[coding] Unsatisfied

I have a large project at work that is a big deal.  My manager is on vacation, and the senior PM who was filling in for the PM who left the company is about to go on vacation.  The one tester on the project has a habit of staring into space blankly whenever I explain something.  It will shortly become the wild west here.

In addition, I am attempting to get fit.  First I ran until my legs hurt constantly, then I biked until my legs hurt constantly, and then I started lifting until everything hurt constantly.  I've been working with a personal trainer and trying to figure out just how hard I can push myself without breaking everything.

In addition, this side business is consuming my life.  It is so much more work that I ever want to do, but I have to do it because I committed and because I want to make money and quit my day job.  Oh and my business partner is super emotional and I have to learn people skills now and also some people we almost took on as partners tried to screw me out of the business.

In addition, I am single again and breathing requires ten times the amount of effort it used to.  In addition, I have less sleep now due to what I assume is mild loneliness.  And now I have to spent a shit ton of time stalking old romantic interests on facebook, destroying my ability to attract mates by giving myself a haircut, and going on dates with girls from PlentyOfFish and NOT OkCupid based on a profile I am too lazy to update because I don't want to bother updating until I work out for a few months and don't look skinny and also buy all new clothes or something.

Also I'm in a kickball league and actively trying to continue my transformation into an extrovert.  It is a challenge.  Oh and kicking a ball is fun too.

Also I am addicted to reading /r/fatpeoplestories on reddit.  This is closely related, and probably a large cause of, the second paragraph of this post.

Therefore, what is it do you think I am spending my time on?  What would be wisest?  Yeah.  3-SAT.  Fucking hell.  When I die my tombstone will probably read "dedicated most of his life in the service of an ultimately flawed belief concerning a mathematical thingy no one cares about."  Anyway.

I was in the shower a week or a few days ago, thinking about my 3-SAT algorithm, and wondering how I could find an instance of 3-SAT that breaks it.  Unfortunately, as if part of some kind of weird addiction, trying to think about how to break it ultimately leads to just thinking about how it has to work.


Then I thought:  why not just convince other people to break it for me?  The world is mostly full of two kinds of people:

1) people who have never heard of 3-SAT
2) people who think P != NP

Its the second group of people that roll their eyes everyone another dumbass tries to announce an algorithm that they think is polynomial time for all instances of 3-SAT.  I think those people can help me out.  I have dedicated hundreds of hours into becoming an expert in a single, crazy approach that makes no sense to other people.  I have basically zero knowledge of breaking 3-SAT algorithms.  However, all of these skeptics in category 2 could fill in that gap for me.  They just need to be inspired to want to help instead of just rolling their eyes and relegating me to the computer science equivalent of someone who claims bigfoot exists but can't prove it.

My first idea:  a contest.  Just throw up a website with an upload button, and promise $X to the first person who can break my algorithm.  Obviously we would need some limits on submission rates per IP, and on problem size and so on to save computing costs.  I can write up some clues (that they should obviously take with a grain of salt), such as saying its a clause-finding algorithm and probably weaker for lower c/v ratios, and make the algorithm print out a number from 0 to 2*(# variables) which indicates how much difficulty it had with an instance, allowing people to fine tune whatever generators they are using to make it more difficult.

Is this a stupid idea?  Probably.  Should I instead be spending my time reading the literature and actually learning how other people are trying to solve this?  Probably.  Am I actually going to do that?  Probably not.


Also, I still have the 1.001 billion 3-SAT instances on which I spent nearly $1000 to generate with Azure instances.

So...all I need is some kind of cheap storage, queue and workflow system that can handle billions of 3-SAT instances.  And this time around I'm not paying for 20 virtual machines to do the processing.

I do have one of those cheap-ass web hosting services, where they promise you "unlimited" shit and cancel your account if your usage doesn't follow their idea of what you should use it for.  I'm already paying for it for other reasons, so I might as well re-use it here.

Also, I need to test drive CloudMine to see if it will work for the skin care app.

