A Musing

This is a test post. Please ignore

2006-11-10T16:48:00.000+00:00

La la la... testing the largest image size displayed.

Tagged: Tagword |

New blog

2005-11-01T14:14:00.000+00:00

I probably won't be updating this blog frequently any more - I've moved over to blogging solely about games at my new site. *start of shameless plug* Check it out at The Average Gamer *end of shameless plug*

Basically, as well as blogging about games-related stuff we're writing easy-reference reviews that tell you at a glance (hopefully) if we think a game is fun and worth buying, or if we thought it was rubbish. There are only a few articles up so far coz I've been messing about with Wordpress and trying to get it looking pretty, but I'll be posting more regularly once everything is running smoothly.

Tagged: blogging

Wesley Crusher grew up to be Babylon 5's John Sheridan

2005-10-24T23:29:00.000+01:00

Check it out on Wil Wheaton's temporary blog. Who knew? I was particularly amused by his comment "I was very grateful that I wasn't Wesley Crusher (not that there's anything wrong with that.)" There's nothing wrong with that at all.

I'd like to know who more TV sci-fi people really are. C'mon Joss Whedon, fill out the quiz here.
Apparently I'm Data from Star Trek:TNG:

"A controlled personality with a vast range of skills and behavior, you are often intrigued by the people and places surrounding you.
In the strictest sense, I did not win -- I busted him up."

So does lots of stuff, interested in learning about things and doesn't really identify with people. Yep, sounds like me.

Tagged: TV | quiz

BBC London is very depressing

2005-10-23T16:05:00.000+01:00

Out of the past 19 posts in BBC online's London RSS feed, there are five articles about murder, two on terrorism, one random violence, one about accidental death, an arsenic warning and a policeman being dodgy.

There are some "happy" stories - some policemen won the lottery, the Queen had dinner on HMS Victory and loads of people are offering to help in the Kashmir earthquake aftermath.

The rest are pretty neutral. And not exactly newsworthy. Apparently Paula Radcliffe is to defend her London Marathon title (like there was any doubt of that), the Saatchi Gallery has been evicted (okay, mildly interesting) , a politician "keeps it real"and Robbie Williams was nervous before a concert until he saw David Beckham looking scared.

Well, thanks, BBC London. My life is now complete because Robbie Williams is comforted by Beckham. How about something useful to us London dwellers, like... hmm... the London Film Festival maybe? Stories that don't make us want to huddle in our homes, too afraid to talk to the neighbours. Not your thing? Okay, I'll have a shot:

There ya go. In ten minutes I've managed to find three stories, not one of which even hints at a murder! Given time and the motivation to actually drag my butt out of the house, I could probably even come up with some heart-warming tale of human interest. Schoolchildren perform for AIDS awareness campaign, perhaps*. And all without the benefit of journalistic training. Good, eh?

* This did actually happen a couple of years ago at Queen Mary College, East London. There was an afternoon-long presentation on AIDS awareness, with free condoms and femidoms and guest speakers. For some strange reason, halfway through the afternoon, 20 kids from a local primary school trooped out onstage and started doing some odd wandering/singing/dancing thing that culminated in them all standing in a row holding up a letter each to read something entirely unintelligible. I think they got it wrong. Heart-warming nonetheless!

Tagged: UK |

UK Serenity ticket stub competition

2005-10-19T22:46:00.000+01:00

UIP are apparently giving away "an exclusive Serenity gift" to crazy fans who see the film three times within between 7th and 31st October. The website is here andis registered by UIP so looks legit, though I haven't heard what the gift is from any of the forums, or if anyone has received one yet. Also, it looks like they've displayed the postcode as W!A 2YA, instead of W1A. Easy mistake to make but very unprofessional.

They did a pretty abysmal job of promoting this promotion, since I can't find a link to it from the official UIP or Serenity websites and there was no mention of it in the cinema or to the fans outside the London premiere. I found out about it from a friend and its been mentioned on a few forums, but that's it. Annoying, since I saw it once within the timeframe and binned my ticket. Lucky I have that Unlimited card :) I'm wandering into the cinema whenver I walk past and picking up a free ticket to the film each time. Only need one more! Yes, the gift is probably something really naff like a set of coasters but I don't care. It's exclusive ;)

Tagged: Serenity

My blog now has categories!

