The comments problem I'd been having? The one that triggered a semi-painful blog rebuild? Turns out it was all due to a <MTCloseComments> lurking in the Category archive template.

I figure in order to keep the whole mess worthwhile, I'll just leave that in the old blog as a nice clean demarkation between where comments Go and where they Don't.

I'm so fucking awesome it hurts.

Having skimmed the plugin documentation a bit more, it looks like it keys off of the number of days displayed in the default index. The thing is, this variable is set in the main blog config, and can be freely ignored by template implementation.

Oops.

13:33 * xeno orders "pizza"
13:33 <@_Lasar> round flat fat discs?
13:34 <@solios> with MEAT
13:34 <@ejp> YAY MEAT
13:34 -!- _Lasar changed the topic of #loc to: What could possibly go wrong? <solios> with MEAT
13:34 <@_Lasar> I must meat.
13:34 <@_Lasar> Meat is the mind-healer.
13:35 <@xeno> it's Domino's pizza :(
13:35 <@_Lasar> Meat is the little-birth that brings total satisfaction
13:35 <@ejp> ...
13:35 <@_Lasar> I will face my meat.
13:35 <@solios> sllhg
13:35 <@_Lasar> I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
13:35 <@_Lasar> And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
13:35 <@_Lasar> Where the meat has gone there will be nothing.
13:35 <@_Lasar> Only I will remain.
13:35 * xeno stares at _Lasar
13:36 <@solios> _Lasar++
13:36 <@_Lasar> The Litany of Meat.
13:36 <@xeno> asdfmasd
13:36 <@_Lasar> MEAT MUST FLOW

From The Chicagoist (found by xeno on io9):

A (now ex-) guard at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh has been charged with slashing a painting on loan to the museum from our very own Art Institute. Art Institute restorers are trying to see if the painting is salvageable, but police say it's damaged beyond repair. Neither museum will comment on how much the painting is worth, but reports say Vija Celmins's "Night Sky #2" is worth around $1.2 million. Well, it was.

A few points:

1. There is no "Carnegie Museum." There are four Carnegie Museums, plural. The Science Center, the Warhol, the Museum of Natural History (MNH), and the Museum of Art (MOA). The painting is (was) on display at the 55th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, not the "Carnegie Museum." MNH and MOA share one street address (4400 Forbes Avenue), so it's an easy mistake to make if you haven't spent any time in Pittsburgh. Most people haven't.

2. The guard, Timur Serebrykov, is, according to a source who's worked for both MOA and MNH, Russian. The artist is Latvian. This probably has far more to do with the defacing than the content itself.

3. This isn't the only thing that's been defaced, broken, or destroyed on the floor of 4400 Forbes over the past few months. It just happens to be the most expensive, and the most high profile.

Most writers I know, all over the world, do the best they can. They must. They have no choice in the matter. All artists are specialized cells in a single, huge organism, mankind. Those cells have to behave as they do, just as the cells in our hearts or our fingertips have to behave as they do.

We here are some of those specialized cells. Our purpose is to make mankind aware of itself, in all its complexity, and to dream its dreams. We have no choice in the matter.

And there is more to our situation than that. In privacy here, I think we can acknowledge to one another that we don't really write what we write. We don't write the best of what we write, at any rate. The best of our stuff draws information and energy and wholeness from outside ourselves. Sculptors feel this more strongly than we do, incidentally. Every sculptor I ever knew felt that some spook had taken possession of his hands.

Where do these external signals come from? I think they come from all the other specialized cells in the organism. Those other cells contribute to us energy and little bits of information, in order that we may increase the organism's awareness of itself - and dream its dreams.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Address to P.E.N. Conference in Stockholm, 1973
(published in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons)

16:35 <@xeno> we're going to the snake hunt saturday o_o
16:35 <@solios> o_o
16:35 <@xeno> MORRIS, BITCHES.
16:35 <@solios> \m/
16:35 <@xeno> i've never been to it
16:35 <@xeno> weird, that.
16:36 <@xeno> and it was the what brought my dad to the area, which is Even Weirder
16:36 <@solios> O_o
16:36 <@solios> I've been a few times.
16:36 <@solios> not the actual hunt but the fairthing.
16:36 <@solios> it's their Blockhouse Festival.
16:36 <@xeno> his dad knew a guy that went to it every year, and one time they came up to it, and soon the whole family was coming up, and then pap found the place there in liberty and bought it
16:36 <@xeno> in 69
16:37 <@solios> weird.

My sister called me about a half an hour ago, give or take. Maybe more. She's finished whatever the Navy calls MOS training down in Mississippi, and is now an E4. She will be managing stores for VFA-213, aka The Blacklions, an F/A-18 squadron out of NAS Oceana in Virginia. Before they were given F-18s, VFA-213 flew the F-14. Before that, the F-4 Phantom. At this moment she's passing through Pittsburgh en route to San Diego for something or other. I didn't catch it.

In a couple of months, VFA-213 - Jen included - will be deploying to the Persian Gulf aboard CVN-71, the Theodore Roosevelt.

She's excited.

Jen returns from her something-or-other in San Diego on the 18th, a Wednesday. She'll be in Pittsburgh for a couple of days, then back home for a couple of days, then back to the USN for considerably longer. She'll be here for my 29th birthday, a Thursday. She says this is "perfect!" and I agree. A band in the courtyard outside is playing jazz and things seem to be going pretty well for the both of us.

I'm excited.

Awhile back, I accidentally managed to totally blow up the ability to leave comments on the site after an entry's been up for a few days. I'm in the process of fixing this the easy way - by creating a new blog, the same as the old blog. Rather than import all of the old entries, I'm currently in the process of crosswiring everything so it Works and Looks The Same.

When I'm done, the site should look exactly as it did a few minutes ago. In theory.

19:05 : And in practice. Though my nice clean blog is now a horrific mess, and will continue to be one until I generate enough entries to scrub the busted blog entries off of the front page. The change in functionality won't be immediately obvious, and there's still a lot more cleanup work to do in order to effectively scrub out the chance of any future "errors" (read : trying to post a comment on old entries), but all things considered this is one web bug that's gone down easily.

So. Comments will work indefinitely on all new entries. A bit more maintenance for me, but hopefully it'll turn out to be worth it. Fusing old/new noise blogs together was a heck of a lot easier than gluing Chapters 0 and 1 of The Dualist together.