Therefore, I sat around for a few hours dreaming this up:

Heterogeneous, cheap-ass 3-SAT storage system for billions of instances

Cleanup

0.  remove duplicates, 2-clauses, 1-clauses, and shuffle so there are no missing variables
1.  swap variables so highest count first (optional)
2.  swap literals so highest count first (optional)
3.  sort literals in clauses by variable # (optional)
4.  sort clauses (optional)


Sharding

Sharding is a fancy ass word for storing things in multiple databases when one database isn't large enough.  We shard on:
1.  v = number of variables
2.  c = number of clauses
3.  counts.  Counts is an descending-ordered list of the counts of each variable.  In addition to listing just the counts of each variable, we also list the higher of the counts of the positive and negative literals.
4.  guid hash.  if we still need more sharding after all that (i.e. if we have millions of instances with the same histogram of variable and literal counts) then just use a hash of the guid that we use to identify each instance.  This is lame though.

5.  Craziness:  if you sorted and ordered the clauses and literals well enough (see Cleanup), you could actually just create a single array of all the literal values for every instance and use that to construct a tree-based index where the nodes of the tree are the actual values in the list.  This wouldn't actually remove all duplicates (duplicate detection should be NP-Complete) however  it would eliminate most of the waste that comes from our poor representation of 3-SAT instances.

Instance GUID

probably something like:  

v.c.vcount0.vliteralcount0.vcount1.vliteralcount1....date.host.randomNumber

v is # variables, c is # clauses, then see #3 in previous section, and host is the host that generated it.


Android App

I should make an android app that generates 3-SAT instances, so that when I am bored standing in the lunch line I can generate an instance according to some parameters, upload it, and look at the results.  Normally I use Duolingo to learn spanish when I'm bored, but the cafeteria is too loud for that.

The Data Store

Obviously all of these tables probably need tombstone fields to avoid ever deleting a row.  Also obviously these tables may be in different databases.

instance_shards
This table only exists in one place

shard_version (increment when new sharding scheme)
v_min
c_min
varcount_min = null (string)
instance_id_hash = null

instances
Many tables exist.  Consult instance_shards to know which one.

instance_id (guid)
v
c
literal_counts
instance_content_location  (url pointing to the actual cnf file)
execution_results_location  (database table with execution details - null when not solved yet)
tag_id (tells you about where this instance came from)


execution_results
Many tables exist.  Might have sort of a 1:1 relationship with instances...not sure.

execution_id (auto increment)
instance_id
result = Unsat, Sat, Fail (0,1,2)
difficulty = 0...2v
details_location = null (reserved for future use)

Details might include algorithm version, host, how many jumps were fixed by filters, etc.


instance_contents
first version:  just a database table
second version:  maybe cloudmine
or s3
or a fileserver at my apartment
the main computer of the U.S.S. Enterprise
carrier pigeons

queue_table
Also, I'll need  queue table when I get around to implementing a portal for people to submit their attempts to break the algorithm.

[coding] Eclipse and Git

Most of the tutorials out there for Eclipse and Git seem to assume that all you want to do is create a brand new project in eclipse, and then add that to a brand new git repository.  I find it strange that the need to create new eclipse project in an existing git repository (i.e. in a new git repository that is set up to push/pull from a remote repository like, idk, github) doesn't appear after twenty minutes of googling/reading.  So here are my instructions.

Eclipse + Git

On server
1.  On server (say, a brand new ubuntu server machine that you just installed git on) create bare repository.


On local computer
2.  create new project in eclipse
3.  Team -> Share ...
3a.  create new git repo
4.  edit new git repo
4a.  r-click on remotes -> create remote
5.  configure for push first, so you can push to the remote and have something in it.


Yeah, sounds simple now.  Imagine being me and always forgetting how you did it every other time.

Note:  this is more for git beginners like me, who still use the local git repo more like a workspace, and behave as if the remote one is a centralized server, as if we were still using SVN.  In my defense, at least I'm not using some disgusting shit like perforce.