2005-10-19T22:28:00.000+01:00

I have to enter them into this manually, since blogger doesn't have a post category function :(

You can get to them from the categories section in the sidebar. I find it's nicer than navigating by date. I've listed all my posts since 1st July 05, since that's when I started posting regularly and putting some actual effort into it.

Tagged: blogger

Yubi-Wa! Bone-conducting wireless headset

2005-10-19T21:43:00.000+01:00

Pic stolen from slashphone.com's article.

Justin McCurry from The Guardian describes this funky-sounding device which basically turns your finger into a stylus which you can then insert into an orifice in your skull. He says

"When the user's index finger is inserted into the ear, a bone conduction transceiver turns vibrations into sounds."

A bone conduction transceiver? I need to get a transceiver implant? Oh, you mean your ear! Technically, your eardrum, ossicles and cochlea I suppose. Bone conduction tranceiver, indeed! Is Mr. McCurry parroting buzzwords without comprehending them? I think so.

Judging by the picture this ugly thing is still a long way off mainstream use but the idea is cool. Other journalists have commented that sticking your finger in your ear just looks silly but if they get the thing down to a reasonable ring size, it wouldn't look any worse than people wandering around holding wired "hands-free" microphones to their mouths, or pressing on earpieces in noisy places. Can't be worse than side-talkin'...

Anyway, something to watch out for if they manage to develop one small enough to just clip inside your hat and buzz conversations through your skull. I'd buy it.

Tagged: technology | phones

A History of Violence reviewed - 1/5

2005-10-14T21:22:00.000+01:00

I would have given it a 0 but the fleshy disfigurements were nicely gross, though few and far between.

IMDB entry

Maybe I just didn't understand the film but as far as I could tell, there was nothing there worth sitting in a cinema for two hours to see. I didn't come out entertained, I didn't come out changed and I certainly didn't come out with the intriguing new take on Life, the Universe and Everything which I was hoping for, from the number of reviews that said "thought-provoking". I came out bored and disappointed and glad I hadn't paid £6.50 to see it.

Looking at the film from a cerebral point of view, the concepts of running away from your history and what really makes a person could have been intriguing, but nothing was ever fully explored. From the point of view of Tom, the film pretty unequivocally took one side and there was never enough revealed about the lives of his family members to discuss their natures. You can't come to any reasonable conclusion about someone based on two five-minute scenes from an extraordinary time in their life.
Menacing villains were portrayed very convincingly (the entire cast was excellent provided we pretend that Tom's daughter wasn't really there) but their characters were very two-dimensional. Despite the intriguing beginnings, this whole film set out to impart one message only, and that message was uninteresting and simplistic. And it didn't need half an hour of footage of cars driving around to tell it!

Good lord, does the man have a newfound fetish for cars? Every scene that was outdoors had an extra twenty seconds of car footage forced into it as if the entire film had been funded by one massive product placement. Even a simple scene like going to the mall had to have a long slow shot of the car driving into the car park. If there was some significance to the interminable shots of cars everywhere, please let me know. I get the menacing scary bits, but 3 full minutes of an uneventful drive to Philadelphia? Unless there were volumes of speech being conveyed by some finely tuned nuances to Viggo's driving and expressions that simply didn't penetrate my bored stupor, I don't see the point of that scene at all.

Looking at the film from an entertainment point of view there are a few funny bits, a few action bits and some good gore. The first third is intriguing and full of atmosphere but broken by the refreshingly realistic, yet stilted and unsexy sex scene (Viggo's I've-died-and-gone-to-heaven face just makes him look like he hasn't gotten laid in years). Sadly, the intrigue is sorely let down by the Philadelphia section of the film which is just simplistic and lame gangster cliché.

Lastly, a note to Viggo: I know you played Aragorn, the hardest man in Middle-Earth so you're not used to this, but even when you're playing a guy with the nickname "Crazy", you can't wince at the strain of moving your freshly-shot arm in one scene and then be obliviously swinging bags around a couple of hours later. Unless there's a deleted scene of athelas-bathing in the DVD.

