You Disgust Me

NaNoWrimo 2008

2008-10-31T17:47:00.002Z

And only aa few hours till NaNoWrimo officially begins here in the UK. And we still haven't properly organsied the kickoff party tommorow. I fail as an ML? Mebbe not.

I should go buy some more energy drinks, really. Gonna be a long night.

oh dear

2008-06-05T10:29:00.002Z

I have a tight pain in my chest. I am experiencing involuntary muscle spasms. My head hurts. Concentration is all over the place. I want to just lie on the floor and cry. Stress stress stress. horrible horrible feeling ARGH I CAN'T COPE NO! HELP! This sucks urgh blathering blathering have to keep typing have to keep trying to take my mind off it this isn't good I'm a nervous wreck wibble someone please help! For the love of all that is good, HELP ME!

Screnzy!

2008-04-02T16:28:00.002Z

So Script Frenzy then.

Thus far I have about seven pages written. Which means I'm right on target. I've also discovered I have but a fortnight to get a lot of college work done. Time management is of great importance here and I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to be doing.

I do not want to see a repeat of last year. Last year was a bit of an embarrassment for me.

A little slice of reality

2008-03-22T14:49:00.003Z

One of the most basic concepts in Buddhism is that nothing lasts forever. In fact everything changes: whether arguing the certainty of change lasts forever is valid I don't know. I've never asked, and personally I'm not a Buddhist. I like some of the more entertainingly mind-boggling concepts, but Buddhism is not for me.

So anyway, nothing lasts forever. There's a Japanese saying, 一期一会 (Ichi go ichi e), meaning roughly "one place one meeting". It means that a particularly moment will not be repeated. You can do the same activity a thousand times, but each time will not be the same.

So what am I talking about here? Improvisational music, actually. An improvisational piece will last only as long as it's played, and then it's gone. It won't be heard ever again, unless someone recorded it. Sure you can say the same about any music: the live performance is going to be subtly different each time after all, but improvisational surely more so than others. I've been writing an improvisational piece lately. Aside from a few bars it's almost entirely off the cuff, and as a result can be entirely different two different performances. This is nothing new, it's been done many times before. But a thought occurred to me, yaknow? Nothing lasts forever. An entirely improvised piece is in a very real way an embodiment of this philosophy. It's a little slice of reality delivered aurally. And there's something really really cool about that.

Tag'd! For great justice!

2008-03-16T00:20:00.000Z

So believe it or not, I’m not such a cynical bastard as I sometimes make out, and I actually like this idea.

Once you have been tagged, you have to write a blog with 10 weird random things, facts, habits or goals about yourself. At the end, choose 10 people to be tagged, listing their names and why you chose them. Don’t forget to leave a comment "you’re tagged" and to read your blog. You can’t tag the person who tagged you. Since you can’t tag me back let me know when you have posted your blog so I can see your answers.

1. When I was in P7 I wrote an article for the school newspaper about threatened "striking" by pupils over a ban on football, and how ridiculous it all was. My peers loved it, the headmistress shouted at me and instigated a rule that she got to read everything before we went to print. That was the last article I wrote for the paper. The "angry rant" style of that article would later go on to form the basis of most of my columns.

2. I’m a keen mahjong player. I prefer classic shanghai rules, altho I’m not averse to hong-kong style.

3. The reason I tend to grow my fringe as long as I can get away with? I have two scars on my forehead: one from when I had chicken pox and one from when I split my head open, and I’m quite self-concious about them.

4. I have very strange thumbs: they can bend backwards slightly further than is normal. It’s not like "double-jointedness" or anything, but I’ve had folk think they’re disocated before.

5. I can’t stand team sports, both watching and taking part in. I prefer solo stuff if it’s competitive.

6. I first started listening to metal cos all the folk at school did. I asked my dad, and he introduced me to The Who. Turns out the other folk where more into grunge and nu-metal, which I decided pretty quickly that I cna’t stand. oops.

7. One of the reasons I tend to lose in fights is I’m scared of hurting folk: while I don’t mind bleeding personally, seeing other people bleed makes me feel ill. And things been broken etc make me feel faint.

8. For the last 60 days I have been reading a few bible chapters per day. Currently I’m up to Numbers 6,7/psalms 26,27/Acts 15.