P.S. best Git/Eclipse resource I could find:  http://www.vogella.com/articles/EGit/article.html

My Attempt to Ruin the Movie Called The Purge

I'm not kidding.  This is full of spoilers.

Also, before I being, this movie gave me more reasons to consider something I had been mulling over:  horror and sci fi are very closely linked.  They usually have some kind of premise (what if all people in the world started killing each other?) but simply take it in different directions.  Sci fi movies explore the premise, while horror movies use it as a means to kill people.

So, lets begin.

The premise of The Purge is that somehow, an American government sanctions a 12 hour period where all crimes are allowed (except against top government officials).  There is no explanation about how such a situation could possibly have been allowed to occur, especially since such a situation could arguably said to violate human rights and cost america all of its allies, making it hard for us to obtain oil.  Anyway.  Part of the premise, so I was willing to give them that.

There is a limit against the types of weapons that may be used during the purge.  However law enforcement is suspended (and law enforcement officers are probably not "level 10" government officials, making them fair game) so there is no way for that rule to be enforced.

Despite all crimes being legal, no one appears interested in bank heists.  Only murder.  Specifically, risky murder because others are also out of commit murder.  In addition, it seems more likely that people would be more interested in finding women to gangrape violently.  Also, there was no mention of the hedonistic parties that would probably ensue.

Fire, police, and ambulance/hospital services are all suspended during this period.  It would seem an obvious course of action to make sure that every member of an upper class family is familiar with basic first aid and basic martial arts and basic firearms training.  The characters, a typical upper class family, have none of this.  They have a random collection of firearms.  They have no armor.

During the purge, everyone just hangs out in their homes, which all appears to have a simple security system with a single point of failure.  They don't leave the country.  Also, no corporations appear to have been created in order to offer people shelter, protected by private security forces that can be trusted because of their performance in past purges.

In fast, there doesn't appear to exist any private security.  Instead of locking rich houses down, why not have private security companies patrol areas?  Why not have privatized medical and fire personnel that are hired by communities?  Why aren't their lockdown hotels that allow people to rent a room for the night?  The movie tried to add this context where some people argue that the purge affects the poor disproportionately, but such hotels could be done on a budget.

When the characters fired guns, they somehow had the herculean strength to get off a large number of rounds without the kickback affecting their aim.  Of course this happens in almost every movie humankind has made, so I guess I can't really fault them for it.

The father is a salesman of home security systems.  He himself uses one of the systems that his company sells, and has sold the same system that he uses to all of his neighboors.  His neightboors, who are just as rich as him, resent him for selling them a security system.  I don't know what the fuck their problem could have been.  They could have bought from a different salesman, or from a different company, or not bought a security system.  Instead, they chose to buy one from him and be mad about it.  This ridiculous sub plot is the basis of the surprise ending.

The plot basically begins during the purge, because a small child knows the code to unlock the security system and unlocks it when the father isn't around to allow a stranger in the house.

In a side plot that really wasn't necessary, the daughters teenage boyfriend thought that murdering her father would be an acceptable way to ease some mild drama between the boyfriend and the dad.  He apparently did not think the girl would mind if he killed her father.

The man they allowed inside was being hunted by a gang of teenagers who threatend to breach the house's security system if the family does not deliver the stranger to them.  All of the characters assume the gang can be taken at their word, and that handing over the stranger will actually guarantee their safety.

Despite the life or death nature of the situation, both of the children do the opposite of their parents instructions at almost every opportunity.

At close to the climax of the movie, they are binding the stranger with duct tape, and they have only moments to hand him over to the teenagers.  This is the point when they sit down for a morality crisis tea party.  All of the characters other than the father say things like "look at what you're doing!  oh no so terrible."  Everyone presents a one-sided emotional plea that would have made perfect sense if the Dad was trying out a new hobby where he ties people up and kills them, but made no sense when the entire family was facing a dire ultimatum.