Tagged: film

Application Keywords, or How To Blag A Place at Uni

2005-10-14T21:06:00.000+01:00

According to The Guardian, psychologists and admissions tutors at University of Hertfordshire have identified the ten words to include on your application and ten words to avoid, if you want to be successful.

Hopefully these will apply to jobs as well. It's clearly the "always" that's been holding me back. My CVs usually have a sentence that runs something like "I always consider things carefully when making a decision..." Maybe I should just be honest - "I consider things carefully unless it looks boring or it's after 4pm on a Friday."

According to the list, what I should be saying is "I have developed transferable skills which mean that when I am involved in planning that may have an impact on my achievements I consider all the evidence, along with my individual experience and draw active conclusions."

"The top 10 words to include on an application form are:

Achievement

Active

Developed

Evidence

Experience

Impact

Individual

Involved

Planning

Transferable skills

The 10 words to avoid:

Always

Awful

Bad

Fault

Hate

Mistake

Never

Nothing

Panic

Problems"

Tagged: cv | applications | buzzwords

Serenity in 2000 words or less

2005-10-14T19:25:00.000+01:00

I've mentioned Serenity so often I suppose I would be remiss in not linking to Ron Swartzendruber's Serenity in 2000 words or less, though it's all over the net at the moment. There are major spoilers. You have been warned.

Uh... there's no actual content in this post. Hmm... *wanders off to find something interesting to comment on*

Tagged: serenity | film

Flickr sets?

2005-10-10T22:43:00.000+01:00

A few days ago (7th Oct 05) I posted that flickr would only let me create three sets for my photos, a limit that was not specified in the account info. At the time, I had tried to create a fourth set and it told me that I had reached the limit for my account type. Today I created two more sets with no problems.

What's going on here? Does anybody know the full limits of a free account or was it just a bug that's now been fixed? I know it can't be limited to three sets a day because I created the first three sets months ago.

Tagged: flickr

Hanzis Matter

2005-10-10T21:42:00.000+01:00

A brilliant little blog dedicated to combating ignorance in tattooing. They post images of tattoos that people send them and provide the real translations. Have a look here.

'One young lady's boyfriend emails me this photo and asking what the character really meant. Apparently the young lady was told by the tattooist that the character is Chinese for "magic".

It would be "Magic", if you want to make cocaine filled balloons disappear by stuff them into your body cavity before the DEA agents arrest you at the border.

The character 腔 has multiple meanings, and one of them is "body cavity".'

If I ever get a tattoo with foreign characters I'm making damn sure I get it translated by a native speaker that I trust before I get it permanently scrawled on my body.

Tagged: tattoo | chinese

Serenity - Fruity Oaty Bars lyrics

2005-10-10T16:26:00.000+01:00

Shamelessly pilfered from fireflyfans.net, with thanks to RocketJock who posted this in the forums:

"Fruity Oaty Bars
Make a man out of a mouse
Fruity Oaty Bars
Make you bust out of your blouse
Eat them all the time
They will blow your mind
Blow your little mind..."

Now anyone who saw the film can have that insidious little jingle stuck in your heads too! Muahahahaha!

Let me know if you see any good images of the octopus from that ad. I like it :)

Tagged: Serenity

Black and White 2 - First Impressions

2005-10-08T14:14:00.000+01:00

On the day of release, they have a patch. This does not bode well.

Even worse, the patch is not compatible with old save games, so if you're a hopeless optimist who thinks that mabe B&W/Lionhead studios can create a game that's fine straight out of the box... don't be so silly!

Actually, mine did work fine and they say that this patch is not a requirement. Then they go on to say that they hope the save games for the next patch will be compatible with this one?

Say what? You hope? You're writing the bloody thing, make it compatible! Or at the very least, provide an options that SHUTS THOSE IDIOT TWINS UP!

