As Above

[title Extrapolation Failure]

Books I've read in the past year, according to All Consuming:-

The Ministry of Fear (Graham Greene)
How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World (Francis Wheen)
The Sound of Paint Drying (John Hegley)
Idle Thoughts Of An Idle Fellow (Jerome K. Jerome)
Artist descending a staircase, and, Where are they now?: Two plays for radio (Tom Stoppard)
England, England (Julian Barnes)
The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival and Manners (J.P. Donleavy)
Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
Arcadia (Tom Stoppard)
The Complete Enderby : Inside Mr. Enderby, Enderby Outside, the Clockwork Testament, Enderby's Dark Lady (Anthony Burgess)
A history of the world in 10 1/2 chapters (Julian Barnes)
Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (Kurt Vonnegut)
Meet My Maker, the Mad Molecule (J. P. Donleavy)
Spies (Michael Frayn)
Voyage to the End of the Room (Tibor Fischer)
What a Carve Up (Jonathan Coe)
With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant (Richard E. Grant)
Steptoe and Son (Robert Ross, Ray Galton, Alan Simpson)
Jennifer Government (Max Barry)
The Space Between Our Ears (Michael Morgan)
Vonnegut Omnibus: "Welcome to the Monkey House", "Palm Sunday" (Kurt Vonnegut)
The Drowned World (J.G. Ballard)
The Meme Machine (Susan Blackmore)
The Drought (J.G. Ballard)
A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings (Richard Dawkins)
Galatea 2.2 : A Novel (Richard Powers)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (Mark Haddon)
Finite and Infinite Games (James P. Carse)
The Dalkey Archive (Flann O'Brien)
Mathematical Magic Show: More Puzzles, Games, Diversions, Illusions and Other Mathematical Sleight-Of-Mind from Scientific American (Martin, Gardner)
The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)
Time Out of Joint (Philip K. Dick)
Down and Out in Paris and London (George Orwell)
Jacques the Fatalist (Denis Diderot)
London Walking: A Handbook for Survival (Simon Pope, Claudia Schenk)
Resume With Monsters (William Browning Spencer)
The Falls (Ian Rankin)
Never Trust a Rabbit (Jeremy Dyson)
Monstrous Regiment (Terry Pratchett)
Three to See the King: A Novel (Magnus Mills)
Historic Framley (Framley Examiner)
Antic Hay (Aldous Huxley)
Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe (Will Self)

(Who was it who sent me the Ministry of Fear for Christmas? A genuine anonymous benefactor, or someone who didn't realise that Amazon doesn't automatically put sender names on wishlist packages? Or should I be waiting for a visit from a deformed stranger telling me that I was sent the book by mistake?)

Mind Hacks

My pre-order of Stafford and Webb's Mind Hacks made it here before Christmas, and looks to be full of the things I've read a bit but not enough about, or have - obviously - been merely skimming via Matt's mini-links over the past year. This may well be the brain book that I'd been hoping all previous brain books would have been, but weren't; why things happen, and how to prove it to yourself. More friends should cultivate their enthusiasms and researches into solid, paperback books that I can buy to read in bus queues and armchairs. Come on.

(Brilliantly, and presumably not unintentionally, the copyright page bears the standard O'Reilly Hacks caveat:- "Some of the hacks described in this publication may not work, may cause unintended harm to systems on which they are used, or may not be consistent with applicable user agreements.")

Pre-Recorded Robot Voice

An excellently absurd piece of audio-interface design on Argos's automated reservations line - when one pre-recorded robot voice switches to a different one to read out a chunk of the catalogue blurb, it softens the disjunct by saying "Here's Chris with the product description".

Third Hours of Inform

The third Hours of Inform have begun, then - good to see some interest. "The adventure must be set in a theatre. It must involve a petticoat, an advertisement, something which is repainted, and a trapdoor."

Hours of Inform

Levez points out that there hasn't been an Hours of Inform this year, and that maybe it's time for one. Is anyone interested? For the uninformed, Inform is a text-adventure programming language which allows the creation of games in the Infocom style - it automatically includes all the default handling and stock responses, and leaves you to expand and alter things as much as you feel like. The language is fittingly object-oriented (each room and game object being a distinct chunk of code that specifies how it reacts to the player's actions, or interacts with other objects), and anyone with a rough grasp of programming could knock up a simple keys-and-doors-and-give-object-to-antagonist sort of game from scratch, in few hours.

The Hours will run in the same way that the last one did - you're only allowed to use twenty-four of them, but can scatter them non-consecutively within the remainder of 2004. As soon as we've got, eh, three people interested (and someone else to provide the arbitrary theme requirements), I'll declare it open. Leave a comment to this post, wherever you're reading it, or email me.

A Single Random Scrabble Tile

Because I couldn't find any on the web and it seemed quicker to write my own than keep looking: A Single Random Scrabble Tile. Use it wisely.

Bad News

There was a good fragment of a Margaret Atwood short story, somewhere, about bad news being a black, straggly-winged monster that rises up and hunts you down; that you can attempt to delay it until after your breakfast or your morning coffee, but should ultimately surrender to it in your own careful time, as it's never going to go away.

So four more years, or until the end of the world, then, whichever is soonest.