dragoon's New Writeups

door prize (thing)

2002-06-03T02:34:09Z

A prize won merely by entering a place or event and being randomly chosen - perhaps the least required effort for a contest possible.

Typically, door prizes will be given away by a business to the millionth or other impressive number customer to walk through the door, with the appropiate fanfare and publicity. Conventions and other ticketed events such as spectator sports usually give away numerous small door prizes by randomly selecting numbers from the tickets sold and then announcing the winners during a slow stretch of the game or when the con organizers want a crowd.

Alternatively, when a bicycle rider goes head over handlebars due to some attentive driver suddenly opening their car door without looking first. Ouch.

sylpheed (thing)

2002-06-01T09:28:06Z

Sylpheed is a GPLed GTK+-based email/Usenet client for POSIX compliant OSes like Linux. The main author is Hiroyuki Yamamoto. According to the FAQ, the name Sylpheed means "light weight", like air, and is inspired by the Sylphs, wind spirits.

Sylpheed was designed to be fast, easy to use, highly configurable and full of features. The interface is the standard three panes for folders, messages and message text, although everything is selectable through keyboard shortcuts. Messages are stored in the relatively uncommon MH format, where each folder is a directory and each message is a file, and mbox files can be imported or exported. Sylpheed natively supports the POP3, APOP, IMAP, SMTP, SMTP AUTH, and NNTP protocols, and also uses the local mail spool or user-configured external programs such as fetchmail. Sylpheed displays the text of HTML mail, but doesn't format it or display images from web servers, avoiding spam web bug confirmation. Sylpheed…

Secret Comics Japan (thing)

2002-05-19T08:13:55Z

Published by Viz Communications under the Pulp or Cadence Books imprint in 2000, Secret Comics Japan is a look at the more underground or indie Japanese manga artists. Unusually, it doesn't fit the usual tankoubon proportions - the book is as tall as the usual American graphic novel and a centimeter or two wider, which combined with the depth of 200 pages makes for a fairly large book. The book is printed Japanese style, right to left, and a small note on the inside of the left cover reminds people that not every language reads the same.

The book opens with a small introduction from the editor talking about the diversity of modern Japanese manga and the blurring of "mainstream" and "underground" work that has followed the differentiation of genres. Chikao Shiratori, a Japanese editor with ties to the innovative, influential if not incredibly well read Garo magazine, picked a wide variety of authors for this collection in both style and popularity - as far as I know, only one…

a mouchoir (thing)

2002-05-17T22:36:53Z

The term for a duel where a handkerchief (or mouchoir in French) is used to determine the winner. Each duellist holds a corner in their mouth, and the loser is the first to release their grip.

The duel "a mouchoir" is typically performed with knives, in the hope that the winning condition will turn a fatal knife fight into something merely painful and unpleasant. Pistols are also sometimes used - in at least one case, the seconds demanded that the duellists dig their grave first and fight inside it.

Sky Ape (thing)

2002-05-13T10:35:33Z

"I fly around with a jetpack and fight crime. What the hell do you do?" - Sky Ape

Written by Phil Amara, Tim McCarney, and Mike Russo, drawn by Richard Jenkins.

Bizarre, surrealistic comic series about Kirk Madge, an talking millionaire gorilla inventor who may just be a Boston Red Sox player named Jack Von Schiller. Who knows. He certainly doesn't. He plays Risk and drinks with his friends Francis Bird, Pirate Steve, Mr. the Fake Lion and Paper Bob. The art is a functional stylistic black-and-white full of subtle details, but it's the writing that makes your brain sit up and salute. It's very random humor, full of non sequitors and a dash of pop culture references. Reminds me of The Tick (think the comic, not the Fox series), but less cheesy, and a little more Zippy the Pinhead-ish, but with its own unique charm.

Sky Ape was originally a four issue series from Slave Labor Graphics in 1997, and reprinted in graphic novel form as Sky Ape: The Collection in…

boot (idea)

2002-04-15T11:09:45Z

To end a client program's connection to a server, for a number of computer services. While it's possible for the disconnection to be accidental, the more common usage involves a deliberate act on the part of someone with privileges on the server. The classic examples for today's inhabitants of Cyberia involve small, individual-run servers with obnoxious clients, such as IRC and various game servers - an older generation might think of MUCKs or BBSes.

Example usage: "Yeah, so we were chatting on #randomchannel when this idiot came in complaining about how he had been booted from the Return to Castle Wolfenstein server for being a team killer - so the op booted his ass again."