When I designed this T-shirt, my goal was to becomre a Theremillionaire. All future ex-beta testers want something to commemorate their special status in this universe (the only thing There thought of offering us is a virtual drink, that’s as useless as you can get), and I thought a big beta would be perfectly appropriate, and nice, and quite wearable. Hence, that it would sell like hotcakes and I’d became a star in this game (for lack of being a star in the real world — oh, wait, I forgot about this blog). And do you know what players answer me when I show them this shirt? Oh, it’s nice. What is it?

Americans are a bit depressing, sometimes.

You probably won’t make it out from a bad still picture, but when I saw my dog running after me from a few meters beneath, it immediately reminded me of the Albator opening sequence (can’t remember the English name of that anime), and now I’m all emotional. (And I’m not even kidding.)

I have to say that this scene always struck me. Every time I saw this dog — was it a dog or a child? I’m not sure — running after Albator’s ship flying away, I was saddened. Yes, I was young and a bit stupid, so I got sad because a dog (or a child, same difference, except that I like dogs better) that only existed in an anime’s opening sequence would spend its time running after a flying pirate ship it would never reach. I guess I already sensed at the time that frustration would be the driving force of… my frustrations.

I finally bought myself a dog (at T$10,000, which equals about $7). Say hello to Pinky! (Well, he’s not black, but he’s a lab, so he gets the name.) As I was playing with it (even though it’s a bit limited, it puts some animation on the screen, it’s cool), I thought they should create a stand-alone, offline version of their virtual dog, so we could play with it without logging in, and it reminded me the time when Petz was the greatest thing you could get as far as virtual animals went. Yeah, it still exists, but did get old, in comparison.

I wish it was as easy to manufacture and sell clothes in real life.

A kilo of dough, a kilo of oil, and I’ve got enough food for all winter. If I don’t stuff myself to death before. It’s not outstandingly good, it’s terribly heavy, but I can hardly stop before my stomach is filled up. Next time I screw up my dough, at least I’ll put in something to give it some taste.

P.S. Was thinking of what I could have tried inserting into the donuts to give them some personality (chocolate? raisins?) and it reminded me of the web page I had read about the deep-fried Twinkies experiment. Never had the opportunity to eat a Twinkie, but now I can relate. True that there’s something magical to seeing the material enter the oil, gradually bake, and come out completely transformed. There’s no other cooking process that’s so impressive and so visual.

Good thing I don’t like spending hours in the kitchen, and having my clothes stink of frying, and more importantly eat oily food too often, or I might be spending my time filling my belly with deep-fried this and deep-fried that.

Moi aussi, dès que j’ai vu cette couverture, j’ai voulu la scanner et la mettre sur mon blog, mais j’ai eu la flemme, me disant que ça ne parlerait à personne, et qu’en plus je devrais me justifier du fait que je lise Télé 7 Jours (mais les lecteurs assidus savent que je suis abonné à Télérama). Résultat, quelqu’un d’autre le poste avant moi. Pff. Du coup, me voilà à la scanner quand même, parce que l’image n’est pas très lisible sur le post que je linke, et que ça saute donc moins aux yeux.

En plus, maintenant, je me retrouve avec une photo de Bernie sur mon disque dur à moi perso que j’ai. Ah bravo, vive la France !

I should be outside taking pictures. Well, I should have been, this afternoon, since I woke up around noon. Or maybe I should have been skating around. You know, something outside my bedroom to enjoy the sun and the, uh, pure air (author’s note: Paris got a pollution alert this week). Free transportation for all!

Je ne vis pas je survis. Non survivre c’est bien trop difficile : j’hiberne. C’est dur de se réveiller quand on hiberne depuis longtemps. C’est dur d’entrouvrir les yeux pour s’apercevoir que le temps est passé et que rien n’a changé. C’est dur de se dire que l’on a rien fait pendant toutes ses années, que l’on a évité tous les obstacles un à un. Mais ces obstacles, ils sont toujours là, personne ne les enlèvera, faut juste se les prendre en pleine gueule. Comme tout le monde. C’est ce qu’il fallait faire bien avant. Car, maintenant, des mauvaises herbes ont poussé, des mauvaises herbes avec des épines, de grosses épines pointues. C’est encore plus dur maintenant, ça peut faire très mal. Alors on se rendort. C’est facile de se rendormir.