Fuck, I hate the tutorial characters, I really do. For those of you who didn't play the original Black and White game, there are two guys who float about offering advice, a devil and angel who call themselves your conscience and provide advice. They're annoyng and intrusive and they don't shut up. And this game has been designed so that you have to listen to them all the time. You can't click a button to skip their lines, you can't skip cutscenes and they're humongous and float right at the front of your screen, so you can't even play while you're ignoring them coz they're totally in the way. Little fuckers.

Out of the box, there's no option to skip the condescending movement tutorial - they ask you if you want a reminder on how to move but forgot to provide the "No" option. The patch does fix this but the movement tutorial is the only section you can skip. You still have to play through the "how to build roads and buildings" and "how to move your creature" sections. This would be slightly less unbearable if it was a video that you could put on and walk away from, but no. It's interactive. And yes, you have to sit through it again if you want to play both sides of the game.

To be fair, as characters they're very well done. They fly around and they're highly detailed and the voice acting isn't terrible. Also for some reason the devil's nipples bounce about an awful lot. But that doesn't make them any less intrusive.

The rest of the game is very pretty, the controls take a bit of getting used to and be prepared to be treated like a four-year old. Someone on the Lionhead forums was very proud that they could sit their four-year-old (who couldn't yet read properly) in front of this game and the kid had no trouble learning how it all worked and didn't need the parent's help at all. That's the level you're treated at in the UNSKIPPABLE tutorial. Which apparently continues through half the game. So if, like me, you played for half the night, so you could get past the tutorial and into the game proper... 1) You have about another 6 hours of condescending instructions to go. And 2) You have to do it all again if you want to patch it so it works properly.

I'm looking for good things to say about this game, but so far it's pretty difficult. Hopefully it gets better in the later lands.

Tagged: games lionhead

Serenity kicks ass! (spoiler-free)

2005-10-07T23:26:00.000+01:00

Brilliant film! There are millions of reviews out there that describe it all so some spoiler-free ones are here and here. It is much darker than the series ever was - think late-season-six Buffy compared to the early high-school episodes. That's no bad thing, it just feels a little jarring at the beginning. And okay, so some of the acting is a little dubious but the action and emotion draws you so far in that you just can't help enjoying the crazy ride! Go see it! And remember that the character-development holes are all explained in the series, so you should buy the DVD boxed set!

On another note, I had a wander down to Leicester Square on Wednesday to check out the stars at the UK premiere (s'pose the Edinburgh/World Premiere doesn't count) and see how the turnout was looking. There are posters all over the Underground and DLR so they had a decent marketing budget - maybe giving out free stuff! :)

Joss, Chiwetel, Nathan and Summer showed up. Joss (suit + shiny trainers) and Nathan (no tight pants) were both brilliant and stayed outside chatting to fans and signing their way up and down the entire crowd for about an hour. Summer (really tiny and elfin) signed for about 15 minutes, then did her interviews and buggered off inside. About 20 minutes later she reappeared, accompanied her publicist, and signed for about another 15 minutes - I suspect her publicist may have had strict words about ignoring her fans. Chiwetel did the same disappearing/reappearing trick. I managed to score some Serenity promo cards and got both Joss and Nathan to sign them (Yay! :) and took a few photos. Also "acquired" a large cardboard Serenity poster that had been cable-tied to the barriers. Good old swiss army knife :)

The few worthwhile photos are here on flickr.

Flickr keep quiet the fact that you can only have three sets on a free account. I like the look and feel of their site so I might go pro if there's enough money sitting in my PayPal account.

Tagged: serenity films whedon flickr

I just don't get it

2005-10-02T22:28:00.000+01:00

No, seriously. I don't think I would noticed what went on in this joke if it wasn't for the little explanation beside it. Thanks, "spill"!

And from a better post on boingboing.net - funny spoof film trailers made for a competition (quicktime format):

Tagged: trailer

Four days until Serenity! :) (my local cinema has a few shows a day early ;)

More on remodelling the games industry

2005-09-29T22:27:00.000+01:00

Following on from my original post about Greg Costikyan's screed (long well-worded written rant) and new company...

