half evil

I read this article comparing the per-time cost of various media, essentially outlining which is cheaper for every hour spent enjoying a specific type of media. I took issue with a few points (as well as the basic fucking premise); the assumption that everyone buys new, the omission of what is easily the most important media to ever grace humanity, and the assumption that all media is interchangeable.

Firstly, anyone smart nerdy thrifty enough to analyze a spreadsheet detailing the cost breakdown of various entertainment media will surely also be aware of buying things used (I don’t mean to sound condescending, err… yes I do). Games and DVDs — like automobiles — are things that depreciate the instant it touches your dirty Doritos-stained hands. A current-gen console title runs you $59.99, but if you wait a month and pick it up used after Timmy spent his dish-washing money on it, you can snag Gears of War 2 for $40. A year-old title it could be as low as $10 (ugh, Dark Sector wasn’t worth the $9.99).

Did everyone just forget about books? Seriously, how did that get over-looked? They’re small, light-weight, portable, and require no power (when done properly AKA Kindle is an over-priced gimmick). They allow you the freedom of enjoying in sessions that fit your schedule. Want to read for 10 hours on a Sunday? No problem. Want to read for 10 minutes on the crapper? No problem! Costs range from the $10-20 for that hardcover you just have to preorder, to $5-10 for a paperback, or free if you ever heard of a goddamn LIBRARY.

With that out of the way, there’s very little substitution between the various formats. If I asked you for a good movie recommendation, you wouldn’t tell me to listen to Isis or to read The Omnivore’s Dilemma. No, you’d probably tell me to go watch Slumdog Millionaire. Unless you have shitty tastes in movies, then you’d tell me to go watch Transformers (if this fits you, please go away).

Some media avail themselves to repeat sessions more than others. Books can reveal the layers of complexity and commentary hidden with each subsequent reading. Movies can evoke an entirely different emotion after the major plot points are already known and you can focus on the subtleties. Music get better with each and every listen, can be played to relax, or event to appease a party with some background noise. Games… well…

That’s a whole ‘nother story. Caveat time: I work in the gaming industry (and I’m a big fucking geek) so my view is biased. Video gaming encompasses a selection of possibilities as wide as all the others combined. Simplistic puzzle and card games exist for the many casual and time-limited players. In-depth story-driven games — with professional story writers and directors — are numerous, can run 10 to 30 hours in length, and often have multiple methods of playing, with multiple storylines. And for the sake of our health, let’s not bring up MMORPGs like World of WarCraft. Games that have ten unique classes with different styles of play. Games that offer distinct sub-games such as “leveling a character”, “player vs player combat”, or “dungeon crawling with 24 other people”. All this for a low $15/m. Fuck, I said I wasn’t going to bring it up.

Instead of watching Star Wars from the perspective of the Jedi, you can play Star Wars from the perspective of the Jedi… and then again from the perspective of the Sith. All in the same $59.99 disc (that you got for $30 used, right?). Encompassing 20 hours of play each play through!

You can’t read an entire book in five minutes, but you can play a full puzzle game in five minutes. You can’t make a single movie or a book last months while still actively enjoying it, but you can easily find games that fit that criteria.

TL;DR: OMG Things are different! Buy a book and go read, but also play video games, watch movies, and go to concerts.

So I just got setup with DreamHost ($9.24 for a full year? yes please!) and I wanted to setup Irssi, an the awesome IRC client. Simple enough, right? Well, DH is cheap massive shared hosting so you don’t exactly get access to just ‘apt-get install irssi‘, you have to build it or copy a binary. And no, it’s not against their TOS, they just don’t “encourage” irc from a shared host — whatever that means.

I found a guide on DreamHost’s wiki, just copy a binary, chmod, and BAM. Yeah except the link to the binary is dead. I found a binary elsewhere, but of course that didn’t work because of some dependency crap. Then I found this guide that shows you how to build it yourself (on a side note, that guy’s site has some pretty loltastic religious ramblings). Very helpful, but no SSL:

irssi Building with SSL support ........ : no

I spent about an hour messing around with different build configurations and even tried installing OpenSSL so I’d have the libs locally, but either that will never work or I lack the necessary kung-fu.

Then it hit me, why not just grab the binary from the latest .deb (this is a Debian box). I headed off to Debian Packages Irssi page to grab the deb file. My box was running AMD64, so went to the AMD64 page and copied a link from a nearby server. On the box you can do (I’m assuming you’re working from ~/ for all the commands):

wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/i/irssi/irssi_0.8.10-2_amd64.deb
dpkg-deb --extract irssi_0.8.10-2_amd64.deb moo

Remember to replace the irssi.deb file with the latest, as this link may go out of date. This will download Irssi and extract the .deb to ~/moo/. Technically, you can run Irssi now, but Perl support will still be busted and it won’t be pretty. So let’s pretty it up first. Make a directory for binaries in your home dir:

mkdir bin
chmod 775 bin

Now, let’s move the Irssi binary there:

mv moo/usr/bin/irssi bin/
chmod 755 bin/irssi

Now, time to fix Perl:

mkdir -p .irssi/scripts/
mv moo/usr/lib/perl5/Irssi* .irssi/scripts/

The scripts directory is one of the places Irssi looks to for Perl libs (it works in my favor, I’m not going to ask WHY!). When trying to load a Perl script without these files you’ll get an error along the lines of “Can’t locate Irssi.pm in @INC”. This solves that.

Now, just export the ~/bin to your PATH variable so that you can type irssi anywhere, and not just in ~/bin.

export PATH=$PATH:~/bin

There’s only one thing left to do, cleanup!

rm -rf moo/
rm irssi_0.8.10-2_amd64.deb

Screen is already installed, so enjoy the goodness of screen and irssi!