online donations as well; donors can easily be distracted and forget to make their donation. Ease their mind. Security is the main concern with credit card donations, Donors are rightfully fearful of identity theft. Every call center has methods in place to protect the credit card information of donors. Patiently explain these procedures as well as why credit card gifts are the best gifts that donors can make. Be prepared to further explain the value of credit card donations and their secure nature. Many donors will give by credit card once they have been properly assured of security measures. If not, follow your organization's standard pledge card procedure. Wrapping up the call. Again, take the time to sincerely thank the donor for their help. Answer any additional questions and then politely end the call. Following this method on every call improves dollars raised as well as the quality of each outbound call. Full Article empathy ethical fundraising fundraising fundraising tips fundrasing tele-marketing
o Quick Rapport Technique. By onfundraising.blogspot.com Published On :: Wed, 05 Jun 2013 13:30:00 +0000 As most fundraisers know, building rapport with donors keeps them on the phone and listening to your request. Rapport isn't a clever trick; it is a means of showing donors that you are interested in them and that you have at least some small things in common. We build rapport in almost every conversation we have whether on or off of the phone. Building rapport with someone you've just called for the first time can be a little harder, but it is certainly possible. One simple technique for rapport building is knowing the state nicknames or motto's of the states that you're dialing into. Asking a donor how things are going in the Equality State rather than simply how things are going, makes your question more intimate. Donors really do open up when you take a personal interest in them. Listed below are the state nicknames. StateNickname(s) Alabama(No official nickname)[1] Cotton Plantation State[2] Cotton State[3] Heart of Dixie[3][4][5] Lizard State[2] Yellowhammer State[3] Camellia State Alaska Great Land (previously used on license plates) Land of the Midnight Sun[6] Land of the Noonday Moon[6] The Last Frontier (presently used on license plates)[6][7] Seward's Folly (named after U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward)[6] Seward's Ice Box, Icebergia, Polaria, Walrussia, and Johnson's Polar Bear Garden were satirical names coined by members of theU.S. Congress during debate over the Alaska Purchase[6] Arizona Apache State[8] Aztec State[8] Baby State (during the 47 years that Arizona was the newest state in the Union)[8] Copper State[8] Grand Canyon State (currently used on license plates)[8][9] Italy of America[8] Sand Hill State[8] Sunset State[8] Sweetheart State[8] Valentine State (Arizona gained statehood on February 14, 1912)[8] Arkansas Bear State[10] Bowie State[10] Hot Springs State[10] Land of Opportunity (former official nickname; previously used on license plates)[10] The Natural State (currently used on license plates)[11][10] Razorback State[10] Toothpick State[10] Wonder State[10] Diamond State California El Dorado State The Golden State[12][13] (previously used on license plates) The Land of Sunshine and Opportunity Golden West Grape State Land of Milk and Honey Land of Fruits and Nuts Where Stars Are Buried The Cereal Bowl of the Nation The Eureka State [14] The Bear State (or Republic) The Sunshine State (in disuse) (c.f. FL) Colorado Buffalo Plains State[15] (in disuse) Centennial State[16] (previously used on license plates) Colorful Colorado[16] (previously used on license plates) Columbine State[17] Highest State[15] Lead State[15] (in disuse) Mother of Rivers[18] Rocky Mountain Empire[19] Rocky Mountain State[20] (in disuse) Silver State[15] (in disuse; see Nevada) Switzerland of America[21] Connecticut Constitution State Nutmeg State Charter Oak State Delaware Chemical Capital[22] Corporate Capital (due to the state's business-friendly laws)[22] Diamond State (allusion to the state flag)[22] Blue Hen State or Blue Hen Chicken State[23] The First State[24][22] (Delaware was the first state to ratify the Constitution; currently used on license plates) Home of Tax Free Shopping[22] New Sweden[22] Peach State[22] Small Wonder[22] Uncle Sam's Pocket Handkerchief[22] District of Columbia A Capital City (previously used on license plates) The Federal City The District[citation needed] Florida Alligator State[25] Citrus State[citation needed] Everglade State[25] Flower State[25] God's Waiting Room Gulf State[25] Hurricane State[citation needed] La Florida Manatee State[citation needed] Orange State[25] Peninsula State or Peninsular State[23] Sunshine State (currently used on license plates) Tropical State[Full Article advanced fund rasing techinques empathy ethical fundraising fundraising tips fundrasing rapport tele-marketing tips o Is it still possible to make money in online fundraising? By onfundraising.blogspot.com Published On :: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:36:00 +0000 The short answer to this question is, yes. While the rules have changed a bit since the early days of raising money online, the necessary elements all still exist in great supply. These are; a large and motivated donor pool, innovative organizations and fundraisers and the technology that brings it all together. This post will cover this complex topic with updates to come. In the mean time, voice your opinion on the relevancy of online fundraising in the comments section below. The first step to success in online fundraising is the cause. While its possible to raise money for just about anything, what really promotes success is having a well defined mission statement. This is something that resonates with donors quickly. The shorter it takes to express your mission statement, the more likely it is that donors will stick around to learn more about your organization and its needs. This does not necessarily mean that they'll make a contribution, but donors who leave your site out of boredom, frustration or confusion certainly wont be making any. After a well defined cause, presentation is the next most important element of online fundraising. Donors are quick to leave sites that are'nt easy to navigate. Ideally donors should be able to make an online gift in just one or two steps, the more complicated a donation system is, the less likely donations are to be made. Simple. modern interfaces are the key to increasing online donations. Full Article o The Future of Fundraising is Local. By onfundraising.blogspot.com Published On :: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 14:50:00 +0000 With the economy finally starting to gain some traction, few people are thinking about those whom society is le aving behind. These are the working poor, the sick and the elderly. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, we will see more soldiers and their families in need. Sometimes fundraising calls for a national effort. The only way to gather money and resources quickly is by calling or mailing into every state for support. This is a proven method of soliciting money. This isn't the case for every fundraising effort however. There are some issues that could just as well be taken care of locally. Additionally, some causes are actually better served by using local fundraisers. Local has a number of benefits; we'll name a few below. More of the money goes to the cause. Some national fundraising companies can take as much as 80% of what they raise for an organization. Millions of dollars are wasted in this way. Local groups just can't afford to pay these prices. A local campaign, whether staffed by volunteers or local professionals, ensures that more of the donated dollars go to work immediately. No one knows local issues like local people. Using locals to fund raise means having a team that understands the issue and is passionate about it. The more knowledgeable and interested in an issue a fundraiser is, the more likely they are to secure donations. As a nation, a number of important issues are affecting Americans; children going to bed hungry, seniors and veterans not getting the care that they deserve and homelessness are just a few of these issues. What all of these issues all have in common is that they begin and end locally. We can choose to wait for a solution from Washington, but President Obama's job forces him to look at the big issues, not the small ones. National organizations face similar problems; they have the money and resources, but not the organization to implement relief locally. Local fundraisers raising and spending money locally have an immediate effect on communities. Bringing the idea of raising money in the community and solving problems locally is one whose time has come. More local groups are starting to see the power of collecting donations at home. As the idea spreads, the benefits will only become greater. Full Article advanced fundraising techniques ethical fundraising fundraising fundraising tips local fundraising tips o 5 Ways to Improve Your Fundraising Now. By onfundraising.blogspot.com Published On :: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 11:35:00 +0000 Excellent fundraisers, as well as average ones often find themselves reaching a plateau when it comes to their fundraising abilities and the dollar amounts that they raise. On a plateau, it is just as easy to move upward as it is to slip backwards; losing progress. Fundraisers are only interested in moving in one direction; upward. pla•teau (plæˈtoʊ; esp. Brit. ˈplæt oʊ) n., pl. -teaus, -teaux (-ˈtoʊz, -toʊz) v. -teaued, -teau•ing. n.1. a land area having a relatively level surface considerably raised above adjoining land on at least one side.2. a period or state of little or no growth or decline, esp. one in which increase or progress ceases: to reach a plateau in one's career.v.i.3. to reach a state or level of little or no growth or decline; stabilize Definitions #2 and #3 have the most significance in fundraising, but definition #1 can be a useful visualization tool. So how do we get beyond the fundraising plateau? Go back to basics. Find something in your fundraising routine that can be improved and work on it. Can your greeting be made more friendly? Can your donation requests be tightened up? What ever it is, work on it. Working on any one issue has the added benefit of providing new perspectives on other issues. Ask the donor. Ask donors, whether, they give or not, what they thought of your performance. Most will provide at least one useful bit of information. Some donors will provide so much valuable criticism that you may find yourself reexamining your entire fundraising strategy. Ask another fundraiser. Sometimes we let shyness, pride or professional competition get in the way of improving our skills. Every fundraiser, at every stage, goes through the plateau problem. Reach out to your fellow fundraisers and get their advice. Become an expert. Often after fundraising for a certain cause for a long time, fundraisers began to feel like experts on the issue. There is always more to learn. Find books magazine articles and any other materials that you can. The more you know about your issue, the better you can fund raise for it. Remember, Plateaus aren't permanent. Keep slugging away, doing the best job that you possibly can. Eventually, you will begin to see some progress. These are just a few of the ways to overcome getting into a rut. Actually the only limitations to becoming a better fundraiser are your imagination and the amount of effort that you are willing to put into improving. Remember, plateau or not, there is always room for improvement. Full Article advanced fund rasing techinques ethical fundraising fundraising tips fundrasing local fundraising rapport tele-marketing o What does it mean to "wane philosophical"? By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Tue, 05 Nov 2024 12:21:38 +0000 "To what extent is science a strong-link problem?", Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, 10/30/2024 [emphasis added]: Here’s a fascinating and worrying news story in Science: a top US researcher apparently falsified a lot of images (at least) in papers that helped get experimental drugs on the market — papers that were published in top […] Full Article Words words words o Not giving up on Hangul for Cia-Cia By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Tue, 05 Nov 2024 15:30:39 +0000 This is a story we've been following for well over a decade (see "Selected readings"). Improbable as it may seem that the Korean alphabet might be adaptable for writing an Austronesian language of Indonesia, there are some promoters of this idea who continue to push it enthusiastically: "An Indonesian Tribe’s Language Gets an Alphabet: Korea’sThe […] Full Article Alphabets Language reform o The etymologies of ballot and bigot By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Wed, 06 Nov 2024 12:30:50 +0000 That's all I've got, so far, for linguistic commentary on the U.S. election results. According to the OED, the etymology of ballot is < (i) Middle French ballotte (French †ballotte) small ball (beginning of the 15th cent. as †balote), small coloured ball placed in a container to register a secret vote (1498) or its etymon […] Full Article Etymology o A bushel of buzzwords from Japan; the advent of phoneticization By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Wed, 06 Nov 2024 22:13:04 +0000 Below are two lists of nominations for Japanese buzzword of the year. Each has 30 entries, and from each list one will be chosen as the respective winner. Since the two lists are already quite long and rich, I will keep my own comments (mostly at the bottom and focusing on phoneticization) to a minimum. […] Full Article Alphabets Word of the year Writing systems o Whimsical surnames, part 2 (again mostly German) By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Fri, 08 Nov 2024 05:21:45 +0000 [This is a guest post by Michael Witzel] A few months ago you published a discussion of whimsical surnames. Since then I have paid attention and have found new ones in almost every news broadcast. It is said that there are 1 million (!) surnames in the German speaking area of some 95 million people […] Full Article