The Dark Balloon

A weblog by Hao Lian.
A terrible secret guarded by golems.
A note that thanks you for being born, all those years ago.

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The dialogue, though, is mediocre.

This, this xkcd cartoon of ours, is the best homage to Bill Watterson’s minimalistic drawing style I’ve ever seen.

[(2008 April 11, 2!) • • • • .]

Recent comments (Ethane, General announcement.) • (HAO, Jammies.) • (Tim, Jammies.) • (Prashanth, Wedding.) • (Hao, Hands.).

Recent posts (10/06, The myth and the man.) • (09/13, 2011 Sep 13.) • (08/21, Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.) • (08/21, Failing beautifully.) • (08/18, Shameless.).

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Bites from a larger cake, (

  • Wired magazine kisses and makes up with Wired News right after I post a comment on Slashdot about distinguishing between Wired News’s and Wired’s credibility.
  • How is Reddit better than Digg? Reddit users ask “Why is this on the front page” at an alarmingly sane frequency—close to never.
  • There’s something intrinsically hilarious in Calvin using the word Weltanschauung in his artist’s statement.
  • Things that sound cooler than they actually are: industrial rock. Thanks to Donkey Kong Country, the word industrial will always remind me of dimly lit, claustrophobic bridges.
  • Donkey Kong Country (one) had the most eclectic level designs. From jungles (first world) to Greco-Roman white stone architecture (second world) to pirate ships (end boss) to mines (above). As an SNES game, the level designs remain cool today.
  • Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain DVDs came out on Tuesday (2006-07-24).
  • MSBuild files are the poorly documented. The only documentation (i.e., list of useful Properties) are the two XML Schemas that come with .NET … whose only mention I found on the MSBuild MSDN weblog. And even that’s incomplete: cursory examination shows that properties like IntermediateOutputPath and OutDir are missing.
  • Whee; people are making Neil Gaiman’s Stardust into a film. Excellent book.
  • Fun things to do #128: Reading all the compiler warnings on MSDN.
  • Calvin and Hobbes
[(2006 August 5) • • • • • • .]