Sunday  the Twenty-Fifth of August, 2002

Random game alert; Tantrix is a bendy hex-tile pipe game - you can play it online in the form of solitaire puzzles, or as a game against human or robot opponents. Pleasantly stringy. A million household uses.

Gimmickry: Jump to a Random Archive Link


 Friday  the Twenty-Third

"While grave-digging, after rainy weather
Always keep a long hollow pipe next to you.
Another poet told me never to forget this.
It will help you to breathe until you're dug out."
How Poets Make Money, and other Martin Newell poems.
"A book locating/lending phenomenon known as the 'Dewey Decimal System' - enabling users to get access to copyrighted text material for free - has sent shockwaves through a panicked publishing industry."
A splendid Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon from a couple of years ago, still appallingly relevant. Relatedness: Banned Books Week, 21th-28th of September. [all via Néa]


 Thursday  the Twenty-Second

"President Bush is taking a stand on one of the region's thorniest issues by proposing that more logging in national forests would help prevent devastating wildfires. [...] The Bush administration said changes are necessary to clear forests of a decades-long buildup of highly flammable materials."
This is not an Onion story. Because "commercially-desirable trees" are a fire risk, Bush proposes to make it easier for logging companies to get approval to cut them down, and harder for environmental groups to appeal against logging plans. War on Fire.
"There was this expression that's one of his favorites. It's that hand-in-the-cookie-jar, love-me-Mommy-because-I'm-a-rascal look. It's A.U. twelve, fifteen, seventeen, and twenty-four, with an eye roll."
Interesting to read Paul Ekman's immediate impression of Bill Clinton, in that article about giveaway facial expressions - that he contacted the White House offering to sort it out ("I could teach him how not to do that in two to three hours."), but they declined.

I'm still amazed that they haven't done anything about Bush's smirk; the way that his proclamations on war and corporate responsibility are completely undercut by the dull grin of schoolboy who thinks he's getting away with something.

There's an odd expressional theory that one half of your face represents your constructed social personality, and the other shows your inner self. The Smirk of Bush becomes even more weird and sinister when you cut his head in half.


"This world, I am afraid is designed for crashing bores
I am not one, I am not one
You don’t understand, you don’t understand
And yet you can take me in your arms and love me, love me, and love me
Take me in your arms and love me..."
New Morrissey material - live versions of songs rumoured to be scheduled for a new album. He's currently touring America, offering only two UK dates, both of them already sold out to the Internet-anagram crowd. Truly disappointed.


 Wednesday  the Twenty-First

A new search-engine sport; Gothwhacking. Pick any two Gothic-cliché words, join them together, perform as many mysterious vowel-adjustments and k-additions as you like, then try to get zero results out of Google.
"E' divertente leggere Nineteen Eighty-Four, ma e' ancora piu' divertente farlo identificando il protagonista con Kevan."
This is both very insightful and very alarming, assuming that I'm translating it correctly.


 Tuesday  the Twentieth

Conversation between myself and a taxi-driver in a determinedly non-lucid dream, last night, on the subject of the infinitely recursive country lanes he seemed to be driving down:- "This is all very... dreamlike." "Yes."

We drove on.


"To recognize individual spam features you have to try to get into the mind of the spammer, and frankly I want to spend as little time inside the minds of spammers as possible."
This is impressive. A Bayesian spam filtering technique that judges every word of every email, rating it according to its appearance in spam and non-spam emails of the past, and filtering messages appropriately. It evolves to fit whatever traffic your particular inbox gets, meaning that spammers can't predict how to get around it, and even if they manage by chance, the filter will immediately adapt. [via Crummy]
The Smaller Picture now supports high-speed Javascript animations of its picture histories, black and white pixels seething and evolving from chaos to order and back again. (It seemed to get a lot of confused or disinterested traffic, two-thirds of the way in, and the easier-to-corrupt-than-repair nature of the medium suggests that you only need a few random clickers to bring forth entropy.)

Very interesting to note that the mediocre drawing of Great Britain becomes more clearly defined when animated; the coastal edges fizzing to give a view of the 'proper' picture, something that a single frame doesn't really capture.

Seven fresh new pictures have been started, anyway - a spiral, a map of the world a television, a monster, a word, a landscape and another anything. Offer your dots.



 Monday  the Nineteenth

Terrifyingly heavy aide-memoires to help people beat other people at Scrabble - anamonics are short phrases which can be memorised and attached to "stem" words; a stem word plus a letter from its anamonic can be shuffled around to make another word. (eg. "ringed : we are surrounded, chief" gives you "redwing", "reigned", "grained", "grinder"...) But if you're playing a game at that sort of level, you might as well just replace your brain with a calculator and get some sleep.

(Related: Playing this spot-the-difference game for more than a couple of minutes will downgrade your eyes and soul to the status of barcode-reader.)


It's strangely rewarding to prowl through the shelves of Warehouse 23. There may or may not be a kitten in there somewhere.
Scrabbling: a nice set of self-defeating transparent-plastic Scrabble tiles, and some thoroughly impressive Scrabble poetry, each tercet created from a full set of tiles.

As Above

Brain children. Recent or noteworthy Web offspring.

Online cliques. Trespassers may be welcome.

In the bookpile. About to read, or currently reading, or meaning to take back to the library.

Incidental music. Ohrwurmen or otherwise.

Other weblogs. The ones I make a point of returning to a lot.

Supporting cast. That have Web pages. In alphabetical order.

Weeks beginning. All having ended.
2002: 19.08 12.08 05.08 29.07 22.07 15.07 08.07 01.07 24.06 17.06 10.06 03.06 27.05 20.05 13.05 06.05 29.04 22.04 15.04 08.04 01.04 25.03 18.03 11.03 04.03 25.02 18.02 11.02 04.02 28.01 21.01 14.01 07.01

2001: 31.12 24.12 17.12 10.12 03.12 26.11 19.11 12.11 05.11 29.10 22.10 15.10 08.10 01.10 24.09 17.09 10.09 03.09 27.08 20.08 13.08 06.08 30.07 23.07 16.07 09.07 02.07 25.06 18.06 11.06 04.06 28.05 21.05 14.05 07.05 30.04 23.04 16.04 09.04 02.04 26.03 19.03 12.03 05.03 26.02 19.02 12.02 05.02 29.01 22.01 15.01 08.01 01.01

2000: 25.12 18.12 11.12 04.12 27.11 20.11


Archive search. You never know.