I wake up early, and what do I find as a welcome? Eudora is broken, which isn’t surprising and could be the opportunity to import my mail into Mozilla or Thunderbird, but Apache is broken too, and that’s much weirder.

And that’s just because I exceptionally turned off my computer for the night (the fan was making too much noise — I’ve got bad luck with fans).

Argh. How do I fix something that has no reason to be broken?

P.S. I got the solution when Mozilla displayed a message about There’s SSL thingy having expired in 2004. I had indeed thought of an internal clock problem, because it made perfect sense, but I didn’t imagine that everything could be right (to the minute) except for being in 2104. Odd. Maybe it’s an unexpected secificity of motherboards designed for AMD CPUs.

Anyway, I already knew that Eudora was poorly programmed, but I’m surprised that Apache or PHP (more likely PHP) would crash because of the year. I hope it’s a specific bug of the Windows port.

Une raison de plus de ne pas héberger son blog chez 20six : mes referrers sont pleins d’URL imbitables (euh, réminiscence d’étudiant en informatique, ça me passera) sur lesquelles je ne cliquerai pas, parce que je suppose a priori qu’il doit s’agit de blogs que je ne connais pas. Alors que, si ça se trouve, ce n’est pas le cas, je deviens une star sur 20six et je ne le saurai jamais, juste parce que les URL des blogs qu’ils hébergent deviennent un charabia incompréhensible.

Bref, les blogs hébergés chez 20six n’ont que très peu de chances d’être découverts dans les referrers des blogs qu’ils lisent et linkent. Et c’est mal. Ou alors, c’est pas grave. C’est-à-dire qu’à une époque, tous les blogs n’avaient pas de commentaires et la pratique de poster des commentaires juste pour se faire de la pub n’était pas encore répandue, et on découvrait donc beaucoup de nouveau blogs par les referrers de son propre site. Pas sûr que ce soit encore d’actualité.

I can pretty well memorize that Tuesday is the day when there’s nothing on TV, but I keep forgetting that it’s also the day when you can’t log in There.

It would be nice if I could keep myself busy on that day at least, since none of my usual time-wasting activities will.

You have to know that I operate a regular rotation through my career plans. This way, each time I switch, I get a little hope back, and just wait until I lose all of it and switch to the next plan, and so on, and so forth, in a neverending cycle (so far). Off the top of my head, I’d say I have about half a dozen different plans. Or maybe more. But if I think about it too much, it’ll depress me again. Anyway, as it happens, right now we’re in the Oh right, I had planned to be a writer, too week, so this is the time for you to offer me story ideas for which you won’t be paid nor credited. And, of course, if your suggestion doesn’t match my tastes, you’ll lose points, because I’ve been writing so much about the movies and shows I like that you should begin to have some kind of vague idea of what appeals to me.

So I’m waiting for suggestions. Did I make it quite clear that it was your sole responsibility whether I went on with this failure of a life, or should I repeat it still a bit more for you to get used with the idea?

Building over: 4 / 15 articles.

This is the building process of my RSS files, and it means that among the last 15 articles of my blog only 4 are displayed in the English version. In short, it just means that you readers are bored to death. That’s because I only write about TV lately, so I don’t really think there’s any point to translating my reviews of French talk-shows or one-year-old 24 episodes. But I feel guilty. Kind of. Well, not guilty, but I feel sorry. Or I just feel like I’m wasting my chance to make an international career (yeah, riiiiight).

I’m thinking — should I display the French version when there’s no translation? I’m not sure how much work that would require, and I’m not sure it would really be worth it. Because I’d imagine that people who are able to read my blog in French, already do read it in French, don’t they?

I hate those times when I have nobody to think of when I close my eyes. I don’t feel like imagining someone who doesn’t exist, don’t feel like dreaming of an unattainable icon, and real people are so disappointing, imperfect, unreliable and… not worthy of me. Yeah. Oh, a big sweet dog lying next to me on my bed sure would be nice, but those things stink and require too much maintenance, and I’m not in the mood for concessions. And, at least, I could have projects to think of and look forward to when I go to bed. But I don’t either. What a nice autumn this is.

Yes, I know I’m repeating myself. But at least I’m blogging.

En me couchant hier soir, je pensais à plein de choses comme toujours, et j’ai repensé sans raison précise (autre que ma boulimie) au vieux débat sur le sexe du Nutella. Du Nutella, ou de la Nutella ?

