Yet Another Graphomaniacs Compendium

2011-04-19T07:13:00.002Z

Crossing over comics and interactive fiction, at first sight, seems to make sense. Your room description becomes the caption and the picture in the frame. Your speech and that of other characters can become speech bubbles. Interactive color - based highlighting can indicate a valid or invalid response as you type. Possibly even an inline popup suggesting alternatives can get round the vocablulary problem. Your past moves would appear in previous panels which you could go back and review. There are quite a lot of fun games you could play with the whole concept.

The central problem, is, of course - verbs. Your rich verb/adverb/ajective set is reduced to pointing and clicking. Possibly double click and pie menus would give you some verb choice. I can think of quite a few things I could do with this setup...yet there's something magical about interacting with the computer in text and having it understand you.

"TAKE RED APPLE AND QUICKLY GIVE IT TO THE MAGIC PONY.".
WHICH APPLE DO YOU MEAN THE BIG RED APPLE OR THE SMALL RED APPLE?

Arrgh.

2010-01-11T09:09:00.003Z

Flower

Yesterday, I went to FACTto see an exhibition that purported to be about video game art. Most of it was mildly interesting, some as a historical document, some as hinting at different possibilites. Among the exhibits was a Research Machines 30Z running the original Dungeon. Alongside it was another game, at the other end of the spectrum called Flower. Its a long time since a game had any kind of emotional impact on me, but this did, mostly because it was a very carefully crafted aesthetic experience, matching fluid control, music, sound and visuals.

I think it's an important reminder that drama is only one mechanism by which emotional impact is achieved: that color, rhythm, form and melody are just as important. To this day one of the most impressive theatre productions I've seen was a staging of Electrain which an ensemble chorus, music and lighting was used to complement a whole in a similar way.

It also reinforces the limited nature of interaction we have with the games. Primiarly we have focused on point and act selection semantics, especially shooting. The question thats running through my mind now is - what have we missed? If we went back in time and gave this medium to William Blake, or Coleridge, or Mozart, what would they see? What would they do with it? What possibilities are we missing just because we are blinded by the norms that have been established by an industry thats been hideously successful, commercially?

2008-08-14T15:06:00.002Z

This made me think of Cordwainer Smiths The Game Of Rat and Dragon.

I always thought his planar mouse brains specialised for hyperspace navigation were fanciful. There's a game in this somewhere: I dream of pulsating quaternion dragons looming in extreme swirling realtime plasma fog...

2008-06-12T21:25:00.001Z

Blues Bar Dialogue circa April 1993.


  JB: Sorry. I've just woken up!

  JC: ZZZ Ain't nothing like sleep for a black sheep!

  JB: I go out at lunch time, get very drunk, sleep till 9.45, wake up
  find a message from my mother on the answerphone "Oh, Jon, where are
  you", then go to the pub for another drink, emm?

  JC: Story of a life! I like the socks you are wearing!

  JB: Yes, but it took me 5 minutes longer to get here trying to find my
  glasses.

  JC: But you are here in time to claim your free beer!

  JB: Free? I've been saving up for it..

  JC: It's strange to see you looking like you might be happy - a visage
  last clapped eyes upon millelenia ago!

  JB: Happy? Guilty of all the crimes this century has commited maybe,
  happy? A moribund euphoria.

  JC: Forgive me for mentioning it, I should have known better.

  JB: Decadence before the fall.

  JC: It's not just you, Jon Bainbridge. Take a look around you. This is
  a lustful and demented planet and we are all happily going to hell!

2008-06-07T21:56:00.004Z

From my notebook 04/04/91

I remember waking up and thinking "that was a good dream". Now I can't remember what it was that I dreamt. It pisses me off that I'm so creative in my dreams yet when I wake I cannot seem to find any coherent images of metaphors that have not been used one thousand times.

My dreams all seem to be of travelling and changing, yet in real life I get nowhere!

"Travelling and falling, these are the best dreams you can have." This, accoording to the Senoi, the dream - tribe via Le Guin.

What lies at the end of dreams? Life is a cul-de-sac with a decidedly dead end...not a very good metaphor, but..from the nipples of the mother-goddess flow the milk of life.

An even worse metaphor, then..

2008-06-07T21:46:00.005Z

Sunday Afternoon Porno Video

1 Switching on

The buzzing of phosphor dots re-arranging themselves
madden the senses like the hum of a thousand flies.
They attempt to escape the surface of the screen
but they are stuck in the skin of a steaming turd,
that enfolds them and congeals as it solidifies.

2 Switching off

The listless eyes absorb the sophistry of simulated sleaze
the bored ears attend each mindless moan
A screen of pulsing and panting, signifying nothing,
Until just before a false little death
silence slices through the last theatrical groan...

2008-06-07T21:28:00.007Z

From my notebook: 08/03/91

My refusal to indulge in secondary process thinking lead swiftly to insanity...not at all wise was it? All this isms pique my ire: situationalism, feminism, Stalinism, Internationalism. Ismism is the interlocked disease of our time, the intellectual equivalent of cheap clothes made by sweatshop labour.

Ok I've been a total shit to Katrina and must apologize. To conflate physical beauty with vapidity and vanity seems a particularly obtuse mistake for a epistemologist to make.

I'm not really a writer just an lexical auditor with pretensions to becoming experimental epistemologist.

Periphasis. A word to conjure with.

Conversation with Tom Alexander:

John: How well do you know Damien?

Tom: Too well.

..

Tom: A lot of very talented people, like Katrina.

John: (surprise) Katrina!?

Tom: She's got the motivation. That's 50%..

Rising conflict can be built out of attack and counter-attack. Rhythm and contrast. Look for those things everywhere, they are bedrock basics.

Nick Pollard: As a writer, beer is better.

So, why do I have heartburn?

North, fifty seven, peristalsis. Nine, six, five, clime, slime. Rhymye.

Claim nothing for your own or you will reap what is sown.

Note that there is hope. The Tories just got the Judith Hanna treatment in the recent by-election. Good. Flush turds down the pan, they belong in the sewers with the rats.

My ancestors were wise: "Don't give a man a sword until he knows how to dance."

Rites of passage. Time to drop the old things and go on.

I was bitter, introverted, socially gauche. This hasn't changed much. Also, slightly obnoxious to women. That's changed. Now, I'm really obnoxious to women.

2007-12-28T16:14:00.001Z

Earthsea

Like many, I'm a big fan of Ursula Le Guin and her writings. In particular, the Earthsea books were ones that I read whilst a teenager, and have revisited several times since. They have many dimensions and introduced me, all unknowing at the time, to Taoist thought. Given that I had a strongly Catholic up-bringing that I was less than enchanted by, the alternative approaches to morality, spirituality and society in the books fascinated me greatly and gave me an alternative viewpoint to many items of dogma the teachers and nuns at school were eager to push onto me. Later, when was a University student, I discovered the Tao Te Ching and was delighted by it's combination of authority and ambiguity.

So I was pleased to discover that a film adaptation of it had been made whilst looking for something to watch over the Christmas holiday, and was airing on a channel I could actually watch. I was expecting something like Peter Jacksons effort at the Lord Of the Rings triology. Perhaps not an adaptation that could capture all the dimensions of the books, but at least a credible transfer of the narrative to a visual medium, perhaps highlighting the aspects that transferred well to a visual treatment.

Instead I switched off the show after five minutes, feeling as if I had just watched someone urinate on a particularly valuable antique. Everybody was white. The name of the lead character was wrong. All the scenes were sexually charged. The story was recast to being about a mad megalomaniac who wanted to unleash dark powers to rule the world. All the hackneyed clichés you can imagine, they were there. I no longer recognised the thoughtful coming-of-age story of a goatherd turned wizard from Gont, struggling with his powers and identity, and the hard choices of a child-priestess, abandoned in the desert, her childhood sacrificed to empty ritual.

It turns out that this adaptation is notorious and has caused a serious spat between Ms LeGuin and the production company. I cannot fathom the decision-making process that lead to the production of this dreck, and hope the producer is never let near a job which requires the slightest creative judgement ever again. Harsh, but that's what you should do to someone who does the equivalent of re-inventing the Wind In The Willows and making Toad a rampant philanderer.

2007-09-29T20:32:00.000Z

It is the end of September and you feel much older..

Time for the September song..September the 29th is the perfect day to discover this song. I'm glad I did..

