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01.06.01 |
| Terragen is quite thoroughly amazing; an easy-to-use landscape generator that produces beautiful, fairly photo-realistic results with alarmingly little effort. Scrawl some terrain, pick textures and water and lighting, and set it going. Relaxingly addictive stuff. [via Graeme@MCiOS] | The somewhat dusty Skeptic FAQ gives an enlightening angle on the cattle mutilation phenomenon; that insuring a cow doesn't cover death by natural causes, but can cover mysterious bloodless assaults by "aliens" or "Satanists". (Dead cows tending not to bleed much.) | |
| Renegade bus drivers; just how common are they? Sole passenger on a
late-night bus to Lewes, the driver asked if I "wanted a ticket or
not", and it seems safe to assume that the fare-tallying machinery
can't cope with such shadowy transactions. Hm. Accepted perk of
the job, or heinous drain on bus company profits? It intrigues me. But on another hand, why do cashiers never ask me if I want a receipt or not? We must be throwing away thousands of miles of the poorly dot-matrixed irrelevance; most of civilisation's purchases are too trifling to require evidence. If we can log all sales electronically, which I presume we do, why the need to spew compulsory bits of paper all the time? Valiant attempts to implant place-of-purchase details into a customer's pocket, regardless of the majority walking away before they're printed? Mere force of retailer habit? Something must be done. |
| I enjoyed Korzeniewski's definition of life the other week - "A network of inferior negative feedbacks subordinated to a superior positive feedback." - from which, by his own admission, infertile humans aren't considered to be alive. Along with, presumably, humans who've decided not to reproduce. Which means you can flip back and forth between life and unlife by simple dithering. Grargh! |
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31.05.01 |
| This is quite nice, if rather useless without a zoom function -
dear old Blighty will, I suspect, appear a bit overpopulated, even if
there are only seven of you. Make your mark on
my guestmap.
[via Blast]
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30.05.01 |
| Dan of Venusberg dines out in Brighton's Room 101, a magnificent vegetarian restaurant with a nicely quiet sense of humour, which I've been meaning to return to. The high-quality, no-nonsense Yum Yum noodle bar on Sydney Street is probably a better plan if you're urgently hungry, though, really. | Hm, free tickets for various bits of televisual comedy, including the intriguing Johnny Vegas Game Show, a new series of the finely-subverted sitcom Coupling and a Bremner, Bird and Fortune post-Election special... All in London, though, of course. | |
| The Cheapass Games Web site mentions some reasonable rule improvements for their mightily entertaining Before I Kill You Mr Bond card game. Hmm. | Hurrah to this weekend's rather gory BBC police drama Messiah for having a male-prostitute murder-suspect called Kevan. ("He didn't even have a proper name.") Asking the IMDB, it can only offer a single character from some American TV movie with that moniker. And it's a female character, at that. Er, what? | |
As Above is part of the Uncertain Organisation.