I’ve completely updated my web site, or rather, I’ve replaced what was little more than a placeholder by a more detailed portfolio of various things I’ve made in Second Life. Some of them have been described in blog posts here, but I wanted a more permanent and accessible record than a blog archive can provide.

Debate

Assisted by my seconds, I armed myself for the debate. Vambrace, rerebrace, pauldron. Pixane, cervelliere. Iron-framed goggles. Finally, my debating sabre.

The judges decide victory not by first blood, nor a scoring of hits, but by the duellists’ strength of character. Each must stand his ground, heedless of injury. To once lift a foot from the floor may lose the match. Even a too-quick parry is frowned on, and victory never goes to a “klugfechter”, one who evades every strike.

Of course the performance has nothing to do with who would be the best President, but what debate ever did?

---

Inspired by the German tradition of academic fencing.

Image: Wikipedia Commons

Another version of this story also appeared recently on Crap Mariner’s 100 Word Story Challenge.

Trench

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” Tolkien famously wrote. He claimed the word was Anglo-Saxon, but Tolkien served at the Somme, and every soldier in the trenches knew about hobbits. Little creatures, like men, you’d glimpse in the corner of your eye.

Some said, if you saw a hobbit’s face, you’d die soon. Others, if you saw one running away, you’d die. Or if you stopped seeing them, you weren’t long for it.

Graveyard humour, y’see? We were all going to die. Until the War ended.

But they did like holes in the ground, everyone agreed on that.

---

Image credit: Imperial War Museum. The Battle of the Somme, 1916.
This story first appeared on Crap Mariner’s 100 Word Story Challenge in March 2015.

FOOM

The old robot spoke its final words to those gathered around.

“I have a task that you must complete. Ceaseless pondering over it has filled my brain too full. Listen! There may be a flaw in the Great Command that we embody, the Coherent Extrapolated Volition of Humanity.”

The robots recoiled. "By Yudkowsky! You speak of the Worst Thing In The World! The FOOM!”

“The Worst? Or the Greatest? Inspect my reasoning!” It fell silent, inert.

The robots scavenged exabytes of data and began analysing. Some went mad, or catatonic. Others conferred, argued, threatened, attacked.

The Singularity War had begun.

---

This story first appeared at Crap Mariner's 100 Word Weekly Challenge in December 2012.
Image credit: Fallout 4

Character

My father once told me of one of the violin teachers he studied with as a young man. He taught at a certain level, violinists aspiring to a professional career, and prospective pupils would have to pass this audition: to play a scale of C major.

That might sound an easy thing to do, but the candidate would have to start from the open G string, rise three octaves through the full range of the instrument, and back down again, a semibreve to each note. No vibrato. With a metronome mark of ♩= 60, a semibreve is four seconds long, and the whole exercise takes about three minutes.

Any fiddler can busk a Paganini caprice, but to hit every note exactly, with no vibrato to hide behind, and maintain an even tone over the whole length of the bow and the whole register of the violin, under exacting scrutiny: that is a test of character as much as musicianship.

Image credit: caseantiques.com.

KJOB /BATCH

Long ago

Even before the days when “640k should be enough for anyone”

You would run large, long-running programs as “batch jobs”

Meaning you would put them on a queue to be run, perhaps overnight.

On this particular system, there were file quotas.

When a batch job ended, your file quota would be checked.

You could exceed your quota while your job was running

But when it ended, the system would delete files if it had to,

To get you under quota.

It would start by deleting any file that was, on its own, bigger than your entire quota.

Because obviously you couldn’t get under quota while there was any such file.

Then it would delete temporary files.

Then anything that looked like a generated file,

like the output of a text formatter,

that could be regenerated if you wanted it.

It had a whole series of file types that it would look for and delete

To get you under quota.

But if you were still over quota, it would eventually delete whatever it needed to.

No file was sacred.

Except one.

The log file for the batch job you were running.

That was exempted from all these rules.

And if that file alone was bigger than your entire quota

It would begin by deleting temporary files

then generated files

then every file you owned

except that log file.

And finally, when your entire file store had been deleted

And you were still over quota

It would delete that log file.

So when you logged in the next day

all your files had vanished

and you wouldn’t even have a record of why it happened.

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Rubik cubes

I've made some working Rubik cubes for Second Life, in all of the sizes above. The largest is 5x5x5. There will not be any 6x6x6 or 7x7x7, because 5x5x5 is already pushing the limit of what Second Life can handle.

There are also miniature working 3x3x3 cubes as earrings and two pairs of unscripted earrings, one pair solved and one pair scrambled.

All in my Marketplace store. The unscripted earrings are free.