Humor Names o Lewotobi Laki-laki By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Fri, 08 Nov 2024 18:27:36 +0000 A serious volcanic eruption on Flores Island has been going on since October 30: The Pusat Vulkanologi dan Mitigasi Bencana Geologi (PVMBG) reported that eruptive activity intensified at Lewotobi Laki-laki during 30 October-5 November, which included a major eruption resulting in fatalities. The large explosive eruption began at 2357 on 3 November, generating pyroclastic flows […] Full Article Names o Bayesian archeology By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Sat, 09 Nov 2024 13:18:29 +0000 The first two panels of yesterday's SMBC: The last two: Back in 1979, David Macauley's Motel of the Mysteries had a much longer story to tell about archeologists' presuppositions. Macauley's plot loosely satirizes the work of Heinrich and Sophia Schliemann in excavating Troy, and also echoes Howard Carter's excavation of Tutankhamunn's tomb. It's 4022, and […] Full Article Linguistics in the comics o Biblical and Budai Taiwanese: vernacular, literary; oral, written By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Sun, 10 Nov 2024 12:21:52 +0000 [This is a guest post by Denis Mair] Cai Xutie was a Taiwanese woman who ran a family farm with her husband in a village near Jiayi in central Taiwan. She was a rice farmer and had never attended a public school. After her husband died in middle age, she sold some of the land, […] Full Article Language and entertainment Language and religion Literacy Topolects o Cognition, culture, … and communication? By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Mon, 11 Nov 2024 13:13:17 +0000 An interesting recent review article (Wooster et al., "Animal cognition and culture mediate predator–prey interactions", Trends in Ecology & Evolution 2024) argues for bridging the academic silos of "predator-prey ecology" and "animal cognition and culture": Abstract: Predator–prey ecology and the study of animal cognition and culture have emerged as independent disciplines. Research combining these disciplines […] Full Article Animal communication o Geometriphylogenetics By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 17:50:10 +0000 Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "There's a maximum likelihood that I'm doing phylogenetics wrong." It's not that Randall is "doing phylogenetics wrong", but rather than he's applying it to an inappropriate problem. The OED's etymology for phylogeny is < German Phylogenie (E. Haeckel Gen. Morphol. der Organismen (1866) I. iii. 57) < Phylum phylum n. + […] Full Article Linguistics in the comics o Autumn 2022 issue of Agapé available By oto-usa.org Published On :: Mon, 03 Oct 2022 00:08:24 +0000 The Autumn 2022 issue of Agapé, the official journal of U.S. Grand Lodge O.T.O., is now available. This and all previous issues can be found here. Full Article Agape o Winter 2022 issue of Agapé available By oto-usa.org Published On :: Tue, 17 Jan 2023 01:10:23 +0000 The Winter 2022 issue of Agapé, the official journal of U.S. Grand Lodge O.T.O., is now available. This and all previous issues can be found here. Full Article Agape o Registration open for NOTOCON XIV By oto-usa.org Published On :: Sat, 28 Jan 2023 21:49:41 +0000 Registration is now open for National O.T.O. Conference XIV, to be held in Denver, Colorado, August 3-6 2023. NOTOCON is normally held every two years, but it was canceled in 2021 due to the pandemic, so this will be our first NOTOCON since 2019. Full Article NOTOCON o Spring 2023 issue of Agapé available By oto-usa.org Published On :: Fri, 21 Apr 2023 04:01:34 +0000 The Spring 2023 issue of Agapé, the official journal of U.S. Grand Lodge O.T.O., is now available. This and all previous issues can be found here. Full Article Agape o NOTOCON Speaker Deadline Approaching By oto-usa.org Published On :: Sat, 22 Apr 2023 19:01:09 +0000 The deadline to propose a presentation for National O.T.O. Conference XIV in Denver, CO, is May 10, 2023. Full Article NOTOCON o NOTOCON Speaker F.AQ. By oto-usa.org Published On :: Fri, 28 Apr 2023 07:51:35 +0000 For potential speakers, a handy FAQ full of useful information is available here. Full Article NOTOCON o Summer 2023 issue of Agapé available By oto-usa.org Published On :: Thu, 08 Jun 2023 05:10:54 +0000 The Summer 2023 issue of Agapé, the official journal of U.S. Grand Lodge O.T.O., is now available. This and all previous issues can be found here. Full Article Agape o NOTOCON Hotel Registration Closing By oto-usa.org Published On :: Thu, 20 Jul 2023 16:45:59 +0000 NOTOCON XIV is fast approaching! The cutoff date to receive our group rate at the hotel is Friday, July 21st. Please reserve now. The speaker schedule has been published on the NOTOCON website. Event registration is still open! We can’t wait to see all of you in August, and wish you all safe travels! Full Article NOTOCON o USGL annual report for fiscal year 2022 published By oto-usa.org Published On :: Sat, 11 Nov 2023 03:04:07 +0000 The U.S. Grand Lodge O.T.O. annual report for fiscal year 2022 has been published. This and all previous annual reports can be found here. Full Article Report o NOTOCON XV: The Crowned and Conquering Child By oto-usa.org Published On :: Wed, 03 Jul 2024 16:11:29 +0000 SAVE THE DATE for NOTOCON XV: The Crowned and Conquering Child to be hosted in Portland, Oregon from July 25 through the 27th, 2025 EV. The call for speaker proposals is now open and we are accepting Volunteer and Vending sign-ups. Registration and hotel reservations will be available in August 2024. Full Article NOTOCON o Happy birthday to me! (44) By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Sat, 30 Sep 2023 18:37:35 -0400 Hello and howdy. I usually describe myself as turning the "ripe old age of so-and-so" on my birthday posts, but I may need a new adjective as I'm solidly in my mid-40s, now (44). Perhaps "fermented." The birthday's come and gone without incident, although there were minor contemporaneous incidents: Still in the math hole. It might be an infinite hole. Trying to get out. But I have improved my console fonts and ANSI color libraries and GPU programming skills, at least. I was very pleased that a recent release of NVIDIA drivers came with a brand new updated OpenCL, which I previously assumed had been abandoned like so many computer things that I become fond of. Kudos to whoever at NVIDIA pushed on this. I am making myself laugh privately to myself (well, no longer private now) by imagining someone who spells it out like an acronym, N-V-I D-I-A. Also, like usual, I ran the Pittsburgh Great Race, a mostly-downhill 10k. No encumbrances this time. I've been in good shape this summer, but I got sick last month and it set me back a bit, so this wasn't a star performance. Still 43m22s is not too bad and I didn't push myself all that hard. Fewer minutes than years old. The new GPU is mostly for math, but I wanted to try it out for its Intended Purpose, (N)Video Games. So I played through Far Cry 6, which was okay. I liked it better than 5, which among other things had a bunch of technical problems (this one was much smoother and more stable), but I probably should have read my review of that game before downloading, as I say something like "I should probably stop playing this series." Still slowly savoring Tears of The Kingdom, which remains great. I also started Return To Monkey Island. I loved the first two in this series, but couldn't get into the later sequels; of course I'm interested in giving this one a shot since it's made by the original designers (and I did like Thimbleweed Park). Too early to render a verdict, but I did like how they deftly handled the canonicity of the end of 2. Then there's this: I think this is Taylor Swift wearing a homemade t-shirt of her "Pegicorn" (sometimes "Pegacorn"), a Unicorn-Pegasus hybrid. The text is in my font Action Jackson: Taylor Swift Pegicorn (Action Jackson font) You can also see this drawing/font at the beginning of the "Making of" video for You Belong With Me". I think she posted this to twitter in May 2009, but somehow I'm unable to find an archive of her tweets from this time (inconceivable??). Full Article o October, the 8th month By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Tue, 31 Oct 2023 22:35:01 -0400 Wow, this month sure went by fast. I'm sure I say that every October, as this is the busiest time of year at work, and stuff like football and Maybe The Last Nice Day This Year keep me busy. I've been plugging away at this math/programming project, currently porting some numerical code that I don't fully understand and finding bugs in it and improving its performance. It's relaxing, at least, but there's nothing good to share here yet and I'm not sure it'll ever make an interesting story. I did make some version-2 circuit boards for a project I've been working on in parallel, too, but the next step in that one is going to be annoying ("Why won't it boot?") so I've been putting it off. They brought the small neighborhood race called "Run Shadyside" back this year. This is a 5k course that I can easily walk to the start of, and Shadyside is about as flat as it gets in Pittsburgh, so it's a nice race to try to PR in. I've been keeping in pretty good shape (despite the setback due to illness mentioned previously), but that morning I was having some burning lungs so I didn't push myself too hard. (Could have been mold? Bad air quality? Slightly sick?) I finished in 20m19s, which is probably my third best official 5K time, although a bit disappointing since I ran several unofficial treadmill 5Ks under 19 minutes this summer. I finished 3rd in my age group. The results feature a new capitalization of my name, the elusive Stegosaurus CasE: "Tom Murphy ViI" Craving a game that would make proper use of the GeForce 4090, I installed Call Of Duty: Cold War. Actually this game is a couple years old, and graphically it's not anything particularly special. I am liking the single-player campaign more than usual for these kinds of games, and avoiding getting sucked into multiplayer. I gave the "zombies" mode a shot and I think I finally understand it, like playing a roguelike on a single seed. I think I'm at the point where I need to set myself some kind of challenge and complete it and retire to more artful things, though. Full Article o New content on radar.spacebar.org By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Thu, 30 Nov 2023 23:27:19 -0500 Here is the new content: I've mentioned that I have been working on running a five-minute mile on the treadmill this year, a goal that at one point seemed in reach. I think I also complained that I got sick and that when I got back to it, they had swapped out all the treadmills for fancy treadmills with built-in Netflix and air conditioning and stuff like that, which I now refer to as "Bob's Tred Mill." There's some good things about these, and some things that make me crazy, but one thing that especially made me crazy is they felt significantly faster than the old Precor ones I was used to. It's definitely a real thing that treadmills are sometimes not calibrated correctly (or the tread stretches out or slips, etc.) but it was also possible that being sick set me back more than I thought. The important thing is to get The Data instead of just The Upset Feelings so I was shopping for things like those hand-held unicycles that you can wheel around to measure how long things (like streets) are, as it does seem like the kind of device that I would own, looking at like the world's most accurate hand-held unicycle thing, and then I noticed at the last thing that most of them have a MAX SPEED of something like 10mph, which would not do. I finally had the brain-stroke that I could use a laser tachometer to do it, since these have a max speed more like 99999 RPM. So I measured the tread length with some chalk marks and put reflective tape on there. The treadmill will go at different speeds when loaded (running on it) vs unloaded, which also depends on your weight and stride and stuff a little, so you also gotta engage in the dexterity-testing act of measuring while running on it, which looked like this: POV: You are me Pointing the laser at the reflective tape dot (visible right next to the laser dot here) as it flies by while running kinda fast is definitely tricky, although I must say that it was one of those times when I thought, "I've been training my whole life for this!" and you can see that I'm showing off a little bit here by also photographing it at the same time. But you are not impressed since it reports 0 RPM. The nice thing about the tachometer is that it only needs a pair of observations to give you a frequency, and you can easily tell if you missed the tape, which you do often on account of the shaking, because you get some integer multiple that's way off from the right answer. Anyway I dutifully took multiple readings unloaded and loaded at (nominally) 6mph, 7mph, ... 