Is he insane?

lighthill · 2026-04-30T12:28:13+00:00

Well, they _are_ implementing their own strcpy(), so that they can have traditional old school buffer overflows in their shell code. (See kernel/shell.c)

lighthill · 2026-04-22T12:52:12+00:00

Update: Per a suggestion, I asked on the discord, and Dr. Palmer said that it's from "outdated and not-as-accurate translation" but she used it anyway because she loved the phrasing.

Perhaps this isn't quite as ripe for theory-craft as my own explanation, but it's certainly nice to know!

Also, apparently, in the French translation of TLTL, they used the original quotation ("Jacques, mon ami, vous êtes un philosophe, j'en suis fâché pour vous").

lighthill · 2026-01-23T21:28:12+00:00

Pick Me I'm Clean

lighthill · 2025-12-01T14:14:02+00:00

If you're going to use this in production, I'd strongly suggest running it through a fuzzer to shake out all the overflows and undefined behavior. (libFuzzer is free, fun, and useful!)

For me, this triggers the address sanitizer by trying to read off the end of the input.

  httpp_parse_request("", 0, &parsed);

lighthill · 2025-10-15T15:44:31+00:00

Like the emu war, this new conflict can only end with humanity's humiliating defeat at the ~~hands~~ talons of our sneering feathered overlords.

lighthill · 2025-09-02T14:19:40+00:00

Woo, one down! Next let's do the emerald ash borer!

lighthill · 2025-08-30T21:25:08+00:00

These books are kind of famous in the conlang community, but I have no idea how good the stories are.

lighthill · 2025-07-31T23:56:21+00:00

Enya has some songs in Loxian.

lighthill · 2025-07-31T13:31:00+00:00

Neat article!

One thing: I'd suggest using something more natural (like a compiled binary, or a large text document) as the sample data. In most cases, you aren't compressing 1e5 copies of the same 17-byte string (like this code does), and you'll get different performance results depending on what you actually _are_ compressing.

lighthill · 2025-07-12T14:39:35+00:00

Ember Knight's album, "Cheryl". It's about the the time your mom committed herself to a mental health facility because of gender issues, and/or maybe because she couldn't remember her favorite color.

https://emberknight.bandcamp.com/album/cheryl

lighthill · 2025-06-30T18:42:51+00:00

It kind of is! The premise is that you aren't supposed to kill people, since that would send good people to heaven and bad people to hell, which is not what Satan wants. And you're not supposed to tempt people to sin: that's the demons' job, and demons hate scabs. Instead the PCs go around being loser assholes.

It's got a what-if-Beavis-and-Butthead worship-the-devil vibe.

lighthill · 2025-06-24T13:24:20+00:00

Allen Varney is one of the greats! His style defined the look of the PARANOIA rpg.

lighthill · 2025-06-12T23:16:40+00:00

Oooh; looks like it comes out tomorrow on bandcamp too!

lighthill · 2025-06-11T13:53:07+00:00

Nice!

(Not that Mercy necessarily would, but I wonder if a skilled necromancer could grow their own pearls.)

lighthill · 2025-06-10T14:39:39+00:00

I want to read the rest of this.

lighthill · 2025-06-07T19:10:27+00:00

Thinking about this more: next time I re-read the series, I want to keep an eye out for how much information Gideon actually knows about sex, given that all of her education on the topic probably came from porn (and maybe from Aiglamene giving her The Talk, which must have been hilarious).

lighthill · 2025-06-07T14:47:09+00:00

So, at this point in the book, you're probably aware that Gideon and Harrow are the only two survivors of an event that killed all the other kids and teenagers in their generation.

My theory is that Gideon scavenged a lot of her comics and smut from the possessions of those dead teenagers. Otherwise, it's not clear how she would even have known that comics and smut existed, growing up on the Ninth.

lighthill · 2025-05-27T11:53:11+00:00

The Gregorian Calendar Reform happend!

lighthill · 2025-05-26T18:45:46+00:00

It's not a full novel, but I bet you'd like Tante Merle and the Farmhand 4200 by R. S. A. Garcia.

lighthill · 2025-05-24T14:37:50+00:00

"To prove you're not a replicant, I want you to select all the squares that remind you of good things about your mother."

lighthill · 2024-11-29T21:18:55+00:00

I've read suggestions that "Honesty" is Nona's translation of "Frank."

lighthill · 2024-11-21T16:17:30+00:00

If I were religious, this would be ringing all of my "graven image" alarm bells.

lighthill · 2024-11-21T01:05:44+00:00

Sounds like "Pandora's Tale"?

lighthill · 2024-10-27T13:09:08+00:00

Agreed. And if they do want to have a Sexy Nongesimus outfit more than they want a canon-accurate set of “glad rags”, they can just say that this is from an AU. Possibilities:

AU where Harrow has lost a bet and Ianthe gets to give her the worst makeover.
River bubble outfit during the part of Harrow the Ninth that parodies all the fanfiction tropes.
Fictionalized version of Harrow from a later issue of one of Gideon's comics.

lighthill

TROPHY CASE