Over at Edge Online:

'Costikyan says that even those already taking advantage of this space [distributing games over the internet] are chasing the wrong goal by offering casual games or publishers' back catalogue titles. This ends up selling games to people who aren't really interested in them. "We'd rather try to sell games to people who already buy them," he says.'

Um, wtf? People who want Valve's entire back catalogue aren't the people who are interested in games? Okay, man. Whatever you say. And "chasing the wrong goal"? How else are you going to "re-engineer the customer" into accepting that downloaded games are just as good as boxed versions, other than by demonstrating so? This guy may know his shit when it comes to game design but I'm not sure he really knows that much about changing mass-market behaviour. Somehow, I don't think slogans like "Corporate games suck" are going to cut it. We're not that much like sheep following the trendy revolution (I hope. Who am I kidding?) You need to prove your benefit to us first. Or get a giant corporation to back you and put the competition out of business (but that's a bit antithetical). Maybe get Valve to prove the benefit for you ;)

That being said, he's doing a hell of a job getting interest in his company. He's a bit of a viral marketing genius, getting a cheap logo and website design out of this recent attention. Nice work!

I can't find a point-by-point summary of the long boring screed, so I'll work on doing that over the weekend if I don't find one by then. Might be handy to refer back to in months to come and see how well he's doing with it.

Tagged: games

Remodelling the Games Industry

2005-09-28T23:38:00.000+01:00

An article/manifesto/announcement here on Greg Costikyan's blog - he's actually following up on his previous games industry rants and trying to set up his own company to combat the insidious effect of EA on gaming innovation. I thought I babble a bit, but he goes on at great length about the problems of the games industry as it stands, and proposes a solution in his two-part article, "Death to the Game Industry: Long Live Games" at The Escapist. Part 1 is here and is his very lengthy description of the problem, complete with diagrams that are the equivalent of business buzzwords. Part 2 is here and is his proposed solution. I shall summarise the main points of Part 1 eventually, but his proposed solution is:

Developers fund the games themselves (with what? venture capitalism I assume)
Blow up retailers (Huh? Yeah, that's what I thought. I'm pretty sure he means "get rid of the current publishers-to-retailers model and have developers distribute the games themselves")
Change consumer perception of downloaded games vs. solid media. (i.e. that downloaded games are scary/unreliable and solid media is the only way)

Now I'm not going to go through the points of his whole screed just yet coz it's late and I'm already sleep-deprived... but is it just me or is this exactly the direction Valve are going, but without the big song-and-dance? They have Steam to distribute their product, which they are also licensing out as a distribution platform - thus supplementing their Half-Life 2 and other games sales income with something more steady and presumably providing them with a source for funding any future game development, nicely removing the need to pitch their games to venture capitalists instead of publishers...

Fair play to both of them, I say. Enough with FIFA and Championship Manager 200x already.

One point I have to make about changing consumer perception - I have no personal experience with Steam so I don't know how they resolve this issue - I do have a very healthy and justified mistrust of hard drives and their ability to choke and die, losing all my data. It's nice to know that I have a DVD kicking about in a drawer that I can just reinstall from instead of having to sit online for days to re-download all the software. That kind of thing eats up my bittorrent bandwidth! I hear you can burn the games to DVD once you have them - how exactly does that work? Would I be able to reinstall and reactivate it without an internet connection? The Steam website doesn't really tell you anything other than to install their client, and I'm not doing that until I know what it does. Well, that and I don't want their games coz I'm rubbish at FPS. I might get it soon for Rag Doll Kung Fu though...

Tagged: games

Religious hypersensitivity follow-up

2005-09-28T21:59:00.000+01:00

Woo, the BBC news people posted my comment! (Okay, in among about twenty others. Not the point!) They've cropped it down nicely, too. My original post about this article is here.

They've updated the article sicne my original post and now tell us that yes, the objection was to the book-slicing. Silly people - did they not realise that by citing Muslims as the reason, they were saying that it's okay to cut up the Bible and the Talmud? They've also added a quote from the Muslim Council of Britain. Nice to see that I was on the side of reason after all.

'The Muslim Council of Britain told the BBC News website: "We have not received any complaints about this piece of artwork.