J’ai donc noté dans un coin de mon carnet (que j’ai ressuscité pour l’occasion, alors que ça faisait des mois que je n’avais pas noté une idée de post en m’endormant — signe que mon blog revit ? rien n’est moins sûr) qu’il faudrait que j’aille faire un tour sur le site de Ferrero pour voir si le Nutella avait un sexe officiel ou non (oui, vous aurez remarqué dans cette phrase que j’ai choisi mon camp). Bien que beaucoup de phrases sur le site évitent d’utiliser l’article défini pour ménager les susceptibilités (non, sérieusement, c’est peut-être vraiment fait exprès, allez savoir), j’ai trouvé la preuve. C’est écrit partout, jusque dans le titre de la page. Le Nutella est un homme, parce que ce sont les hommes qui remplissent les ventres. (Si vous hésitez entre un sous-entendu sexiste et un sous-entendu sexuel, sachez que l’intention de l’auteur était sexuelle.)

Et ce n’est pas tout, il y a aussi une réponse officielle à la question couteau ou cuillère (problématique qui divise encore plus les foules, alors qu’elle est moins grave ; autant je ne supporte pas d’entendre quelqu’un dire la Nutella, autant je me fiche qu’on utilise un couteau, une cuillère ou une pelleteuse, du moment qu’on ne souille pas mon pot). Réponse particulièrement ridicule, bien qu’elle me donne raison : le Tarti’Nutella (non, je ne plaisante pas, ça existe), bien que décrit comme étant à mi-chemin entre cuillère et spatule (encore pour ménager les susceptibilités, je suppose), a surtout clairement la forme d’un couteau.

Déjà que je suis en train d’exploser mon régime alimentaire depuis trois semaines, c’était vraiment pas le moment de penser à ça… Au fait, en l’absence de glaces Ben & Jerry’s, la Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Caramel Brownie se défend plutôt bien.

I’m happy. Nah, just kidding. But I found a new toy. Ever since Macromedia launched ColdFusion (I think it was ColdFusion, but I may be confused), I’ve been drooling at one of its functionalities: server-generated title images. (Yes, I can hear the complaints from a few in the back. I’ll care when Windows XP has real font anti-aliasing and when HTML has embedded fonts. For now, you’ll have to do with images.) A dream for me (and many a webdesigner), because of the reasons listed in the parentheses above. Full control over the display of headers: which designer wouldn’t dream of this?

I had completely forgotten about it, but every time I plan a site redesign (oh, I was tired of the previous layout, it looked like I borrowed granny’s wallpaper, and that concept really doesn’t fit my current mood — see how everything is grey now? that’s much better) I’m back to this problem: how do I make pretty headers? This time, as I felt like getting myself a bit busy, I checked out the PHP documentation for True Type font usage (I remembered there was something like this, but never really studied it). Then I did a phpinfo() and… I was baffled. Yes, my hosting company does support FreeType, the library used to render True Type text in PHP! Long story short (well, too late for being short), after a desperate hunt for information about how to make FreeType work despite the servers’ restrictions (hint: the PHP functions require the full path to the TTF file; since realpath is disabled here, I had to use $document root), I managed to get my system working. See the date headers here in the blog? They’re generated by a script on demand (and cached in a big messy folder that I guess I’ll have to organize someday). You can’t imagine how good that feels for me. I don’t know how long FreeType has been enabled on this server, but I wish I had looked into it before.

So there you go. Blog dates are images again, but they use only one image per date. All headers on other pages are pictures too, and I can change them any way I like without having any administrative stuff to do. So cool. And the design is grey, because that’s what it should be. I like this design. I should stop trying to make designs that aren’t my style. But I don’t want to, I’ve done pretty much everything that was, so I do have to explore other paths. Pixel patterns were one of those paths, and I’m glad I’m back home.

P.S. I knew I had stolen the accolades somewhere, but I didn’t remember where. Uh, sorry. It’s six in the morning, too late to make a new version anyway.

You can die from heroin overdose (duh). You can die from water overdose. You can overdose on anything, it’s only a matter of quantities. So what would the quantity be for a Special K overdose? (I do mean the cereals.) And if I drink a whole bottle of water in addition to the full pack I just ate, will my stomach explode? How long would it take to die of a stomach explosion? Why is it that Coke and Pepsi dissolved my teeth but I haven’t got an ulcer?