So, effectively, they first alienate the stranger by hunting him down, and THEN they don't even make use of him as a bargaining chip.  They could have increase the number of armed adults from 2 to 3, but instead he is just tied up when the teenage gang breaches the security and enters the house.

The family leaves all of the pictures on the walls so that the teenage gang know how many family members to hunt down.

The family fails to play loud music or anything else that might harm the gangs ability to find them.

Instead of taking the high ground to kill some of the teenagers, or forming real defensive positions, or creating distractions, the father and mother stand around with firearms.  The son briefly hides in the basement where he waves a flashlight around to make himself easy to find, and the daughter just goes missing off screen, so that she can have random scenes being attacked, or maybe be a brief deus ex machina, I don't know which.  Instead of letting the teenagers come to them, the father and mother wander around the house so that someone can get the drop on them.

With the exception of the father who is knifed while passing through a doorway that he somehow failed to clear while wielding a shotgun, all of the members of the family are repeatedly attacked and seconds away from death before an off screen character shoots the person about to make the kill.

When the teenage gang members start dying, the rest of the gang presses the attack, even though it is clear that the family is armed enough to put up a fight and present a serious threat.

Then, at the climax, neighboors--the ones who are still mad about choosing to buy security systems--show up.  They are not wearing body armor but suits and cocktail dresses.  They walk in the house and shoot the teenagers.  Despite all of the difficulty the father and mother had with combat, the neighboors don't have any trouble as they walk in and somehow always end up behind where the teenagers are facing.

A heart monitor watch is introduced early in the movie.  It appears to have been placed there for no other reason that to include the heart beeping trope that they usually do in hospitals.  As that scene played out, I couldn't think of anything else other than the fact that the script writers deliberately planted the plot device early in the movie, and actually went out of their way just to include something cliche that should have been avoided.

Everything I wrote and will write doesn't matter compared to this:  there is apparently no ill affects in society from the purges.  Magically, no one has PTSD, or lifelong emotional problems caused by memories of watching people kill, almost being killed, or being raped mercilessly.

The reason I hated it the most, though, was that as with all horror movies I couldn't identify with a single character.  No one behaved as I would.  No one.  Everyone was a giant pussy, a psycopath, or an idiot.

First of all, this happens once a year.  Leave the fucking country.  Can't leave the country?  Travel to an undiclosed location.  Can't travel?  Create a private hotel with a private security company that is paid to protect the guests.  Open an entire fucking chain.  When the super secure hotel is not being used during the purge, it can double as a normal hotel.

Hotel unavailable because of lame plot device?  Stay with father.  Safer in greater numbers.

Are police, emergency and other services going to be unavailable?  Guess what.  EVERYONE IN THE FAMILY IS TAKING EMT CLASSES.  Also, everyone in the family is learning Krav Maga.  Also, everyone in the family is going to the shooting range.

Also, in addittion to the family arsenal of weapons, we will have body armor.

In addition of the ineffective metal sheets that would be impractical to build into a houses architecture, we will have a panic room.  People under 18 who do not listen to their parents during life threatening situations will not have the codes to disarm the security system.  Also, the houses security system will not be a completely on or off situation.  It will be possible to only open the front door.

In addition, the upper floors of the house will have build in sniper nests, so that it is possible to fire out of the house.

In addition, all of the entrances to the house will have flame-based booby traps.

Again, BODY FUCKING ARMOR.  Also, flash bang grenades.  And caltrops.