"We would have preferred to have been consulted by Tate Britain before the decision was taken to remove John Latham's piece.

"Sometimes presumptions are incorrectly made about what is unacceptable to Muslims and this can be counter-productive." '

On another note, one guy, Jai Gomer, comments is that he is "disgusted" by the artist's comment in the article that "...It shows that all religious teaching comes from the same source". Jai goes on to call the artist narrow-minded and a bigot. Calm down, dude! The guy was trying to defend his art, not come up with a PC sound-bite. I very much doubt you can really describe him as "One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ" just coz he's only addressing the Abrahamic religions. I'm sure he knows there are other schools of thought out there and he was just talking in the context of his current piece which, by the way, does NOT say that those religions are the only religions. Sit down and think clearly about things before leaping on your "this is policitically incorrect!" bandwagon and you'll lead a much less stressful life.

Tagged:art | religion | tate

Nine days until Serenity :) (Seven if I get tickets to the UK premiere, but that's unlikely... and only two if you're in the US. Lucky buggers...)

Bon Jovi are my friends

2005-09-27T14:24:00.000+01:00

They went to all the trouble of hiring a plane to tow a banner over London with the message "Bon Jovi says Have A Nice Day". Saw it over the St Paul's area on my lunchbreak. Aren't they nice?

Or maybe they're just plugging their new album.

Unfortunately, my phone's camera is too low-res to see the plane in the photo, let alone the banner so no picture available.

Tagged: music London

Ten days to Serenity :)

Blogger in IE vs Firefox

2005-09-26T18:59:00.000+01:00

I was so confused... Yesterday I posted with some tags separated by the pipe symbol | and they displayed fine. Earlier today I posted and the posting process tripped out the | symbols and put the links all next to each other. Now I realise that for some reason posting through IE strips out the | symbols. How odd.

Sorry for bothering you, blogger support! Issue resolved. Well, workaround discovered, which is good enough for me.

Speaking of Firefox/IE... I'm using tableless CSS to format my blog and make it scalable so people with 1280*1024 resolution don't have to view it in teeny 800*600 columns and people with teeny columns can still read it (hopefully). If I reduce the window width in Firefox it goes to a width of about 600px before the main container drops down below the sidebar. It did something similar in IE until today and now the main box drops below the sidebar at about 900px, rendering the changes useless. What's up with that? Update: forgot I cut and paste some code from a test in my Lost post that was in a table. Table now removed, readable in 800*600 again :)

Tagged: blogger | IE

Eleven days until Serenity :)

Religious hypersensitivity at the Tate

2005-09-26T12:05:00.000+01:00

BBC News reports that the Tate Gallery removed a very benign work of art on a very flimsy basis.

"The gallery said: "Having sought wide-ranging advice, Tate feels that to exhibit the work in London in the current sensitive climate, post 7 July, would not be appropriate."

What could be inappropriate in today's climate about a piece that aims to say "that all religious teaching comes from the same source, whatever name you give to it" according to its creator, John Latham?

For once, I actually filled in their "tell us your views" section. Religious over-sensitivity annoys me. I can't see anything remotely offensive about this piece and can only assume the objection here is that the Quran, having been cut in half, was not treated with the respect it demands of its followers, but I didn't know that the Tate was in the business of upholding religious commands. I very much doubt they're going to remove any exhibit with topless women in it, even though that is deemed unholy by some interpretations of the Quran. You can't just pick and choose the bits of a religion that are easy to comply with and leave the rest.

The only other thing I can think of that might cause offence would be that the creator has dared to put the Quran on the same level as other (lesser) religous texts, but that's a rather extreme speculation and highly unlikely.

My comment to the BBC is copied below:

"As a mixed-race person who grew up in an extremely multi-cultural environment, I don't understand how this piece is more offensive to Muslims than it is to Jews or Christians. By objecting to it on Muslim, rather then religious grounds in general, the Tate is only promoting segregation rather than the acceptance of all religions on equal footing. How is this a good thing?

