C&C: Home

Welcome to my personal website, a grab-bag of content without a preplanned theme. I chose "creative and critical" to reflect the content-production elements which are creatively coming up with ideas and critically winnowing and honing those ideas. In hindsight, the humility shown by my friend the Aspiring Animist would have been appropriate: more apt, though overlong, would have been aspiringtobecreativeandcritical.net. I hope that its contents are anyway of some use, interest, or value. They are listed in full below.

Commercial software

MyConversations: a conversation plugin for MyBB, available for purchase at that link.
MyGallery: a responsive image gallery for MyBB. Contact me to purchase.

Free software, web apps, and functions (non-MyBB)

ProofTools, a freely downloadable, cross-platform software tool for automatically and graphically validating logical proofs using the method of semantic tableaux aka proof trees. ProofTools is documented in its manual and background and technical addendum pages. Also available is a feature comparison of free proof tree software.
FUPS: Forum user-post scraper, a web app to scrape the posts of a specified user or in a specified set of forums from a specified phpBB or XenForo board. I have released the FUPS source code on GitHub under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3 or later.
Sudso: a Sudoku solver written in Javascript and HTML.
A Target word game analysis web app, which performs some basic validation and comparison of solutions to the word game commonly found in newspapers in which the aim is to find from nine letters as many words of four letters or more as possible which include the middle letter. Also provided are interfaces to look up a word and to find all words for a given puzzle.
The Treeview skin for MediaWiki, which adds a treeview component to MediaWiki-powered wikis for hierarchical browsing of a wiki's content. The skin is documented in a README, in its Help:Treeview skin, Help:Treeview skin:Syntax and Help:Treeview skin:Treeview articles, and in a colour-changing how-to.
A web app inspired by episode #903 of the web comic xkcd, to check how many links it takes to reach the Philosophy article on Wikipedia from any arbitrary article. The app features about, statistics and changelog pages.
The TrustedLinks and UntrustedLinksLogger MediaWiki extensions, tools to block spam links on your wiki by blocking users without the 'postlink' right from editing URLs into pages (note that a more convenient solution might be the ConfirmEdit extension by Brion Vibber and others - it shows a CAPTCHA in the same situation).
repl_str() and repl_wcs(), Standard-compatible string and wide string replacement functions for the C programming language.
strposm(), a strpos() variant (drop-in replacement) for PHP that can also take an array of needles. Its advantages over similar existing functions are that it returns the position of the earliest occurrence of any of the needles, not just the first match that it finds, and that it optionally returns the matching needle, so you know which one matched.

Free MyBB plugins (hosted elsewhere)

I either created or help to maintain these as a member of the unofficial MyBB Group, for the MyBB forum software version 1.8.x.

Active Threads, which provides a listing of the threads that were active (posted to at least once) during a given period. I am the original and so far sole author of this plugin (aside from a bug fix by Crazycat), which was added to the MyBB Extend collection on 2020-02-07. Resources:
Link Tools, which extracts the links (URLs) in posts made to a MyBB board, and then provides four new features: link previews, seamless link searching in full text search mode, a duplicate link warner (when starting a new thread), link limiting, link posting moderation, and anti-link spam protection. This plugin was added to the MyBB Extend collection on 2020-11-10. As for Active Threads, I am the original and so far sole author of this plugin. Resources:
Image Auto-Resizer, which auto-resizes uploaded images so that they do not exceed a stipulated maximum width and height (defaulting to 900 pixels for both). I am its original author, inspired by azalea4va's code in the Resize image attachments thread, and encouraged by Eldenroot. This plugin was added to the MyBB Extend collection on 2020-12-21. Resources:
Export Posts, a tool for members to download their posts, optionally including attachments. I am this plugin's original and so far sole author. It was added to the MyBB Extend collection on 2021-01-07. Resources:
Bump Absorber, which inhibits thread bumps (by new posts) in stipulated forums other than by the thread author - original poster (OP) - after a stipulated bump interval has elapsed since the last bump. I am this plugin's original and so far sole author. It was added to the MyBB Extend collection on 2022-02-07. This plugin was written for a fee for andrewjs18, who requested that it then be open-sourced. Resources:
OP Can Close Thread, which allows the authors of threads to close and reopen their own threads in forums stipulated in the plugin's ACP settings if they are in an authorised usergroup. I am this plugin's original and so far sole author. It was added to the MyBB Extend collection on 2022-02-08. This plugin was split out of the Bump Absorber plugin given its distinct functionality. Resources:
Download Threads, a tool to download all posts from a thread in a choice of formats. I wrote this plugin in collaboration with dragonexpert. It was added to the MyBB Extend collection on 2021-03-03. Resources:
- GitHub repository.
- MyBB Community Forums thread.
Thank You/Like System, which provides exactly the functionality you'd expect of a plugin with that name. I only help to maintain this plugin: it was already well-developed by others by the time I began helping out. Resources:

