Projects
Dvorak
The improvised card game.
Back on the Orion Express
Er, coming soon.
Bookpile
Playing the Moldovans at Tennis
Tony Hawks
The Inheritors
William Golding
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Haruki Murakami
Worldwar: In The Balance
Harry Turtledove
The Origins of Virtue
Matt Ridley
Incidental Music
The Certainty of Chance
The Divine Comedy
Eine Kleine Middle Klasse Musik
The Rutles
Other Blogs
Found HumanLint Interconnected Wherever You Are [UK Blogs]
Friends
Alice Chrissy Dave Eperdu John Lori Nik Paul Raven Riana Sandy Simes Tracy Yao
Before
As Above at Stormloader
Banner-advert-ridden drivel.
Weeks Beginning
20.11 27.11 04.12 11.12 18.12 25.12 01.01
07.01.01
I didn't think I'd make it, but I managed to see Unbreakable before anyone could reveal the ending to me. (Sixth Sense looks rather clumsy and irritating when you know the twist, which I did before I saw it, annoyingly. Feh.)

Splendid film, anyway. A tad badly-paced and under-explained, but a rarity for bounding onwards slightly faster than the audience can catch up - trying to work out the significance of upside-down camera shots whilst keeping up with the film itself is, for me, the hallmark of a good thing. And it's a thoroughly interesting and multi-faceted plot. Ambiguous enough to be worth watching even if someone has blurted the ending at you.

05.01.01
Chrononauts; a rather glorious-looking time-travel card game from the Icehouse people. [via AaFaIT]

(I've got a set of cardboard Icehouse pieces gathering dust, superceded by the shiny plastic ones, if anyone wants them, incidentally.)

An evening of Brazil last night; rather less coherent a film than I remembered it being, although I'd not seen it for six or seven years. Thoroughly beautiful retro-futuristic scenery and props, though, all madly-inefficient mechanical wiring and tiny monochrome monitors behind magnifying screens, propping up a fearsomely overcomplicated bureaucracy that you can all-too-easily imagine the evolution of. A horribly fascinating world to escape to for an hour and a half.
04.01.01
The maximum dosage of the throat sweets I'm taking is, apparently, a mighty eighty lozenges per twenty-four hours. They're even selling multi-flavoured packs, these days. Surely all this just dents their placebo effect, showing them up as the boiled sweets they really are? I'd be much more in awe of them if they were dark green and had a label saying "If you take more than ten of these in a single day you will die."
Children see maths teachers as "scruffy nerds", scientists as "unfashionable geeks". Which is perhaps a bit harsh and generalising, but kids are harsh and generalising. And it cuts both ways - being a train driver is quite a dull job when you get down to it, but that doesn't mean we should be stamping out juvenile idealisation of the role.

The "researchers" say themselves that enjoyment of a subject is the key thing, which is exactly the point - if a child finds a subject fascinating, they won't care about turning into a particular teacher or vague stereotype, they'll just see it as part of their own life and interests.

A fine interviewing of Haruki Murakami. [via Why The Naming Imperative?] Monoliths arrive on Earth, in an odd news story which mostly concentrates on giving away the plot to 2001.
Unnerving - doing my occasional check on aloud.com for gigs I might not have heard about, I found that The Divine Comedy were doing a couple of dates in London later this month. Phoning up to buy tickets, they only had, er, two left.

I daresay other ticket places still have a few, though, if anyone reading this is as much of a fan and was just as ignorant of their gigging. Full details posted to Decent Things.