12mph and made a spreadsheet with all the results converted, and... found that the treadmill is just about 1% too fast loaded, all across the board. This would be just 3 seconds for a five-minute mile, which is not nothing, but it definitely does not vindicate my Upset Feelings (I was thinking it felt more like 10%). My best guess is that the old treadmills were (all?) actually too slow, which is annoying because now I doubt some of the unofficial 5k records I painfully set for myself during the summer. But, well, the thing about endeavoring to do challenging things is: No Cheating! In project news, I feel I have a foothold now to get myself out of this math hole, as I've finally migrated this algorithm to work only with 64-bit integer arithmetic and so I can port it to GPU soon and then be out of ideas about how to make it faster. I have no idea if there's a good story to be told for this project, but I'll try (and also, it is okay if sometimes the hobby programming doesn't lead to a video or Sigbovik paper, you know?). And speaking of Sigbovik: Heroes have emerged quite on time this year, so it's certainly looking like there will be a proceedings and conference (perhaps with livestream), so start writing those papers now. Aside from the math hole, I've been making some progress on two other concurrent projects. It's getting normal again (even quiet) at work and winter break is coming up, and I'm looking forward to having some several-day stretches to work on them. I played through Golf Peaks (well, I haven't beat all the bonus levels yet but I've been working back to front so it's just a matter of a little time at this point), which was a very nice little puzzle game that does almost everything right. Other than the very irritating music in one world, I think my only disappointment was that it doesn't elegantly handle infinite-length puts. I'm also still working on Return to Monkey Island, which I do like, although it doesn't hold up to my memory of the first two. I think one of the problems with modern point-and-click adventure games is the voices, actually: Not because the voice acting bothers me, but because it goes so slow compared to reading. It's like when you just want to figure out the maximum speed of the hand-held unicycle and they're trying to get you to watch a video instead of just reading. Tears of the Kingdom (which I'm still savoring, but getting close to the end now) does a good job with this; you do hear snippets of voices, which helps with the characterization, but you can blow through the dialog at a pretty fast pace. Probably a lot cheaper, too! Full Article o From now on, the title of the post is allowed to just be "January 2024" (only when it is January 2024, however) By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Wed, 31 Jan 2024 22:08:59 -0500 Hello again, This month I've been plugging away on the project I mentioned in the previous post which involves among other things a PDF generator and now an implementation of ML (as in Standard ML, but also the other one). This is probably the 10th "compiler" I've written in my life, and it's kind of fun to revisit these problems that you've done many times and try out different approaches, although this time one of the approaches is "Use C++" (for reasons of making good on a joke, but also for reasons of mlton doesn't work on my computer any more). And although C++ is a fine tool for many applications, it does have some deficiencies for the task of writing a compiler (one of the most irritating: a very modest limit on the stack depth? Like my computer has 256 Gigabytes of RAM and 2^64 virtual addresses and somehow it can only manage 1 megabyte for the stack and there's no standard way to increase it? Get off my lawn). But then you can also experience new ways of struggling with C++, like: A middle of the night power failure wrecked my computer's GPT (as in GUID Partition Table, but also the other one) and I was deep in the depths of taking the computer apart to reset its parts, its BIOS (its Basic In/Out System, which is where it stores its biography) and its hard drives were everywhere on the floor, and it could not be saved, and this after I already broke my computer this year by trying to put the world's biggest video card in it, too hard. And I could not merely perform recovery because of Unknown Error, so I had to begin anew again and restore from backups. But when you restore from backup and you're in the mood of "why is this so complicated and I don't understand how computers work any more?" it occurs to you (me) to also change your underlying development environment instead of reinstalling the devil you know. So I ended my friendship with Cygwin64 and switched to new best friend MSYS2. Both of these things are different ways of wishing that you were using Linux while you're using Windows. The main reason I tried this new way of struggling is that Cygwin is very behind on its version of x86_64 clang (C++ compiler), which I wanted to try because it supports AddressSanitizer and clangd on Windows, and I wanted to give LSP in emacs a shot (it's finally good!). There were a few growing pains, but I think MSYS2 is what I would recommend now. One of the nice things they did was create multiple different environments depending on what you want to do (e.g. "I want to use clang to compile x86_64 code" or "I want to do 32-bit cross compilation for ARM") and in that environment, you just say "g++" and it invokes the compiler you want, instead of the weird contortions I've been doing for years with manually invoking x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++. I was also able to get clblast working before being too filled with rage to continue, so that is nice for the ML inference on the world's biggest graphics card. I made these graphics to help me tune the correct settings of GPU layers (y axis) and number of threads (x axis): tune-single tune-batch In some sense the results are obvious (more threads and more layers is faster) but it was interesting to me how the cliff of performance drops off at a different number of layers for single and batch mode (I guess because the batch needs some memory itself?) and how it's clearly better to use fewer threads than cores for batch as well. I was not surprised to see performance drop off for >32 threads (everybody knows that hyper-threads kinda suck) but I was very surprised to see performance pick up again when it gets back up to 64? And only for single mode? I wish I understood that better. But mostly I'm a sucker for the custom visualizations. Right but when writing this compiler I realized that I wanted to use some Greek letters, and I can't handle it when some characters are in a different font in my source code, so I finally made some space for those in my programming font FixederSys. These certainly still need some tweaks, but it's already better than just being in some other weird font: {{{caption}}} You can also see that I have been adding some "useful" emoji at the top. It is an interesting puzzle to try to make these things recognizable (especially for the 1x version, whose charboxes are 8x16 pixels). I am pretty sure I will not try to do all of the emoji (like, the flags are totally hopeless at 8x16), but it is tempting to round out the Unicode support somewhat. Like I was trying to make a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ today and had to settle for ~\_( :) )_/~ which is pretty much (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻. Also: Adam revived our old game jam game Headcat, which I described in post 927, now over 16 years ago. You can play it online at Headcat.org. It is harder than I remember, perhaps explaining why it did not reach #1 on the One Appstore Per Child charts. Also: I started and finished (true ending, but just with one character) Slay the Spire. Good game, but you don't need me to tell you that. Same for Alwa's Legacy, which is the sequel to Alwa's Awakening. Both of these are very true-to-form "8-bit" and "16-bit" platformers that I enjoyed and would recommend for genre fans, though I did not try to 100% them. The graphics are the highlight and I thought it was very cute how these could easily have been a pair of games from the NES and SNES. The good old days. And speaking of good-old days, I am now playing Katamari Damacy, which I had played at a friend's house many years ago, and always wanted to spend more time with. It totally holds up (aside from stuff like: You have to play through the tutorial and first level before you can access the menus at all, like to make the game fullscreen?) and it's honestly inspiring how unhinged the game design and writing are, and how fun it manages to be. What an accomplishment! Full Article o "April" 2024 By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Tue, 30 Apr 2024 23:59:58 -0400 Oops! Usually when I fail to post on time and then illegally backdate the post, yielding a penalty of -1,000 points, it's shortly after midnight. Like, as I'm trying to fall asleep (which of course involves and involuntary inventory of everything I may have failed to do), I'm struck with a panic and then get back out of bed to write some dumb pro-forma apology post. This time I just went to bed and actually fell asleep and now here I am noticing that it is May 1. Still, the whole point of doing this every month is to make the grid of months line up nicely, so the post is backdated by 9 hours and nets -1,000 points. Speaking of lining up nicely: I did get my SIGBOVIK papers in on time and gave a lightning talk at the conference. SIGBOVIK was very popular this year, with our longest-ever proceedings (see SIGBOVIK 2024 PDF or bound volume). This year my project is a paper about a new typesetting system that I wrote to produce the paper (and the talk's slides). That system is called BoVeX and the paper is called Badness 0, which you can read as Badness 0 (Knuth's version) and/or Badness 0 (Epsom's version). You can also maybe find a recorded livestream of the breakneck 5 min presentation, but I would wait for the proper video (in progress now!), which is the same content with much better pacing and details. Speaking of details: I also presented at An Evening of Unnecessary Detail, which is one of Matt Parker ("Standup Maths")'s live shows. Other than the part where I tried to pack a dense months-long technical project about details into 12 minutes, this was a blast! Lots of cool, interesting people. This took place in a proper comedy club in Brooklyn, like with posters of people that I watch on TV (e.g. Taskmaster legend Fern Brady is performing there in a few weeks, so it seems I'm a mere 5 or 6 steps away from my dream of being a contestant on Taskmaster now), and was sold out (due exclusively to the eminence of others, since it was sold out before I even joined the bill). I finally hung out with Grant Sanderson ("3blue1brown") and told him about math. The audience was amazingly attentive and wholesome, and quite a few of them recognized me and wanted to talk after the show, which is fun. (I do not envy the queue that Matt and Grant endured, though!) Enjoy my technically deficient vacation photography: I'm photobombing, but Matt is so used to this act that he is reflexively crouching down so as not to appear twice my height Speaking of technically deficient photography: An additional reason why my video is not done yet (or indeed, why it currently has status Filming 0) is that I finally pulled the shutter release on a new video camera. After much deliberation (and visiting the B&H showroom while in NY, etc.), including on far more ridiculous options, I settled on the Canon R5C. After a complex week-long courtship ritual with the FedEx guy, that finally arrived last night, at which point I immediately realized that I need further accessories. But I'm excited to shoot on this thing and to make my computer suffer with 8k video. It seems to have gotten too complacent with "Full HD." Finally, I think the main reason I failed to post on time last night was that I was up late playing Balatro. This game is all over the place so you probably don't need me to tell you about it, but it is indeed a good (and addictive) deck-building game that I am enjoying instead of sleep. I am not interested in 100%ing this one, but there are still lots of appealing challenges left for me to do. I'd recommend it if you have the self control to avoid firing it up "for a quick game" when you should be working on your projects or sleeping. Full Article o Glue and Boxes By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Wed, 31 Jul 2024 23:44:56 -0400 'been taking it easier this month, which is my reward for finishing a video, but not totally leisure. Like for example I added a Cyrillic codepage to FixederSys, and I have been working on a Wikipedia article that involves digging through old newspapers. One other thing that resembles digging through old newspapers is that I'm finally repointing some of the bricks on my house (yes, this is "taking it easier"), as the mortar is in places 120 years old, and has become quite soft, like it's just sand held gently in place by paint. I'm using lime mortar, the glue of the ancient world, as this appears to be the house's original connective tissue (and apparently if you use the wrong mortar on old soft bricks you can ruin 'em, although I have discovered that mortar chemistry is akin to like editor or programming language wars among computer people). This work would be relaxing or even satisfying if not for the fact that some of it is significantly off the ground, so most of the work is actually ladder acrobatics and vertigo things. I will spare you the specifics of the dodgiest moments, which I'll have you know I did without any harm, even concluding at times that "this is simply too many somewhat or slightly dodgy things at once, together totaling too much dodge," not because the stories aren't relaxing or even satisfying but because I feel like committing it to blog might come back some day to haunt me, like when some near-future AI is deciding "how much shall it cost to insure Tom 7 against accident or brick wall failure"? But that is coming along and now I own three ladders of different heights. Another thing is I got back to 3D printing. I don't know if I mentioned here before that I finally upgraded my 3D printer from the impressive-at-the-time but now-actually-quite-incapable Makerbot Replicator 2X to the utterly-non-disappointing Bambu X1C. It's a really good printer, which does the things you always thought a 3D printer did in the first place, like print a part in 3D all the way through without failing. I printed some props for my last video with that thing, but recently I've been making things that are more relaxing or even satisfying, like replacement parts for broken things around the house, or boxes, like here for my audio equipment: Box closed Box open Box very open This is based on a popular model ("rugged parametric box") but lest you worry that I have let myself go, rest assured that I refactored the whole Fusion 360 file to make it more parametric and rebuilt using the obvious mirror operations (??) and so on so that it would be nicer for customizing, and then of course here there are many customizations. It is very satisfying to pack the XLR cable and timecode cable and preamp neatly in the same box and then close the lid and you get an elegant abstract line drawing of what you just put away. This is printed in carbon-fiber impregnated PLA, which is an excellent material. The handles and inlays are of course solid gold. Lastly I have been playing the video games! As usual! I finished Hades (100%!) and Grapple Dog and I am very deep into the Animal Well (love it) and a couple