9. My main ambition in life is to do something that’ll be remembered. I can’t stand the idea of being forgotten.

10. Despite being both a bassist and a metal fan, I can’t listen to dance music, which shares the same basic rhythm structure. As in literally can’t listen to - it makes me physically ill to the point that I vomit if I’m exposed to it for long enough.

Now who am I going to tag?

1. Lauren - because I know Skylar already tagged her, and she probably won’t respond either way.
2. Tarinaky - for being stupid enough to add me as a friend today.
3. Laurence - becasue should he decide to respond, it’ll probably be hilarious.
4. Tornis - For being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
5. Yams - Becasue I don’t think she even has a blog. I just want to annoy her!
6. Kaoru - for similar reasons.
7. Ash - Becasue I’m grasping at sticks now
8. Sarah - because I can.
9. Jim - because I lack the sense not to?
10. Aksel - because he’s annoying me right now

An Interesting new development

2007-12-05T20:06:00.000Z

Ok, so I had this crazy idea. I'mma go read one of Jesus's parables a day, and then spending an hour sitting thinking about it and what it actually says. Which is fair enough.

Then I decided I'm gonna take it a step further. Now lately I've been sending out quite a few emails to various friends with bible commentary and things, and I thought to myself, "why not try blogging it? Could be interesting."
So that's just what I'm going to do. Oh dear. So anyway, set up a new blog, where I'll be posting said daily musings. Or hopefully daily anyway, assuming real life doesn't cause me to miss the odd day. Aparently there are a total of 71 parables in the gospels, but some of those are repeats. The catholic encylopedia reckons 33 total, I've seen a list of 57
somewhere, aanother with 40, aparently if "proverbial phrases" are included it can reach up to 60. So I'll have to work out exactly how to handle this, write up a list etc, but I'm estimating it'll take maybe 2 months to go through? Should be fun.

Nanowrimo

2007-11-01T00:01:00.000Z

So like, midnight. Which means that as it's November 1st I get to start on my nano novel for this year. Crap crap crap! Need to get a few thousand words in to make up for the three days I'mma miss at the end of the week.

So I'm picking up with Benny again this year. Amongst other characters. Gonna do a sorta encyclopedia of the Woodsman setting through the eyes of various different characters. Should be either pretty good or a pile of rubbish ready to be chucked out, methinks...

Well this is inconvenient

2007-06-11T10:37:00.001Z

Ever have one of those weeks you have ansolutely no memory of whatsoever, and're only vaguely aware that you manged to do an unhealthy amount of work?

Yeah. So from what I recall, I spent the last week finishing off a huge amount of colelge work I was seriously behind on, culminating in my staying up until 2AM on tuesday, failing to actually fall asleep for more than an hour before i had to get up at 6, and then, for various reasons,
being totally unable to catch up on lost sleep. At all. Carn't be healthy. I also had a scare partway through the week where I thought I might be at risk of a heart attack, but it turns out it was jsut stress.
Oh, and my script's been untouched since last sunday as a result. Not cool.
So anyway, if anyone happens to reads this and knows of something important i've forgotten, tell me. ASAP.

Talking of scripts, I believe I have wandered into one of the greatest cases of word padding yet. Y'know when y'suddenly decide that jokes are good? And that turning your script into an excuse for lots of jokes is ewasier than actually having a plot? Yeah?
Exactly. Prison jokes and airport jokes are in, actually bothering to work out where the whole thing's going is out. Even been coming up with my opwn variants on some classic sketches in the hope that it works. Fan-bloody-tastic.
Worst bit is, some of them are actually quite funny. And most of those are the bits I came up with myself, which is just wrong on so many levels.

The plus side is, I had a dnetist appointment today to get some fillings put in. And it was a bit nasty. Horrible experience in fact: came quite close to having a panic attack a few times. Nasty, naty. Now that's great inspiration for a scene...

Plotting

2007-05-15T15:05:00.000Z

In theory if I do enough planning, I won't suffer writers block in the middle of my screenplay.

So, so far I've worked out two characters, who'll form the main focus of the story. James Maddox is the leader of a religeous cult who believes that the events of the book of Revalation have come to pass, and leads his followers on a pilgrimage to Meggido. That's tel-meggido, a settlement in israel near to har-meggido. And sometimes I wonder why I could never grasp hebrew...
Aaaanywho. T'other character's Ayman Farrakhan, a somewhat inept terrorist who really just wants to be accepted by his peers. This is one of the screenplays that'll never be picked up by a studio. (¬_¬)

What's really tricky is that, if there's a clear protagonist at theis point it's Ayman. Trying to convicne the audience to support a bastard who wants to kill lots of people isn't exactly easy. So I'm thinking I'll need to come up with some more characters to sort that out. Not sure exactly how it's working as of yet.

