Fred and Loathing on The Internet

They Scanned My Code For Iterables So I Told Them My i's Are Up Here

2023-Aug-10

Huzzah! A minor one. I have not rolled out a big new flashy dashboard exploring all the text mining data I have procured by scraping fan typed transcripts of the TV shows Succession and Mad Men. What I did was take out the good parts of the Mad Men work I did about a year ago for my site in its Django period. The web scraping parts needed rewriting because either the site’s CSS tags changed or my prior work was saved incorrectly. The modeling of the script words of my old work was needlessly complicated, so most of that went by the wayside. The only stuff I kept was the plotting stuff. Anyways, it’s over at /dash/succession. I think Shiv took the total top spot of name drops because of her marriage to Tom. That provides her with another topic to attach to her besides the ‘succession’ topic she shares with Roman and Kendall.

I started a book I picked up on impulse when I saw in the same section of the central library stacks I visited to get a O’Reilly book about Spark. The Cult of The Dead Cow by Joseph Menn. The author does not have much flavor to his writing other than bare chronicling of facts. My interest in the topic is something strong enough to keep me going through the flavorless prose and hopefully insight into the hacking world celebrities of the 90s becoming regulars in the tech industry, with my emphasis on ‘industry’. I like stories of computer hippies and rebels. I hope the story ends up with them maintaining their ‘Hack The Planet!’ energy. If not, I hope they were handsomely rewarded.

I did not know Cult of The Dead Cow had any renown. The people and events in the book start to sound familiar once the story approaches the late 90s, the era when my interest in video games somewhat mutated into a keen interest in the hardware to get the games running. Around that time I was lucky enough to have a friend who introduced me to Linux, which was somewhat new at the time. He also showed me a lot of shady stuff, but dear readers I’ll have you know I did not partake in any of his old fashioned illegal hacking. I just learned enough to find old video games, but I sure thought what he was doing sounded cool.

In 9th grade I did try to get a hacking tool I found on cultofthedeadcow dot com. That’s what grabbed me about that book on the stacks. Back then I didn’t get the hacking tool I got on that site to work, so I probably just went back to finding arcade game ROMs to emulate on my PC.