2007-08-07T20:45:00.000Z

Learning the World

I've been Learning the World and finding it a fun read, if not too serious: anything with giant alien space bats in it isn't asking to be taken at face value...

The thing that really struck me is how drenched the book is in market economics. It's been pointed out to me that this is a function of the novel being a piss-take of Robert A Heinlien; but my thoughts on initially reading it was to contrast it with HG Wells; his novels are as drenched in socialism as Learning the World is with market capitalism. It leads me to the obvious conclusion that modern SF will probably date in the same way. In a hundred years time the economics and politics will easily be the most anachronistic of elements in the SF of the current day. Either because laissez-faire capitalism will be taken to it's logical extreme and the the currently-considered-mad position that all taxation is essentially insurance will be realized and the state will vanish as we disappear into the insurers maws and regulation becomes a thing of the past, or it will be replaced and discredited as utterly as communism was...

2007-08-07T20:23:00.001Z

Is this thing on?

It's been awhile...

2007-02-17T20:23:00.000Z

Meaty Post

I always loved Terry Bissons short "They Are Made Out of Meat". So someone went and made a short film out of it. I love how the opening shot plays with your expectations, and the great choice of setting, perfectly exploiting all the multiple meanings of the word "meat". However, I'm still not going veggie.

2007-01-30T15:53:00.000Z

Life sucks when..

You have to use a tablespoon to open your front door because someone stole the handle..

2006-12-26T21:16:00.000Z

Technology changes things

I can remember my full initiation into the Internet: I was studying a course in Theatre of the Deaf at Reading University, in 1992, having miserably failed to capitalise on a lower second IT degree from a middling polytechnic in the midst of an economic recession. The word "Thatcher" still has me struggling to hold back a reflexive desire to issue a saliva projectile from my mouth.

No matter, it was 1992 and the net was still a thing of wonder. I discovered email, Yahoo, text muds, Usenet and gobs of information about games programming which I absorbed and went on to use in finally carving out a niche for myself as a games programmer.

What excited me about the medium was it's communications potential. Previously profoundly deaf and unable to use the 'phone exculded me from society - it was difficult to keep in contact with old friends, and employment. "Being deaf is the worse of the lot - you can't use the 'phone". It occured to me that this medium was obviously going to be liberating for deaf people - at last instantaneous, cheap textual communication became the norm. And so it was: email, sms and im were highly useful for the deaf with a small 'd' who chose (or had chosen for them) English as their first langauage.

But then there are the Deaf with a capital 'D' - those who choose to sign and define themselves as a linguistic minority rather than a disabled group. Until now it doesn't really help them, as glossed sign reads a lot like pigdin English with a broken grammar, which of course instantly puts the average hearies prejudices into play.

This is finally changing, now that broadband and cheap video is common: these people are finding a voice - finding the liberation the rest of us experienced back then when the web was new, and wide eyed middle managment bullshitted on about the "power" of email. Never mind that, when you have YouTube. There's a lively range of discussion and exhibition going on out there..

2006-12-13T07:54:00.000Z

Adolescent Poetry

Found on a mobile phone abandoned on the Bakerloo line

Love is not a threesome;
Love is me and you.
Love is not a publication, a private edition will do.
Love requires no great demonstration.
Most of all, Love is not a zoo.

2006-09-15T20:57:00.000Z

Yet more predictable outrage.

Another wave of outrage from the people who brought you the jihad against perfectly good Danish dairy products over some third rate cartoons published in a minor rag. This time, the problem is that a retired academic making a complentative and thoughtful speech at his old university quoted a more than slightly brusque Byzantine Emperor damning the religion besieging his city.

The interesting thing in both cases is that there is a delay between the speech and the actual reaction. The similarity of the developments in both cases is striking. It suggests that some people in the Islamic world are actually on the look - out for incidents like these and are using them to inflame anti-Western sentiment.

It might be instructive to follow a trail of reports: first, the initial report from Reuters. Slightly later on, a more comprehensive version appears in the New York Times. The Intelligent Design people managed to read the speech as " Slamming Evolution ", an aspect I hadn't previously considered (and I've read the text).

The first seriously negative report comes out of India on the 12th. Pope Launches Scathing Attack on Islam from a site that describes itself as an "alternative" and "independent" source of Indian news. This may be a coded phrase meaning "utter bollocks ". The source was Zee News who also happen to be a source of articles like "Cash and a car for Blood Of Danish Cartoonists". Nice. Beginning to see a pattern?

Now, why would a Hindi news agency want to show Islam in a bad light? And who was silly enough to uncritically believe that article? I may never know. The following day, the Philadelphia Inquirer is smart enough to realize The Pope's words may roil Muslims.

Roil is an interesting choice of word which can mean "to make muddy by stirring up sediment" which seems to certainly be what the media has done in this case. However the Islam Online article of the same day is quite thoughtful and informative and critical of the Pope, but not seemingly outraged. At this point in my trip through the Google news cache, I'm still getting many reports about the other events surrounding his trip - the open - air masses, the assiliant who was captured and then let go. The outrage story plainly hasn't erupted yet.

There is one excitable report from a site called Hot Air helpfully predicting a truck bomb in St. Peter's Square, but most of the reports are wrap-ups commenting on how the popular tour has helped the Pope's image. "Pope sheds image of dour theologcian". Boy, did he ever, but not the way he intended..

It seems quite a few people in India believed that Zee News article: the following day (two days after the speech), AsiaNews reports from India, (ah, Zee News!) pointing out the controversy opens Muslims to manipulation. Talk about pointing out the obvious...

This is also the day that the story finally gets legs when Ali Bardakoglu criticizes the Pope's remarks. The interesting thing is that what he actually said depends on who you listen to: there's the moderate version and the inflammatory version. Needless to say it's the inflammatory version that the worlds press run with..

Interestingly, it seems that Mr. Bardakoglu has a great deal to lose if Turkey integrates with Europe, as he heads the Department Of Religous Affairs, the existence of which as part of the state is seen to be a contradiction in a secular country striving to join the European Union. Perhaps he's only trying to justify his job?

No matter: I have illustrated my point. In the hysterically amplifying echo chamber of the modern mass media all it takes is a few wildly misrepresentative and excitable articles in a widely used regional outlet to ignite a worldwide perfect shitstorm of hysteria. Flash mobs on a global scale. Low literacy rates in the Islamic world might make them more suspectible to this kind of thing, but that is a politically incorrect observation. Please don't quote me, or I might get Poped off..

Having slogged your way through this article, I hope you feel a bit more clued-up about the way the world works. This trawl through the Google News cache took a couple of hours, and isn't really that entertaining, but I think it is illustrative..

EDIT: Just for the instant experts who have not read the text, but instead rely on the crazy distorting echo chamber of the "free" press..here is a link to the text of the Popes controversial speech in Regensburg. I'm still enjoying the irony of a call for rational dialogue being met with such a response.

2006-09-09T21:00:00.001Z

The Human Condition

It's just this box: you are born into a humanoid species with the usual options - suffer, procreate and die. Taken as an amalmagam, Myspace is a compilation of the utter futility of this activity. We reach out for someone different, try to be something special, or new, but we just end up with the same bunch of experiences and mistakes as millions, if not billions of our fellow semi-evolved chimpanzees.

Science Fiction gives us a chance to see what might be outside this particular box, or to truly test it's dimensions, yet it's all too often a disregarded form. It's lack of regard is probably influenced by fear of confronting the reflections in the mirror it holds up to us, the lack of intellectual honesty shown by people (increasingly people, in power) who disregard the data. People who prefer to offer and indulge in the flight into fantasy.

Yet the paradox of fantasy is that so many of the things that surround us and make our society work, and influence our individual behavoir are based on myth: self - constructed narratives as memetic and powerful as the old sufi teaching stories. Thus they are subject to expertly crafted counter-myth. We live in a story space; sleeping, we walk onwards: confused bundles of psyche driven by whispers and dreams.

Only once in a thousand years does a soul wake up.

2006-08-11T23:02:00.000Z

So it goes.

O yeaz, I have been in a frantic mode this last day or two looking for my metro pass. Around these parts, it's possible to buy a pass for the Metro (think light railway/underground) for a whole year. Every year they do a sale in October where they knock two hundred quid off the price. That's when I get mine. Only if you lose it, that's a lot of money down the drain. Guess what I did.