I reckon if I can work out what's gonna happen this week, get a treatment written by next week, hmms. COuld work, i guess.

Stephen gets his site stolen by the Iranians

2007-05-12T16:07:00.000Z

So I log on to winterrevolution this morning, and get a 403 error. That's "you do not have permission to view this site", for those folk who aren't big on netspeak. My immediate reaction is "good grief, some idiot's gone and fiddeld with something", so I log in to the ftp only to be told the NTFS definitions are out of date. And a quick check at entfirms tells me my ftp's empty. At this point I'm beggining to wonder.

So, I go to a quick check with some of my resources and find out how pinging works: every country that pings gets a 403 with one exception: Tehran.
Oh hells yes. The nutters who sent me death-threats have finally managed something. I'm now the proud owner of some sorta jihad site or somethign! Yay!

...or not. Someone from the US was ncie enough to let me know she gets not a 403 error, but "site down for maintenance, will be back at 11:03 EST". Which is kinda odd to say the least. So either it'll beback to normal soon, or I'll find out what the Iranians have done to it.

Two years I've been with netfirms, and this is the first time they've put me down for maintenance and given me a 403.

Script Frenzy

2007-05-11T10:11:00.000Z

So, I decided to enter Script Frenzy this year. I mean, I was planning on doing so anyway pretty much from when I heard about it. Which was some vague mention of a possibility somehwere iirc...

Anywho. by my reckoning writing a screenplay should make two weeks tops, which gives me an extra two weeks oif planning if i need them, although that';s liekly to end in disaster if I get too overconfident about my writing ability. Goodness knows I need a plan of the whole outline to get it to work properly.

Which is where the problem comes in - I honestly haven't a clue what I'm gonna do. So many ideas floating around, most of which are completely stupid. Is it a sci-fi? Set in mdoern times? Fantasy? Historic?

Well I have a vague idea it'll be set in the UK. And be something of a surreal dark comedy. And possibly be ridiculosuly offensive to folk who don't see the funny side of nutters who blow themselves up in the name of their god.

So, yah. Islamists will feature. Be trying to avoid being overly-political about it, mind. Just seems that having terrorists as the target for jokes oculd be interesting. Other than that, I don't really know.

Im part of group TPF this year, just like with NaNoWriMo
although this time there's jsut three of us. Myself, yamPuff and vicious. And Yams has exams and stuff the first two weeks, so shes in a worse position than I am. Hmms. We've set a rule that everyone has to use the phrases "SPARTA!" and "Tonight we dine in hell!" in their scripts, and on top of that I've set the optional challenge of using "I'm Spartacus" at some point, so I'm not sure how that'll work out. Have to fit them in somewhere, and try to keep them not standing out as obviosu references. Not easy.

This is gonna be fun.

Walking up a giant uterus, smashing demon sperm with a 2 by 4

2007-02-08T20:18:00.000Z

I said I wouldn't go waste this blog dragging up past articles, but I figure seeing as I haven't updated for a while yet I'm currently in no mood to come up with something original (long story. Suffice to say I really aint up to much at present), here's one from nintendowned.com which I personally think is worth reprinting. Enjoy.

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The following was published to Nintendowned.com in April 2006, in the "Retrospective" column.

So I'm sitting here consuming vast quantities of caffiene in an attempt to reache the state of mental breakdown required to actually complete a coin-op, when it suddenly hits me. I'm sitting here playing retro games, and I'm wasting so much potential. I have hundreds of games, good and bad, fun and boring, worth writing about and worthy of throwing in the bin. And some of them, not all, but some, are begginers of series. So read on, dear reader, as I tell you of some of the wonders you may have missed. The great games that will forever have a place in the hearts of those of us who enjoyed them at the time. Whether you're too young to have played them or just didn't come across them for whatever reason, these games are ones you should hunt down. Now! And if you played them at the time, maybe you'll enjoy revisting them from an interesting perspective.

Now, I don't want to try preaching here. I'm not gonna explain to you that Street Fighter II was one of the most influencial games of it's era and all that junk, oh no. Street Fighter II was and still is a bloody amazing game, plain and simple. But then, I'm not going to talk about Street Fighter II today, oh no. To start with, we're going to the amusement arcade. The box we're looking for? A little thing called splatterhouse.

