Mon Feb 8 12:46:14 EST 2010
wherein bbot is old at heart
Cruising the bowels of the internet this morning, (ICHC, dooce, wedinator, you know, the sites I feel ashamed for even knowing that they exist.) when I came upon this gem.
Today, I realized the only reason I watched the SuperBowl is because Justin Bieber ███████ about it. I don't even like football. I had no idea what was going on the whole game. All I knew was who I was cheering for, because Justin Bieber ███████ who he was cheering for. FML
Ha ha, what a loser. Who's this Bieber guy?
Justin Drew Bieber (Born March 1, 1994) is a Canadian pop/R&B singer. He was discovered on YouTube by Scooter Braun, who later became his manager. Braun flew Bieber to Atlanta, Georgia, to consult with Usher and soon signed a record deal with Island Records, where he began his professional career.
N--no! That's not true! That's impossible!
1994! He's fifteen! A child! With a million ███████ followers!
So, inserting those censor blocks was fun.
(What censor blocks? Exactly.)
Xemacs is a great editor, and I love it to bits, but it's old, and does a lot of things in amusingly broken ways. This is mostly because it is so old that most of it was written before various APIs were nailed down, so it implemented many things by itself, then had to maintain them for backwards compatibility. This results in awful, hideous shit like their copy and paste implementation. Summary: It keeps its own clipboard, only it calls it a "ring buffer", and can have multiple entries, and is sometimes overwritten with what you just deleted because it also serves as the undo function, and it can never ever be fixed, because it would break a million other things.
Xemacs' unicode support is similarly fucked. (And unicode certainly doesn't need any help) The block character is U+2588, FULL BLOCK, and trying to input it natively was getting me lost in a maze of twisty little xmodmaps, all alike, and all inscrutable Unix bullshit that we supposedly left behind in the 90s.
So I punted, and just pasted it in, which made Xemacs colossally unhappy, and rendered not at all.
So I punted harder, opened the file in vi, and pasted it there, which worked perfectly, since all the encoding zaniness was handled by gnome-terminal, and vi just accepted the bytes.
Magic!
(Fun fact: Lucid went out of business before Bieber was even born!)