other small ones. I'll give my thoughts on these but I started writing this post too late and now we're inches from losing points. Full Article o Of all homonymic months, August is the most majestic By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Sat, 31 Aug 2024 10:11:27 -0400 I’m traveling for the long weekend. Either I’m having bad luck with the epic heat waves or there have been a lot of epic heat waves, because again the short road trip threatens to be tyrannized by the hot air. It did at least touch 100°F this time, so at least it is a proper respectable heat wave. We are in a place called Hocking Hills, whose AirBnB has these OBX-style stickers that say “HHO”, which could either be confusingly “Hills, HOcking,” or perhaps “Hocking Hills, Ohio”, but not “Hocking hills OHio” as one might expect. I plan to stick the sticker upside-down for “OHH”, as in “Ohh yeah, I need to write a post on Tom 7 Radar for the month of August, and I need to do it on this mediocre wi-fi which Google Internet Speed Test describes as ‘fine’ while everyone else drinks beers outside.” Fair enough: This is a self-imposed curse and one that’s easily tended to at any time during the month. During the month: I worked again on making my own video codec, which is a very bad way to spend one’s time, but I don’t think there are any modern lossless codecs that would be suitable for my use case. And I do like a data compression project because of the inherent benchmarkability. The use case is for the increasingly common situation where I have a program generating a series of video frames (e.g. BoVeX is making an animation), which I usually do by writing a sequence of PNG files to disk. I’m way ahead of PNG files so far even without doing any inter-frame stuff, which is not impressive, but does make me feel like it’s at least not totally pointless. (Still, it’s quite pointless: Sure I can make these files smaller at significant cost of complexity and encoding times, but these animations typically use space similar to like one second of 4K 60fps XF-AVC footage.) Sometimes programming your own lossless video codec is a bit too fast-paced so you need to write a Wikipedia article from scratch about Clairton Coke Works by digging through newspaper archives. I haven't even gotten to the last 30 years of its history yet! I also rounded out the Cyrillic in FixederSys though I don't think I've uploaded a new version of that yet. As usual I did some hacking on secret projects. UHH, elsewise, I did finish off Animal Well which I liked very much. My spoilerless advice to you is: Don't try to 100% this game without at least looking at a spoiler-controlled guide! But I did have fun once I felt like I was stuck-ish finishing the remaining postgame puzzles. I have also been playing Chippy, a bullet-hell twin-stick shooter that is quite hard (I usually feel good at this genre) and has several new good ideas in it. It's essentially all boss fights, and the chief innovation is that you fight the giant bosses by disconnecting pieces of them. I'm on the last boss so I will probably finish that one soon. As I have confessed many times, I like dumb first-person shooter games, and I played through Trepang 2 this month as well. It does have a few moments, but it was mostly pretty dumb, like I wanted. And then I started Touhou Luna Nights, which is a "Metroidvania" fan-game with great pixel art and music. OK, I should get back to this vacation! Full Article o ¡Tengo muchos años! T_T By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 21:54:59 -0400 Hello team! I turned 45! It happens every year (not the same age, but the same feeling, of time marching forward, with me along with it) so no big surprise. This weekend was the Great Race, also every year, but I unsubscribed from their e-mail list at some point months ago because they seem to operate this list under the misconception that subscribers want to think about Great Race 24/7 all year round. I thought: It should be easy to just remember when the Great Race is, as it always falls on the weekend near my birthday, and I do not need a list constantly mailing me reminders. Easy. But then I forgot about the Great Race, so I didn't run it. I did take the day off for my birthday despite this being the busy time of year at work, which was worth it: I made some good progress on some projects that had been backed up in my anxiety-brain for some time. Of course they are confidential, but here is a graphic of some significant progress: Minusweeper I forgot to mention this one when I did it, but did you know that you can "buy" a Unicode codepoint, by making a donation to the Unicode consortium? So of course I bought ASCII 0x37, which is the digit 7. True story: I did a lot of film photography when I was younger, and although I do miss film, I'll admit that the saddest thing I feel about its obsolescence is actually that those little black plastic film canisters are no longer all over the place to be repurposed to hold little objects. I found them very satisfying and useful! Fortunately now that I'm old I found another similar ubiquitous shape, which is these orange prescription medicine bottles. I've been using those for a while to "organize" small parts like screws (e.g. when I take something apart that I might want to put back together, I put the screws in the medicine bottle and label it) but then they just roll around in the drawer of crap. So this: RxBox, Unpopulated RxBox, Populated A very simple part, of course, but what could be more satisfying than 3d printing your own holder for canisters for fasteners that goes in a drawer in a cabinet? And speaking of satisfying, I finally finished Chippy (regular difficulty) which was really quite hard. Several of the last bosses I had to practice over several evenings before I beat them! It was a good and creative game, though. I'm mid-way through Solar Ash, which is good (but it's no Hyper Light Drifter IMO!) and just started playing Satisfactory, since they finally put out a 1.0 version of that. It's quite well done, but I'm not sure if I actually like it (seems a bit heavy on the cookie crafting; in fact I'm letting it craft in the background as I write this). I am getting a kick out of allowing thinking about my messy design as the "saddest factory," a joke which I'm sure occurs to everyone, but that's Game Design! Full Article o This halloween I am dressed as a withered husk, who was made this way by: Satisfactory 1.0 By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Thu, 31 Oct 2024 22:35:04 -0400 OMG. I can't believe October is over already. I blame Satisfactory which, okay, I do get it now, and it did destroy my body and mind. I am inches from being done now; I just want to make sure that I finish it with enough force that I do actually put it away, as I could imagine tinkering with my saddest factory forever. The game isn't without flaw, but I think most of those flaws are not interesting to talk about. I do have one petty but important criticism, which is mildly spoilerful and anyway will only be interesting if you played the game. There is an object called the Somersloop ("cool S") which allows you to double the output of a machine. Canonically this item is some kind of "loop" and the flavor text talks about how it is able to create more energy than you put into it. So when I'm out hunting for Korok seeds I have this thought that maybe I could create a loop of factories whereby it would create infinite resources by repeatedly doubling. And I'm thinking about it but the crafting tree doesn't have any notable loops in it, but I remember the "packager" which allows you to put a fluid in a container or the converse, and I'm like: Yes, that's great! So I get back to base and I am doing this, just for fun to create an infinite fuel factory or whatever, and I realize that the packager just doesn't have a slot for a Somersloop. They must just hate fun, elegant twists. It would not break the game to allow this (you can always get infinite resources lots of other ways) or cause any other problem I can think of. Hmph! The thing about constructing a factory and watching it churn is that it's basically the same thing as a programming project that you invented for yourself, and it's probably better to do the programming project. Here's progress on my mysterious rectangle: Minusweeper 2 It's good progress if I do say so myself! Anything but black here is a Satisfactory result, which is 90.55% of them at this point. I may need heavy machinery for the remaining 9.45%, but that is part of the fun. I think that's really it for this month! Please vote in the US Elections if you can (but I guess also vote in any important elections. And obviously, vote for the good guys???). And happy Halloween! Full Article o Card Deck Review: THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW TAROT By hellnotes.com Published On :: Mon, 04 Nov 2024 19:59:25 +0000 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Tarot: Headless Horseman edition Nick Lawyer REDFeather (October 28, 2023) Reviewed by N. Richards What a wonderful way to honour the Irving Washington classic gothic story of 1822, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and the season of autumn as well as the art of Tarot all in one hit of […] The post Card Deck Review: THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW TAROT first appeared on Hellnotes. Full Article Halloween Collectibles Hellnotes Reviews Horror Collectibles Horror News o Book Review: THE EERIE BROTHERS AND THE WITCHES OF AUTUMN By hellnotes.com Published On :: Wed, 06 Nov 2024 20:04:20 +0000 The Eerie Brothers and the Witches of Autumn Sheldon Higdon Scary Dairy Press LLC (September 4, 2023) Reviewed by Nora B. Peevy The Eerie Brothers and the Witches of Autumn finds Horace and Edgar, the twin Eerie brothers, battling monsters to stop Hex from collecting one of the four globes to absorb the abilities of […] The post Book Review: THE EERIE BROTHERS AND THE WITCHES OF AUTUMN first appeared on Hellnotes. Full Article Book Reviews Hellnotes Reviews Horror Authors / Books Horror News o Book Review: INK VINE By hellnotes.com Published On :: Fri, 08 Nov 2024 22:08:43 +0000 Ink Vine Elizabeth Broadbent Undertaker Books (April 12, 2024) Reviewed by Nora B. Peevy When I heard Elizabeth Broadbent do a reading from Ink Vine, I knew I had to get my paws on that book. Her authenticity and unique voice, plus her sense of humor, shine through in this tale about standing up against […] The post Book Review: INK VINE first appeared on Hellnotes. Full Article Book Reviews Hellnotes Reviews Horror Authors / Books Horror News o Book Review: OF TEETH AND PINE By hellnotes.com Published On :: Sun, 10 Nov 2024 21:30:20 +0000 Of Teeth and Pine Desiree Horton Independently published (October 31, 2024) Reviewed by Nora B. Peevy Desiree Horton’s second novel is filled with blood, a taste of the beautiful outdoors, and a lot of snark. I fell in love with her main character, Vick, the female forest ranger who will not put up with any […] The post Book Review: OF TEETH AND PINE first appeared on Hellnotes. Full Article Book Reviews Hellnotes Reviews Horror Authors / Books Horror News o Book Review: WICKED ABANDONED By hellnotes.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 18:49:48 +0000 Wicked Abandoned A New England Horror Writers Anthology Edited by Rob Smales and Scott T. Goudsward Published by Wicked Creative, LLC (September 25, 2024) Reviewed by Carson Buckingham All I have to say is that New England sure grows a bunch of great writers! Wicked Abandoned is one of the best anthologies I’ve read in […] The post Book Review: WICKED ABANDONED first appeared on Hellnotes. Full Article Book Reviews Hellnotes Reviews Horror Authors / Books Horror News o A Change of Routine By magistratesblog.blogspot.com Published On :: Fri, 10 Jun 2016 10:04:00 +0000 Some of the most common trials to face JPs nowadays are the Section 172 cases that arise from the ubiquitous speed cameras. Some people (such as Christopher Huhne) simply lie about who was driving the speeding vehicle, and others claim not to know the ID of the driver, but the consequences of being caught can be nasty. These cases tend to be listed in just a few courts, which can be pretty tiresome for the bench members. As it happens these cases are a rarity in my court, so this week the S172 that appeared on my list was the first that I have ever done, in about 30 years on the bench. The evidence was pretty thin, and we acquitted. The clerk told us later that these cases often fail to stick. They are a tidy source of revenue for the various loophole specialists in the legal profession, as many people will cough up a hefty sum to keep their driving licence. Full Article o Suppressio Veri, Suggestio Falsi By magistratesblog.blogspot.com Published On :: Fri, 17 Jun 2016 22:17:00 +0000 In the aftermath of the appalling murder of an MP some commentators are looking at the occasionally poisonous comments made about politicians. The received wisdom of the public is that politicians are dishonest, but that is almost invariably a misreading. If MPs and others had to answer every question frankly, life would be impossible. Most of the usual questions would have to be answered with "I don't know" or "well, I hope that A happens but it might well be B for all I know." The Paxman figure would then rip the interviewee to shreds. So let's give them a break shall we? Full Article o Sorry By magistratesblog.blogspot.com Published On :: Sun, 03 Jul 2016 21:53:00 +0000 This is a brief apology for the recent lack of postings on here. The first reason is that I have just had a visit from my son and his newly-pregnant wife who live thousands of miles away and the second is the absolutely amazing news agenda of the last couple of weeks. As one who has closely followed politics since my early teens, I have just been riveted by events. Oh yes, and I spent a couple of days in hospital being tended to by efficient and charming staff, most of whom were Polish. I hope to return to something like normal this week, I see that the old idea of sitting courts in pubs and suchlike has resurfaced, so perhaps I'll have a look at that.. Full Article o Enough, Already! By magistratesblog.blogspot.com Published On :: Tue, 09 Aug 2016 17:12:00 +0000 This is not a political blog, although politics