Yes, lost it. So I turn my bedroom and my clothes out about 300 times in a vain attempt to find it over the weekend, finally giving up on Monday morning, and asking about a replacement. I need to pay 15 quid and find an insurance slip I'm sure I don't have. Pants. Rather pissed off with myself now, I decide to stomp off to Intermezzo for a coffee.

As soon as I'm there, the lovely Rhea (and she is lovely) descends from the cappucino machine to wave some small blue object in my face that transforms my mood. No, it isn't a cache of Viagara, it's my missing pass. Sometimes life gives you a repreive from execution. Not often, just sometimes.

2006-08-06T15:50:00.000Z

Interior. Day. The inside of Peter's flat. Peter lies semi-concious on a chinese carpet, wearing a silk dressing-gown whilst inhaling sporadically from a huge hookah that dominates the unkempt room. Someone knocks on the door. Peter turns over and ignores them. They knock again. Peter continues to ignore the knocking. We hear the door being opened and two men in bright blue bellboys uniforms come in. Peter sits up and stares at them.

Peter: Where did you get the key to my flat?
Luiz: (for it is he) Dramatic liscence. We have a warrant for your arrest on the grounds of extreme lexical self-indulgence and negilent progtanonisting.
Peter: What?
Bruce: (for it his he) Your author complained to us about your disrespectful and lazy attidute and general unwillingess to participate in his plot.
Peter: The ungrateful bastard!
Luiz: You have no-one to blame but yourself.
Peter: Look, he wrote me this flat and this hookah, what did he expect? I thought the plot would be fine without me.
Bruce: You'd have to ask him. In the meantime I request you come with us.
Peter: Am I under arrest?
Luiz: Not if you come quietly. It has been decided that your dissapearence will furher the plot.
Peter: And if I don't come?
Luiz: Basinstoke, Slough and Reading.
Peter: No way! I'll come quietly.
Bruce: Good. We have a nice flat in Brighton for you. The neighbours are a bit mad, but that's ok. You are going to be in total isolation.
Peter: Total isolation?
Luiz: Only for a couple of months. Soon a gorgeous drama student will come and attempt to seduce you.
Peter: Sounds good to me.

Luiz and Bruce march Peter out of the flat.

But of course, she won't actually seduce him; she's *far* too good for him - she knows how to handle self - indulgence, and he doesn't. An important life skill, without which, we are totally maimed.

2006-08-02T19:36:00.000Z

Money

The more you think about money the weirder it gets: it's a purely human construct with a science (Economics) attacted that tries to pose as something other than a statistical study of human behaviour and tries to confuse the stuff with a force of nature. Yet it is universal enough to be used in cultures spanning across space and time that have almost nothing in common, reinforcing this illusion. And it is an illusion. "I promise to pay the bearer on demand --" that's all you are trading, unfulfillable promises. Banks are the biggest con artists in the world. It's all held up by smoke and mirrors.

But human behaviour is so predictable it all just works, and no one has been able to dream up a working alternative. I'd love to know if a physical medium of exchange is something that multiple societies have developed independently, or it is just a human fobile, but have no other intelligent species available for comparison, so I'm not sure whether tobe depressed or resigned. I can't think of any potentially arbitary phenonemon so pursuasive among human society.

2006-07-07T20:49:00.000Z

Dreams

Slowly, some creative energy is returning to me after a year in a void. My plotting problems with Lunch With Laura still exist, but I'm marking time by doing websites for friends, updating my old animation engine with an exciting French animatrix called Fred (everyone should have one!), and dreaming again. Last night I dreamt I was stranded and needed to get to Harrogate from Leeds, and so shared a cab with a gracious and very blonde Scandinavian Princess...yes...as one does.

2006-05-10T19:47:00.000Z

The Girl In The Fireplace.

If you only see one Doctor Who episode of this series: it should be this one.

Applying critical faculties to a show about a 900 year old bloke bouncing round time and space in an old police box while chased by genocidal pepperpots requires a bit of selectivity if it is to be feasible, but here are some reasons why this episode is a Must Watch (mild spoilers, beware).

1> Dialogue

The whole programme was peppered with excellent dialogue: "I just made it up", "France. Another Planet.", "I'm not winding you up.". Madam de Pompadours delivery was perfectly aristocratic and the speech mannerisms were perfect. This was a woman with wit who could really string a sentence together. Mickey acts as the perfect "straight man" for delivering lines to. I hope they keep him around.

2> Production values

The costumes, the constantly shifiting locations each with lots of subliminal clues every time they are entered. The gorgeous costumes, and the absolutely fantastic image of the Doctor bursting out of the mirror - only an actual period drama series could do better.

3> Script

Moffat continually played with our expectations. This was classic Who (and I use the word classic in a heavy cannonical fanwank old-series sense) in that we were put in the middle of a mystery and didn't fully know what exactly was going on until the very end. Revelation followed upon revelation, compounding the riddle: the fireplace, the automaton, the clockwork, Madame du Pompadour, the horse, the human heart, the mind meld suddenly turning two way, the zaphodic doc...at no point could I predict further than the next two minutes of the programme. If there was Nobel for television scriptwriting, Mr Moffat would be on the shortlist.

4> Acting

Easily the most subjective part, but Ms Myles blew away Ms Elisabeth Sladen from the previous episode. Sorry, Liz. David Tennnant managed an extraordinary emotional range, and so did she. The Doctors abandonment of Rose hightened the emotional tension of Rose and Mickey when they were trapped. Usually scenes like this have the impact of a wet lettuce because you know the Doc will wave his sonic screwdriver and save them, so these are my least favourite scenes but Billie acted her socks off with the only slightly - off dialogue of the whole script.

5> Minor bad points.

The dannana diaquiri lines are too derivative of Zaphod Beeblebrox (for a moment I thought I saw a second head). Easily forgiven. Then there's Arthur, the horse. There's a logical explanation for his presence, but blink - and you missed it. The Doctor finding his way back to the 51st Century via the fireplace. was unexpected, leading to a slight wiff of deus ex machina (or deus ex fireplace, as the case may be). There was no Checkhovian gun in scene one for this, unless that was another blink and you miss it moment. This being one of the frustrations of the 45 minute format: you have to be completely alert in order not to miss anything.

6> Ms Myles.

*swoon* *thud* 'nuff said.

2006-02-20T11:46:00.000Z

On Fairy Stories

"The magic of faery is not an end in itself, it's virtue is in its operations: among these are the sastisfaction of certian primodorial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time. Another is ... to hold communication with other living things."

Tolkien.

It's interesting that, by Tolkein's criteria, Neil Gaiman's Sandman is not really a fairy story, being rooted in dream rather than faery..

2006-02-15T23:58:00.000Z

Overheard at Brown

I wish there were more blogs like this: this is the raw snippet experience that makes writers drool. Setting, character, motivation, all evoked by a single whacky line..if anyone knows of any more blogs like this one, can they comment? Ta.

2006-02-15T12:51:00.000Z

Myself as a South Park Character

I blame Shrydar. Try it at
South Park Studios

2006-02-14T07:20:00.000Z

Free speech

Like everyone else, you like it when it suits you...you just have to put up with it when it doesn't.

2006-02-06T08:52:00.000Z

To the man with the placard.

Yes, you.

The one saying that 3/11 (sic) was on its way to Europe. Lets sit down and talk about all this, shall we? I'm making the generous assumption that you are capable of rational debate on this matter. I can even see your point of view, up to a limit. The decision to re-publish the cartoons *was* provocative and probably offensive. I can also see the editors point of view; an important principle was at stake - their mode of defense may have been unfortunate. However, calling for large scale terrorist attacks killing thousands of innocent people in reprisal is hardly proportionate response.

There was a period in European history when religious authorities did have complete controls of speech and intellectual discourse. We call it the Dark Ages, and, frankly we see a lot of Islamic countries still stuck in them. If that's the way they want to live, fine. If you want to come and live in Europe, please, however, attempt to understand your host society and why it allows you to criticize it so vocally without a visit from the religious Police, Saudi-style.

We don't let the Church, or, to a lesser extent, the State, anywhere near our media for good reasons. One I could mention is that if the Church had had it's way we'd still believe that disease was caused by devils, the Sun went around the Earth, and that Kings had a divine right to rule.

Instead we have an acute awareness of our planets position in space and it's fragility, a modern medical science that saves countless millions of lives, and a society capable of self-scrutiny and removing governments shown to be corrupt or oppressive. This is a direct result of separating Church and State. Only when we gave ourselves the freedom to question did we have the freedom to progress.