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I'm sure most of you have played at least one survival horror game. Resident evil most likely, all though of course there are many others. Alone in the dark, say. Whatever. The fact is that they all owe their roots to one game. Splatterhouse. Picture the scene. A mansion, owned by one Dr West, a parapsychologist who mysteriously vanished. Two students, Rick and Jennifer, take shelter in the mansion during a storm. Unfortunately, Jennifer is captured and Rick murdered. He is brought to life through the power of the "terror mask" and thus our game begins. Simple side-scrolling action as Rick fights his way through the mansion, killing demons with his fists or with weapons. Violent weapons. In fact, it was the first arcade game to be given a mature rating. Possibly something to do with, I kid you not, the level in which Rick walks down a giant uterus, smashing demonic sperm with a 2 by 4. Splatterhouse spawned three sequels, Wanpaku grafiti for the famicom was a Japan-only release and featured super-distorted characters. Splatterhouse 2 and 3 were improvements on the first game, keeping the difficulty level maxed whilst continuing the story. Splatterhouse3 was also notable for its multiple endings. For each level! Basically, you had to complete each level within a time limit to avoid the death of Jennifer, or Rick and Jennifers son, or what have you. And obviosuly depending how the game went, there were multiple endings. Smoothly done.

Splatterhouse: violent, impossibly difficult horror fun with a character who looks like Jason Voorhees.

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Of course, if I'm going to discuss splatterhouse then I should start following a theme. Splatterhouse: side-scrolling beat 'em up. Streets of Rage: also a side-scrolling beat 'em up. Also known as Bare Knuckle, the SOR trilogy for the sega genesis featured one or two players fighting through a number of levels against hordes of punks in order to reach "mr X" and kill him. Sounds simple, but of course it's rather difficult. Many was the time I reached the end, only to be cut off at the last hurdle by an inability to win against the man with the machinegun. We're talking grade A fun here, people. Like Goldenaxe. A fantasy battle in a similar vein, goldenaxe featured three skimpily-clad warriors with swords, axes and magic fighting against the undead and other skimpily-clad folk to defeat Death Ader and reclaim the goldenaxe. Although of course it wasn't that simple. Riding on dragons was commonplace. Fighting was simple, yet the sheer number of enemies on screen at a time made the whole thing difficult, particularly for those of us who onserved out magic for jsut the right moment. A whole world of pain was visited upon your little man during those games. And you enjoyed it.

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Back to more familiar territory now, as we move onto a more conventional game, one which has survived over the years. Or rather, game type.

Tachibana Ukyo is, to many people, the epitome of "cool". Those of us who understand how to get the best out of him will tell that with Ukyo, it's not about winning but about looking good. It's known as the Ukyo philosophy. There's also a good chance you haven't heard of him. Personally, I was first introduced to him on the ferry between Brodick and Ardrossan. For those of you who don't know where that is, it's off on the North coast of Scotland, Brodick being the only main port on a small island called Arran. That arcade box was removed years ago. Doesn't mean I don't remember it though. The game in question? Samurai Shodown. I used to be very very good at that game. Still am. It's a beat-em-up very much in the style of Street Fighter, the main difference being that the characters have weapons. Swords for the most part. It also had death animations including chopping in half and extreme blood loss. Something removed from the American release. The impact of Samurai Shodown? The story goes that it was an inspiration for Soul Caliber. It also spawned a number of sequels, and the fifth game even got a rerelease on Xbox recently. You may know it as Samurai Spirit, or you may not.

Killer Instinct was also a beat-em-up with weapons. Or at least one or two characters waved the things around. 3d characters with moving 3d backgrounds. Of course the big selling point was the combo system. It had its flaws, sure, but it was also very very impressive. By hitting the correct buttons you could string together huge and complicated combos, which weren't exactly easy to block. Not like the combos in street fighter II. Those combos weren't even real combos.

Ah, yes, Street Fighter II. How many games are there? Hundreds. All of them Street Fighter II. Street Fighter 3 was a bit pish and not many folks really remember it. SF2 on the other hand was the biggy. Special moves that were easy to pull off, speed, great characters, and of course the tournament system. It was a particular arcade box, the championship edition if memory serves me correctly. You used to have a few of these things strung together. You had two players fight each other on each box, and then the winner on one box was paired off with the winner on another. Classy it was. A really good player could stay on a box for ages, getting any would-be challengers to stick in their 20p to try and beat him. And if they did, they got to play until someone could beat them. Hundreds of games, all for 20p. And that's what it's all about, hmm.

