Kuroko Project

The upcoming re-release of Cyber Troopers: Virtual On Oratorio Tangram(lovingly abbreviated as “VOOT”) has begun a revitalizing of a long-dormant community.
However, the unique control system for Oratorio Tangram(or OraTan for the short-short abbreviation) may not be ported over and I wanted to explain exactly how two digital sticks are the very heart and soul of Virtual On.
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Everybody’s talking about it. Couple of days in jail, whole town changes, etc.

There are two camps over this currently: the Rails side(”Whoo! Chocolate in my peanut-butter! Less magic and plugins that don’t explode randomly between versions!”), and the Merb side(”DHH is going to defenestrate us all! They won’t taste great! These books from the tech section are out-of-date six months earlier than usual!”

I’m mostly in the Rails camp(due to work), with a little of the Merb camp. It would be nice to keep them existing as separate frameworks, if only because of the other elephant in the room: the Rails-branding(read: money) and need to provide splashdown points for decamping Java webapp programmers. However, the Merb team seems to think this won’t be an issue, so I’ll reserve judgment for when the behemoth finally appears.

In any case, the fact that DHH and the Rails team are willing to adopt formal APIs, clearly define module boundaries, and leave monkey-patching behind is a welcome sign.

Echo-chamber-driven Internet Drama on the rise in the Ruby community. Again.

Giles Bowkett:
original, followup, self-flagellation

_why’s sum-up and thoughts.

Zed’s response to _why’s mention.

_why fires back.

Can we skip this and go straight to the Yo Momma Fight? Loser gets Force-chucked into experts-exchange.com!

As Charlie Stross has noted Stanislav Petrov bent the rules and prevented a nuclear exchange at the nadir of the Cold War 25 years ago today. He ended up losing his job and pension over it, and still doesn’t consider himself a hero.


Two years ago, I was eagerly awaiting DEFCON to have fun destroying the world with other people online. After viewing a gameplay sample on YouTube, I idly clicked on a related-video, which happened to be the attack scene from Threads. I followed that up with a chaser of a music video using a Yo La Tengo cover of Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War”.
I got maybe three hours of sleep that night, and had shivering nightmares during all three of them. I haven’t played DEFCON or even looked at it since.


I’ve never been sure if it was revulsion over what it would actually be like, or repressed childhood memories from listening to adults in the early eighties. But along with Charlie and the rest, I’m raising a glass to Comrade Petrov. How about you?