Also, if I was faced with the ultimatum of handing over a stranger by an arbitrary deadline, or having my entire family slaughtered, the optimal strategy is to obtain the stranger and plan to hand him over at the last second before the deadline.  Also, explain to the stranger your desire to not kill him and solicit his help in brainstorming a better solution.  This approach is best, because both choices in the ultimatum involve the strangers death, and this strategy makes those two outcomes similar enough that there is little practical value in choosing one over the other.  The only different is, by cooperating with the family, the stranger has a better chance of survival.  While executing this plan, I would most likely attempt to devise an alternate solution.  We could:

0.  Make it clear to everyone that our survival depends on our actions in the next few hours, and that when we are down to the wire, we are not going to drop what we are doing to debate the wider moral implications.  In addition, I would explain that the arbitrary choices I make are the ones I've calculated for our best chance of survival, and in no way represent the right or moral choice in that situation.  We may be making the evil choice.  We may be making the righteous choice.  Too bad!  When a madman puts my family under a ridiculous and survival related ultimatum, the entire universe loses the privilege of expecting me to behave in a way that is consistent with any moral standard or belief system of any person or culture.  I do not mean that my survival supercedes such beliefs, only that I may choose to do the wrong thing.  Also we will not be stopping in the middle of anything to have weird out of place conversations about right and wrong.  Conversations like that only happen while making plans.

1.  Go to the second floor, or anywhere we can make a hole, and start sniping the teenagers to reduce their numbers and so that they can't walk around the yard freely.  Start with their leader.  Or,

2.  Open up just one entrance, so that the teenagers can enter but only on our terms, and we have made whatever preparations necessary involving furniture, weapons and booby traps in order to give ourselves the advantage.  Or,

3.  Wait until they enter and set the house on fire.  Or,

4.  Fight our way out of the house and make a run for it.  Distractions could be used to allow the children to escape.  Or the parents and stranger take off in different directions while allowing the children to hide in one place, in a corner, guns facing outward.  Presumably the gang would lose interest in the house once their quarry has left it.  Or,

5.  Create a ruse based on the premise that the stranger is in control of the situation inside the house.  Possibly have him threaten to kill himself if they enter.

In conclusion, the movie was phenominaly stupid because:

• the premise was phenominaly stupid
• the realization of the premise made no sense
• most killings were predictable
• the survival main characters was mostly effected by deus ex machina
• the characters' behavior made no sense
• all of the main characters make poor decisions during the entire movie

Redeeming  qualities

• most of the dialog did not make me cringe

Ironically, this movie is still less stupid than Sunshine.

Six to Midnight

meh

Fuck the NSA

I've known a number of...people...who do that thing where they think they don't do anything wrong, so its ok for law enforcement to spy on them and download their sex tapes off of their computer and do whatever they want with them.


This article presents the best counter-arguments to that line of thinking.

For the record, I have never owned, touches, seen, or been near, a lobster.  I have also never talked in an elevator in New York.  And etc.

The Spaghetti Monster

The coder grabbed his mountain dew and his lucky chair and prepared for battle.  He met his adversary on the plains of incompetence.  It loomed there on the mountain of technical debt, flaws piled together, grown for a millennia under the tender care of programmers who didn't understand the language they wrote, grown in to the most monstrous glob of spaghetti code.  It had no heart but triple pairs of mixed concerns.

"I've seen you here before, and I have ignored you.  Too long have you been allowed to live, sheltered by management's indifference.  Too many times have I written you off as someone else's aborted fetus of code.  Well," the coder chugged his soda and threw it on the ground, "not today."

The beast growled and charged down the slope.

The programmer raised his keyboard in the air and screamed "I will end you!"

And then he flipped off the people looking at him funny.

I don't know if this will actually work

I copied this from here, and haven't read it.   Thought I would do my part to waste the NSA's time.  More likely, this was a waste of my time.


North Korea attack drill domestic security deaths, law enforcement prevention dirty bomb hostage. Shots fired looting SWAT threat pipe bomb incident facility. First responder militia initiative. Nuclear hazmat chemical spill, North Korea nerve agent exposure, biological anthrax cloud - ebola recall avian flu, infection pandemic & toxic wave. Pork influenza plague symptoms quarantine tamiflu.