Your freedom will only be possible when the last Middle-Eastern Dictator has been strangled in the entrails of the last Islamofacist Imam.

So free speech is not just an abstract, silly, corrupt, godless, western, decadent (whatever adjective you want) idea, but it's central to European identity and it's one of the things that makes human progress possible. If you can show that Islam has made comparable contributions to the human condition on a par with say, antibiotics, the internal combustion engine, or even the good old printing press, we'd like to hear it.

And to close on a less than pleasant note, Europe is also aware of it's own failings - it's part of that self-critical gig I was explaining earlier. We are familiar with masses of angry young men, dispossessed and spouting extremist and racist slogans marching through streets. They used to be ours. We know where *that* leads. If necessary, we are ready, again to deal with this. We hope it won't be. As long as there isn't another 3/11.

2006-01-13T15:22:00.000Z

Got to hand it to Greenpeace.

They do emotionally manipulative propoganda really well. I suspect any hijacked plane anywhere near a nuclear power station in the UK would be shot down. I also note that attacks get made on other energy installations, albeit with less devastating consequences.

I'm no nuclear advocate, but blantantly manipulative ploys like this *really* annoy me, and deserve to backfire. Next straw man please.

2006-01-13T13:11:00.000Z

Best Xmas present ever.

2006-01-07T10:04:00.000Z

Daddy - O

Daniel Connors came into the world at 1.55pm. He weighed a shade over 7 pounds. Mum and Dad are completely chuffed to the gills! Our new visitor is gaining weight and filling nappy after nappy with what looks like chicken korma..which I'll never be able to look at in the same way again.

2005-11-14T09:24:00.000Z

On hearing again.

Another phenonemon I have noticed - mainly while watching documentaries on television - is that I come across a word I've never actually *heard* pronounced before, although it's part of my vocabulary. It's usually quite an exotic word - inconscient, for example - that I aquired in my late teens, post hearing loss. Every time I hear one of these for the first time, there's a moment of confusion, followed by a little shock and a thrill of recognition. "So that's what that word sounds like". It's a genuinely exciting thing to experience, even in very small doses. At last, I understand the Hellen Keller phenonemon.

2005-11-07T18:04:00.000Z

Fatal statistic

Today, during my project management reading I learnt an interesting (albeit unsourced) statistic: people under 45 working for more than 48 hours a week have twice the risk of death from coronary heart disease.

Death March may be an uncannily apt description.

2005-11-02T09:39:00.000Z

Pornzilla.

Internet Explorer is doomed once the one handed surfing crowd get hold of these Firefox tools. Not that I've actually tried them, I'll take their word for it that Firefox is the best porn browser, as it's good at lots of other things, too.

2005-11-01T08:53:00.000Z

Time to check for rootkits

For the non technical people, rootkits are a very stealthy and hard - to - detect kind of virus, and very hard to detect and remove. They may not be malicious but having them on your machine is likely to slow it a little and/or compromise your privacy. You can catch them off seemingly innocent sources. If I'm really paranoid, I'd say this is why so many UK newspapers are giving away free CD's/DVD's. Of course, if you are running Mac OS X or Linux - nothing to worry about...

2005-10-13T13:37:00.000Z

Back to University

So, now it's back to University, for me. This is the first life-changing experience I can directly attribute to my implant. I want to go back and to my Masters properly, because, frankly I suffered as an undergraduate with my deafness, greatly. Given that I didn't have access to the content of most of my lectures and had to do a lot of individual study in the library to keep up. Now, of course, all that should have changed, and I do have no problem following the lectures, and am determined to do much better and make up for lost time. Also, it gives me a chance to use my implant more, and come out from behind the monitor screen ;-).

Ironically, the mode of study I was forced to adopt for my Bachelor's is seems pretty much the general mode of study for a Masters anyway!

2005-09-27T08:23:00.000Z

25 September

It's a very special day. It's the day the world survived. It should be an international public holiday.

2005-08-29T09:05:00.000Z

Life doesn't get better than this..

A lazy summer day in a prime seat in the Blues Bar, sipping Guinness and listening to a hot new act: Kawme "D", and occasionally looking back to see the Aussies lose their grip on the Ashes..sigh..pity it had to end.

2005-08-26T19:36:00.000Z

Woof! Woof!

Throw us a sausage..

Discworld: Which Ankh-Morpork City Watch Character are YOU?
brought to you by Quizilla

2005-08-23T19:50:00.000Z

75

It's amazing the difference a few juduicuously placed characters can make to a layout: in this case a 75 in the right place means the right hand column of this blog is seventy five percent of the width of the browser window. It might be about right..

2005-08-23T11:05:00.000Z

Similarites

Occasionally I notice strange similarities between two seemingly different books. In this case "The Player Of Games" by Iain Banks and "The Dispossessed" by Ursuala K Le Guin. They might be interesting books to read alongisde one another.

The similarites are in both setting and plot: a lone representative of a more socially advanced culture visits and has an enormous effect on a much more socially regressive culture. Shevek is a Physictist from Annares, an anarchistic culture based on a moon orbiting Urras: a much more capitalistic culture, and we see it through his eyes. Likewise, The Player of Games centres around Jeanu Morat Gurgueh, a game-player of the Culture: which is a post-scarcity society in which money is no longer needed as a medium of exchange because an individual has acess to all the material things he/she could reasonably need due to advanced technology. Gurgeh is visiting the Azadian Empire, which is a frankly revolting and feudal society even by 21st Century Western standards, and again: we see the society through his eyes, seemingly seeing our own by proxy.

The books even share similar flaws. Although they present a sideways view of our own society, and are intellectually interesting, pointing out the links between langauge culture and society in that both protagonists come from an idealistic society with an artificial language (Pravic, and Marain), it must be said that both authors have a quite leaden prose style and the books can be a struggle to read, but are worth the effort because they make you see our current societies in a completely different light, as someone from outside might see them, which is always a valuable thing, even if you disagree completely with the premises of the protaganoists of the books..

The one interesting difference is that the society in the Dispossessed is based on soldiarity in the face of scarcity - their social model of mutual co-operation is a neccissity if the Annaresti culture is to surrvive. However, the Culture is the way it is for exactly the opposite reason. When anybody can have anything, possessions become meaningless..

2005-08-22T12:31:00.000Z

On Actually finishing something.

Ok, so I finished writing Part One of my perpetual graphic - novel in progress. Nine pages, taking two years. That's an awful output rate. I'll never be a pro, but its great fun all the same. Writing the words and waiting for the image to come. It's a form of meditation. And the buzz you get when it clicks is great: just as good as coding a neat subroutine, as bad as the blues you get when you are creatively constipated.

Its so lang since I actually finished something, I'm amazed. As I'm leaving my job for University at the end of this month, I really hope it's a turning point. I look at all the unfinished projects I have: the space opera game, the rougish mutiplayer job, the Angels and Guard IF I wanted to write, and I have this image of a giant Space Bat and Crystal Dragon lost in endless, crazily lit tunnels that's annoying me, too. After eight years of production hell on and off and many published games, it's time to have some fun, and try and enrich the commons.

Coming back down to earth, I Now have the problem of whipping up a tool that will take a structured comic script and post it , panel by panel to a blog. Time to head over to BadByteBootstapBlues and brush up on my XML-RPC.

2005-08-22T12:24:00.000Z

Shoot the sploggers.

That "Next Blog" button on the nav bar has been all but useless for a long time now, due to the predominance of splogs - blogs full of spam. Depressingly predictable. It will be interesting to see how Googles now "flag" system works. Will people actually weed out the commons, or are there so many splogs that people will give up? There must be a critical point. OTOH, the sploggers will simply start removing the toolbar from their blogs, but I'm sure Google has thought of that one.

Browsing the profiles, I also noted that a lot of the blogs of people who had the same interest as me were created late in 2004 when bogging was hot, had three or four and then the blogger gave up. Methinks Google really need to think about meta-moderation of the blogsphere. As well as "Flag As Objectionable" how about "Flag as defunct" to send the inactive blogs to a virtual graveyard, waiting to be resurrected or not, out of the orbit of the nav bar. It would help to sort out the signal from the noise.

2005-08-13T15:48:00.000Z

Sound of their breath fades with the light.

Watching Donnie Darko for the first time recently on terrestial television, I had the experience for the first time of recognising songs that I had listened to many times on the soundtrack CD actually in the film.

