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| This evening I have mostly been playing Breakout clones, taken
from a pleasingly odd "CD of shareware stuck to a large piece of cardboard"
I found nestling amongst unreadable computer magazines in a newsagents
last week.
Both of the best have Web pages - Wilkanoid has
a nice cartoonish solidity and a healthy twist of gimmicks and powerups,
while DX-Ball
2 goes for suave, shiny graphics (an absurdly
raytraced ball skittering off a vast array of textured bricks) and has a
nicely fluid feel to it. Both worth a download.
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| Magnificence from John Hegley
at the Corn Exchange last night; two hours of poetry, music and line-drawing, with
surprise assistance from no less than Simon Munnery.
With a caption competition to occupy us during the interval, and the man
breaking-off mid-poem to bless a sneezing audience member, it was one of
the most relaxed and engaging man-on-a-stage thing I've seen in quite a
while. Applause. I must buy
his new book.
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| I've always been a bit amazed and impressed that these
WikiWiki
things aren't constantly covered in 30pt bright-red graffiti. Someone's
set up a Nomic
information one, which seems to be evolving
nicely. A pity there doesn't seem to be any complete and precise change-logging,
though - such would be immensely useful for the self-updating game-data things that
Nomics tend to thrive on.
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| An interview
with one of the founders of the
International Time Capsule Society,
whose pages include the
nine
most wanted time capsules, those which were stolen or mislaid or simply
couldn't be found again when the time came.
Passing mention of the Internet
(more than just, ahem, AOL) is quite sobering, though - I wonder how much of its
content will still be around in a thousand years' time, cached or relocated or
whatever, and what future generations will make of it. Will schoolchildren be
forced to read early 21st-century weblogs as part of their history
lessons? Will people have to wade through a millennium of obsolete technical
information, and personal home pages of the dead, when searching the Web?
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| Commons vote to ban hunting by something of a landslide,
and pro-hunting activists are suitably pathetic and whiney about it. I hate all that
"destroying jobs" drivel they come out with, of these mysterious dog-handling
people who'd be completely unprepared for a different line of work (such
as, I don't know, running boarding kennels), of the beagles who'd
just be kicking their heels without hunts to attend, of the obvious
inability of the upper-classes to get together under less violent social
pretexts.
"We are still confident that the Upper House will do its constitutional
duty and protect the people from the exercise of parliamentary
prejudice." said Richard Burge of the Countryside Alliance, although
independent polls showed that the majority of 'the people' actually wanted
hunting banned. Damn the parliament, being prejudiced towards the will
of the people like that.
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| Credit cards really should have a number you can phone to report
that you might have lost your card, or may just have left it at
home this morning. Then they can cancel it for twenty-four hours, and
you can take appropriate action the next day, possibly saving both you
and them the bother of replacing a card you nervily asked them to
blacklist which was on your kitchen table all the while.
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| Excellence from Untitled Document as
Straw-clutching Hague Calls For US-Style Election -
"Do they concern themselves with matters of policy, or political
experience, when electing a leader? No! They have an out and out
popularity contest where the candidate with the highest-quality
television advertising and the best comic timing scrapes to victory with
a smaller share of the popular vote than his opponent. And that, my
friends, is the kind of election that I can win!"
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| Hm, very strange to see some
19th-century-ish
photos of Lewes, including
one where
my flat's quite visible. I'm not even sure how long the building's
been there - at least another hundred years before that, I expect. Eerie to
think of the uses the room might have seen in its time, humbling to
consider how little my residency will impact it on its way to the
23rd century. (Unless I accidentally set fire to it or something.)
| Decent Things is rapidly turning into a list of things
I'm attending locally, which I suppose is useful to anyone who lives
around here.
John Hegley's
at the Brighton Corn Exchange on Friday, but I can't seem to find out
whether he's touring properly or not. Tsk.
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| Foolish; a Bill
Bailey Web site person emails me saying that they've sold out of
medium-sized
T-shirts and would I like to change my order? I respond by pointing out that
their Web site only sells medium-sized T-shirts, which may well be why they've, er,
sold out. And I prefer the vagueness of oversized T-shirts anyway. May not
be too late to change your order, or, indeed, place one.
| I'm sorry, but every time I read the name "Consignia", I just
think "Con Insignia". I couldn't even remember if it was the new name for the
Post Office or the Financial Times people, until I checked the Web site.
What on earth is the point?
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| Finished
Playing
the Moldovans at Tennis over the weekend; a nicely quirky
travelogue, giving insight into the culture and condition of the
titular eastern-European country as author Tony Hawks (to win a bet with
Arthur Smith) seeks out its national football team for eleven games of
tennis. A bit clumsy in its heavy-handed similes, though, and Tony's
alarming persistence in writing down every single joke he thinks of,
irrespective of context, often comes across as facetious. But it's
reasonable enough light reading.
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| Sharp insight from Dan, on the
finer points of HTML;
"Bold is easy, you just press the keys really hard. Italic is trickier,
you have to strike them at an angle and it's really hard to get them all
going the same way."
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