Infrastructure security CIKR AMTRAK collapse, computer infrastructure communications infrastructure telecommunications, WMATA metro; electric outage port dock bridge brown out cancelled, body scanner power lines grid. Gang drug violence drug cartel, Mexico heroin marijuana cocaine narcotics, San Diego, Ciudad Huarez, MS13 Mexican army methamphetamine, trafficking kidnap bust!

Guzman Arellano-Felix, Tucson US Consulate decapitated, narco banners shootout execution. Terrorism Al Qaeda Iraq Afghanistan Iran Pakistan attack, conventional weapon target weapons grade enriched ammonium nitrate, home grown nationalist recruitment - car bomb Hezbollah IRA IED AQAP Al-Shabaab plot, weapons cache Taliban Jihad fundamentalism.

Emergency hurricane, ice stranded mudslide erosion hail twister tornado, help disaster snow templor forest fire, typhoon avalanche sleet aid relief closure. Cyber security botnet DDOS denial of service malware virus trojan keylogger cyber command 2600 spammer fishing rootkit phreaking brute forcing mysql injection cyber terrorism. Worm conficker scammers, hacker China social media.

How to beat FTL on Easy

...even if you suck at it.

According to the internets, some people think easy mode is ridiculously easy.  It is not.  The number of times that I have died in this game is...incredible.  Apparently it is by design, because they styled it after Nethack, i.e. it is super difficult and you only win by playing hundreds of times.  Nethack was a little too much at once, and I never had the patience for walking around endlessly trying to find my way around yet another dead end.  FTL is fun though!

So, if you are wondering whether its possible to beat the game, it is, and I finally did it.  It seems that you only have a hope of winning if you die enough and read enough tips to start exploiting nuances of the game.  For example, apparently you can cloak after the enemy ship fires and that will make their shots miss. Logically, this makes no sense to me because its not like the cloak moves your ship out of the way, but, whatever, I'll take every little bit of help I can get.

I used the B type of the Stealth Cruiser, and this is what my ship had by the end.  I think the key, here, is that I got Ion Blast II super early in the game...those Ion weapons probably won it for me.

Weapons

• Glaive Beam
• Ion Blast II
• Ion Blast

Drones

• Defense I
• Hull Repair*

Augmentations

• Long Range Sensors
• Automated Reloader
• Adv. FTL Navigation

Systems

• Sheids 7
• Engines 5
• Oxygen 2
• Weapons MAX
• Drones 4
• Med 2
• Teleport MAX
• Cloak MAX
• Pilot 2
• Sensors MAX
• Doors 2
• Power MAX

Other

• Luck
• More Luck
• Play it 100 times
• Do not fight spiders

Real tips

• You must save up to buy shields as early as possible.
• Get extra scrap by boarding other ships

*however you should switch to Beam 1 before the last (3rd) battle with the rebel cruiser because it gets zoltan shields

Now, whats next? Shall we try normal difficulty?  Fuck no.  I'm going to play it on easy again.

Weight Games

I just measured myself...my weight is going up.  Up!  For the second week in a row.  However, I've dropped a belt notch in that time.

I would like to believe that the weight measurement is going up simply because I'm putting on muscle, however currently I only do four muscle building exercises:  squat, shoulder press, bicep curl, and pushups.  And my arms dont really look any bigger.  Nor my chest.  My legs might, but I haven't paid any attention to them because I've never heard a girl mention that she was attracted to/looked at legs.

So either I have to invest in some weirdass medical devices, to measure the body fat directly, OR simply try to ramp up exercise to the point where I lose so much fat the weight goes down despite weightlifting.  Oh, and another possibility is that I am failing at losing weight.

This is very sad.  I was having fun experimenting with different activities and seeing which ones lost the most weight.  So far, the winner is spending two days standing / walking around museums all day long with my Dad--that one dropped me 2.2 pounds.

So, I suppose that completely wild ass guesswork is back on the menu.

Note to self - good android UI resource

http://www.androidpatterns.com/

2 + 2 = Pensive

My business partner appears to operate based on emotion.  I've never had so much difficulty communicating with someone before.  Specifically, the more exact, or the more precise, I am with my statements, the less effective they are in communicating my thoughts.

