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| Sunday |
the Eighteenth of August, 2002 |
"I'm J. Arthur Bower, and this is the most
multi-purpose potting compost of my life."
24 ends tonight, in the UK. I accidentally read an American article
on series two that gave away big things in its first six words,
during the week, but there's some hope that I'm misremembering its
detail, or that it may have been lying. Where there is uncertainty,
there is dramatic tension.
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| Saturday |
the Seventeenth |
"Before Grandfather Tortoise could speak Brother Hare answered, 'It
smokes because the mountain spirit is angry. He is in love with the sky
spirits but even from the top of the mountain he cannot reach them. So
he burns with anger and smoke pours from the top of his head. And that
is why the smoking mountain smokes.'"
How the People Came to
Stop Thinking - a nicely-carved little science/religion schism
from Mr Tulloch.
Upsideclone is one year and forty-three pieces old, today. It's
brought forth a lot of stories and allegories and dialogues and
adjectives that daylight might never have otherwise seen. It's
affected the way that I think about rain and film developer, about adverts
and job descriptions, litter and lotteries, spam and subliminal messages,
McDonalds and patents, gods and aliens, plates and spoons. Attaching
extra meaning to the stuff of the world, and encouraging people to make
their own perceptions solid, to nail them down for display and
distribution.
It's all good (nearly all), but to skim off the best of the best, to recommend
a handful to print out and read in the garden:-
And it's always accepting new submissions, from anyone with an idea
and a keyboard. It's good to write, good to have an excuse to write. We are all Upsideclone.
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| Friday |
the Sixteenth |
"Happiness, for instance, is essentially A.U. six and twelve -- contracting
the muscles that raise the cheek (orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis) in
combination with the zygomatic major, which pulls up the corners of the
lips. Fear is A.U. one, two and four, or, more fully, one, two, four,
five, and twenty, with or without action units twenty-five, twenty-six,
or twenty-seven."
The Naked Face -
reading the hidden meanings behind expressions and microexpressions.
Astonishing to see how portrayals of emotions have been
broken down into simple constituent "action units";
that a clever enough image-scanner might intuit as much as (or even more
than) a human eye-and-brain, given the correct equations. [via Matt]
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More clever physics from the Rollercoaster people:
Fishing with Moominpappa, which can be played with soothing patience or in
a savage grapnel-bludgeoning sort of way, as fits your mood.
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| A superb bit of nicely-physicked deranged-premise Java gaming -
Rollercoaster sees you controlling the speed
of a series of cars, attempting to reach the end of the track without
crashing horribly. (The wheels aren't fixed to the rails in any way,
somewhat irresponsibly.)
[via Rich@MCiOS]
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Corollary: Scrabble Nethack, a single blank tile versus hordes of
marauding upper-case monsters, their hit-points indicated by the value
of the letter. "Something is written here in the dust. You read the words:
Double Letter Score."
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| The second entry in Nethack Scrabble still fails to clear
the three-letter mark. "Actually didn't start out intending to do something for the purpose of making an entry, but I realized the opportunity presented itself, so grabbed a screenshot. Ta-da." says
Tyrethali.
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| Thursday |
the Fifteenth |
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| "There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..." -
history and translation of the lorem ipsum
text, with a handy 'lipsum' generator.
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"The problem with sequels is, very obviously, that very rarely are they better than the original in whose steps they follow (lat. sequor, I follow), and in fact are very rarely as good; the basic Western drive to endless refinement and progression shatters on the rocks of Violence Force II, with most of the original cast gone and either double or half the budget. It doesn't seem to matter much which."
Timely analysis of the sequel, of media intention and audience reaction,
of unsolved child murder. Dan's on the stand at Upsideclown, deftly
demonstrating what precious things can grow from
dull compost.
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| Wednesday |
the Fourteenth |
"Right now, Goths are plotting to get hangovers from a deep-frozen cream
cake. My pocket and dove are synchronised, and milk churns that I work
with may be flip-top.
I'm Federal Agent Jack Bauer, and this is the most padlocked iguana of
my life."
24 Dreaming.
It was funnier when I was writing it last night, but that's vodka and
tiredness for you.
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| Tuesday |
the Thirteenth |
| What was a bottom-pinching ghost
in Uttar Pradesh has become the
Muhnochawa,
a glowing, flying, face-slashing octopus.
This is the same region that brought us the
monkey
man of Delhi (a terrifying, nebulous creature that was eventually debunked in this police report),
and, prior to that, the kidney-and-eye-eating Pakanna
(dismissed as rumour after more than thirty people were mistaken for the devil and
beaten up).
The authorities step in to strangle new superstitions at birth. Three
cheers for science and progress, but there's a nagging feeling of
having moved past the imaginative stage of the holocene; that an invisible monkey or face-clawing squid would have gotten far better PR and distribution a thousand years
ago, would still be around in textbooks and oral legends today. The next
hundred years feel very boring, at times.
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"Not only is it building an arsenal the like of which the world has never seen, it has unilaterally withdrawn from the treaties designed to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, and has refused to accept any kind of international monitoring of its chemical or nuclear weapons facilities."
Yes, you can guess the punchline. An exhaustive call for regime change from the Independent.
[via Plasticbag]
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| Monday |
the Twelfth |
Having received email from an adventurer stumped by the chicken
puzzle in The Man From DEFRA,
I'm tempted to run another Hours of Inform contest, perhaps with forty-eight of them this time,
over some imminent weekend or other. Any takers?
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"The second series of 24 starring Kiefer Sutherland, renamed The Next 24, was broadcast in early 2003. Acclaimed a minimalist triumph, it featured moody cut shots of the entire cast (aside from those who were shot/killed/stabbed/choked to death on their own semen in the first series) asleep."
Do You Recall The Next 24?
The
Guardian and
BBC seem unable to
talk about the second series without threatening spoilers, so I shall sleep
for another week.
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