inevitably creep in to discussions of matters legal. I have followed politics since I was at school, although I was never elected to anything. The current situation beggars belief, and I imagine that today's crop of journalists will shake their heads in their old age, and say "but you should have been there in the summer of 2016; everything seemed to happen at once. " I am now even more convinced that my belief in the iron Law of Unintended consequences is the right one. I have had to cut back on my sittings of late, as I am awaiting an operation to give me a new knee joint, and although I can get around in the courthouse it isn't always easy. As I am due to retire from the Bench in late October I have excused myself from getting to grips with some of the more complex innovations that have recently been introduced, such as iPads on the bench. I own a couple of iPads and I am comfortable with using them, but inevitably any government-issued software is over-engineered and the last thing from user-friendly. My court has a few boxes that contain the iPads as well as charging them overnight, but those JPs who wish to use them have to submit to training as well as an elaborate procedure to keep them secure. It is worse for judges of course, but then they are paid £130k and more to cope. Given my impending retirement, I cannot summon up the enthusiasm to get stuck in to this 21st century stuff (albeit the technology is a decade old). I am trying to avoid becoming what old Army types call demob-happy so I shall concentrate on justice before bureaucracy. Full Article o Something And Nothing By magistratesblog.blogspot.com Published On :: Mon, 17 Oct 2016 16:29:00 +0000 I sat today in a bench of two with a liked and respected colleague who is to retire in a couple of months when she reaches seventy (although you would never guess it)..Before the off, we fantasised about how bulletproof we felt, as disregarding the guidelines could at worst result in ejection from the bench that would take longer than we have left to sit. We dealt mostly with breaches of community orders: the miscreants were mostly addled by drugs, and immune to letters or calls from probation. I was obliged, several times, to explain in plain language that it was the defendant's reponsibility to stay in touch with probation, rather than the other way round. Our powers are limited in these cases, so I went home doubting that we had achieved very much. 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o Is it still possible to make money in online fundraising? By onfundraising.blogspot.com Published On :: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:36:00 +0000 The short answer to this question is, yes. While the rules have changed a bit since the early days of raising money online, the necessary elements all still exist in great supply. These are; a large and motivated donor pool, innovative organizations and fundraisers and the technology that brings it all together. This post will cover this complex topic with updates to come. In the mean time, voice your opinion on the relevancy of online fundraising in the comments section below. The first step to success in online fundraising is the cause. While its possible to raise money for just about anything, what really promotes success is having a well defined mission statement. This is something that resonates with donors quickly. The shorter it takes to express your mission statement, the more likely it is that donors will stick around to learn more about your organization and its needs. This does not necessarily mean that they'll make a contribution, but donors who leave your site out of boredom, frustration or confusion certainly wont be making any. After a well defined cause, presentation is the next most important element of online fundraising. Donors are quick to leave sites that are'nt easy to navigate. Ideally donors should be able to make an online gift in just one or two steps, the more complicated a donation system is, the less likely donations are to be made. Simple. modern interfaces are the key to increasing online donations. Full Article
o The Future of Fundraising is Local. By onfundraising.blogspot.com Published On :: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 14:50:00 +0000 With the economy finally starting to gain some traction, few people are thinking about those whom society is le aving behind. These are the working poor, the sick and the elderly. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, we will see more soldiers and their families in need. Sometimes fundraising calls for a national effort. The only way to gather money and resources quickly is by calling or mailing into every state for support. This is a proven method of soliciting money. This isn't the case for every fundraising effort however. There are some issues that could just as well be taken care of locally. Additionally, some causes are actually better served by using local fundraisers. Local has a number of benefits; we'll name a few below. More of the money goes to the cause. Some national fundraising companies can take as much as 80% of what they raise for an organization. Millions of dollars are wasted in this way. Local groups just can't afford to pay these prices. A local campaign, whether staffed by volunteers or local professionals, ensures that more of the donated dollars go to work immediately. No one knows local issues like local people. Using locals to fund raise means having a team that understands the issue and is passionate about it. The more knowledgeable and interested in an issue a fundraiser is, the more likely they are to secure donations. As a nation, a number of important issues are affecting Americans; children going to bed hungry, seniors and veterans not getting the care that they deserve and homelessness are just a few of these issues. What all of these issues all have in common is that they begin and end locally. We can choose to wait for a solution from Washington, but President Obama's job forces him to look at the big issues, not the small ones. National organizations face similar problems; they have the money and resources, but not the organization to implement relief locally. Local fundraisers raising and spending money locally have an immediate effect on communities. Bringing the idea of raising money in the community and solving problems locally is one whose time has come. More local groups are starting to see the power of collecting donations at home. As the idea spreads, the benefits will only become greater. Full Article advanced fundraising techniques ethical fundraising fundraising fundraising tips local fundraising tips
o 5 Ways to Improve Your Fundraising Now. By onfundraising.blogspot.com Published On :: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 11:35:00 +0000 Excellent fundraisers, as well as average ones often find themselves reaching a plateau when it comes to their fundraising abilities and the dollar amounts that they raise. On a plateau, it is just as easy to move upward as it is to slip backwards; losing progress. Fundraisers are only interested in moving in one direction; upward. pla•teau (plæˈtoʊ; esp. Brit. ˈplæt oʊ) n., pl. -teaus, -teaux (-ˈtoʊz, -toʊz) v. -teaued, -teau•ing. n.1. a land area having a relatively level surface considerably raised above adjoining land on at least one side.2. a period or state of little or no growth or decline, esp. one in which increase or progress ceases: to reach a plateau in one's career.v.i.3. to reach a state or level of little or no growth or decline; stabilize Definitions #2 and #3 have the most significance in fundraising, but definition #1 can be a useful visualization tool. So how do we get beyond the fundraising plateau? Go back to basics. Find something in your fundraising routine that can be improved and work on it. Can your greeting be made more friendly? Can your donation requests be tightened up? What ever it is, work on it. Working on any one issue has the added benefit of providing new perspectives on other issues. Ask the donor. Ask donors, whether, they give or not, what they thought of your performance. Most will provide at least one useful bit of information. Some donors will provide so much valuable criticism that you may find yourself reexamining your entire fundraising strategy. Ask another fundraiser. Sometimes we let shyness, pride or professional competition get in the way of improving our skills. Every fundraiser, at every stage, goes through the plateau problem. Reach out to your fellow fundraisers and get their advice. Become an expert. Often after fundraising for a certain cause for a long time, fundraisers began to feel like experts on the issue. There is always more to learn. Find books magazine articles and any other materials that you can. The more you know about your issue, the better you can fund raise for it. Remember, Plateaus aren't permanent. Keep slugging away, doing the best job that you possibly can. Eventually, you will begin to see some progress. These are just a few of the ways to overcome getting into a rut. Actually the only limitations to becoming a better fundraiser are your imagination and the amount of effort that you are willing to put into improving. Remember, plateau or not, there is always room for improvement. Full Article advanced fund rasing techinques ethical fundraising fundraising tips fundrasing local fundraising rapport tele-marketing
o What does it mean to "wane philosophical"? By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Tue, 05 Nov 2024 12:21:38 +0000 "To what extent is science a strong-link problem?", Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, 10/30/2024 [emphasis added]: Here’s a fascinating and worrying news story in Science: a top US researcher apparently falsified a lot of images (at least) in papers that helped get experimental drugs on the market — papers that were published in top […] Full Article Words words words
o Not giving up on Hangul for Cia-Cia By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Tue, 05 Nov 2024 15:30:39 +0000 This is a story we've been following for well over a decade (see "Selected readings"). Improbable as it may seem that the Korean alphabet might be adaptable for writing an Austronesian language of Indonesia, there are some promoters of this idea who continue to push it enthusiastically: "An Indonesian Tribe’s Language Gets an Alphabet: Korea’sThe […] Full Article Alphabets Language reform
o The etymologies of ballot and bigot By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Wed, 06 Nov 2024 12:30:50 +0000 That's all I've got, so far, for linguistic commentary on the U.S. election results. According to the OED, the etymology of ballot is < (i) Middle French ballotte (French †ballotte) small ball (beginning of the 15th cent. as †balote), small coloured ball placed in a container to register a secret vote (1498) or its etymon […] Full Article Etymology
o A bushel of buzzwords from Japan; the advent of phoneticization By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Wed, 06 Nov 2024 22:13:04 +0000 Below are two lists of nominations for Japanese buzzword of the year. Each has 30 entries, and from each list one will be chosen as the respective winner. Since the two lists are already quite long and rich, I will keep my own comments (mostly at the bottom and focusing on phoneticization) to a minimum. […] Full Article Alphabets Word of the year Writing systems
o Whimsical surnames, part 2 (again mostly German) By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Fri, 08 Nov 2024 05:21:45 +0000 [This is a guest post by Michael Witzel] A few months ago you published a discussion of whimsical surnames. Since then I have paid attention and have found new ones in almost every news broadcast. It is said that there are 1 million (!) surnames in the German speaking area of some 95 million people […] Full Article Humor Names
o Lewotobi Laki-laki By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Fri, 08 Nov 2024 18:27:36 +0000 A serious volcanic eruption on Flores Island has been going on since October 30: The Pusat Vulkanologi dan Mitigasi Bencana Geologi (PVMBG) reported that eruptive activity intensified at Lewotobi Laki-laki during 30 October-5 November, which included a major eruption resulting in fatalities. The large explosive eruption began at 2357 on 3 November, generating pyroclastic flows […] Full Article Names
o Bayesian archeology By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Sat, 09 Nov 2024 13:18:29 +0000 The first two panels of yesterday's SMBC: The last two: Back in 1979, David Macauley's Motel of the Mysteries had a much longer story to tell about archeologists' presuppositions. Macauley's plot loosely satirizes the work of Heinrich and Sophia Schliemann in excavating Troy, and also echoes Howard Carter's excavation of Tutankhamunn's tomb. It's 4022, and […] Full Article Linguistics in the comics
o Biblical and Budai Taiwanese: vernacular, literary; oral, written By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Sun, 10 Nov 2024 12:21:52 +0000 [This is a guest post by Denis Mair] Cai Xutie was a Taiwanese woman who ran a family farm with her husband in a village near Jiayi in central Taiwan. She was a rice farmer and had never attended a public school. After her husband died in middle age, she sold some of the land, […] Full Article Language and entertainment Language and religion Literacy Topolects
o Cognition, culture, … and communication? By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Mon, 11 Nov 2024 13:13:17 +0000 An interesting recent review article (Wooster et al., "Animal cognition and culture mediate predator–prey interactions", Trends in Ecology & Evolution 2024) argues for bridging the academic silos of "predator-prey ecology" and "animal cognition and culture": Abstract: Predator–prey ecology and the study of animal cognition and culture have emerged as independent disciplines. Research combining these disciplines […] Full Article Animal communication
o Geometriphylogenetics By languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 17:50:10 +0000 Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "There's a maximum likelihood that I'm doing phylogenetics wrong." It's not that Randall is "doing phylogenetics wrong", but rather than he's applying it to an inappropriate problem. The OED's etymology for phylogeny is < German Phylogenie (E. Haeckel Gen. Morphol. der Organismen (1866) I. iii. 57) < Phylum phylum n. + […] Full Article Linguistics in the comics