03.01.01
Well, three days into the 21st century and there's still no real sign of aluminium-foil jumpsuits, personal jet-packs or lunar holidays. I suppose stupid little metal scooters might please the futurists of the past, but I get the feeling this wasn't really what I expected the year 2001 to be. Yes, my younger self would probably find the modern technology quite lovely, and be impressed that I was working in an area of computing that barely existed ten years ago, but it just doesn't feel as futuristic as it should. Inevitable consequence, I suppose, of getting there a day at a time. I daresay I'll be just as unimpressed by 2050.
After my grumbling about the difficulty of making original objects for The Sims, Ole reminds me that Creatures had an aspect of game-object creation. I have actually got a copy, I just became rather infuriated with the Tamagotchi-style inanity of the thing and gave up on it. Maybe I'll dig it out and make some Triffids.
Interesting Straight Dope article about the nocebo effect, evil twin of placebo. I don't know if I slept through my alarm or managed to turn it off without the luxury of consciousness, this morning, but either way I awoke with five whole minutes to assemble myself and snare a bus. This doesn't seem the best of portents for 2001, really.
02.01.01
Aha. An in-depth look at the very hex of data structures in The Sims.
The Sims Transmogrifier is a cunning piece of software that lets you export any object from The Sims and, without too much faffing around, completely alter its appearance before putting it back into the game. Previous project; changing a chess table into a Mornington Crescent Table. Current project; daffodils into Triffids.

A pity there's no easy way to reprogram interaction and reaction, though; manually editing the files to change messages seems to be the feasible limit. Disappointing. Carving new objects is much more fun than actually playing the game.

01.01.01
For what it's worth, a few predictions for the year ahead:-

  • Mad carrot disease. Critical elements of BSE found in vegetable crops as a result of tainted bonemeal being used as fertilizer. World Governments tentatively start putting money into finding a cure for CJD, rather than just snidely banning each other's exports.
  • Coach disaster. With Railtrack still not getting their act together, train-fearing commuters turn to an increasingly busy National Express, and a single over-worked driver is enough to bring about public outrage. Public again choose to ignore consistent number of deaths caused by privately-owned cars.
  • Mobile phone harrassment. Bored hackers put up a site that uses Lycos's SMS system to cron-job anonymous text messages to your enemies in the middle of the night. Surprisingly few victims realise anything is amiss.
  • Who Wants To Be a Dot-Com Millionaire? Ill-conceived Internet-linked TV quiz show hacked to smithereens during first live broadcast.
  • Mobile phone virus. Abusing phones' engineer maintenance codes, a virus sweeps through Europe's mobile phone networks, phoning a random person from each phone's recent-call log to pass itself on. Mobile companies issue security patches for newer models of phone, but are unable to do anything about the older ones, which continue to bounce the virus back and forth whenever switched on. Customers encouraged to upgrade to new phones. Virus suspected to be manufactured by phone companies themselves.
  • Text-message wristwatches. Compass-point buttons allow characters to be typed symbolically. Option to convert "c u l8r" brevity to coherent English upon reception almost completely unused.
  • Mobile phone trivia. Call a free number run by the phone company, answer a few trivia questions, listen to some adverts and win extra credit for your phone.
  • Mobile phone cancer. Research shows sterility in people who've been keeping phones in trouser pockets or handbags for the past couple of years, and hefty brain tumours springing up in trivia-quiz addicts.
  • Big Brother. New "reality show" open to anyone; applicants pay to have cameras fitted in their house, programme producers selecting a few at random for possible filming. Chosen house is monitored and recorded for a month, then broadcast. Huge prize money, micro-celebrity shrapnel, increased public acceptance of in-home cameras, thousands of takers for the next series.
  • Flood, drought, flood. Waters rise again during the winter thaws, but drop even further as we crawl into a summer heatwave. Water authorities impose hosepipe ban to incredulity of public, and take action to improve water flow to resevoirs; 'improvements' make for even worse flooding in autumn. Widespread disaster and looting.
  • Florida recount. After an independent recount establishes that Gore received by far the most votes after all, not even counting those miscast or waylaid by police. Americans protest on the streets. Bush declares martial law.
  • NATO abolished. And replaced by huge pre-targetted missiles set along the east coast of America.
  • GM contamination. Over-zealous eco-warriors enthusiastically smash a high-security research compound to pieces, unwittingly releasing toxin-resistant, high-growth, super-weed seeds into the wild. All natural crops are overgrown, majority of wildlife poisoned, mankind blinded, Triffids conquer the world.
More or less everything by Kevan Davis.
As Above is part of the Uncertain Organisation.

kevan@somethingorother.com