Sadly, I'm not going to continue. There's so much more i want to say, but I just don't have the time. If I write much more, I'll have to start cutting more bits out than I already have, and that just won't do. Maybe if this little rant turns out to have gone down well I'll look at some more games. Or the same ones in more detail. But for now, that's your lot. Go out and try some of thsoe games if you haven't already. Y'might be surprised.

Stephen Whitehead

21 April 2006

20:47

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Ignore this.
b3188c2af7db5f46c6464d43dcfc5897

Another video

2006-12-30T17:10:00.000Z

Seeing as I _did_ say I'd make another video an' all, I thought I should share it. Kind forgot t'mention it or something. Or possibly couldn't be bothered posting it here knowing no-one ever reads this crap. I dunno.

Anyway, here it is. ANd a vast improvement on the last one. Enjoy.

Aparently music videos are harder to make than I thought.

2006-12-10T14:41:00.000Z

For some reason I decided to have a try at ripping scenes from a DVD, compiling them together and adding music. Here's how it turned out.

As y'cn see, it's a bloody failure. Naturally I have to adress those failures.

For a start, the picture isn't in synch with the music for most of it. That's due mainly to the afghanistan bit lasting too long, throwing bits out of place. At least some of it worked. Then there's the fact that my attempts at lip-synching failed. Well it's live action. Should never've tried that. Ignore it. I also got a bit lazy near the end, didn't use the scenes I wanted to, forgot how some went and thus got the wrong bits in parts and so on and so forth. Maybe at some point I'll redo it properly. I think at the end I just grabbed anything as well. That's really unforgivable.

Obviously my next video will be an AMV, I'll use some decent software and I'll actually plan it properly rather than just in my head. Hmm.

Some facts about Santa

2006-12-08T07:40:00.000Z

And now for the traditional yearly debunking of the santa myth. Y've probably seen et before, but still...

What a kill-joy I am.

SOME FACTS ABOUT SANTA CLAUS

1) No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

2) There are 2 billion children in the world (persons under 18). But since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist children, that reduces the workload by 85% of the total - leaving 378 million according to the Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there is at least one good child per house.

3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household, a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding, etc. That means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, at tops 25-30 miles per hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming each child gets nothing more then a medium sized LEGO set (2 lbs), the sleigh is carrying 321300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting the 'flying reindeer' can pull TEN TIMES that normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine - we need 214200 reindeer. This increased the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh to 353430 tons. Again for comparison, this is four timed the weight of the HMS Queen Elizabeth.

5) 353000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. This will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy per second, each. In short, they will burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating a deafening sonic boom in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa meanwhile, will be subject to centrifugal forces of 17500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250 lb Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by a 4,315,015 pound force. In conclusion, if Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas eve, he's now dead.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Aparently being offensive is a bad thing

2006-11-14T17:23:00.000Z

Ponder this. Is it acceptable to make offensive and inflamatory comments? At all? Aimed at anyone you like? is it unnaceptable? Should it be ilegal? Think carefully.

So anyway, the government are now telling us that insulting anybody at all in the privacy of your own meeting-place should be made a criminal offense. Yah. The reason? Some BNP leaders got cleared of incitement of hatred. Well of course they did! I mean, all they said was that Islam is evil, or words to that effect. It's not like they actually encouraged members to go out and kill all the muslims or anything. 'least not on this occasion, and the joy of the court system is that your past actions must not be taken into account. Yessss.

Anyway, it raises questions. I mean, if we're not allowed to say anything bad about a belief system because it might offend folk, we're basically losing civil rights. There's a reason that I'm more than happy to sonstantly make posts that could be reas as an attack on [insert group here], and that's becasue of freedom of speech. The fact that I accept they have the right to make comments about my beliefs. And that's important.

Of course, if the government get their way that won't be allowed. Great shame.

