1)

This is insane. I'm not yet decided on whether it's a good thing or a bad thing yet (more members is good but I don't necessarily think all the incentives make sense). But it's definitely insane.

What about it makes it insane?

 

 

I dunno... just the audacity of the proposal. The outlandishness of it. I didn't mean it as an insult (again, it could genuinely do good for the site, although I'm upset about post count increases as a reward since I think that furthers the impression of post count as a points system rather than as an unbiased measure of a person's activity). I meant it in the same "crazy-cool" sense as deflecting asteroids with lasers or building a house out of a beached submarine.

 

 

Source: Announcing the BZP Referral Program

Er, the pizza delivery man thing is soooo out of date. These days we use ice cream trucks for our fortress invasions.

*ahem* The BZP staff are now channeling Emmett, and even adopting insanity to try to curtain forum inactivity. Unfortunately, the alien vote (in terms of biomechanicals and otherwise) is already secured, it's the insane masses that don't understand.

It's Truth in Television. After all, what is one being's insane is another being's awesome, and some things can be insanely awesome. Tell that to the guy who built the floating couch.

2) For a while, a thing that sorta nagged me was that there was not a Find & Replace command in the RTE in yonder forum. It wasn't too much of a big deal because I could just Copy & Paste into another program and do it, but...

Where have I been for the past two and a half years? *bangs head on desk*

3) Recently I've been discharged from school for a week before a four-week summer intersession class starts up. Fortunately, it's even easier than the classes I took this semester. Then I have a six-week before my family heads off on a week's vacation. As an additional insane note, I'm actually more comfortable with this - if I had the summer truly off, my parents would not leave me alone and would assume that I was doing something "time-wasting" like checking BZPower or doing anything related to Bionicle. If I'm actually taking a class, they assume that I'm preoccupied with that while I'm on the computer and they leave me alone.

I've also found that if I'm truly disconnected from all obligations I won't be doing anything productive on my projects anyway; I'll just be lazy and post stuff here or browse TV Tropes or rewatch movie trailers over and over. I hate breaks.

It also brings on the temporary insanity that helps with writing. Apparently when my brain is tired and worn out it spontaneously writes things to heal itself back up; the more deep the wearing, the more it demands. It saves money on therapists, though. One of these days I might hire a psychologist to figure out why my brain can operate at full speed/tilt for months and even years, and then suddenly go crazy on some writing attack and refuse to do anything but read and write for days/weeks/months/years like some sort of...insane person.

Of course, the surface answer is obvious. "You're a writer, you cool dude!" Well okay. Tell that to my parents, whose purple prose boils down to this: Program or get another place to live. Program or die. Talk about insanity.

Don't get me wrong. I like programming as a tool, and I like the results it gives me. I wish I could just do that and throw my writing to the floor and forget that it ever existed. But I just can't. I also can't pretend that I don't have the skill either - the lineup of people who have complimented my writing stretches on.

Fortunately, this jump won't last for too long and won't cause any damage IRL, since my next class =/= programming. But I may write a thing or two, might make progress on that comedy, etc - I doubt I'll finish it, as I expect it to be a long one. Yes I do hear that voice that tells me that YOU ARE NOT MAKING PROGRESS ON THE CATEGORICAL GREGF REFERENCE AND DO NOT DESERVE TO LIVE, and so I'll return to that when this insanity abates. Should only take a couple days, and I'm going back to work on it on Monday anyway...I know exactly what I need to do now programmingwise; the deciding and thinking was the holdup.

And why am I writing this really long blog post that is starting to sound whiny and full of lame excuses? Insanity.