Its interesting to contrast the images and feelings the naked songs and lyrics produce against the images and actions in the film itself. "Under the Milky Way Tonight" always evoked for me a certian world-weariness, and passivity: an ennui with existence. However in the film, Donnie is anything but passive - it plays as the film moves to a climax, and it fits perfectly there, too. Interesting.

This dissonance is probably not a novel sensation to anyone over 12, but it's new to me. As I get more blasé about the fact I can hear much better, it's little moments like this that reach out and remind me just how magical what I have gained really is. At one point in his life, Beethoven would have given everything for what I now have.

2005-08-07T10:17:00.000Z

On Holiday

The first time in a long time that I've been able to completely relax..

2005-08-06T15:08:00.000Z

Milburn House

And heres a 'photo of the entrance to the building itself.

The image itself is quite large. Click on it for more detail..

2005-08-06T14:55:00.000Z

Electra

A detail from the floor of Milburn House in Newcastle - Upon - Tyne. It's an interesting building..A Reading University production of Elcetra, is incidentally, still one the best plays I've ever seen..

2005-07-22T17:03:00.000Z

Terrorist Alert - ACT

A shadowy terrorist organisation known only as A.C.T has claimed responsibility for or dismissing England's five top-order batsmen yesterday...

Intelligence officials feel certian this is the notorious Australian Cricket Team, noted for many years of savage, and spectacularly successful attacks on English batsmen. Police urge the public to be vigilant and watch out for suspicious individuals with red balls..

2005-07-20T21:11:00.000Z

A novel way of catching bird flu..

Although, I wouldn't reccomend it..

2005-07-20T20:49:00.000Z

Free the teapot twenty-one!

Their only crime that I can see is in being mostly harmless nutters in the wrong part of the world. The civilised thing to do is laugh at them when they fail to win by-elections.

2005-07-20T10:08:00.000Z

Singularities

I seem to have read quite a few singularity - inspired books recently: well, only two on my account - River of Gods and Singularity Sky. However, they are such different kinds of books it's obvious it's becoming a widely used SF trope. Somewhat like city - smashing atomic-powered weapons were back in the 1930s & 1920s. Perhaps this is a reaction the the scads of SF-as-fantasy and Banksian Space opera we have had in the 1990s and 1980s: a return to SF-as-prophecy. This gives us about 20 years until whatever it is that's going to happen *does* happen. Although it must be said Strong AI has *always* been 20 years in the future...

2005-07-11T13:57:00.000Z

River Of Gods.

After
the dissapointment of Ares Express, which was less than inventive
return to the fizzingly original world of Desolation Road, I thought
Ian McDonald was a spent force. Of course, I've turned out to be
completely wrong. He solved his creative deficit by changing
cultures. Instead of the Africa-centred Martian, and Chaga stories, he
comes up with a seemingly alien - free tale centred around a
near-future India, splintered into smaller states, and habouring AI's
outlawed by the USA's Hamilton acts, much in the way the US attempts
to outlaw P2P or Strong Cryptography in these present times.

He comes up with a colourful cast of characters from every section of
society: Shiv, a low-life criminal, Shaheen Bador Khan, a civil
servant privy to cabinet decisions, Thomas Lull a self-exiled US
academing, and Nanda, a Krishna Cop, charged with the hunting of rogue
AI's, along with some others. We find, in the end, among other things,
the final resting place of William H Gates, which will be a delicious
twist for those of us who curse the insecure and sometimes buggy
software that his empire foists on us.

Although the wide cast means that it takes time for the story to
get moving, as the characters are introduced at the beginning, one by
one, it pays off because once the story does get moving it's hell of a
ride, and we get to see a complete and vivid picture of an alien, but
very interesting and plausible future society, as a setting for a
story that's a heady brew of SF tropes and themes: Cyberpunk, Hindu
Mythology, First Contact, and straight Thriller.

2005-07-04T10:18:00.000Z

Musical taste

The last few months have been interesting. I find my musical taste re-evolving in fast - forward time. Initially, I was repelled by the complex acoustics of Miles Davis, and anything more complex than straight 4 beats - to - the bar..but gradually I've been working up the ladder - from that simplicity, to prog rock's frantic beat, to the more gentle melodic-rediscovery of Vivaldis string concertoes...

Now, for some reason I'm hooked on The Church's "Under The Milky Way Tonight"..The only thing I'm sure I can't stand is accordions. And Harmonicas. And Folk Music. Folk Music with harmonicas and mouth organs just sends me running for cover.

2005-05-06T15:47:00.000Z

QOTD

"I think we will see Gordon Brown replace Tony Blair before we see David Tennant replace Christopher Eccleston

Possibly. Personally I think Blair will hang on for the EU constitution referendum. Is that before the second series or after?

2005-04-23T17:57:00.000Z

Shrydar Goes Mad

Madness Down Under! Shrydar, my ex-lead programmer is going quietly insane - he thinks he can get more colour out of a c64 by coding pixels close together to produce a controlled moire - effect. If he can get an effect he can consistently reproduce on different tellies, I'll eat my hat...

Actually, maybe he's not so mad - the system he's working with is completely deterministic - everything in the C64 runs off the same clock - and of course, all colour tellies have to reproduce the same colours from the same signal..this is going to be an interesting one to watch..

2005-02-28T22:55:00.000Z

An Audio Tour of the Casa Gaudi

I am back from Barcelona - a city I should have re-visited two years ago. One of the more interesting experiences was touring the Casa Gaudi with an audio guide - one of those dinky little DAT things that plays back a lecture about the room you are standing in at the press of a button. It's a mildly amusing toy. I was heartened to be able to hear the commentary but annoyed at it's fluffiness. Yes, Gaudi WAS a genius, yes, he did brilliantly fuse geometric and natural forms, but repeating it one hundred times more doesn't make it any more or the less true.

Gaudi always gives me a strange deja vu, as when I was a teenager, before I knew of his existence I wrote parts of an SF novel where the houses were grown, rather than built, much in the style of a Gaudi house, execept maybe made of leather and bone and fuelled by chlorophyll versus stone and sunlight. It's always odd to see something that you always thought lived only in your imagination standing there in the light of day.

2005-02-23T09:19:00.000Z

Pillowman

I'll have to eat my words about my implant not changing my life. I went to the theatre yesterday, and for the first time in about 20 years, I understood every word of a play.

The play itself was "The Pillowman" by Martin McDonagh. It's billed as a black comedy, but I'm not sure it is. It might be more of a white tragedy. If there is such a thing, natch.

The writer used some cheap and tedious devices to pad the dialogue - characters often repeated things three times, the word "fuck" used for empathis which I find tedious from over - use in many texts

However, I'd completely forgotten the power of words to conjure up illusions in a small, dark space with the help of talented actors, and that's what this play was all about, and it did it quite well. I can't say too much without spoiling the whole thing for the causual reader of this blog (if you do exist, please say hello ;))

At last I have access to the theatre again. It feels like coming out of exile. I left the theatre with my mind fully charged and whizzing with thoughts and ideas...I don't know if they will surrvive or die. Let's find out.

2005-02-21T11:42:00.000Z

Latest tuning appointment

The latest tuning appointment confirmed what has now become a routine that I am confident with, mapping my hearing by an audiogram like process, where I listening to pure tone beeps, to get frequency response, that is used to generate a program that is uploaded to my processor. The usual incremental improvment in my hearing faculties is a result.

I think I have gained as much improvement from the implant as I ever will, now. I can pick words out of conversations or announcements without lipreading, but can rarely make out a coherent whole. I can just about follow a television programme, and can hold a simple 'phone conversation. It isn't real hearing, but it's so much more functional than what I had before, there is no comparison, and I have no regrets

I also get one other bonus - I got some gadgets to try after my last appointments: adapters that let me plug my processor into a mains powered (TV/Computer), or battery-powered (CD player/iPod) device, and one also for the 'phone.

I'm looking forward to plugging myself into my PC soundcard at work. It should freak out some of my colleagues...

2005-02-03T20:29:00.000Z

Shrydar

My ex lead programmer has gotten himself a blog. He sounds seriously sleep-depreived. Hope he's ok.

2005-01-25T22:38:00.000Z

A new sound

One sound I recently recognised is one that I don't remember from 20 years ago, but now seems omnipresent: the beeping, burping and chirrping coming from pockets, handbacks, rucksacks, purses and pouches. The mobile. The are as much part of the urban landscape now as birdsong is of the rural one. Perhaps more so, but less predictable, and so it's been awhile before I've finally comprehended the meaning of some of those funny noises.