o Autumn 2022 issue of Agapé available By oto-usa.org Published On :: Mon, 03 Oct 2022 00:08:24 +0000 The Autumn 2022 issue of Agapé, the official journal of U.S. Grand Lodge O.T.O., is now available. This and all previous issues can be found here. Full Article Agape
o Winter 2022 issue of Agapé available By oto-usa.org Published On :: Tue, 17 Jan 2023 01:10:23 +0000 The Winter 2022 issue of Agapé, the official journal of U.S. Grand Lodge O.T.O., is now available. This and all previous issues can be found here. Full Article Agape
o Registration open for NOTOCON XIV By oto-usa.org Published On :: Sat, 28 Jan 2023 21:49:41 +0000 Registration is now open for National O.T.O. Conference XIV, to be held in Denver, Colorado, August 3-6 2023. NOTOCON is normally held every two years, but it was canceled in 2021 due to the pandemic, so this will be our first NOTOCON since 2019. Full Article NOTOCON
o Spring 2023 issue of Agapé available By oto-usa.org Published On :: Fri, 21 Apr 2023 04:01:34 +0000 The Spring 2023 issue of Agapé, the official journal of U.S. Grand Lodge O.T.O., is now available. This and all previous issues can be found here. Full Article Agape
o NOTOCON Speaker Deadline Approaching By oto-usa.org Published On :: Sat, 22 Apr 2023 19:01:09 +0000 The deadline to propose a presentation for National O.T.O. Conference XIV in Denver, CO, is May 10, 2023. Full Article NOTOCON
o NOTOCON Speaker F.AQ. By oto-usa.org Published On :: Fri, 28 Apr 2023 07:51:35 +0000 For potential speakers, a handy FAQ full of useful information is available here. Full Article NOTOCON
o Summer 2023 issue of Agapé available By oto-usa.org Published On :: Thu, 08 Jun 2023 05:10:54 +0000 The Summer 2023 issue of Agapé, the official journal of U.S. Grand Lodge O.T.O., is now available. This and all previous issues can be found here. Full Article Agape
o NOTOCON Hotel Registration Closing By oto-usa.org Published On :: Thu, 20 Jul 2023 16:45:59 +0000 NOTOCON XIV is fast approaching! The cutoff date to receive our group rate at the hotel is Friday, July 21st. Please reserve now. The speaker schedule has been published on the NOTOCON website. Event registration is still open! We can’t wait to see all of you in August, and wish you all safe travels! Full Article NOTOCON
o USGL annual report for fiscal year 2022 published By oto-usa.org Published On :: Sat, 11 Nov 2023 03:04:07 +0000 The U.S. Grand Lodge O.T.O. annual report for fiscal year 2022 has been published. This and all previous annual reports can be found here. Full Article Report
o NOTOCON XV: The Crowned and Conquering Child By oto-usa.org Published On :: Wed, 03 Jul 2024 16:11:29 +0000 SAVE THE DATE for NOTOCON XV: The Crowned and Conquering Child to be hosted in Portland, Oregon from July 25 through the 27th, 2025 EV. The call for speaker proposals is now open and we are accepting Volunteer and Vending sign-ups. Registration and hotel reservations will be available in August 2024. Full Article NOTOCON
o Happy birthday to me! (44) By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Sat, 30 Sep 2023 18:37:35 -0400 Hello and howdy. I usually describe myself as turning the "ripe old age of so-and-so" on my birthday posts, but I may need a new adjective as I'm solidly in my mid-40s, now (44). Perhaps "fermented." The birthday's come and gone without incident, although there were minor contemporaneous incidents: Still in the math hole. It might be an infinite hole. Trying to get out. But I have improved my console fonts and ANSI color libraries and GPU programming skills, at least. I was very pleased that a recent release of NVIDIA drivers came with a brand new updated OpenCL, which I previously assumed had been abandoned like so many computer things that I become fond of. Kudos to whoever at NVIDIA pushed on this. I am making myself laugh privately to myself (well, no longer private now) by imagining someone who spells it out like an acronym, N-V-I D-I-A. Also, like usual, I ran the Pittsburgh Great Race, a mostly-downhill 10k. No encumbrances this time. I've been in good shape this summer, but I got sick last month and it set me back a bit, so this wasn't a star performance. Still 43m22s is not too bad and I didn't push myself all that hard. Fewer minutes than years old. The new GPU is mostly for math, but I wanted to try it out for its Intended Purpose, (N)Video Games. So I played through Far Cry 6, which was okay. I liked it better than 5, which among other things had a bunch of technical problems (this one was much smoother and more stable), but I probably should have read my review of that game before downloading, as I say something like "I should probably stop playing this series." Still slowly savoring Tears of The Kingdom, which remains great. I also started Return To Monkey Island. I loved the first two in this series, but couldn't get into the later sequels; of course I'm interested in giving this one a shot since it's made by the original designers (and I did like Thimbleweed Park). Too early to render a verdict, but I did like how they deftly handled the canonicity of the end of 2. Then there's this: I think this is Taylor Swift wearing a homemade t-shirt of her "Pegicorn" (sometimes "Pegacorn"), a Unicorn-Pegasus hybrid. The text is in my font Action Jackson: Taylor Swift Pegicorn (Action Jackson font) You can also see this drawing/font at the beginning of the "Making of" video for You Belong With Me". I think she posted this to twitter in May 2009, but somehow I'm unable to find an archive of her tweets from this time (inconceivable??). Full Article
o October, the 8th month By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Tue, 31 Oct 2023 22:35:01 -0400 Wow, this month sure went by fast. I'm sure I say that every October, as this is the busiest time of year at work, and stuff like football and Maybe The Last Nice Day This Year keep me busy. I've been plugging away at this math/programming project, currently porting some numerical code that I don't fully understand and finding bugs in it and improving its performance. It's relaxing, at least, but there's nothing good to share here yet and I'm not sure it'll ever make an interesting story. I did make some version-2 circuit boards for a project I've been working on in parallel, too, but the next step in that one is going to be annoying ("Why won't it boot?") so I've been putting it off. They brought the small neighborhood race called "Run Shadyside" back this year. This is a 5k course that I can easily walk to the start of, and Shadyside is about as flat as it gets in Pittsburgh, so it's a nice race to try to PR in. I've been keeping in pretty good shape (despite the setback due to illness mentioned previously), but that morning I was having some burning lungs so I didn't push myself too hard. (Could have been mold? Bad air quality? Slightly sick?) I finished in 20m19s, which is probably my third best official 5K time, although a bit disappointing since I ran several unofficial treadmill 5Ks under 19 minutes this summer. I finished 3rd in my age group. The results feature a new capitalization of my name, the elusive Stegosaurus CasE: "Tom Murphy ViI" Craving a game that would make proper use of the GeForce 4090, I installed Call Of Duty: Cold War. Actually this game is a couple years old, and graphically it's not anything particularly special. I am liking the single-player campaign more than usual for these kinds of games, and avoiding getting sucked into multiplayer. I gave the "zombies" mode a shot and I think I finally understand it, like playing a roguelike on a single seed. I think I'm at the point where I need to set myself some kind of challenge and complete it and retire to more artful things, though. Full Article
o New content on radar.spacebar.org By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Thu, 30 Nov 2023 23:27:19 -0500 Here is the new content: I've mentioned that I have been working on running a five-minute mile on the treadmill this year, a goal that at one point seemed in reach. I think I also complained that I got sick and that when I got back to it, they had swapped out all the treadmills for fancy treadmills with built-in Netflix and air conditioning and stuff like that, which I now refer to as "Bob's Tred Mill." There's some good things about these, and some things that make me crazy, but one thing that especially made me crazy is they felt significantly faster than the old Precor ones I was used to. It's definitely a real thing that treadmills are sometimes not calibrated correctly (or the tread stretches out or slips, etc.) but it was also possible that being sick set me back more than I thought. The important thing is to get The Data instead of just The Upset Feelings so I was shopping for things like those hand-held unicycles that you can wheel around to measure how long things (like streets) are, as it does seem like the kind of device that I would own, looking at like the world's most accurate hand-held unicycle thing, and then I noticed at the last thing that most of them have a MAX SPEED of something like 10mph, which would not do. I finally had the brain-stroke that I could use a laser tachometer to do it, since these have a max speed more like 99999 RPM. So I measured the tread length with some chalk marks and put reflective tape on there. The treadmill will go at different speeds when loaded (running on it) vs unloaded, which also depends on your weight and stride and stuff a little, so you also gotta engage in the dexterity-testing act of measuring while running on it, which looked like this: POV: You are me Pointing the laser at the reflective tape dot (visible right next to the laser dot here) as it flies by while running kinda fast is definitely tricky, although I must say that it was one of those times when I thought, "I've been training my whole life for this!" and you can see that I'm showing off a little bit here by also photographing it at the same time. But you are not impressed since it reports 0 RPM. The nice thing about the tachometer is that it only needs a pair of observations to give you a frequency, and you can easily tell if you missed the tape, which you do often on account of the shaking, because you get some integer multiple that's way off from the right answer. Anyway I dutifully took multiple readings unloaded and loaded at (nominally) 6mph, 7mph, ... 12mph and made a spreadsheet with all the results converted, and... found that the treadmill is just about 1% too fast loaded, all across the board. This would be just 3 seconds for a five-minute mile, which is not nothing, but it definitely does not vindicate my Upset Feelings (I was thinking it felt more like 10%). My best guess is that the old treadmills were (all?) actually too slow, which is annoying because now I doubt some of the unofficial 5k records I painfully set for myself during the summer. But, well, the thing about endeavoring to do challenging things is: No Cheating! In project news, I feel I have a foothold now to get myself out of this math hole, as I've finally migrated this algorithm to work only with 64-bit integer arithmetic and so I can port it to GPU soon and then be out of ideas about how to make it faster. I have no idea if there's a good story to be told for this project, but I'll try (and also, it is okay if sometimes the hobby programming doesn't lead to a video or Sigbovik paper, you know?). And speaking of Sigbovik: Heroes have emerged quite on time this year, so it's certainly looking like there will be a proceedings and conference (perhaps with livestream), so start writing those papers now. Aside from the math hole, I've been making some progress on two other concurrent projects. It's getting normal again (even quiet) at work and winter break is coming up, and I'm looking forward to having some several-day stretches to work on them. I played through Golf Peaks (well, I haven't beat all the bonus levels yet but I've been working back to front so it's just a matter of a little time at this point), which was a very nice little puzzle game that does almost everything right. Other than the very irritating music in one world, I think my only disappointment was that it doesn't elegantly handle infinite-length puts. I'm also still working on Return to Monkey Island, which I do like, although it doesn't hold up to my memory of the first two. I think one of the problems with modern point-and-click adventure games is the voices, actually: Not because the voice acting bothers me, but because it goes so slow compared to reading. It's like when you just want to figure out the maximum speed of the hand-held unicycle and they're trying to get you to watch a video instead of just reading. Tears of the Kingdom (which I'm still savoring, but getting close to the end now) does a good job with this; you do hear snippets of voices, which helps with the characterization, but you can blow through the dialog at a pretty fast pace. Probably a lot cheaper, too! Full Article