I had been thinking that tomorrow I’d celebrate the simultaneous happenings of Monday and Sept. 15th to buy a weekly pass so I could spend the week out. That I’d make pictures, and maybe even meet some people (or maybe not, because lately it’s not something I’m quite inclined to do — even in There I’m fed up with chatting with people I don’t know). I don’t know why, I was certain I’d do that. No hesitation.

Well, yes, but no. Sure, a weekly pass is less expensive than a monthly pass. But it’s not free either. If at least you were massively buying the garoo.net T-shirts, I could afford it. But you don’t. You just sit there and wait until I design those shirts, but you’re not going to fool me, because I know very well that nobody will buy them even if I get to make some. Oh, and what about my novel, that nobody’s buying under the pretense that I haven’t written it yet? And the koalas, what are you doing to save the koalas from extinction?

You should all be so ashamed of yourselves.

That would keep me company.

It’s depressing to see how the designers working on the There universe are talented — company employees as well as designer players. Not depressing because I’m jealous (I’m beyond that by now) but because the There government is making the place less and less enjoyable over time. Oh well.

As I was posting an article in the There forums (yes, again, but, well, I don’t know what else I could be writing about here: I’m not doing anything, seeing anything, thinking anything these days), I thought back of this quote from The Matrix (yes, that’s original too, isn’t it?):

Did you know that the first matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. So the perfect world we dreamed, but your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the matrix was redesigned to this…the peak of your civilization. (I’m not sure, there may be mistakes in this quote. Nevermind, you get the idea.)

The thing is that, since I’m in There, I see restrictions adding up, prices raising, and general player happiness slowly dropping. Since I’m an idealist, I’m among those who, related to the quote, think that the There designers and programmers’ skills are not up to par with the general concept and visual design. But… what if I was wrong? What if it was true that a paradise world, where everyone could do what they want, build their house wherever and however they like, and spend their time visiting the planet and chatting with other avatars, without caring about money, just couldn’t work, even virtually? I know that would please me, but am I the only one in this? And yet, when I played The Sims, and I used cheat codes to pump up my bank account, I didn’t invent those cheat codes myself, I had found them on the web, and other players were using them the same way.

Wouldn’t it be a pity if human species made Agent Smith right by the way they design virtual worlds?

Their designers have kind of blown a fuse now. I wish it were because they realize that the management has been turning their great work into a universe that fewer and fewer people really enjoy, but I’m afraid it’s just because they’re losing their minds.

Un de mes lecteurs m’a envoyé un mail, il n’y a pas longtemps, pour me demander si j’avais une version agrandie de la photo ci-contre, qui illustre le film Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train dans la section icônes de mon site, et dans laquelle on voit au premier plan Sylvain Jacques, acteur forcément remarqué dans ce film (par tous les pédés, au minimum) et qu’on n’a pour ainsi dire pas revu depuis.

Du coup, ça me fait bizarre de voir qu’il est à l’affiche du nouveau film de Chéreau, Son frère. Je suis sûr de voir des critiques de ce film sur tous les blogs gays d’ici la fin de la semaine, donc je n’aurai pas besoin d’aller le voir pour savoir si l’acteur est toujours aussi… bon.

Et puis, quand j’aurai fini de recharger frénétiquement la page de connexion de There, j’envisagerai de chercher des photos du film sur le web. Ils doivent bien avoir un site. Ou pas.

A personal post, a TV show post (which I didn’t translate, because it’s about the second season of Alias that’s just beginning here) and a technical post all in the same day. And it’s only midnight. Wow. Reminds me of garoo.net’s better days. What could be missing, apart from the metapost I’m writing right now? Of course, all this remains a bit short, not fully developed, and I could have stretched it all much more if I had been motivated, which I am not at all these days. But still. I’m spoiling you. Aren’t you spoiled?

In the meantime, There still isn’t back up yet (which may be normal, because I’m not sure at which time they were supposed to open today) and, worse, their forums aren’t responding. I’m done with my daily web review, I have watched and commented Alias, and I absolutely need an activity before the undubbed airing of Scary Movie 2 begins, because I wouldn’t survive it. What, work? But what work? Oh, it’s a miracle! The forums are back online!

P.S. Unmiracle, the forums have crashed again. It’s not such a good omen.