Why isn't there a dawn chorus for mobile phones?

2005-01-21T13:36:00.000Z

The more things change..

Its strange. I have the implant now, but in someways it has made no difference; my daily routine is still the same. I go to work, code, come home. I no longer need to lipread as much: I can hold simple (very simple) conversations on the 'phone. Every so often I still hear or recognise something I haven't heard before: a buzzer, a certian accent, a musical instrument - although I'm not sure that being able to hear the bagpipes is a bonus - and it's always a 'wow, isn't that cool' moment.

However, even though I'm capable of much more now in terms of hearing I'm not really using that capability day to day in what I do: I don't work with people. It was something of a deliberate decision perhaps, to become a games programmer, but it was also where my enthusiasms lead me. I always thought I'd re-evaluate my life and revolutionise it, after this implant - but there doesn't seem to be any point as I'm happy where I am. On the other hand, I'd be great to take this thing further and see how far I can go with it.

2005-01-13T09:39:00.000Z

Trinity

Currently I'm reading Almost Like A Whale by Steve Jones. I'm learning a lot about the low-level mechanics of evolution from it, and the fine distinction between species and varieties, and the role of hybridization. You see, one of the puzzles of evolution via natural selection is how we get from species A to species B with no apparent in-between species C that could possibly be viable in the wild. This is called hill climbing - the analogy being that getting from species A to species B involves temporarily reversing evolutionary progress in order to create a better adapted species later on.

I've also been reading The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's an alternative history - Europe is wiped out by the Black Death - completely depopulated apart from a few small settlements in the Orkneys. The history he outlines is interesting: the American continent is colonised in a completely different pattern. Europe is Islamic, India initiates the Industrial Revolution. The Native Americans and Japanese ally themselves against the Chinese. It's all very novel and entertaining, and told from the perspective of a group of characters in the grip of the Bhuddist cycle of death and rebirth throughout history, which is a very clever way of maintaining an unbroken narrative and plot through the centuries. The two histories converge in the present time. With Islam dominating Europe and the West of Asia, and China dominant in the East and the Americas, there is a clash of civiilizations. A Great War is fought, that dwarfs the First World War in magnitude with a front all the way across Asia. In spite of this there is no subsequent war, and nuclear weapons are not developed. No government makes the investment in the new weapon.

At first I thought that this was highly unrealistic, but this article "Pilgrimage to Trinity", written by the son of one of the Los Alamos gang, who went into nuclear physics himeslef - made me change my mind - the development of nuclear weapons turns out to be an example of technological evolutionary hill - climbing. The investment required to produce the material to build the first one is huge: but once it's done you are on the other side of the hill. It's something that's known to be possible, it's known there is a given route from A to B and it's possible to retrace the steps. The only way to prevent nuclear proliferation is never to build a thermonuclear weapon in the first place.

It's at a time like this I think of a newspaper article I read in 1992 - in the light of events in Europe at the end of the 1980's and the end of the cold war, membership in CND had declined dramatically, given that the chances of WWIII had dropped drastically. Why, does CND still exist? Why should anyone still have membership? "Because there are still nuclear weapons in the world", was the answer - and it appears to be right.

Too Late.

2004-12-01T22:26:00.000Z

Game Studio for sale. Only one careless owner.

Acclaim Austin up for sale..Here's the links - and here.

Some interesting items have been pointed out.

Concealed cameras? Don't they trust their employees, or something? Probably not. It does explain the exquisitely timed visits to the kitchen made by certain management members...!

2004-11-16T11:38:00.000Z

Quote of the Day

We can misunderstand each other when using the same language and we
can communicate using different languages. Everything depends on
whether there is a shared effort to achieve understanding beyond
language. (J. A. Marina)

2004-11-12T14:48:00.000Z

Good Bye Lenin

I recently went to see the film "Good Bye Lenin" with my wife. It was an interesting experience in many ways.

Firstly the context in which we saw it; it gave me, from the West an insight into ordinary life under socialism, undistorted by the propoganda of the '80s and '70s. It's impossible to even begin to understand modern Europe and the process that is working out within it , without knowing this.

It's a touching story of a boy who tries to create the illusion that the wall has not fallen after it has, in order to try and spare the life of his mother, who has had a heart attack and should not be subject to excitment.

Like the revolutionary socialists themselves, he tries to create an illusion from the noblest of motives, and the whole thing gets out of control, and ends up developing into an alternative history, where the wall fell because of the enormous pressure from people coming from the West to defect to the East, to drop out of the rat race, of contiunally struggling for jobs, material items, and avoiding drugs and crime.

It made us laugh, it's a ludicirous scenario, isn't it? Then you read headlines like these, and begin to wonder. It's true that there wasn't any intellectual freedom, and not much in the way of material goods under the USSR, but there was empolyment, of a kind, and a security, of a kind. Which explains the phenonemon of Ostalgia, and the continuing popularity of Communist parties in Eastern Europe, besides everything. This memory will mean that Europe will never completely embrace the tooth-and-claw capitalism of the USA or the Asian countries. This might be a good thing, it might be a bad thing, but I'm sure it will continue to be Europe's thing - trying to find a balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of the macroeconomy.

So much for such theoretical matters. The film isn't so dry, at all. The characters are all well played, the situations they get into funny and suspenseful, and the end is supremely moving. I expect more films to centre around this moment in history. There must be many, many stories to tell. It could even become the E.U.'s foundation myth, like America's War and Declaration of Independence, if enough time passes...

The other interesting part of it was when it was pointed out that in the films before the fall of the wall the presnence of the wall is the problem, now, in this film, it's it's absence.

The final interesting thing for me is that it's the first time that I went to see a film with my implant on. It was a sensorily overwhelming experience, to hear the music and the speech with such clarity, but I don't know enough German to know how clearly I would have understood a spoken word - only film. Certainly I followed the speech given before the start of the film, despite the lecturer standing in a darkend theatre, far from me. This is the first time I've done something like that, for many, many years, and it was a supremely disorienting experince for me to follow someone's speech from a distance with no visual contact. There's this disembodied thing squirting words into my wet, pulstating brain. Poor thing, yet it's a normal expeirence for 99.99% of the worlds population who have ears to do the job for them..

I'll have to try an english language film. And the Theatre, and the Opera, and I get all this for free from a European health system founded due to socialist ideals...free for all at the point of use..hmm..even if it is falling apart at the seams..I wonder if, in my 60's I'll be experiencing NHStalgia? :-)

2004-11-09T10:22:00.000Z

The power of the haircut.

Before

..and after.

..the sausage was delicious, by the way.

2004-11-09T10:15:00.000Z

Suspcious character.

This chap seems to have taken to stalking us. We keep seeing him peering at us though our first floor living room window every few days. He's not getting any herring, it's reserved for the penguins!

2004-10-03T22:50:00.000Z

Sensory overload

After my second tuning appointment, something finally clicked. I don't know what, but I have a suspicion it had to do with finally removing the over-sensitivity I have to soft sounds. The result is amazing. Ok, I know people rave about these things, but it's hard not to - I hear things I haven't heard for years - car indicators, footsteps, hard consonants, well you name it, it's all here in the mix. And it's overwhelming. I just forgot how many dammn sounds there are. With my hearing aids I was always struggling, with this thing I'm at the recieving end of a 24 hour cacaphonic audiorama. It's really tricky. The little things get you - like putting down your coffee cup and doing a double-take when it surprises you by making an audible thud!

Also, I've forgotten just how damn noisy eating crisps is...why do people eat such *audible* things..?

2004-09-12T18:49:00.000Z

The Cyborg, Reloaded

Well I finally got rewired: completely. When the surgeons openened me up it transpired that the first implant hadn't worked at all and I have a brand new implant in my head.

The difference between the two hospitals was interesting, too. In Newcastle the nursing staff always seemed to be working at breakneck pace and were always dashing around. In Middlesbrough, the nursing staff were much more calm, under much less stress, and always had time to greet you politely and generally be pleasant. It's quite a difference. Yet Newcastle Freeman is rated three-star and Middlesbrough two-star. Clearly I don't understand health service provision, but I'd have thought stressing nursing staff to breaking point wasn't good for quality health care. Whatever.