o From now on, the title of the post is allowed to just be "January 2024" (only when it is January 2024, however) By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Wed, 31 Jan 2024 22:08:59 -0500 Hello again, This month I've been plugging away on the project I mentioned in the previous post which involves among other things a PDF generator and now an implementation of ML (as in Standard ML, but also the other one). This is probably the 10th "compiler" I've written in my life, and it's kind of fun to revisit these problems that you've done many times and try out different approaches, although this time one of the approaches is "Use C++" (for reasons of making good on a joke, but also for reasons of mlton doesn't work on my computer any more). And although C++ is a fine tool for many applications, it does have some deficiencies for the task of writing a compiler (one of the most irritating: a very modest limit on the stack depth? Like my computer has 256 Gigabytes of RAM and 2^64 virtual addresses and somehow it can only manage 1 megabyte for the stack and there's no standard way to increase it? Get off my lawn). But then you can also experience new ways of struggling with C++, like: A middle of the night power failure wrecked my computer's GPT (as in GUID Partition Table, but also the other one) and I was deep in the depths of taking the computer apart to reset its parts, its BIOS (its Basic In/Out System, which is where it stores its biography) and its hard drives were everywhere on the floor, and it could not be saved, and this after I already broke my computer this year by trying to put the world's biggest video card in it, too hard. And I could not merely perform recovery because of Unknown Error, so I had to begin anew again and restore from backups. But when you restore from backup and you're in the mood of "why is this so complicated and I don't understand how computers work any more?" it occurs to you (me) to also change your underlying development environment instead of reinstalling the devil you know. So I ended my friendship with Cygwin64 and switched to new best friend MSYS2. Both of these things are different ways of wishing that you were using Linux while you're using Windows. The main reason I tried this new way of struggling is that Cygwin is very behind on its version of x86_64 clang (C++ compiler), which I wanted to try because it supports AddressSanitizer and clangd on Windows, and I wanted to give LSP in emacs a shot (it's finally good!). There were a few growing pains, but I think MSYS2 is what I would recommend now. One of the nice things they did was create multiple different environments depending on what you want to do (e.g. "I want to use clang to compile x86_64 code" or "I want to do 32-bit cross compilation for ARM") and in that environment, you just say "g++" and it invokes the compiler you want, instead of the weird contortions I've been doing for years with manually invoking x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++. I was also able to get clblast working before being too filled with rage to continue, so that is nice for the ML inference on the world's biggest graphics card. I made these graphics to help me tune the correct settings of GPU layers (y axis) and number of threads (x axis): tune-single tune-batch In some sense the results are obvious (more threads and more layers is faster) but it was interesting to me how the cliff of performance drops off at a different number of layers for single and batch mode (I guess because the batch needs some memory itself?) and how it's clearly better to use fewer threads than cores for batch as well. I was not surprised to see performance drop off for >32 threads (everybody knows that hyper-threads kinda suck) but I was very surprised to see performance pick up again when it gets back up to 64? And only for single mode? I wish I understood that better. But mostly I'm a sucker for the custom visualizations. Right but when writing this compiler I realized that I wanted to use some Greek letters, and I can't handle it when some characters are in a different font in my source code, so I finally made some space for those in my programming font FixederSys. These certainly still need some tweaks, but it's already better than just being in some other weird font: {{{caption}}} You can also see that I have been adding some "useful" emoji at the top. It is an interesting puzzle to try to make these things recognizable (especially for the 1x version, whose charboxes are 8x16 pixels). I am pretty sure I will not try to do all of the emoji (like, the flags are totally hopeless at 8x16), but it is tempting to round out the Unicode support somewhat. Like I was trying to make a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ today and had to settle for ~\_( :) )_/~ which is pretty much (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻. Also: Adam revived our old game jam game Headcat, which I described in post 927, now over 16 years ago. You can play it online at Headcat.org. It is harder than I remember, perhaps explaining why it did not reach #1 on the One Appstore Per Child charts. Also: I started and finished (true ending, but just with one character) Slay the Spire. Good game, but you don't need me to tell you that. Same for Alwa's Legacy, which is the sequel to Alwa's Awakening. Both of these are very true-to-form "8-bit" and "16-bit" platformers that I enjoyed and would recommend for genre fans, though I did not try to 100% them. The graphics are the highlight and I thought it was very cute how these could easily have been a pair of games from the NES and SNES. The good old days. And speaking of good-old days, I am now playing Katamari Damacy, which I had played at a friend's house many years ago, and always wanted to spend more time with. It totally holds up (aside from stuff like: You have to play through the tutorial and first level before you can access the menus at all, like to make the game fullscreen?) and it's honestly inspiring how unhinged the game design and writing are, and how fun it manages to be. What an accomplishment! Full Article
o "April" 2024 By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Tue, 30 Apr 2024 23:59:58 -0400 Oops! Usually when I fail to post on time and then illegally backdate the post, yielding a penalty of -1,000 points, it's shortly after midnight. Like, as I'm trying to fall asleep (which of course involves and involuntary inventory of everything I may have failed to do), I'm struck with a panic and then get back out of bed to write some dumb pro-forma apology post. This time I just went to bed and actually fell asleep and now here I am noticing that it is May 1. Still, the whole point of doing this every month is to make the grid of months line up nicely, so the post is backdated by 9 hours and nets -1,000 points. Speaking of lining up nicely: I did get my SIGBOVIK papers in on time and gave a lightning talk at the conference. SIGBOVIK was very popular this year, with our longest-ever proceedings (see SIGBOVIK 2024 PDF or bound volume). This year my project is a paper about a new typesetting system that I wrote to produce the paper (and the talk's slides). That system is called BoVeX and the paper is called Badness 0, which you can read as Badness 0 (Knuth's version) and/or Badness 0 (Epsom's version). You can also maybe find a recorded livestream of the breakneck 5 min presentation, but I would wait for the proper video (in progress now!), which is the same content with much better pacing and details. Speaking of details: I also presented at An Evening of Unnecessary Detail, which is one of Matt Parker ("Standup Maths")'s live shows. Other than the part where I tried to pack a dense months-long technical project about details into 12 minutes, this was a blast! Lots of cool, interesting people. This took place in a proper comedy club in Brooklyn, like with posters of people that I watch on TV (e.g. Taskmaster legend Fern Brady is performing there in a few weeks, so it seems I'm a mere 5 or 6 steps away from my dream of being a contestant on Taskmaster now), and was sold out (due exclusively to the eminence of others, since it was sold out before I even joined the bill). I finally hung out with Grant Sanderson ("3blue1brown") and told him about math. The audience was amazingly attentive and wholesome, and quite a few of them recognized me and wanted to talk after the show, which is fun. (I do not envy the queue that Matt and Grant endured, though!) Enjoy my technically deficient vacation photography: I'm photobombing, but Matt is so used to this act that he is reflexively crouching down so as not to appear twice my height Speaking of technically deficient photography: An additional reason why my video is not done yet (or indeed, why it currently has status Filming 0) is that I finally pulled the shutter release on a new video camera. After much deliberation (and visiting the B&H showroom while in NY, etc.), including on far more ridiculous options, I settled on the Canon R5C. After a complex week-long courtship ritual with the FedEx guy, that finally arrived last night, at which point I immediately realized that I need further accessories. But I'm excited to shoot on this thing and to make my computer suffer with 8k video. It seems to have gotten too complacent with "Full HD." Finally, I think the main reason I failed to post on time last night was that I was up late playing Balatro. This game is all over the place so you probably don't need me to tell you about it, but it is indeed a good (and addictive) deck-building game that I am enjoying instead of sleep. I am not interested in 100%ing this one, but there are still lots of appealing challenges left for me to do. I'd recommend it if you have the self control to avoid firing it up "for a quick game" when you should be working on your projects or sleeping. Full Article
o Glue and Boxes By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Wed, 31 Jul 2024 23:44:56 -0400 'been taking it easier this month, which is my reward for finishing a video, but not totally leisure. Like for example I added a Cyrillic codepage to FixederSys, and I have been working on a Wikipedia article that involves digging through old newspapers. One other thing that resembles digging through old newspapers is that I'm finally repointing some of the bricks on my house (yes, this is "taking it easier"), as the mortar is in places 120 years old, and has become quite soft, like it's just sand held gently in place by paint. I'm using lime mortar, the glue of the ancient world, as this appears to be the house's original connective tissue (and apparently if you use the wrong mortar on old soft bricks you can ruin 'em, although I have discovered that mortar chemistry is akin to like editor or programming language wars among computer people). This work would be relaxing or even satisfying if not for the fact that some of it is significantly off the ground, so most of the work is actually ladder acrobatics and vertigo things. I will spare you the specifics of the dodgiest moments, which I'll have you know I did without any harm, even concluding at times that "this is simply too many somewhat or slightly dodgy things at once, together totaling too much dodge," not because the stories aren't relaxing or even satisfying but because I feel like committing it to blog might come back some day to haunt me, like when some near-future AI is deciding "how much shall it cost to insure Tom 7 against accident or brick wall failure"? But that is coming along and now I own three ladders of different heights. Another thing is I got back to 3D printing. I don't know if I mentioned here before that I finally upgraded my 3D printer from the impressive-at-the-time but now-actually-quite-incapable Makerbot Replicator 2X to the utterly-non-disappointing Bambu X1C. It's a really good printer, which does the things you always thought a 3D printer did in the first place, like print a part in 3D all the way through without failing. I printed some props for my last video with that thing, but recently I've been making things that are more relaxing or even satisfying, like replacement parts for broken things around the house, or boxes, like here for my audio equipment: Box closed Box open Box very open This is based on a popular model ("rugged parametric box") but lest you worry that I have let myself go, rest assured that I refactored the whole Fusion 360 file to make it more parametric and rebuilt using the obvious mirror operations (??) and so on so that it would be nicer for customizing, and then of course here there are many customizations. It is very satisfying to pack the XLR cable and timecode cable and preamp neatly in the same box and then close the lid and you get an elegant abstract line drawing of what you just put away. This is printed in carbon-fiber impregnated PLA, which is an excellent material. The handles and inlays are of course solid gold. Lastly I have been playing the video games! As usual! I finished Hades (100%!) and Grapple Dog and I am very deep into the Animal Well (love it) and a couple other small ones. I'll give my thoughts on these but I started writing this post too late and now we're inches from losing points. Full Article
o Of all homonymic months, August is the most majestic By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Sat, 31 Aug 2024 10:11:27 -0400 I’m traveling for the long weekend. Either I’m having bad luck with the epic heat waves or there have been a lot of epic heat waves, because again the short road trip threatens to be tyrannized by the hot air. It did at least touch 100°F this time, so at least it is a proper respectable heat wave. We are in a place called Hocking Hills, whose AirBnB has these OBX-style stickers that say “HHO”, which could either be confusingly “Hills, HOcking,” or perhaps “Hocking Hills, Ohio”, but not “Hocking hills OHio” as one might expect. I plan to stick the sticker upside-down for “OHH”, as in “Ohh yeah, I need to write a post on Tom 7 Radar for the month of August, and I need to do it on this mediocre wi-fi which Google Internet Speed Test describes as ‘fine’ while everyone else drinks beers outside.” Fair enough: This is a self-imposed curse and one that’s easily tended to at any time during the month. During the month: I worked again on making my own video codec, which is a very bad way to spend one’s time, but I don’t think there are any modern lossless codecs that would be suitable for my use case. And I do like a data compression project because of the inherent benchmarkability. The use case is for the increasingly common situation where I have a program generating a series of video frames (e.g. BoVeX is making an animation), which I usually do by writing a sequence of PNG files to disk. I’m way ahead of PNG files so far even without doing any inter-frame stuff, which is not impressive, but does make me feel like it’s at least not totally pointless. (Still, it’s quite pointless: Sure I can make these files smaller at significant cost of complexity and encoding times, but these animations typically use space similar to like one second of 4K 60fps XF-AVC footage.) Sometimes programming your own lossless video codec is a bit too fast-paced so you need to write a Wikipedia article from scratch about Clairton Coke Works by digging through newspaper archives. I haven't even gotten to the last 30 years of its history yet! I also rounded out the Cyrillic in FixederSys though I don't think I've uploaded a new version of that yet. As usual I did some hacking on secret projects. UHH, elsewise, I did finish off Animal Well which I liked very much. My spoilerless advice to you is: Don't try to 100% this game without at least looking at a spoiler-controlled guide! But I did have fun once I felt like I was stuck-ish finishing the remaining postgame puzzles. I have also been playing Chippy, a bullet-hell twin-stick shooter that is quite hard (I usually feel good at this genre) and has several new good ideas in it. It's essentially all boss fights, and the chief innovation is that you fight the giant bosses by disconnecting pieces of them. I'm on the last boss so I will probably finish that one soon. As I have confessed many times, I like dumb first-person shooter games, and I played through Trepang 2 this month as well. It does have a few moments, but it was mostly pretty dumb, like I wanted. And then I started Touhou Luna Nights, which is a "Metroidvania" fan-game with great pixel art and music. OK, I should get back to this vacation! Full Article
