Projects
Dvorak
The improvised card game.
The Foldover Game
Blind communal prose.
Back on the Orion Express
Still coming soon.
Bookpile
How the Dead Live
Will Self
Worldwar: In The Balance
Harry Turtledove
Incidental Music
Reinvent the Wheel
DD&HSW
Get Me To A Monastery
The Divine Comedy
Other Blogs
AngryBlog Blast! Blue Ruin Bullet Through the Brain Digital Trickery Found Groke HumanLint Interconnected Life as it Happens MomBlog UK Off-Topic qwertyuiop Venusberg The View from Here Wherever You Are Yao's DOT.Home [UK Blogs]
Supporting Cast
Alice Chrissy Dan Dave Dunx Eperdu John Lori Nik Paul Raven Riana Sandy Simes Tracy Tyrethali Yao
Weeks Beginning
20.11 27.11 04.12 11.12 18.12 25.12 01.01 08.01 15.01 22.01 29.01 05.02 12.02 19.02 26.02 05.03 12.03 19.03 26.03
06.04.01
I'm not sure whether to applaud or sob - a toaster that stencils a one-symbol weather forecast onto your breakfast, downloading the details from the Interweb. I'd rather have a toaster with radio-style pre-sets, myself ("two slices for Kevan, please", "two crumpets"). Have they invented those yet? Feh. I've been veering between being very ill and very busy, on this rather grey-painted Friday. Shockwave Scalextric has been the highlight of it. [via The Brain]
05.04.01
Halfbakery is a superb concept for a Web site - a forum for the presentation and discussion of tentative ideas and inventions. Heat-Seeking Fans, Guerrilla Pedants, a CD Recommendation Engine (which I've been considering for ages), an AmIHotOrNot Breeder... Half-ingenious, half-witty, and rather surprising that mercenary vultures don't sweep through and patent things left right and centre, really. Good stuff.
Last night I dreamt that I'd been voted to be the Lib Dem Shadow Chancellor, with nobody asking me if I wanted to do it, or even giving me any advance notice. I was desperately trying to get some useful reference material from a bookshop-owning Ken Campbell, half an hour before I was due to give a speech in the Commons. I wonder what it all means. Win a life-size Dalek. Lord knows what I'd do with it if I won it, mind. Particularly when my flat's at the top of a flight of stairs. [via The View From Here]
I do not spik lak yow... freespeling.com campaigns for random semi-phonetic spelling throughout the English-speaking world, as if inconsistency and accent-affected text would somehow make the language easier to learn.
"Start by freespeling just a ONLY A FEW WORDS on each page. Dont change just for the sake of change. Help your readers, dont confuse them."
Maybe he has more support than I realised... [via memepool]
04.04.01
"They don't believe there will be any food here they will be able to eat, they believe they can contract the disease and in some extreme cases Americans think their hands and feet will fall off."
Hm, Jake Shillingford resurfaces to do a spot of DJing at some Camden venue that sounds slightly too irritating to merit going all the way to the capital for. But still. A discreet mobile phone jammer, which elegantly disables nearby mobiles as if they'd drifted out of signal range. Sustained blanket attacks on trains and things seems a bit harsh, though - a narrowly targetable version would be kinder. And something to kill Walkmen (nail-scissors aside) would be glorious, of course.
Sounding like a science-fiction plot device, the Stroop Effect is the process by which reading ability takes effortless precedence over named colour-recognition. Take the test yourself with this Java applet and be unnerved at just how badly your brain works. I think we'd better let him in; download an entertaining Virtual Theremin toy from the BBC Science pages. [via memepool]
03.04.01
Warily buying an unexpected bottle from a Tesco shelf last week for the spirit wife's birthday, but only having the vaguest ideas of what to do with the stuff, the Absinthe FAQ gives a bit of historical and chemical background, as well as some serving suggestions.
02.04.01
More insane proof that Morrissey predicted the death of Diana Spencer, this time with the help of aliens from a Carl Sagan novel. David Alice - a man with little understanding of the concept of coincidence - would be really good at HipBone, wouldn't he? [Moz bit via NTK] The gloriously atmospheric Garden Nomic returns from the compost heap this morning, with a clean-slate ruleset and fresh set of people. I've just proposed that players be allowed to play Goblins or Fairies, as well as the ubiquitous Gnomes. Frivolous socio-political metaphor is great, and the sort of thing that Nomics can run well with. Join at the ground floor today.
01.04.01
Anyone who's ever played a game of Nomic should immediately purchase and digest Steven Krane's The Omega Game; anyone who enjoys twistingly-plotted slowly-revealing thrillers should do the same. Twenty people awake in a luxurious hotel on an anonymous Pacific island, with no memory of how they got there, only signed-and-dated copies of an "initial ruleset" for a mysterious game, the rules of which they can change by unanimous consensus. Nomic meets The Prisoner meets The Game, with much fast-paced drama, exotic isolated atmosphere and an impressive scattering of guessable-but-unguessed plot swerves. Thoroughly enjoyable.

And it does make the idea of a non-abstract real-life Nomic seem quite appealing, so long as we get something into the rules to prevent people being, er, murdered... Nomic Mystery Weekend, anyone?

More or less everything by Kevan Davis.
As Above is part of the Uncertain Organisation.

kevan@somethingorother.com