AWS outage
Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
Attendance was of all ages -- I saw one grandmotherly woman likely ten to twenty years older than me with a sign saying "Why Do I *STILL* Have To Be Marching In Protests?", and there were people the age of my various kids and everything in between.
There was no violence, no confrontations with ICE or police -- in fact, the police simply watched, kept the roads safe and clear, and made sure everything moved as smoothly as possible, even when the protesters streamed all the way across the Green Island Bridge and back. The organizers took pains to remind the crowd that not only were we nonviolent, our job was de-escalation even if threatened. Fortunately, that caution didn't need to be used.
The crowd was united in its disapproval of the current regime of lunatics and traitors and showed it in their signs and in their costumes. Scooby-Doo was there, as were the expected T-Rexes, giant frogs, and also a Minion and multiple others. I wore the Straw Hats' Jolly Roger as a cape, plus a straw hat. There were multiple One Piece fans around who commented on it -- one young lady carried a sign that said "The only king I want is LUFFY, The Pirate King!".
The speakers were for the most part energetic, articulate, and even understandable, which is often a problem for me in public venues. One gentleman dressed in Revolutionary War getup read the various charges against the King, pointing out how Mad King Trump is echoing a lot of Mad King George's offenses. New York Democratic politicians actually showed up, Senator Paul Tonko probably the most notable.
In some ways, it was really like attending a folk festival, including some songs in between speeches. There was anger, but not directed at anyone there, only at the crazy people in Washington who are not only damaging our country, but embarrassing the hell out of all of us. Forget economics, it'll take decades to live down having this bozo in the White House at all.
Mostly it as filled with positive energy, people here to have their voices heard, and to be part of a larger movement against our incompetent fascist regime.
Oh, you wanted examples of gravity slasher movies?
Shear, rated Glip-Glorp 5 for overabundant teenage necking, sexual situations and violence.
Crush, rated Glip-Glorp 7 for inveterate exposure of secondary sexual organs, profanity, sexual situations, and violence.
The Spagettifier. The granddaddy of the genre, rated Glip-Glorp 9 for unrelenting nudity, shower scenes, girl aliens of one species making out with girl aliens of another species (and not the species you’d think), sexual situations, profanity, gore, sexual situations involving gore… like, two piles of gore make out, violence, blasphemy, and questionable financial advice. It’s a classic.
Event Horizon is the consummate “Hyperspace is/Wormholes lead to hell,” but of course there’s also Doom, Half-Life… which isn’t hell, but those portals still lead to a dimension full of jerks. Obviously Warhammer 40K. I don’t know how it works in Warhammer Zero K. I’m going to assume that wizards using teleport spells have a 5% chance of bringing demons along with them. I actually don’t know anything about Warhammer Fantasy. I assume they’re connected, like, the dark elves in WhF worship Slaanesh or Tzeentch instead of Lolth. I could google it, but if I don’t then it allows someone break out their esoteric Warhammer knowledge and a soapbox.
Then there’s edge cases like the Natural Selection asymmetrical multiplayer mod for Half-Life. It’s less “warpdrive is the devil” and more “deep space has mysterious fungus.” I think. Or maybe there is some sort of hyperdrive that attracts evil extra dimensional spores like a bug zapper minus the zapper. I’m not sure. I played it 2 or 3 times.
Oh, and I guess The Expanse, where defeating distance attracts evil shadow Pacmen. Spoilers. Look, if you haven’t watched The Expanse, it’s baaaasically the best Sci-Fi thing out there. I think it just edges out Stargate SG-1 and DS9, which are my other tippy-top faves.
Oh, I just thought of another one, From Beyond. One of Jeffery Combs’s earlier movies. Just after Reanimator, I think. Anyway, From Beyond is based on an H.P. Lovecraft book, and on that note, I suppose any movies with summoning circles, whether they’re drawn in lamb’s blood or are created by a bunch of janky electronics are all in the same… over-genre. Of course, the whole point of summoning pentagrams is collect calls to hell, so that doesn’t count in the whole “Who could have foreseen this outcome” category.
Ooh, look! A new vote incentive! And it’s updated with color!
Well, in progress, obviously. I have another one that’s actually a bit further along, but everyone was all, “Sydney Kobold vote incentive!” So I switched to this one. Plus the other one was a multi-character picture so it will actually take me longer to finish. I hope to have an update for this one each week, so stay tuned. There is a slightly higher res version on Patreon.
By the way, this gunmetal blue-ish background and teal pencils are how I draw the comic. I set it up this way so I don’t have to spend all day staring into a bright white blank page.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Carl was debugging a job management script. The first thing that caught his attention was that the script was called file.bat
. They were running on Linux.
The second thing he noticed, was that the script was designed to manage up to 999 jobs, and needed to simply roll job count over once it exceeded 999- that is to say, job 1
comes after job 999
.
Despite being called file.bat
, it was in fact a Bash script, and thus did have access to the basic mathematical operations bash supports. So while this could have been done via some pretty basic arithmetic in Bash, doing entirely in Bash would have meant not using Awk. And if you know how to use Awk, why would you use anything but Awk?
njobno=`echo $jobno | awk '{if ($0<999) {print $0 + 1} else { print 1 }}'`
As Carl writes: "I don't mind the desire to limit job count by way of mod(1000) but what an implementation!"
Nobody saw this coming! (nobody saw this cumming?) It’s JOYCE(?!) and DOROTHY in “FRIEND OF DOROTHY (THE BIGGEST),” the newest Dumbing of Age Pornographique featured over on SLIPSHINE! It’s 19 all-new, full-page comic pages of definitely Not Safe For Work stuff. It hankies AND it pankies. It knows all the sexifying ways without having to Google anything first!
So go grab a subscription and your wife, I mean girlfriend. I definitely meant to say girlfriend.
Nobody saw this coming! (nobody saw this cumming?) It’s JOYCE(?!) and DOROTHY in “FRIEND OF DOROTHY (THE BIGGEST),” the newest Dumbing of Age Pornographique featured over on SLIPSHINE! It’s 19 all-new, full-page comic pages of definitely Not Safe For Work stuff. It hankies AND it pankies. It knows all the sexifying ways without having to Google anything first!
So go grab a subscription and your wife, I mean girlfriend. I definitely meant to say girlfriend.
- First page of Jay saying these things
- Second page of Jay saying these things
- Third page, which panel three's visual was pillaged from
I think Bishop's friendly smile from earlier made an impression!
The challenge for this page was taking dialogue from three previous pages, scrapping out bits and pieces, and pasting them together to present a relevant backstory for Bishop. This had to act not only as a recap, but as a substitute for Tedd's own thoughts, Jay's dialogue combined with the fantasy visuals meant to imply everything.
AND HEY, maybe I communicated what I wanted! I'll know soon enough!
As for why I didn't want any of Tedd's current thoughtsâby which I mean wordsâit wasn't an idea I set out with. It's just when I tried to add any, it didn't feel like Tedd thinking. It felt like narration. So I used Jay's words as context, and stuck with the most incredibly subtle visuals for Tedd's thoughts.
--
I was about to look up who Davan was dating back in 2009, but luckily y'all covered it in the comment section, thank you! That's Vanessa.
Wow, a LOT of you came here to GWS for the first time when this strip was first posted, after Randy and I started the crossover for this arc!
Since scheduling this Hair of the Dog post, I started re-reading Something Positive from the very first strip, and now I'm so very far in I'm behind on my to-do list, because I can't stop reading it. If you too would like to remember (or learn) how much you enjoy reading S*P, you can start right here in December of 2001! (Fair warning, a bunch of years are missing, sadly!)