eating cucumbers without permission...

!

Outrageous! In a good way; and unexpected, very unexpected. Jokes about thanking the Academy haven’t been funny since ever, so I’ll just move on celebrating with a related post.

I had two questions about using Multiply to insert content from multiple blogs in the one page, and it is indeed very easy. It’s liable to be super inefficient in terms of database usage (cache! cache!), but easy to do.

Hate that WordPress produces clean, informative URIs? We can help.

The first post in my test install has this address:

http://localhost/wp-test/2005/08/03/hello-world

With Stupid URIs™, it can become one of these:

Backwards

http://localhost/wp-test/5002/80/30/dlrow-olleh

Query variables are reversed.

Zxy

http://localhost/wp-test/2005/08/03/svool-dliow

‘a’ becomes ‘z’, ‘b’ becomes ‘y’, and so forth.

Morse

http://localhost/wp-test/..---_-----_-----_....._/-----_---.._/
-----_...--/...._._.-.._.-.._---_------_.--_---_.-._.-.._-.._

(Broken up due to length.) Back when I were a lad, we used to travel forty miles in the snow to send our web-blog posts up the wire with a clicker, one letter at a time. And all that after ten hours down the salt mine.

Banshee

http://localhost/wp-test/iiieieieiiiiii/ieiiiiiiiii/ieiiii/iaiiiiiiiieiaii
iiieiiaiieiiaiieiiaiiiiieiiiaiiiiiiieiiiaiiieiiaiiiiieiiaiiiiiiiieiiaiieiaiiii

(Broken up due to length.) Or, “Whitney Houston Concert”.

Miscellaneous

No, no more, no more. Though it’s easy to write your own — you just need to extend the base Stupid class and add methods called encode and decode.

It runs Backwards by default; you’ll need to change the line

$stupid = new Backwards();

to be new Banshee(), new Morse(), or whichever.

Some of the above won’t work with anything outside [a-z], I think. (Sorry, international characters!)

Also, if you use this, you are mad. I found it sitting on the harddrive this morning, and my motives for writing it are lost in the mists of time, i.e. June. Alcohol may have been involved.

Next up in this series: a plugin to add Microsoft metadata to every post. How can I live even a moment more without class="MsoNormal" all over the place?

It’d be unfair to to pick on Yu-Gi-Oh!’s horrible dubbing, though it is horrible — I could watch the original, after all, or read the manga. And the character designs, well, my hatred of them is a personal preference, just a little subconscious bias against anything that looks like the love child of Cloud Strife and Sonic the Hedgehog.

The plot centres around the players of a collectible card game called “Duel Monsters”, and a typical episode goes something like this:

1. Yugi, the protagonist, is challenged to a round of Duel Monsters, often for the most hilarious of reasons. (In the first episode, it’s because his grandfather has been kidnapped, an event which can’t be said to segue naturally into a rousing game of cards.)
2. The enemy will say something like: “Friends make you weak!”

3. The game is played, dragged forward by the players’ helpful exposition:

   “Now I will play this magic card, raising my creature’s attack points!” “Now his creature is more powerful and I cannot counter-attack!”
   “I will place this creature in ‘block mode’, to prevent his attack from lowering my life points!” “No! My life points! They have gone down to one thousand three hundred and twelve!”

4. Ten minutes later, Yugi will probably win, at which time he will declaim the moral, e.g., “The power of friendship always triumphs!” (The “power of friendship”, like “trusting in the cards”, is apparently related to drawing good cards from the deck at a statistically improbable rate.)

It’s an animated rulebook, now with bonus! platitudes.

Surprise surprise, there’s a Yu Gi Oh! CCG, with rules — *gasp* — strikingly similar to those of Duel Monsters. I wonder what the show’s producers expect the kids to buy? The show is the card game. I have nothing against collectible card games — Oh Magic, how I miss thee! If only I hadn’t had to switch my addiction over to cocaine in order to save money… — but I’m less than enthusiastic about poorly-scripted marketing vehicles cluttering the airspace.

What’s strange in all of this, and scary, is the show’s popularity. It topped the ratings for its Saturday morning cartoon slot. It has the fourth-highest number of stories at fanfiction.net — behind only Harry Potter, Inuyasha and The Lord of the Rings — so presumably there’s something there to write about. (A fair number of those stories are about hot male on male action, but there’s gotta be more to it than cute boys and veiled homoeroticism.) To be fair, earlier incarnations did involve more than Duel Monsters, but the earliest episodes have never screened in English. The Western audience didn’t have that slightly-better material; they saw the advertainment first. And they don’t just watch it; they love it.

Yu-Gi-Oh! is The Merch.