This typically works out where I tell her something about topic A, and then when we are discussing topic B, she argues about my statement concerning topic A.  However, her argument isn't the actual statement I made about topic A, its about how she felt when I made the statement, and she is submitting, as supporting evidence, her feelings on my statement on topic A, e.g. "...yes but I felt blah blah blah when you said blah blah blah, and I feel like..."


So.

Learning experience.  I mean...definitely an experience.  I feel like if I can learn how to talk to this girl, that will open up an entire class of personalities that I will be able to work with in the future.





[Edit]
Also, this shit is why people become annoying food hippies.   I don't want to be a food hippie.  I don't want to only buy local, organic, vegetarian, vegan, paleo, keto shit that I pack into the back of a prius.  But how can I be expected to be a regular person who just grabs food off shelves when companies are bleaching cherries and soaking them in corn syrup?  That even renders ineffective that rule about only buying things your grandmother would recognize as food.  Bleh.

If You Can Dodge a Wrench

Actually, dodgeball was taken.  However I just signed up, alone, by myself, for kickball, which seems like the backup sport for horny singles.  Here's to meeting new people.

Next Moves

Sixteen days since we broke up, and I still feel sad.  This is fucking bullshit.  Its taking way too long to move on.

I have been thinking of ways to meet girls.  Have been putting off salsa because getting back into that is a lot of work, and even though I've met some girls that way, most of the time when you go dancing at Century, the most convenient location, it is just a sausage-filled waste of a night.

Other ideas:  sports.

Specifically, co-ed, team, drop in sports.  Unfortunately I haven't found anything that is all three yet.  But I will look.

[fiction] Summertime Sadness

I got my red dress on tonight
Dancing in the dark in the pale moonlight
Done my hair up real big beauty queen style
High heels off, I'm feeling alive

I think I'll miss you forever

 Like the stars miss the sun in the morning sky
Later's better than never
Even if you're gone I'm gonna drive

Nearly 80 people had been invited to the funeral.  Six hundred showed up uninvited.  Most of them were just curious if it was going to really happen.  The Road Ninja's uncontrollable apprentices held them off the sand.  They inspected Pudge's intivation and let her through.  She made her way down a path lit by Tiki torches, following the smell of beer and sweat to a throng of people in the dark.  Somewhere close by a bassist was putting a floor under everyone's conversation with slow tones wandering out of a portable speaker.  The sand made her heels impossible so Pudge took them off and held them with her fingertips.  Heels!  She was light enough to wear heels!  Christine would have been so proud--and that is the thought that made her start crying.

The invitations made no mention of location, but the most likely place was a poorly guarded secret by this point, and and orange spotlight gave it away anyway, painting a gaudy R and N onto the stratus clouds that lingered.

Tears streamed down her face as she pushed through the crowd searching for Biff.  She needed to hug him, or maybe she needed him to hug her.  All she knew was she needed a hug.  Even if it was from Snow.  Pudge imagined Christine's voice in her head berating Snow and it only made her cry harder.

The beach was quite dark.  Pudge didn't realize where she was until the flames appeared mere feet away from her.  It was Biff, with a flamethrower.  The flames shot out like angry dragons, lighting up Christine's beautiful, peaceful face before engulfing her with such heat that everyone stumbled back.  Pudge watched Biff's face over the fire.  His face was emotionless--completely blank--as if someone gave given him a drug that froze your facial muscles in place.  He stared ahead with dead eyes, looking very intently but seeing nothing.  To either side of him were Jason and Snow, flanking him like lieutenants.

Jason wondered if Biff was religious.  Did he imagine that Christine's spirit shined like one of the stars?  Or perhaps that she lingered in terrestrial bondage because her business was unfinished?  It was more likely neither, as her death had been too senseless, a sad matyrdom of stupidity alone.  Biff looked more like he didn't believe in anything at all.  Rather, everything he believed in was going up in smoke, literally, and blowing out to the ocean.