Another MyBB-related project

MyBBAuth, a MediaWiki extension, allows members of a MyBB forum to log in to MediaWiki with their MyBB credentials. MyBBAuth draws major inspiration from, and in a sense is an update for newer versions of MediaWiki to, MyBB-Mediawiki-Bridge. It can be discussed in its dedicated thread on the MyBB Community Forums.

A few original poems

A morsel of original photography

Some photo favourites, mostly around Queenstown, Tasmania, where I once lived, shot between 2011 and 2012. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

A philosophical series

A series on clear semantic modelling, ontology, idealism, and dualism introduces the series and explains how it scratches an intellectual itch I had.
An introduction to clear semantic modelling introduces my notion of "clear semantic models" as models of meaning which make use of syntactical elements - words or other symbols - in order to clearly express a key concept via a coherent set of component concepts and the relationships between them, and provides a set of criteria by which to assess whether a semantic model is a clear one.
A mostly grounded clear semantic model of conscious reality develops my own model, which can be summarised thusly: consciousness as an actualised capacity for volitional experience illuminates reality through subjective portals.
Assessment of a mostly grounded semantic model of conscious reality for conformance with the criteria for clarity assesses my model as described.
Contextualising common ontologies from the perspective of a grounded consciousness-based semantic model concludes that physicalism incoherently denies either the light of consciousness or the direction of its shine; micro-pansychism theorises unparsimoniously that each element of matter is a portal; idealism and cosmopsychism theorise that all energy has mentality and, potentially, reflectivity; and dualism theorises that only the mind has mentality.
An analysis of Bernardo Kastrup's semantic model of idealism identifies an unresolved paradox in Bernardo's model of idealism.
The argument against idealism from conflicting perspectives is based on the unresolved paradox identified in the previous page. The argument runs that idealism entails a contradiction in that the subject of experience which is the universal mind experiences from multiple conflicting perspectives simultaneously.
Idealism as a network of minds presents an idealistic model in which a Source Mind acts as "server" for our "client" minds.
A theoretical dualistic model of conscious reality presents a model which is dualistic in the three senses of ontological, theistic, and moral, and which better accounts for the contingent facts than all previous models considered.
The failed argument from idealistic misidentification by differentiability presents my failed first attempt at a rigorous argument against idealism.
The failed argument from idealistic misidentification by affect and intentionality presents my failed second attempt at a rigorous argument against idealism.

Another site of mine

withrespect.net.au, my in-progress attempt to offer a vision of a respectful world. Right now, the expression of the vision is fairly limited.

A couple of "related" online sources

Mark Boulle is a talented indie musician who happens to be my cousin. He makes great music - euphonic, laid-back, chilled, and down to earth. My favourite songs of his all have an emotional quality in common that's hard to capture in words, but "poignant" comes close for most of them. Here they are in order:
1. Hey You from Munkle Might (2022): hauntingly bittersweet despite or perhaps in virtue of its simplicity, this song draws me in and is my favourite. Its lyrics complement its melody perfectly.
2. Running Away from Munkle Might (2022): same album; same comments as above. A very close second.
3. Green Vagabond from Japanese Eggs (2021): simple and gentle like the previous two; bittersweet, but not to the same degree, this song has an almost implacable rhythm that's very pleasing to listen to.
4. Backseat (a reworked and renamed version of Humbadum's title track) from Swell (2019): as above.
5. Static from Shoot to Kill (2007): its dynamism belies its title, yet, like the four above, its melody and lyrics are emotionally moving - not quite bittersweet, but something adjacent. I would probably have ranked it higher when I first heard it, but have worn it out through listening.
6. Suga Mama from Take from the Rich (2010): a sweet and gentle song.
7. Tambourine Stare from Music Will Make You Go Insane (2008): as above.
8. High Kite from Gofer Land (2012): gentle and somewhat bittersweet with moody jabs of electric guitar.
9. Head Hurts from Humbadum The Lost Album (2015): as above but an organ replaces the electric guitar.
My aunt Rhae Hooper is a visual artist who has painted some great moments in rugby in some quite varied styles, among other works.