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| Friday |
the Twenty-Fifth of July, 2003 |
"A Triffid was operated by a man crouched inside, cooled
by a fan installed in its neck; the 'clackers' were radio controlled.
The gnarled bowl, based on the ginseng root, was made of latex with a
covering of sawdust and string while the neck was fibreglass and
continued down to the floor, where it joined with the operator's
seat."
In the
Kingdom of the Blind - glorious details of the BBC's
adaptation of the book.
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To mark the unmarked John Wyndham centenary (which passed on July
the 10th), the British Film Institute are showing the BBC's adaptation of
Day
of the Triffids and some other things.
The series is also being repeated on UK Gold again in August,
and the much-maligned US film version is out
on DVD.
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| Thursday |
the Twenty-Fourth |
Wanted: a dozen or so people to take part in an idle photography
experiment, over the next couple of weeks. Candidate must have
the ability to take a photo and submit it via email within twenty-four
hours or so of being asked to, ideally. Apply within.
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| Wednesday |
the Twenty-Third |
"50. ARGUMENT FROM INFINITE REGRESS
[1] Ask atheists what caused the Big Bang.
[2] Regardless of their answer, ask how they know this.
[3] Continue process until the atheist admits he doesn't know the answer to one of your questions.
[4] You win!
[5] Therefore, God exists."
A pick-and-mix of facetious and facetiously-summarised
proofs of God's inexistence -
it makes for a reasonable logic-exercise duckhunt, however far you
manage to get through it. [via Grimace]
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A sequel to Battle
Monkeys, although I'd actually
started writing this first, the Monkeys being a lazy zeitgeist spinoff.
I was going to call this one Zilla Killer, but didn't want giant
Toho lawyers coming around and demolishing my house.
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"Alan Robinson, manager at the Tesco store on Newmarket
Street, Cambridge, seems excited about the store's current trials of
RFID tags in Gillette Mach 3 razorblades. [...] "We haven't had a single
customer ask what the tag is doing in their packet of
razors!""
What it's doing, says
this Guardian article,
is triggering a security camera on the razor aisle, and another at
the checkouts, although it's not made clear why you need a radio chip
to do this. (CASPIAN
have found some documentation that suggests the shopper would be
actually tracked throughout the store.)
Little electronic tags will, enthuse the manufacturers, eventually
be cheap enough to glue beneath product labels, embed into banknotes and
stitch into clothes, reducing customers to shimmering, information-rich
constellations, triggering and echoing god knows what. Cranking
humanity's perception of the world up to a more data-rich level (where we can
still put objects into opaque
pockets to hide them from other people), but one where the extra
vision is restricted to supermarket managers, policemen and enterprising
hi-tech muggers.
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| Tuesday |
the Twenty-Second |
If you're using All
Consuming to keep a public track of the books you're reading (and if you
aren't, you should be), you can
now set up your own Futuristic
Book Club. No effort required - it automatically scours weblogs
in search of people who've mentioned the books that you're currently
reading, and drags them unwittingly into your circle of chairs to
repeat whatever it was that they'd said about them. Inspirational
repurposing of fairly scattered data.
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"Alien Possession - Action - Until the start of the player's next
turn, Cally is treated as an Independent Adversary. Cally immediately
makes a Close Combat attack on any Crewmembers in her
location."
The first new Dvorak deck in ages, and it's a Blake's 7
card game. It seems to capture the planet-of-the-week ethos quite
neatly, with appropriate pitfall and shootout shenanigans, and desperate
rescue missions. Half the references are lost on me, but there's a good
feeling of analogy to it.
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| Monday |
the Twenty-First |
Kaleidoscope
has launched. Conspiracy theorists may recall the
BlogNomic
prize game, in which players were rewarded with game
points for completing specific tasks in their weblog postings ("Write a
post with as much alliteration as possible", "Take a photo and link
to it") - Kaleidoscope is a standalone, automated reincarnation of
that game, open to anyone. It's either a meta-game for your weblog, or
a gallery of comparative interpretation, or both. We'll see where it
goes.
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