|
|
| Nice reference in Crawl; the Venom Mages'
basic spellbook is called "The Young Poisoner's Handbook".
| Ah, so that's what
Jason Hutchens is up to these days; teaching computers to talk
properly. Disappointingly vague stuff, though - only "transcripts of
conversations" managed to fool judges, which is pretty meaningless,
and the Web site for Ai
Enterprises seems to be nothing more than absurd hype,
unless I'm missing a "click here for actual content" button. Oh well.
|
| I really can't gauge the seriousness of this at all, but
Graybo
is now proudly selling mugs and T-shirts with his face on for about twenty quid
each. Beware, though; I think the mugs lie about their dishwasher-friendliness -
my lovely MCiOS one is looking particularly
pale and unwell these days.
PersonalPrint.com
seems a saner place for small-order UK-based printing stuff, anyway - having
processed a fake order to check prices, it turns out at £14 including postage
for a T-shirt. Hmm. A white-on-black
"ATTENTION SCUM"
one would be nice, I think... [via Matt, ages ago]
|
| The Grim Reaper
pegs me at 34 in his age test; some ten years out. But I gave him a fake email
address, which might slow him down.
[via Blast!]
|
| Matt
talks of strange Today programme dreams
- I've often found it
a pleasantly confusing thing to wake up to; that the morning's news
stories filter gradually into your consciousness, merging with the
remnants of your dreams and settling themselves into random contexts. I
once spent a while listening to some story about monkeys learning to
communicate with scientists before I realised that they weren't actually
talking about "the Monkees".
| "Yeah, I'm on the train" gets said a lot, yes, but I think we can
safely kill the weak-stand-up-comedy reasoning that the owner is showing
off the mobility of their phone, now that they cost twenty quid and
everyone in the world has them. Location is a natural enough thing to ask
of someone whose position is uncertain, or for them to anticipate
and tell you, as
this
rather lengthy paper explains.
|
| Found whilst wondering if his "Pancake Man" poem was online anywhere
(it doesn't seem to be), a particularly good interview with
John Hegley, with Simon Munnery in the background.
| Pancake Day;
it's strange how ritualised pancake preparation seems, at least to this
brain - that despite saying, every February, how we should have them more
often, the whole, glorious assembly-line production of them somehow seems
too extravagant for any other day. And just making a couple of them feels
belittling of the experience. Funny what you grow up with.
|
| Interesting - this site's been getting a few visits from
people searching for information on the currently fashionable hobby of
mobile
phone harrassment, which was near enough one of my predictions
for 2001 (it also seems to overlap with the idea of mobile phone
companies pretending to be hard at work solving a problem, and telling people
to just - oh - upgrade their phones in the mean-time).
I was wrong about the journalistic Florida recount,
though, which was finished the other day and saw Bush ahead by a mighty 537 votes out of about 6
million. Although, naturally, this still ignores voters who misread the form or were wrongly
refused the vote or were waylaid by police long enough to miss their chance. Feh.
Still no disasterous GM terrorism, yet, mind. But there is a particularly confused
conspiracy theory going round about the current foot-and-mouth epidemic being
the work of animal rights activists.
|
An odd interlude on the bus this morning; a photography student asking
individual passengers if she could take photos of them holding the
cardboard head of Stagecoach's company director, on a stick.
"Can you smile as if you're deliriously happy?"
"No, probably not."
|
| More personality testing - the nicely-written
Environics Survey
labels me as an Autonomous Post-Materialist, which sounds about right.
[via Blast!]
| The Brunching Shuttlecocks' Monster
Pitch claims to be a random horror-film-plot-generator, but is
actually just a way to read a hundred-and-twenty-five varyingly amusing
plot ideas, with your choice of cast. Which is fair enough, really.
|
| Behold Superiority. The League
Against Tedium made his glorious televisual debut last night, made all
the more striking in front of dramatic scenery and subtle background
music. Standing on top of a van barking witty non-sequiturs into a hand-held
camera, stinging away to snippets of opera and multimedia display and
pre-recorded aphorisms, this feels very much the ideal medium for the League's
persona, and landmark television.
Yet BBC2 have
already
decided not to bother with a second series:-
"It's sad, because Simon's comedy is about great language and ideas,
it's a timeless notion of wit. He has that epigrammatic style you feel
could fit in and be appreciated at any time in history. Except,
apparently, on BBC2 in the year 2001."
|
| Hm, the Bem Sex Role Inventory claims
that I'm "sex-typed in the feminine direction" (5.05 vs 3.9). Curiously, you
can work out how the questions weight things by only answering one of them
and seeing what total it gives you (feminine = cheerful + gullible,
masculine = athletic + self-reliant, apparently).
[via plasticbag.org]
| Bright sunshine, fresh snow, and sandbags across my Lewes doorstep. The
British weather gods are, I fear, badly privatising their industry.
|
|