Snow shifted his eyes between Biff and the fire.  Biff wasn't moving.  Possibly not breathing.  Maybe he had actually died, unable to carry on like those redbone coonhounds in Where the Red Fern Grows.  Whatever the case, Snow was unhappy.  He had been promised a certain bill of goods.  Catharsis.  Closure.  A bittersweet memory.  But he felt none of those things.  The wound was still raw, the sand dirty, and the air cold.  And the crowd?  Lame and disrespectful.  This was no better than the travesty they could have instigated in a funeral parlor, worshipping Christine's poorly unmangled face in tuxes and black dresses and making love to "what she would have wanted."

Biff faded away from the fire.  The first few people he passed were close enough to know it was him, and touched his arm.  He evaded their platitudes until he was far enough from the light to be identified, and disappeared.

Somewhere on the other side of the crowd, Laurence Lee stood with flashlights aimed at his face, holding a drink aloft.   "Captain, Barcardi 151, Coke, Dr. Pepper, a splash of moutain dew and a black cherry.  By the power vested in me, by my own auto body shop, Wilson's Tire Garage, which is currently have a sale on free brake checks, I declare these to be the official ingredients of a new drink known as The Miller.  Who wants one?"  And people cheered and shit.

Snow followed Biff as best he could.  He filtered from group to group of wasted junkies, all their various body parts adorned with lines that were shared among strangers.  Girls lost their tops and the boys started keeping them warm any way they pleased.  Girls tripping on acid or shrooms were bent over doggy style, and some of those threw up from alcohol poisoning, but without stopping.  Friends watched, frowning while frenemies recorded for the internets.

They had certainly come a long way from a secret club where a five people drive a round a little, and then shared a joint.  A long way.

Snow very quickly located Biff when he heard the latter's engine roar to life and peel out into the street.  Snow hauled ass to the garage.  Despite a reputation to live up to, he didn't have a drop of rum in his system.  His instinct had instructed him to stay alert in case Biff tried to pull some kind of kung fu double tragedy.

Snow bounded up the stairs taking 4 at a time, as is the province with tall men who choose to be energetic.  The house lights were on in the garage, making everything unusually bright, practically blinding.  Snow squinted as he sprinted across the floor to his treasured purple roadster, Sir Pancake, and slid across the hood like a champ.  He popped inside and jammed the key into the ignition.

Click.

What?  Battery.  Gas.  Clutch.  Key.  Nothing.

"He did it to everyone," said Jason.

Snow peeked out of his car.

"He knew we would following."

"I am going to kick his white punk ass bitch...ass," stumbled Snow.  "Fucking...bitch.  I'll just hotwire something.  Do you have a--"

"I'll do ya better.  Got a sportbike in the ladies room," motioned Jason.

The reason there was a sportbike in the ladies room is actually very interesting.  You see normally--well, perhaps that detail isn't relevant to this story.

Snow found a helmet and launched onto the road with an accidental wheelie.  He rode like a beginner with a death wish, nearly clipping the pegs on every corner.  He traced a line through the hills, like a man running his finger over a girls curves.

Then Snow braked, hard, skidding to a stop with enough force to love tap the guardrail on the opposing side of the road.  Far away, in a place distant enough for the earth to barely stand out from the sea in the pale moonlight, two headlights accelerated left, towards the featureless black.  Snow shivered.

There was no holding back for the Boss 429's single occupant.  He redlined and shifted, redlined and shifted, again and again, until he was grinding into the top gear.  Snow could make out where the cliff was by the point where the headlights tilted and sailed down.  There was no sound at that distance, only the sight of the muscle car's headlights winking off for good.

"And so passes The Road Ninja," said Snow, to himself, one hand over his heart like he was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in grade school.  "Never was there a more...um....hmmm..." Snow looked around.  Then he paused for a while.  "And something about pancakes."

And then he went home.

Eventually, they all went home.