o ¡Tengo muchos años! T_T By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 21:54:59 -0400 Hello team! I turned 45! It happens every year (not the same age, but the same feeling, of time marching forward, with me along with it) so no big surprise. This weekend was the Great Race, also every year, but I unsubscribed from their e-mail list at some point months ago because they seem to operate this list under the misconception that subscribers want to think about Great Race 24/7 all year round. I thought: It should be easy to just remember when the Great Race is, as it always falls on the weekend near my birthday, and I do not need a list constantly mailing me reminders. Easy. But then I forgot about the Great Race, so I didn't run it. I did take the day off for my birthday despite this being the busy time of year at work, which was worth it: I made some good progress on some projects that had been backed up in my anxiety-brain for some time. Of course they are confidential, but here is a graphic of some significant progress: Minusweeper I forgot to mention this one when I did it, but did you know that you can "buy" a Unicode codepoint, by making a donation to the Unicode consortium? So of course I bought ASCII 0x37, which is the digit 7. True story: I did a lot of film photography when I was younger, and although I do miss film, I'll admit that the saddest thing I feel about its obsolescence is actually that those little black plastic film canisters are no longer all over the place to be repurposed to hold little objects. I found them very satisfying and useful! Fortunately now that I'm old I found another similar ubiquitous shape, which is these orange prescription medicine bottles. I've been using those for a while to "organize" small parts like screws (e.g. when I take something apart that I might want to put back together, I put the screws in the medicine bottle and label it) but then they just roll around in the drawer of crap. So this: RxBox, Unpopulated RxBox, Populated A very simple part, of course, but what could be more satisfying than 3d printing your own holder for canisters for fasteners that goes in a drawer in a cabinet? And speaking of satisfying, I finally finished Chippy (regular difficulty) which was really quite hard. Several of the last bosses I had to practice over several evenings before I beat them! It was a good and creative game, though. I'm mid-way through Solar Ash, which is good (but it's no Hyper Light Drifter IMO!) and just started playing Satisfactory, since they finally put out a 1.0 version of that. It's quite well done, but I'm not sure if I actually like it (seems a bit heavy on the cookie crafting; in fact I'm letting it craft in the background as I write this). I am getting a kick out of allowing thinking about my messy design as the "saddest factory," a joke which I'm sure occurs to everyone, but that's Game Design! Full Article
o This halloween I am dressed as a withered husk, who was made this way by: Satisfactory 1.0 By radar.spacebar.org Published On :: Thu, 31 Oct 2024 22:35:04 -0400 OMG. I can't believe October is over already. I blame Satisfactory which, okay, I do get it now, and it did destroy my body and mind. I am inches from being done now; I just want to make sure that I finish it with enough force that I do actually put it away, as I could imagine tinkering with my saddest factory forever. The game isn't without flaw, but I think most of those flaws are not interesting to talk about. I do have one petty but important criticism, which is mildly spoilerful and anyway will only be interesting if you played the game. There is an object called the Somersloop ("cool S") which allows you to double the output of a machine. Canonically this item is some kind of "loop" and the flavor text talks about how it is able to create more energy than you put into it. So when I'm out hunting for Korok seeds I have this thought that maybe I could create a loop of factories whereby it would create infinite resources by repeatedly doubling. And I'm thinking about it but the crafting tree doesn't have any notable loops in it, but I remember the "packager" which allows you to put a fluid in a container or the converse, and I'm like: Yes, that's great! So I get back to base and I am doing this, just for fun to create an infinite fuel factory or whatever, and I realize that the packager just doesn't have a slot for a Somersloop. They must just hate fun, elegant twists. It would not break the game to allow this (you can always get infinite resources lots of other ways) or cause any other problem I can think of. Hmph! The thing about constructing a factory and watching it churn is that it's basically the same thing as a programming project that you invented for yourself, and it's probably better to do the programming project. Here's progress on my mysterious rectangle: Minusweeper 2 It's good progress if I do say so myself! Anything but black here is a Satisfactory result, which is 90.55% of them at this point. I may need heavy machinery for the remaining 9.45%, but that is part of the fun. I think that's really it for this month! Please vote in the US Elections if you can (but I guess also vote in any important elections. And obviously, vote for the good guys???). And happy Halloween! Full Article
o Card Deck Review: THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW TAROT By hellnotes.com Published On :: Mon, 04 Nov 2024 19:59:25 +0000 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Tarot: Headless Horseman edition Nick Lawyer REDFeather (October 28, 2023) Reviewed by N. Richards What a wonderful way to honour the Irving Washington classic gothic story of 1822, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and the season of autumn as well as the art of Tarot all in one hit of […] The post Card Deck Review: THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW TAROT first appeared on Hellnotes. Full Article Halloween Collectibles Hellnotes Reviews Horror Collectibles Horror News
o Book Review: THE EERIE BROTHERS AND THE WITCHES OF AUTUMN By hellnotes.com Published On :: Wed, 06 Nov 2024 20:04:20 +0000 The Eerie Brothers and the Witches of Autumn Sheldon Higdon Scary Dairy Press LLC (September 4, 2023) Reviewed by Nora B. Peevy The Eerie Brothers and the Witches of Autumn finds Horace and Edgar, the twin Eerie brothers, battling monsters to stop Hex from collecting one of the four globes to absorb the abilities of […] The post Book Review: THE EERIE BROTHERS AND THE WITCHES OF AUTUMN first appeared on Hellnotes. Full Article Book Reviews Hellnotes Reviews Horror Authors / Books Horror News
o Book Review: INK VINE By hellnotes.com Published On :: Fri, 08 Nov 2024 22:08:43 +0000 Ink Vine Elizabeth Broadbent Undertaker Books (April 12, 2024) Reviewed by Nora B. Peevy When I heard Elizabeth Broadbent do a reading from Ink Vine, I knew I had to get my paws on that book. Her authenticity and unique voice, plus her sense of humor, shine through in this tale about standing up against […] The post Book Review: INK VINE first appeared on Hellnotes. Full Article Book Reviews Hellnotes Reviews Horror Authors / Books Horror News
o Book Review: OF TEETH AND PINE By hellnotes.com Published On :: Sun, 10 Nov 2024 21:30:20 +0000 Of Teeth and Pine Desiree Horton Independently published (October 31, 2024) Reviewed by Nora B. Peevy Desiree Horton’s second novel is filled with blood, a taste of the beautiful outdoors, and a lot of snark. I fell in love with her main character, Vick, the female forest ranger who will not put up with any […] The post Book Review: OF TEETH AND PINE first appeared on Hellnotes. Full Article Book Reviews Hellnotes Reviews Horror Authors / Books Horror News
o Book Review: WICKED ABANDONED By hellnotes.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 18:49:48 +0000 Wicked Abandoned A New England Horror Writers Anthology Edited by Rob Smales and Scott T. Goudsward Published by Wicked Creative, LLC (September 25, 2024) Reviewed by Carson Buckingham All I have to say is that New England sure grows a bunch of great writers! Wicked Abandoned is one of the best anthologies I’ve read in […] The post Book Review: WICKED ABANDONED first appeared on Hellnotes. Full Article Book Reviews Hellnotes Reviews Horror Authors / Books Horror News
o A Change of Routine By magistratesblog.blogspot.com Published On :: Fri, 10 Jun 2016 10:04:00 +0000 Some of the most common trials to face JPs nowadays are the Section 172 cases that arise from the ubiquitous speed cameras. Some people (such as Christopher Huhne) simply lie about who was driving the speeding vehicle, and others claim not to know the ID of the driver, but the consequences of being caught can be nasty. These cases tend to be listed in just a few courts, which can be pretty tiresome for the bench members. As it happens these cases are a rarity in my court, so this week the S172 that appeared on my list was the first that I have ever done, in about 30 years on the bench. The evidence was pretty thin, and we acquitted. The clerk told us later that these cases often fail to stick. They are a tidy source of revenue for the various loophole specialists in the legal profession, as many people will cough up a hefty sum to keep their driving licence. Full Article
o Suppressio Veri, Suggestio Falsi By magistratesblog.blogspot.com Published On :: Fri, 17 Jun 2016 22:17:00 +0000 In the aftermath of the appalling murder of an MP some commentators are looking at the occasionally poisonous comments made about politicians. The received wisdom of the public is that politicians are dishonest, but that is almost invariably a misreading. If MPs and others had to answer every question frankly, life would be impossible. Most of the usual questions would have to be answered with "I don't know" or "well, I hope that A happens but it might well be B for all I know." The Paxman figure would then rip the interviewee to shreds. So let's give them a break shall we? Full Article
o Sorry By magistratesblog.blogspot.com Published On :: Sun, 03 Jul 2016 21:53:00 +0000 This is a brief apology for the recent lack of postings on here. The first reason is that I have just had a visit from my son and his newly-pregnant wife who live thousands of miles away and the second is the absolutely amazing news agenda of the last couple of weeks. As one who has closely followed politics since my early teens, I have just been riveted by events. Oh yes, and I spent a couple of days in hospital being tended to by efficient and charming staff, most of whom were Polish. I hope to return to something like normal this week, I see that the old idea of sitting courts in pubs and suchlike has resurfaced, so perhaps I'll have a look at that.. Full Article
o Enough, Already! By magistratesblog.blogspot.com Published On :: Tue, 09 Aug 2016 17:12:00 +0000 This is not a political blog, although politics inevitably creep in to discussions of matters legal. I have followed politics since I was at school, although I was never elected to anything. The current situation beggars belief, and I imagine that today's crop of journalists will shake their heads in their old age, and say "but you should have been there in the summer of 2016; everything seemed to happen at once. " I am now even more convinced that my belief in the iron Law of Unintended consequences is the right one. I have had to cut back on my sittings of late, as I am awaiting an operation to give me a new knee joint, and although I can get around in the courthouse it isn't always easy. As I am due to retire from the Bench in late October I have excused myself from getting to grips with some of the more complex innovations that have recently been introduced, such as iPads on the bench. I own a couple of iPads and I am comfortable with using them, but inevitably any government-issued software is over-engineered and the last thing from user-friendly. My court has a few boxes that contain the iPads as well as charging them overnight, but those JPs who wish to use them have to submit to training as well as an elaborate procedure to keep them secure. It is worse for judges of course, but then they are paid £130k and more to cope. Given my impending retirement, I cannot summon up the enthusiasm to get stuck in to this 21st century stuff (albeit the technology is a decade old). I am trying to avoid becoming what old Army types call demob-happy so I shall concentrate on justice before bureaucracy. Full Article
o Something And Nothing By magistratesblog.blogspot.com Published On :: Mon, 17 Oct 2016 16:29:00 +0000 I sat today in a bench of two with a liked and respected colleague who is to retire in a couple of months when she reaches seventy (although you would never guess it)..Before the off, we fantasised about how bulletproof we felt, as disregarding the guidelines could at worst result in ejection from the bench that would take longer than we have left to sit. We dealt mostly with breaches of community orders: the miscreants were mostly addled by drugs, and immune to letters or calls from probation. I was obliged, several times, to explain in plain language that it was the defendant's reponsibility to stay in touch with probation, rather than the other way round. Our powers are limited in these cases, so I went home doubting that we had achieved very much. Full Article
