Projects
Dvorak
The improvised card game.
Back on the Orion Express
Er, coming soon.
Bookpile
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
Uffington Wassail
Half Man Half Biscuit
Sister I'm A Poet
Morrissey
Other Blogs
Found HumanLint Interconnected Wherever You Are [UK Blogs]
Friends
Alice Chrissy Dan 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 01.08
12.01.01
Rejoice, for the swish if careless BillBailey.co.uk is now operational, bursting with galleries and downloadable songs. Most glorious of all, though, is the long-overdue availability of a compact disc of the man's finest works, purchasable online for fourteen quid. And some rather nice "Insect Nation" T-shirts. Bravo.
11.01.01
The Internet can be quite unsettling in its coincidences. Browsing around, I found someone mentioning As Above in their blog for my link to a Boring Postcards book last year, before linking to some other boring postcard sites, including one maintained by a friend of my girlfriend, which I didn't even know was there. Er. Alien food symbols are everywhere. [via Log]
Amusing clothe-a-cartoon-person Java nonsense. Witness a rather poor attempt at myself. [via everywhere] A horribly sensationalist bit on last night's BBC 10 O'Clock News; in covering that rather odd "Look, look, we've spent five years tracking down people who view Internet child porn - if we're lucky they might be sentenced to up to three years in prison!" story, we were treated to a swish graphical flipchart showing us dozen or so example photos; head and shoulders with the faces pixelised. Why?
This depleted uranium business seems quite surreal when you step back from it - "Hm, these bullets we're using to blow up enemy tanks might be dangerous to our troops." - as if troops being ordered to take risks to increase the odds of a victory is somehow a new and shocking thing.

They seem to be underplaying the civilian aspect rather callously, either way - I'd thought it was just a battlefield-dust issue, rather than a case of significant amounts of uranium getting into the soil. "Several European countries supplying peacekeeping troops to serve in the former Yugoslavia have told them not to eat local produce or to drink the water." What about the people who actually live there, for goodness' sake?

10.01.01
Myth III due out in November. Admittedly I still haven't mustered the determination to slog through Myth II's Great Library level, but they're fine games - I was impressed at the elevation of thoughtful strategy and common sense over frantic clicking and dull micro-management, and the inter-level diary voiceovers have a splendid "War of the Worlds" feel to them. I trust Myth III will retain all of that. And that the "true 3D characters, procedural foliage" nonsense won't strain my PC too much.
09.01.01
We're due a lunar eclipse this evening, which should be impressive - even the murky orange ones are mysterious and forboding, a menacing reminder that the moon isn't just the night-time scenery it's so easy to take it for granted as, but a thoroughly real and unimaginably vast lump of rock.

Of course, it's all just God mucking about, really; "The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come." (Joel 2:30-31) Don't worry about the world ending, though - the quoted article was written about a lunar eclipse in 1996. Careless of a deity to have them happening so often, really.

The recent spatter of Web Trumps in people's blogs has reminded me that I was musing over a Blog-themed Dvorak deck, the other day; something with a bit more of a strategic edge, focusing on the actual activity of Web logging, rather than its personalities. Finding myself in a quiet oasis of network death this morning, I've scrawled a prototype deck. A bit shameless and self-deprecating of me to use site hits as a victory condition, but "objective quality" didn't seem as quantifiable. Comments and gauntlets welcomed.
uncertain.org is being a little uncertain of itself at the moment, incidentally, and likely to be down for a day or so, later in the month. Bear with me. Hm, I wonder how many hits and emails test.com gets as a result of people using it as a generic test URL?
Splendidness; journalistic grammar-and-style curmudgeon Bill Walsh has started his own blog, even if he doesn't seem to be updating it very much.

The rest of his site, The Slot, is well worth a browse, too. Sadly a lot of the previously vast content has been taken down since it went into a book, but some fine rants remain, wittily attacking the maddening usage of incorrect grammar and poor writing style.

08.01.01
Very odd news story that I think I saw on Teletext over Christmas, but can't seem to find anywhere else; the frightening revelation that cigars and pipes cause as much yellowing of teeth as cigarettes. What next - shock news that they also cause lung cancer and emit smoke when ignited? Quitting smoking is as difficult as killing your best friend say over-dramatic and hopefully thought-experimenting Australian researchers. My friends should be very afraid.
Mark Thomas tsks the government over "misunderstood" attempts to gather background and "dirt" on him. The implication that it's only a serious problem if a minister specifically requested it, but not if a misguided civil servant dug it up and delivered it, seems odd. [RealAudio clip from the Today programme]

(And don't forget tonight's new series of The Mark Thomas Product, of course.)

Strangeness is afoot with Brighton's buses - they were all suddenly plastered with enthusiastic "All Fares only £1!" stickers this morning, and I was derided for attempting to buy a return ticket to Hove. That's my travel expenses up by two quid a week, then. City life, eh?
More or less everything by Kevan Davis.
As Above is part of the Uncertain Organisation.

kevan@somethingorother.com