okay so something i really adore about garnet is that she’s cool, but she’s very deliberately cool. she knows she’s cool. she works on it. she doesn’t ask questions. she delivers gravely portentous lines. she adjusts her shades to gleam meaningfully in punctuation to whatever bit of mysterious wisdom she’s imparting. she’s constantly showing off how good she is at punches, then pretending like it’s no big deal.
and when she’s not doing her absolute best to be the cool mom, she’s a huge fangirlish dork who picks pearl up and shakes her when she’s excited about shit. and who gets flustered on the phone. and who makes heart-fingers at steven and wears oven mitts and thinks most of what amethyst does is hilarious. she’s not the most mature gem in the room. she’s two kids in a beautiful trench coat playing I’m Definitely A Real Grownup who breaks character the very moment she thinks of a good pun.
I’m suddenly laughing at the idea of a cliche noir detective story written in the brutally concise style of Hemingway.
A woman walked into my office. She had legs. I noticed her legs. “I have a problem. I need your help,” she said. They always said that. I knew her legs weren’t the problem. I hoped she might want my help with them anyhow.
“Can you pay?” I asked. Of course she could. Her shoes were worth more than my rent. She could pay. “I can pay,” she said. Her eyes were wet. I wondered if anything else was wet. Probably not. I am not handsome. Not since the war. She was looking at my scar. Lots of people do. Most look away. Not her. She did not look away. She looked at my scar and I looked at her legs. There were two of them. I liked that about her. I liked that a whole lot. “Will there be danger?” I asked. There always is. This city bleeds danger, then drinks it right back up again.
“I’m afraid there might be danger,” she said. She had the voice of a beautiful woman. She also had the face and body of a beautiful woman. She was beautiful.
The light from the window was striped. It made stripes on my cigarette smoke. The end of my cigarette crumbled into ash. My marriage had also crumbled into ash.
“I can handle danger,” I said. I patted the butt of my gun. My gun was a Colt. My gun and my scar were all that was left from my time as a soldier. My gun, my scar, and the nightmares. I looked her up and down. “I am good at handling things.”
Every time I recommend Discworld to someone, I get asked “where should I start?” There are several reading order guides floating around the internet, but they just give the order of each series, they don’t give you any information on which to base a choice of starter novel. For that, use this handy (and very biased, okay, I admit it) flow chart!
For everyone one who has been asking ME where to start (I’m sorry I don’t reply to you all I get asked this so often) this is an exceedingly good chart.
When programmers at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory set out to develop the flight software for the Apollo 11 space program in the mid-1960s, the necessary technology did not exist. They had to invent it.
They came up with a new way to store computer programs, called “rope memory,” and created a special version of the assembly programming language. Assembly itself is obscure to many of today’s programmers—it’s very difficult to read, intended to be easily understood by computers, not humans. For the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), MIT programmers wrote thousands of lines of that esoteric code.
Here’s a very 1960s data visualization of just how much code they wrote—this is Margaret Hamilton, director of software engineering for the project, standing next to a stack of paper containing the software:
The AGC code has been available to the public for quite a while–it was first uploaded by tech researcher Ron Burkey in 2003, after he’d transcribed it from scanned images of the original hardcopies MIT had put online. That is, he manually typed out each line, one by one.
“It was scanned by an airplane pilot named Gary Neff in Colorado,” Burkey said in an email. “MIT got hold of the scans and put them online in the form of page images, which unfortunately had been mutilated in the process to the point of being unreadable in places.” Burkey reconstructed the unreadable parts, he said, using his engineering skills to fill in the blanks.
“Quite a bit later, I managed to get some replacement scans from Gary Neff for the unreadable parts and fortunately found out that the parts I filled in were 100% correct!” he said.
As enormous and successful as Burkey’s project has been, however, the code itself remained somewhat obscure to many of today’s software developers. That was until last Thursday (July 7), when former NASA intern Chris Garry uploaded the software in its entirety to GitHub, the code-sharing site where millions of programmers hang out these days.
Within hours, coders began dissecting the software, particularly looking at the code comments the AGC’s original programmers had written. In programming, comments are plain-English descriptions of what task is being performed at a given point. But as the always-sharp joke detectives in Reddit’s r/ProgrammerHumor section found, many of the comments in the AGC code go beyond boring explanations of the software itself. They’re full of light-hearted jokes and messages, and very 1960s references.
One of the source code files, for example, is called BURN_BABY_BURN--MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE, and the opening comments explain why:
About 900 lines into that subroutine, a reader can see the playfulness of the original programming team come through, in the first and last comments in this block of code:
In the file called LUNAR_LANDING_GUIDANCE_EQUATIONS.s, it appears that two lines of code were meant to be temporary ended up being permanent, against the hopes of one programmer:
In the same file, there’s also code that appears to instruct an astronaut to “crank the silly thing around.”
“That code is all about positioning the antenna for the LR (landing radar),” Burkey explained. “I presume that it’s displaying a code to warn the astronaut to reposition it.”
And in the PINBALL_GAME_BUTTONS_AND_LIGHTS.s file, which is described as “the keyboard and display system program … exchanged between the AGC and the computer operator,” there’s a peculiar Shakespeare quote:
This is likely a reference to the AGC programming language itself, as one Reddit user . The language used predetermined “nouns” and “verbs” to execute operations. The verb pointed out 37, for example, means “Run program,” while the noun 33 means “Time to ignition.”
Now that the code is on GitHub, programmers can actually suggest changes and file issues. And, of course, they have
You can find the official Apollo 11 AGC source code on GitHub here
I try to stay consciously away from the roles of the girl who throws herself at the leading man, because I’ve done it a lot and I want to move on. I ticked that box.
New Witch: I’ll do a spell to make them go away. First I need twelve candles, three kinds of crystals, five different herbs, and when’s the next full moon?
Intermediate Witch: Eh, how’s one candle and a mushroom I found in my pocket for a curse? It goes “I hate you please die.”
Experienced Witch: Probably faster just to tell them to fuck off.
magrat
nanny ogg
granny weatherwax
This might be the best response I’ve seen to this post yet.
Kimchi and Justice 