Of course, this is nothing new. Anyone remember the Mohammed cartoons? Well for anyone that doesn't, they were basically some harmless pictures of the prophet Mohammed. Onl;y really offensive one had a bomb on his turban, which was actually pretty clever. It's asking the question of whether muslims are terrorists, or wether terrorists use Islam as an excuse, evidently. Or maybe it was jsut designed to be inflamatory. Regardless, there was some slight overkill in the reaction from the Islamic community. And we're talking bombings of Danish embassys, death-threats to all who published the things, national newspapers refusing to make copies in case someone killed them (even private eye settled for just descriptions. Ridiculous.) So obviously I'm going to resist the temptation to post one here as an example. It'd just get pulled, anyway. Instead, here's a slightly less offensive cartoon that was published shortly after. gives a good idea of the problem, methinks.

So anyway. What's really happening now is taking it one step further: lets throw the danish cartoonist in prison becasue it happens to offend some overly-sensitive religeous types. I mean, really. Ever seen the pope urging the RC church to go murder TV comedians? Concidering there seems to be an insult hurled at Christianity on more or less every TV show these days you can't really argue he's not more justified than the folk upset over a few cartoons, surely? Hmm. Not seen the Dalai Llama launching a crusade against the Chinese lately, either. Well, well, well. Don't see Richard Dawkings being beheaded either.

So let me get this straight. There's only one major religeon likely to react to offensive comments, and thus we're going to throw folk in gaol for expressing opinions against religeous groups? I remind you that religeon is a choice. Nobody's forcing you to follow a certain belief system. It's not something that you're born into and stuck with through life, in the manner of, say, race. Racial hatred, now that's bad. That should be punishable. By all means, lock the BNP leaders up for life with their nazi-loving white-supremacy movement. But insulting a group that people choose to belong to? The BNP as champions of free speech. Not gonna see that happen very often.

Oh, what the hell. Here's a picture of Mohammed.

Now I'm just being silly

2006-10-23T13:53:00.000Z

So, the SNP say they're going to win a majority in the next election, will hold a referendum and thus wind up with an independant scotland. To be honest, I don't think it'll happen. I wouldn't expect the SNP to win, I wouldn't expect a referendum to give us such crap and I woldn't expect to see independance (can the executive even do that? Pretty sure only Westminister can go in for that BS, but regardless...)

However, in a worst-case scenario I suppose I should actually consider the possibility. Apart from anything else, we all know I'd rather leave Britan entirely than stay in a ridiculously liberal hell-hole. And I'd imagine an independant scotland would probably wind up with disestablshment of the church, proportional representation and more poltitical correctness than y'cn shake a stick at. Not to mention I'd need a passport to visit friends and relatives in England. Mad.

So, pros and cons

Con
The afformentioned passport rubbish
Liberalism. Everything I love and respect about Britain, gone.
Note the geographical location of Scotland? We're talking about having a tiny independant country smaller than Yorkshire with parts of the UK on either side. And if size = country, why not make Yorkshire and Lancashire independant as well? In fact why not split the UK into lots of countrys? Aside from teh obvious.
I'm a patriotic brit. I see myslef as British first, Scottish second, and my family's english on my father's side. I see the possibility of racism.

pro
Well, I doubt the muslim council of Britain would have such an easy time affecting a Scotland. I suppsoe anything that slows the gradual takeover of Britain by Islam has to be a bonus...
Actually, I can't think of any others.

So in short, I'm a ridiculously old-fasione, conservative racist. Well there's a slap in the face.

In other news, the government plans on forcing through reforms to the Lords using the parliament act. Which means the hereditary lords get banished, a lot of the life lords get forced to retire and a large sum of the hosue gets elected in. Uhu. Bye bye traditional British politics.
Let's look at the prupose of the Lords: they're there to stop the government coming up with ridiculously damaging legislation. They helped to slow down tahtcher's rain of terror you know. They serve an important purpose, and their not being elected is an important part of that. It's one of the reasons it works. An elected house of lords would, basically, result in more-or-less a second house of commons. Hell, calling them lords'd be a bit stupid, wouldn't it? They wouldn't be lords. They'd just be talking heads. It's cause anarchy. It'd never work. Just like proportional representation slows the democratic process, so would this bullshit. Bloody fools.

I've changed my mind. Independance has it's advantages. Speeds my escape, and there's no comments of "we were better of with britain", becasue britain'll be a shit-hole by the time mr Blair's finished with it.

Motivational Posters

2006-10-06T18:34:00.000Z

Ok, so I have too much time on my hands. Anyway, for some obscure reason I decided to make some Paranoia themed motivational psoters.Y'know, just some basic stuff. One or two of 'em are a bit funny, most are naff. I dunno, maybe someone'll like them and it seems a waste not to share them. So without further ado...

