The Pokémon Syndrome

Originally written in December 2011

Image placeholder:? Professor Oak, a middle-aged man with greying hair, stands in an adventurous pose clad in typical Pokémon Trainer gear, including a baseball cap, a jacket, a backpack, shorts, tennis shoes, and hanging from his belt, a number of colorful hand-held devices. Caption: Lets do this! (Again!) †

Go do something you haven't done in a few years. Preferably something you've only done once. Something you really didn't do so well at. You think this time it'll be different: you're older, wiser, and have as and advantage over last time that there was a last time you can now look back to.

Except that… you don't.

After a while, you'll realize you're doing everything exactly the same! It turns out that when forced to make the same decisions under the same conditions, you'll come out with the same results. This is good: it means you are still the same person you were years ago; but it's also bad, because it means that, like a machine, given the same settings – the same input – you produce the same output; you haven't changed – haven't learned.

I call this "the Pokémon syndrome" because I discovered it playing the Pokémon games.

I am so stupid

So, I said I had a bunch of posts lined up for you the last time I was here
I wasn't lying
but they're nowhere to be seen

The reason is, I had the posts written, but I refused to actually set the automatic post date until I had done the illustration for them. Since these illustrations are, more often than not, easier to do on the computer, I've waited until I've had a computer and free time on it.

DIE FARMERS, DIE!

No, this is not a blog post about the whiskey rebellion. For one, the soldiers in the drawing are wearing uniforms that are five years out-of-date. (Though I have to admit it might be fun... especially if I could get Lora Innes in on it ...hmm)

This post is about link farming: possibly the only thing abhored ("hey!") by readers and moderators alike.

Link farming is the practice of having several other websites point to yours for no good reason. In the early days of the web this meant creating several "dummy" websites. Currently, the most popular form of link farming is posting spam comments, making the comment-enabled site their unwilling dummies in every sense of the world.

Link farming comments were usually easily identifiable because they contained out-of-context nonsense (apparently extracted from someone else's Word documents by a virus) and gibberish usernames. The link might sometimes be in the text, or be hidden in the username.

However, ever since this webcomic was posted, link farming comments have taken on a different approach. The spam bots now post apparently constructive. Stock phrases like "very intersting", "terrific post", or "no one could have said it better" are unfortunately what they now cycle through. Fortunately, they're still detectable.

As you may have noticed, during my hiatus, such bots took over my site, posting as many as 6 such comments in a single minute. Google spam detection caught 243 of them, but no less than 125 still made it into the public eye. Today, however, I can happily tell you they are all gone, and the actually meaningful comments remain.

Unfortunately, this means I am now requiring CAPTCHAs to post comments. My sincerest apologies go out to everybody.

Rumors of my death have been greatly exagerated

Yes, I know Mark Twain only looked like this during the last decade of his life, but he considers the pictures of the time the best pictures ever taken of him.

As you probably know by now, I'm in my senior year. You may also remember me mentioning I was required to write a thesis to graduate. For this, like all things in the area of computer science, it is required to write a computer program and make it work.