not that house centipedes should be afraid of cats. off the top of my head I can't imagine anything that should scare a house centipede. like the xenomorph they are the perfect organism

I just saw a house centipede scurry across the room, taking a path that went *right between* the front legs of one of the cats (who was grooming her back, so she was looking the other way), then into the darkness under the sideboard. I assume this was on a dare from another house centipede.

@enkiv2 don't forget the beatboxing!

lucky fella tbh https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/nyregion/manson-whitlock-typewriter-repairman-dies-at-96.html?_r=0

@whoisgina oh whoa that's a good idea!

say you register a domain with your name (e.g., <your-full-name>.com)—what's the best username for an e-mail account at that domain, if you want it to be a general "here's how to get in touch with me" kind of thing? all of the options seem either repetitive or confusing to read out loud

just noticed that this new concrete/sound poetry generator I'm working on inadvertently produced some Captain Planet fanfiction

oh haha, there's actually a whole section in this paper about Book from the Sky

this is from the 6th century BCE but feels like the freshest new collab from Xu Bing, David Ha and Mirtha Dermisache http://www.xubing.com/en/work/details/206 http://blog.otoro.net/2015/12/28/recurrent-net-dreams-up-fake-chinese-characters-in-vector-format-with-tensorflow/ https://hyperallergic.com/444659/selected-writings-mirtha-dermisache-ugly-duckling-presse-siglio-2017/

the fluid, abstract, almost hallucinatory character forms in these textual talismans from "Scripture on the Rites of the Vajra-Being of Impure Traces for Exorcising the Hundred Transformations" are really beautiful—to my eye they're mimicking both the form of individual characters and the form of blocks of characters? (from from Robson, James. “Signs of Power: Talismanic Writing in Chinese Buddhism.” History of Religions, vol. 48, no. 2, 2008, pp. 130–169.)

(the "Bibliography of Translations from the Chinese Buddhist Canon into Western Languages" was especially useful for me today http://mbingenheimer.net/tools/bibls/transbibl.html)

academics making available their scrupulously-maintained specialist materials on their personal sites in (I assume, in this case?) hand-written html was among the original use cases of the web and still probably its best use case, e.g. http://mbingenheimer.net/tools/indexTools.html

but for real, someone make a post-scarcity life sim that is just you and your animal friends leisurely exploring Norgay Montes and Cthulhu Regio, and sell me a Charon expansion DLC

it seems like a real missed opportunity to call it "Animal Crossing New Horizons" and *not* set it on the surface of Pluto??

@RavenWorks this is a good explanation

(I think the reason I love Etrian Odyssey and Persona is that they have very little of this; in EO the "town" is just a menu! in Persona there's a bunch of wandering around and talking to people, but it's integrated into the actual game mechanics and almost always takes place in public spaces. in the PSP version of Persona 3, they replaced all of the "wander around and talk to people" segments with menus, and it made the game much better imo)

(western RPG do this too, but then at least the people in the house act surprised when you come in and get angry when you take their stuff. in JRPGs, it's just A Thing That You Must Do, there is no intra-fictional explanation of why you do it or why everyone's okay with it. which I guess would be fine, if it was also fun to do, but for me it just induces anxiety—I feel like unless I check every nook and talk to everyone three times I'm going to miss something important)

what accounts for the origin and persistence of that "hey, it's a town! let's systematically walk uninvited into everyone's houses, talk to all the people and rifle through their things" trope in jrpgs? it's so tedious and off-putting. I just bought the 3DS DQ VIII on sale and within the first twenty minutes this is your primary task—aimless home invasion, going through people's wardrobes right in front of them, hoping to wander into trigger volumes that advance the story