It could be viewed that since Muslims are supposed to treat the Quran with the utmost respect, it is offensive to them to cut it in half in order to convey a message - but that is the very nature of art; provoking thought by drawing criticism. If the gallery aims to preserve its reputation of showcasing thought-provoking and interesting displays I would have thought the current climate of heightened cultural sensitivity was precisely the right one for a piece like this.

From a objective point of view, this piece doesn't desecrate the Quran any more or any less than the Talmud or the Bible and objecting to it on the grounds of potentially offending Muslims is displaying a disproportionate level of sensitivity. Were the piece to be a commentary on Muslim sectarianism or their lack of integration into society or celebrating imams who promote terrorism then pulling it on the grounds of "the current sensitive climate" might be understandable. This artwork made no comment on the current climate and from my interpretation, it just tried to highlight the similarity, rather than the differences in three major religious texts. By removing it, the gallery has done the exact opposite."

Tagged: art religion tate

Second series of Lost

2005-09-25T20:49:00.000+01:00

It's started. Yay! :)

For those of you who don't know, it's a fantastic drama mostly based in reality with the occasional really bizarre event thrown in to confuse you. IMDB link

I do wonder... they're in a tropical rainforest. There's been no mention of finding petrol or oil (and most of that on the plane was probably used up in the first episode's explosions). Yet the main characters are constantly walking around with flaming torches made from sticks with cloth wrapped around them. Magic ever-burning cloth, I think.

Hmm... my OKCupid Lost Character Test results follow:

Hurley

You scored 53% kindness, 36% courage, 36% seedy past, and 48% secretiveness!

"For the record, my belt HAS dropped a notch. I'm a big guy. It's gonna be a while before you're going to want to give me a piggy back ride."
Dude, you are Hurley. You are a kind soul with some terrible luck. While you're always lending a helping hand, you're not exactly the bravest guy on the island. What you do is even more important - keep people entertained. The only problem you've got is that whole jinxed numbers thing. You're so secretive, no one on the island even knows that you're a multimillionaire! Let it out, dude. There's no use trying to keep it all bottled up inside, man.

Tagged: Television | Lost

12 days until Serenity...

Not impressed with Blogrolling

2005-09-24T00:30:00.000+01:00

Today is the second time in as many days that I haven't been able to access blogrolling.com and since I'm using it in my sidebar, it just kills the blog completely :( Apparently, "Squid is unable to create a TCP socket, presumably due to excessive load." If they're having ongoing problems, they should have the decency to tell us, even if I am a freebie user.

It is very nice not to have to go into my blog template every time I want to add a link, but if it's going to keep killing my blog, it's just not worth it. I'm going to remove their code as soon as the site is back up and I can get my links.

I'm in a blog-maintenancey mood this week. Totally repainted the site, so it doesn't look quite so cookie-cutter any more, added trackbacks from Haloscan and added an RSS feed. More work to do over the weekend, perhaps...

Experimenting with Technorati tags for each post: blogroll

14 days to Serenity :)

WoW plague and Player vs Real World dynamics

2005-09-22T17:01:00.000+01:00

In Collision Detection, Clive Thompson comments on the WoW plague saying:

"Maybe we should be using online games to study the effects of a real-world bioterror attack? Maybe FEMA and the government should hire Blizzard to build them an online world, and populate it with players by offering it for free. They researchers can test the effects of a contagious bioterror attack such as smallpox -- by releasing a virtual version of it, and seeing how players react."

I have never heard a worse idea in my life. Has this guy ever played an MMORPG?

Real-world behaviour does not exist in these worlds. The whole draw of them is the escapism from the constraints of the real world - players are breaking the quarantine because they can, with no fear of recrimination. They break the rules just for the sake of breaking the rules, when most of them wouldn't dare in real life. I'm sure some of them go out an infect as many people as they can just because it's funny to see animated avatars collapse into skeletons - when it's your real world cousin who catches Ebola and dies it's not so funny, and no one in their right mind would break a quarantine in order to spread the disease.

My point is that you can never use gamers to predict real-world behaviour, because the very essence of gaming is to escape those real-world restrictions and consequences and get away with behaviour you would never be able to in real life. And therein lies their beauty.