I'm now waiting for the switch on of the new implant, which will be on the 22nd. This time there isn't quite the same build - up of emotional baggage - no speculation, expectation, no chance of a let - down, which may be a big advantage when getting to grips with using the thing. Been there, done that, got the I.C.'s embedded in my skull..

Meanwhile here's a link thats not for the squeamish: a picture of what your skull looks like after surgeons have unzipped it an rezipped it several times, like a pair of dodgy second - hand trousers. It isn't pretty.

2004-07-27T13:10:00.000Z

Marble Madness Rides Again

TrackBalls: a Marble Madness clone for Win32 and Linux (and from what I see, could easily port to Mac OS X). Marble Madness was one of my favourtie arcade games ever, so I expect this one to result in quite a bit of lost productivity..

2004-07-22T06:42:00.000Z

Another Op on the Horizon

After another consultation with ye consultant (a different one, this time) I have it confirmed what I'd more or less guessed: the business end of the implant (the bit with the electrodes that actually simulates the nerves) isn't properly sited in my inner ear. It 'fell out' or something. Which is a tad alarming, but no damage has actually been done to my ear. The consequence is that high power levels are needed to actually stimulate my nerves, hence the continous screeching rather than any sensible sound. Anyway, I go in for another op to try and reseat it on the 27th August. Fingers crossed.

2004-07-08T08:52:00.000Z

What shall we do with the broken cyborg?

Bad news. Prior to the last tuning appointment I was shown an Xray of my skull and the implant. The implant isn't sited properly. A normal implant shows up as a spiral wound around itself three times, in the cochlea. Mine barely completes one half-turn and is mostly in the middle ear. Which means only the nerves that receive the highest pitch are being simulated and I hear nothing much below Upper C. I may even possibly be hearing pitches that humans usually don't recognise - being on the threshold of hearing. Which is an interesting experience, but doesn't make for a successful implantation. So it looks like I'm being handed back to the hardware boys (surgeons) because the software girls (tuning team) can't program their way around this one. Back to the drawing board....

2004-07-02T13:29:00.000Z

Switch on.

Yes, the moment you have all been waiting for, folks..was a big disappointment. Four electrodes simply didn't work, two caused physical pain and had to be switched off. What sound I'm getting is far from recognisable. I expected to be able to hear and recognise environmental sounds, but most things just sound like screechy hearing aid feedback - something I thought I was well shot of. Very, very soft sounds like newspapers rustling, or the guitar being played softly sound very, very good. But anything above a whisper is just high - pitched screaming in my ear. It's bitterly disappointing. What makes it worse is that no-one takes it seriously. Even the audiologist says "oh, it's bound to sound a bit Donald duck at first.". I beg to differ madam, this isn't Donald duck - this is full on screaming tomcat having it's tail amputated while being scraped across a blackboard. I'm bitterly disappointed

That said, the fact I can hear those softer sounds indicates it might become usable with enough tuning and practice so I'm going to persevere. Engineers of both software and hardware are used to things not working right first time, which is handy, since I am one, sort of. However, if I go to the implant user group and get buttonholed by some Pollyanna going on about how wonderful it all is and how natural speech sounds, I'll give them the smack in the teeth they richly deserve...

2004-06-24T17:09:00.000Z

Italians and Football

My wife often accuses the English (and me, personally) of taking football too seriously. But we are no match for the Italians it seems. I'm glad that the Danish Consulate is still in one piece. Although it might congeal into a huge pastry..

Postscriptum. The ref who decided against the English goal in the England vs. Portugal match had his email address published in a tabloid newspaper and had to get security after recieving a lot of death threats. Clue, up folks! It's only a game for gossake. The Portugese deserve a home win. And so do the Greeks, and Czechs, come to think of it. It's a hard life. Only one team wins. Roll on 2006...

2004-06-24T16:58:00.000Z

Mozilla Firefox as a newsreader

I made a plesant discovery today, the Mozilla extension: Sage, which turns Mozilla or Firefox (or Firebird, or Phoenix) into a newsreader. It's great to have a list of newsfeeds as a sidebar in my browser and finally integrate the two things. Now all we need is MozBlog in Firefox and the perfect blogging platform would be here..

2004-06-24T11:34:00.001Z

Lisp Hacking

I did my first Lisp hacking for eight years last night. I'd forgotten what fun it was to use such a dynamic, fluid language. Glenn Eherlich was right: "Programming in Lisp is like playing with the primordial forces of the universe. It feels like lightning between your fingertips. No other language even feels close.". I am pleasantly surprised by how much has changed since I last programmed in it: an ANSI standard has emerged, a Universal Foreign Function Interface has been designed and implemented, usable by many implementations for binding to C libraries - like the SDL. The popularity of other dynamic, interpreted languages like Python and Perl are leading a new generation of programmers to appreciate the advantages of non-static code, and opening minds to LISP. Right now, coming to it as an outsider, it feels like a language on the verge of a breakthrough. Maybe it always felt that way, though.

2004-06-16T09:12:00.000Z

Another coridoor of the infinite library

If you search here for long enough you might find a Mondrian or a Pollock. Search for even longer and you might find Hopper or Rembrandt. It's a visual equivalent of Borges's infinite library. How tedious and dangerous infinity is..

2004-06-16T08:57:00.001Z

Silly Google Search of the Day

After a mishap with a broken $ gave my blog a title of $BlogTitle I thought I'd search for "BlogTitle" in Google, just to see if it was a common probelm. It was. Blog after blog, with a broken title..who is going to tell them all?

2004-06-13T11:31:00.000Z

Switching on the Cyborg

I finally have a date for my implant to be switched on. This is the most interesting part of the process. The initial experience varies wildly - some people report clicks and whistles and random noise, other people report voices that sound like there's been a serious leak in the local helium bottling plant...it seems to be different from individual to individual. I await with curiosity and a certain amount of eagerness, after all It's not every day you gain a new sense. Most people go through life with just the ordinary five ;)

2004-06-13T11:27:00.000Z

Writers block

I used to think writers block was an affliction of the self-indulgent, but now I know better. I slump around the flat: a completely useless lump in a continual daze. Probably I'm going to have to do something drastic to unblock. I'm not sure what..if only it was as simple as cleaning the toilet. Probably my problem is simply over-work compounded by domestic monotony. I need a crisis, an emergency..something..anything.

2004-06-11T10:50:00.000Z

Poem of the Day : The Palace

I first came across this poem as a quoted fragment in Gene Wolfe's "There are Doors" ( a highly reccomended read for fans of the Kafkaesque ) and I like it a lot - it expresses well how people build on the efforts of previous people to build whatever it is they are interested in - an art form, a bridge, a palace, a computer program, whatever - and how human achievement is actually a form of collaboration spread over the ages that one individual can only ever claim to be part of..

2004-06-09T09:37:00.000Z

On becoming a Cyborg

Recently I decided to have some quite drastic surgery: I elected to become a cochlear implantee. Philosophically, I have very mixed feelings about this. I work in an environment where people communicate verbally all the time, and all the people around me are hearing, and socially a much greater premium is being placed on my ability to hear. I know the alternative is to change this, to become part of the deaf community and get a deaf-related job, where the empathis is on sign language skills - there are a few: teacher of the deaf, social worker, etc. However, I've never felt accepted in Deaf society as a Deafened person. So, what the hell, I may as well go with the medical model. I can't help getting the feeling that I'm loosing a lot by surrendering the social model of my deafness. There are a lot of good things about community - the power and creativity of people acting in a team brings good things. However, there's also loss of flexibility and a "crab principle" that excludes people from outside or makes it impossible to raise aspirations. Going round in circles..

2004-06-09T09:29:00.000Z

Restlessness

Strange dreams last night. I was dreaming I understood Icelandic, and was being interviewed for a job in the USA in that language via a device that looked partly like an old Remmington typewriter with a large screen attached, and was an intriguing mixture of webphone and instant messenger.

I should probably travel more and watch less Terry Gillam films..

2004-06-07T17:18:00.000Z

The birth of a new Blog

Yet Another Graphomaniacs Compendium really wasn't meant to be about game development, but more about other things, too. So I have decided to start maintaining two blogs on a left-brain, right-brain basis. This here is the right brain: it will deal with the more right-brain things I do and a more personal things as a more traditional personal blog might. Game Development and programming moves to the Bad Byte Bootstrap Blues. You clicks your URL and you takes your choice..