I’m amazed I could be so wrong about someone. Well, I’m exaggerating — I did feel there was something wrong. But still, big surprise. Ah, what hormones can do… (And flattery, too. That’s important, flattery. I would have liked to believe it didn’t work with me.)

Well now, who’s volunteering to replace him? I need… Oh, I won’t be picky: a man under 60, under 300 pounds, less ugly than Quasimodo, and living alone in Paris. (You’ll have figured that the priority right now is spending the night with someone in a bed.) In addition, if he’s over 25, over 130 pounds or less cute than Ryan Philippe, I’d really appreciate him to be straight and impotent.

You have thirty-five seconds to submit your candidacies.

P.S. No, in fact, I wasn’t that wrong about him. I had just memorized qualities more than flaws, but I was quite conscious of everything, and after some thinking back about it there’s nothing surprising anymore. So, nothing special, and it didn’t deserve being blogged. Except that it’s very important for me to be able to gauge people right away. And it would have been serious if I had really, fundamentally been wrong. Because, so far, it never really happened to me, and that’s a skill I like to rely on.

I need :

• a couple of graphics/animation designers specialized in low-polygon 3D
• a programmer specialized in 3D low-polygon animation
• a programmer specialized in distributed client/server systems
• a few investors
• and that's pretty much it for now...

Voilà. That’s not much, is it? With this, and with all the good ideas bouncing around my skull, I’ll build a wonderful virtual world surpassing every competitor, from There to Second Life through the various incarnations of the late Deuxième Monde.

Come on, I’m sure we can do it. A nice universe, fun to explore and build, with kan-garoos all around, where everyone would be a millionnaire, and that wouldn’t crash when there are more than ten people in the same zone. Don’t forget that I’m a genius of an engineer, a genius of an artistic director, a genius of a designer, and that even my business sense could surprise you. So who’ll join me in creating Garooland (temporary name)?

Tiens, draguer au cinéma, j’ai pas encore essayé.

You can’t quite tell from the picture, but it’s really surreal to see a dozen dogs jump at the same time, some of which a few meters high.

But now, do I really have to be bored and demotivated to be advertising for a game I think isn’t good. Well, it’s a game that makes for nice screenshots, but it’s just not enjoyable to play.

Quand je bois de l’eau gazeuse dans une bouteille verte, ça me rend malade. C’est normal ?

I’ve got a sore throat again. That’s getting old. There must be something wrong in the atmosphere in my room — and yet, the computer’s fan isn’t blowing toward the bed anymore since I moved furniture around. And it’s not really cold. What gives?

I’ve got to get out and make pictures. I’ve got to get out and make pictures. I’ve got to get out and make pictures. I’ve got to get out and make pictures. I’ve got to get out and make pictures. I’ve got to get out and make pictures. I’ve got to get out and make pictures.

But, with the days getting shorter, that would imply having to get up a bit earlier too.

Oh, there was a photo contest for the Parisian readers of Télérama, and I only find out about it when they publish the results. Maybe I should read the Paris supplement more often.

Now that the heat wave is over, I almost feel a little bit somehow like taking my camera out for a walk. Let’s say the want is not very firm yet but it’s beginning to surge. You know me: whatever I can do lose focus.

Ma connexion marche encore, mais je n’ai plus de serveur SMTP (parce qu’on est le 1er septembre, je suppose). Pratique.

Fausse alerte.

According to my computer (not according to my blog), here ware, it’s September 1st. That doesn’t change anything for me, but it’s an upsetting symbol. I feel like it’s just one more train I’m missing. Of course, that’s a bit silly, and it’s perfectly expected that I wouldn’t have done anything constructive out of my summer, since it’s been the same for everyone else. And also since early August was way too hot to think. And since my summer wasn’t that useless—in fact, it was a step I needed to go through for what’s to come (or not). But I’m still there, nothing changed, and there are only four months left to the end of the year, which makes it quite a bit hopeless. Even if I change my reference: there are five months and six days left to the end of my twenty-seventh year. And then… then I’m twenty-eight and nothing changes, but I’ll be that closer to the age when everything will be lost and it’ll be too late to do anything. Right now I’m heading toward that one small step at a time. Alright, it’s an old topic, I’ve got nothing new to write about it today, but I just wanted to lament a bit over lost time. Insert here a stupid closing pun that I can’t really translate into English. Or maybe I could, but it’s 6am now so I can’t.