(no subject)

I got another time-traveler spam. This one was just one paragraph and somehow had a lot of random-generated anti-anti-spam chaff at the bottom with random characters and a "Below is the results of your feedback form" line.

I can't help but wonder if this spammer is actually just a tool of the spam industry. Think about it. He sends out these messages and whenever someone wants to convince some poor small company that spam is the way to go, a few companies might ask "isn't it illegal?" And the spammers can retort, "well, have you ever received a spam from some guy on AOL who desperately seeks time travel technology? He keeps sending them out every few months, and he's probably some schizophrenic living in his parents' basement. And if he's not paying for it, you guys won't either."

Or I can't help but wonder if this is actually just a soft sell, where gullible kids might click on the e-mail address and ask "did you find any of that time travel stuff? 'caus I could use it too."

It also makes me wonder how long it'll take someone to develop cold-reading techniques for convincing passers-by on the street that they carry a message from the future for them specifically.

damn hands!

Dammit, my hands itch.

Lotion does NOTHING.

They've been like this on and off for years. Every so often I go to the dermatologist and he gives me nine sample tubes of some random anti-inflammatory and that controls it a little bit but I'm all out.

But what I want to know is, can it be cured entirely? Because it used to be on just one hand at a time. Now it's on them both if it's on one. But it used to be on one of my feet and on my arms too but not anymore.

I'll try maybe icing them down, because I think that's what worked on my arms...

(no subject)

Starting almost from scratch, I imported the letters and numbers from the Atari 5200's font in ROM, compressed them down to about 178 bytes (from 288) , and wrote an Atari 2600 program to use it in a scrolltext. I still have 50 bytes of RAM and about 1K of ROM and over a hundred scanlines to do whatever else I want. I'm stalled out for a while, but visions of a logo dance through my head...

And though it seems like a lot of work, it might not really impress anyone but myself. Even if I complete the rest of the program into the idea that I had, and burned it onto a cartridge so I could debut it by surprise at the Classic Gaming Expo this year, which is barely a month away... it probably won't garner more than a raised eyuebrow.

I still have to return this video game I rented, and I haven't showered.

"I am a hacker again," I want to say. But what was I before?