2004-02-23T00:01:00.000Z

A parallel world

While we played on our Speccys, Beebs, Orics, TRS80-S, MZ80K's or whatever, there was a whole other world developing in parallel on the other side of that curtian. I'd like to see some of the sadder retro apologists - the ones that bang on about any game from later than 1982 being creatively bankrupt - from Edge locked up in a small dark room with one of these for a year...

The part that's really interesting about this post is the IQ151 tape "network". A teacher was able to load a program from one tape onto all his/her pupils machines simultaneously. I have visions of the UK euqivalent - a bank of Spectrums connected by serial cable, all displaying the same dancing colour bars of the loading screens in perfect rolling harmony..

2004-02-22T00:23:00.000Z

HTML-Tidy

Another thing that I learnt from the XML.com discussion was the existence of HTML-tidy which turned out to be a very useful app when it comes to preventing your html turning into bug soup. A nice straigtforward command line app that you run on an HTML file. Wonderful. Integrates beuatifully with vi and finds a truly frightening number of glitches in my templates..

The only thing wrong with HTML-Tidy is the fact it doesn't recoginise blogger tags. It would make a good blogger template validator otherwise. I should have a look at the source. It should be easy to change.

2004-02-21T17:41:00.000Z

Parsing RSS with a bit of string and chewing gum.

I finally get round to looking at RSS parsers and the new-generation of newsreaders - and guess what? The best way of parsing RSS XML turns out to be good old regular expressions.

The degeneration of XML into tag soup is an interesting process. It's a social process, a lazy process. Define a standard so anal it takes real effort to conform to it, it will get broken. Some popular app (usually a Microsoft one) will do something different from what the standard expects - and we get two sets of rules for escaping strings, for example. It can be seen in HTML, filesystems, many image formats (remember what a mess flic files became?)

Free standard conforming libraries woud be the answer, you'd think, but no - programmers need to hack. Better to kludge up a few lines of 'C' to generate sort of XML than actually use a bulltetproof library. 'It's quicker', the chourus, 'the library is too big and clunky'. All the time, they sink slowly into the mire..

Half a litre of tag soup, please. With css bug croutons ;)

2004-02-21T09:40:00.000Z

Nevrax

Somone seems to be trying the "give the code away", keep the art and music under a key approach. It's for an MMORPG which is a good idea, because an MMORPG is basically selling a service anyway. It's also in a very crowded marketplace which Microsoft live in. Not a place I'd want to be.

The trouble is that the engine is just infrastructure that most players don't care about. What you definitely should give away is the tools for creating content. Mods always enhance a game, the engine itself isn't enough - although this way people can modify the engine to enhance content (add animated textures, specular lighting, etc).

2004-02-21T01:47:00.000Z

Text only writers

And just in case you think I have a bad case of the "good old days", good things are being done with the old text adventure medium now. Look at Emily Short or Adam Cadre's games and you will see what I mean. Enough, or I will sound like a monomaniac.

2004-02-20T23:21:00.000Z

Anacreon

It looks like the source code to Anacreon has been released under the GPL - 13 yrs after it was published. A sourceforge project has already sprung up around the game. It ought to be very interesting to see how a remake of a 13 yr old text only game will look on modern hardware. It's amazing that it has an active fanbase at all after all this time. Some games just refuse to die, and the GPL can give them new life. How many of those BASIC text -only games deserve a modern remake ?

2004-02-11T09:55:00.000Z

Angels in America

Like millions of other people I've watched Angels in America. I've been struck by the resemblance between this and Was, by Geoff Ryman - both have central characters dying of Aids, both are about the central truth of America as opposed to the fantasies of the right - currently much in vogue. However although both tell very different stories - they both do the same thing. They confront history with fantasy - and attempt to overcome it, by attacking fantasies about history. Dangerous, delusuive, and destructive fantasies need to be contrasted by others, and not only in the USA, but probably the whole world. It's what writers are for...but I'm a games programmer. I plead irresponsibility!

2004-02-09T19:02:00.000Z

Programming

n. A repetitive, yet challenging activity desingned to provide irrefutable proof of your own stupidity..

When you spend 45 minutes compiling the wrong source file and wondering why things are broken..things like this come back to you. Sigh.

2004-02-08T18:18:00.000Z

Business models

Seeing games like Diablo rip off the glory days of ascii gaming and Nethack and looking at the tendencies of UNIX programmers to write text based programs that work 100% and *then* put on the GUI on top of this makes me wonder, couldn't a similar thing be done with games? Write a sequence of text only games: interactive fiction, rogulikes, simulations - anything that works in text (everything except 'twitch', basically) or simple 2d graphics. Give them away on your site for free. Observe feedback, observe downloads. The most popular one, gets the full - on 3d commercial treatment..

It would be a fun way to get started, and nothing gives you traffic like "free stuff"..and you'd be building on top of something proven, and popular - that *works*..

2004-02-06T19:43:00.000Z

My to do list.

Multi-full body overlay : cache lookup.

ISubAnimationAccessors.h -- writeable!?

Overlays/Aiming - they need a manager

Refactor "Get Animation Code"

All minor things. All things that would have been "done properly" with more thought out requirements and design. A long time ago I worked for a financial services coding shop - no feature was added without a design doc detailing it - givning the declaration of each function needed to implement to achieve it and an english language description of what each function could do.

I've yet to see any game I've worked on get near this level of professionalism - except Stuntman.

2004-02-05T20:35:00.000Z

The spririt of Lambdamoo lives on the web

One of the more interesting "early" net-phenonema was LambdaMoo - a freeform mud anyone could log into and extend - most MUDs kept the powers of coding to wizards - and do any kind of bizarre thing with. Some of the whackiness that resulted seems to have been replicated on the web (to judge by the hype) in "The Game Neverending" . It will be interesting to see if it treads the fine line between a fruitful creative commons and a horribl e noisy free for all, and if the engine will allow the flexibility that makes this possible in the first place. I've signed up as a beta testa out of pure curiosity.

2004-01-28T11:19:00.000Z

Deathmarch

"The death march is the result of piss-poor management" - Jamie Fristrom. Amen. If only I dared use this as my .sig at work.

2004-01-17T17:36:00.000Z

It's all a myth.

The band on the Titanic didn't play "Nearer my God To Thee"; they played ragtime to the end. Amazing what you learn from playing old text adventures. I've been playing Jigsaw - written by the same man who wrote the legendary Curses. It has an interesting premise - a time travelling duel played out over a jigsaw - each peice of which represents an episode of 20th century history. It evades the paradoxes time travel by making "create paradox" == end of game. Which is neat design solution to what would otheriwse be an agonising coding problem.

2003-12-20T14:16:00.000Z

Global Dimming and the price of tomatoes

This goes a long way to explaining a lot of interesting things - probably a breakthrough in climate modellling.

But does it mean tomato futures are to be sold or bought? Questions, questions..

2003-11-18T18:43:00.000Z

UK visits: Compare and Contrast

George W. Bush

Bill Clinton

Jiang Zemin

I don't feel it is necessary to add anything at all to this..

2003-09-15T17:09:00.000Z

Toys I have been playing with.

Ratpoison and Boa Constructor. Both lethal to rodents, I'm pleased to say :)

All programmers ought to have a gui like RatPoison. It changes your entire GUI experience so that every window is maximised and managed like a text editor window ( ie you cycle between them, split them, etc, but never have to resize them or drag them ) which is incredibly fast if you happen to be one of the emacs or vi crowd who like split windows. There's also a prettier version with embedded Lua scripting called Ion

Boa - Constructor is kind of Dephi for Python. It's huge and its obviously very powerful, but I was never comfortable with this kind of RAD tool. I question it's use for something like Python where it's bilingingly easy to slap components together by hand with a text - editor anyway. It may be an example of the right tool for the wrong problem. If the Boa Constructor team targeted the C++ version of wxWindows instead of wxPython they might have a killer app on their hands. Of course, it may be possible to produce a front end that targets either.

2003-09-15T12:57:00.000Z

What did I do to deserve this?

Over the last week I have been getting a large volume of bounced email apparent sent users that do not exist in the yagc.demon.co.uk domain. Some spammer is using my domain as a reply-to address. I wonder how I came to their notice. Someone obviously didn't like having their mails directed to spamtrap.

Now, how exactly do I stop the scum? I look up the originating ISP, and the bastard is in China. Mail to the abuse address bounces. I'm doomed. If this site goes off-line soon, you know who is to blame.

I guess I can move the games to sourceforge, the blog to blogspot..