Well, darn

2006-10-05T20:26:00.001Z

And why have I not been online all week? Becasue my motherboard broke. Capacitors popped and it died. On monday. Just got the whole thing replaced. I'd go into more detail, but I have a headache due to withdrawl symptoms.

Yes! Internet withdrawl symptoms! I truly am addicted!

Oh, and Defcon first impressions (only a week late, too!): Not bad really. The AI's evil htough. And I've not been able to try mplayer yet becasue the only servers that would show up on the lsit were called "new server" and were the property of demo users who were trying to play solo and failing. ARGH.

Well, darn

2006-10-05T20:26:00.000Z

I'm rather annoyed, by golly.

2006-09-29T20:04:00.000Z

Remember I mentioned my POS PC? Yeah. Keeps resetting itself. Can't play Defcon until I get a new PC or convince a friend to let me use theirs. Damn, eh? Although installing it onto my zip drive does have a rather perverse appeal, I must say...

Anyway, unless I can get it working, put me down as horribly angry and be glad I'm sticking to my no-cusswords policy.

And on that note

2006-09-29T19:44:00.000Z

2:16 until demo downloads, I've nearly finished listening to all the songs Tom Lehrer released on the subject of nuclear holocaust (halfway through we shall all go together when we go right now) and I've got me cd key sat here ready to copy into the game. Assuming I can get the damned thing ot run on this POS desktop, expect a review sometime tommorow.

And if not, I'll rant about the horrible injuries I'm no doubt going to have gained after the three-hour paintball session I'm booked in for in the morning.

And the download's finished. Time to nuke the US back to the stone-age.

STOP PRESS

2006-09-29T19:28:00.000Z

No sooner have I clicked submit on my previous post, than my cd key arrives. Sent out at 1918 GMT, approximately one hour and eighteen minutes late. Yes.

Unfortunately everybody-dies.com is still down. So I continue getting the demo from fileshack.

And an update

2006-09-29T19:21:00.001Z

There's a demo available. I'm currently downlaoding it, and it allows 2-player games. Which is better than nowt.

So, that's how they worked it out. Pretty smart idea really: you get it in demo form and use your cd key to unlock it. The problem? Seems they haven't yet sent out the cd keys yet. Certainly I can't find anyone that's recieved the damned thing. Still, I'm sure it'll sort itself.

I'd also like to draw another comparison to id software: they tried doing that with quake. First episode shareware, enter registration to get the rest. The result, unfortunately, was that people hacked the game and id lost a lot of cash. Especially after having given the discs away free in their shareware form. Ooh dear. Of course, I'm sure Introversion have a way to avoid that in this day and age. Online verification or something. With a game designed for multiplayer, that would of course be fatal.

Everybody dies

2006-09-29T17:31:00.000Z

Well, Defcon is gonna be released in approximately 34 minutes from when I satrted typing this entry. As it satnds right now, it looks like so: the Introversion online store is down.

Due to unprecedented demand on our store web server. Unfortunately this has overloaded the system, so we have temporarily disabled the store.

DEFCON Keys will be emailed to you at 18:00 GMT which is 19:00 BST in London, UK.

We will be re-enabling the store shortly.

So, we get cd keys and then hopefully we can download. How is another matter. As it stands, someone over at PLN suggested p2p software, which I'm guessing is a possibility. I'm also kinda banking on a large number of mirrors popping up, although I don't really see that being feasible to be totally honest.

Funny really. this actually reminds me a bit of the Doom release back in December 93. Sorta. It got uplaoded to a filespace ready for distribution. There were 151 users allowed on the filespace, and 151 connected with the rather brilliant result that id couldn't connect. When they eventually did, and uplaoded it, so many gamers connected and downlaoded they crashed the server. Brilliant. Now, i aint saying that's what'll happen here by any means but it'd be pretty damned impressive if it did.

Makes you wonder really. Digital distribution's been around for years. Almost 13 years ago it was problematic, and today it still is. This is gonna be something special. Only question right now that I can see is how are they gonna handle it? Because evidently just making it direct download from the online store aint gonna work, as we've already seen. Maybe they'll email us a downlad url with the cd key or something, who knows?

And of course I'll be sure to make some sort of cynical comment if it isn't the msot revolutionary, mind-blowing idea ever. Like launching us all our own personal copy attached to a disarmed nuclear missile, say!