Projects
Dvorak
The improvised card game.
Back on the Orion Express
Er, coming soon.
Bookpile
The Inheritors
William Golding
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Haruki Murakami
Worldwar: In The Balance
Harry Turtledove
The Origins of Virtue
Matt Ridley
Incidental Music
It's Clichéd to be Cynical at Christmas
Half Man Half Biscuit
Forever
My Life Story
Other Blogs
Found Interconnected Wherever You Are
Friends
Alice Chrissy Dave Eperdu John Lori Nik Paul Raven Riana Sandy Simes Tracy
Before
As Above at Stormloader
Banner-advert-ridden drivel.
Weeks Beginning
20.11 27.11 04.12 11.12
17.12.00
I always feel as if I'm in a low-key zombie film when forty-odd geese at a wildlife park realise I'm carrying bread. Mr Black has alerted me to a rather nice Java word game at Yahoo; Word Racer is much the same as Wordzap, which is essentially just Boggle, but - as befits a game run by computer - rather than a word being discounted if both players get it, the person who spots it first gets the points. Word Racer uses some rather odd board shapes, but seems a splendid little diversion for the wordily minded.
16.12.00
Hm, I've just been playing a demo of Empire's Typing of the Dead - half 3D zombie-shotgunning fest, half, er, typing tutor. Your character dashes around the game automatically - all you have to do is type the words that pop up in front of the undead, as quickly as you can. Get it right and down they go.

Empire may have tapped into something big, here - actually having an excuse to flourish your fingers and go "Ahaha!" after some particularly speedy typing is a glorious experience. Or is it just me that gets an odd satisfaction from rapidly typing a lengthy login password? [Vote: Yes or No]

15.12.00
The position of uncertain.org has been undetermined for the past day or so, hence no particular updates and a thoroughly missing site. Oh well.
14.12.00
Amusingly persuasive reasons why James Bond must be a Time Lord. [via MetaFilter]
So, farewell then... My Life Story are splitting up, and I was somewhere in the audience of the first of three farewell gigs in Camden last night. Always a shame when a decent bunch of people stop producing music together, but the timing seems about right, somehow. With three very good albums and some memorable live performances to look back on, forever would be, as the man says, too long.

It's always strange - simultaneously invasive and reassuring - to be reminded that countless other people have listened to what you think of as the soundtrack of your life, that it's just as likely the soundtrack to their own. Weirdly, unpleasantly defiling to hear a booming neanderthal request for the beautiful, painful, B-sided "Silently Screaming" during every single quiet moment of last night's gig, though.

13.12.00
Why wait for specific downloads? Download the Internet today. [via Found]
The tobacco industry campaigns against putting horrible pictures on fag packets to get across just how much damage the things can do to the human body. Better than the tiny warnings at present, I admit, although it seems terribly naïve to think that most smokers don't realise cigarettes can kill them.

Besides, as a non-smoker I don't really want to have to look at photos of cancerous lungs every time a friend lights up. Wouldn't it be better to have insulting and sarcastic messages in huge white-on-black text? "THESE KILL ME AND I PAY FOR THEM.", "STILL TOO WEAK TO GIVE UP.", "DO I LOOK COOL AND INTERESTING YET?" and whatnot. I'd applaud that.

"I was crouching in the haze of a copper-bottomed swamp, but heaven knows I'm all-weather now..." Odd how randomly-generated sentences often seem more amusing than intentionally-written stuff.
I've always been impressed by the range of personality disorders in the work of A.A. Milne; a group of neurodevelopmentalists have gone as far as writing a jokey paper on it - Pathology in the Hundred-Acre Wood. The "medication solves everything" message is almost entirely self-defeating in this context (friendship and complementing character traits being much of what life's about), and the single-parent assumption is rather offensive, but it's an amusing enough commentary. [via MetaFilter]
12.12.00
Hm, I got a transparently malicious screensaver virus thing in my mail this morning, yet it was delivered from an anonymous address rather than purporting to come from a friend of mine. Is this a cunning propagation tactic, made on the basis that most people's friends wouldn't send them nudge-nudge Snow White stories? And does this mean that my "only have friends intelligent enough to leave dodgy executables alone" worm avoidance scheme is flawed somewhere?
Take the Guardian's amusingly pointless yob test if you've any doubts about your yobness.
A nice "interactive" overview of countries' stances on European Union, from the dear old Guardian. [via Interconnected] Some rather poor-resolution photos of Sunday's Neil Innes gig have been gathered together, should anyone be interested.
11.12.00
Soluble vitamin C - the taste of a lemon-flavoured battery terminal, and hours of insoluble snowstorm fun. Bargain.
A foolishly small audience for last night's Neil Innes gig; carelessly underadvertised, by the looks of it. A splendid evening, though, regardless of the fact it was the same general thing he did a few months ago - heaps of anecdotal rambling of the Bonzos, the Rutles and Python, and various songs from here and there (including the splendid Protest Song). Pity so little of his stuff is commercially available. Copyright all owned by bastards, I think he's said at one point. The Logo Foundation offers copious resources for the old turtle-directing programming language, including freeware downloads. I didn't get where I am today without programming a plastic turtle to wander around the floor of a primary school.
It annoys me when my subconscious writes better stuff than my waking brain. I had a genuinely disturbing nightmare last night; Day of the Triffids without the Triffids, just the sudden blinding of ninety-nine per cent of the population, and the resultant anarchy. Dreamt in an unnervingly narrative style, with a lot of horrendous "Only later did I realise..." asides.

Lampless suburbs roamed by fully-sighted prison escapees and the reckless, starving blind, myself flailing around on a lightweight motorbike (silently pushable when creeping around, but speedy enough to escape sighted attackers) being shot at a lot, and blind children being bundled into what claimed to be NSPCC vans ("only later did I realise..."). Very vivid and unpleasant desperation and violence. I woke up in total horror around 3am and still haven't quite gotten the nausea out of my head.

Proudly displaying a mysterious understanding of free speech and the Internet, eWatch helps companies find negative customer comments online, and "removes offending messages from where they appear in cyberspace". It also promises to track down specific posters "within 7 to 10 days for a price of up to $4,995 per screen name". What drivel. Let's see how long it takes them to delete this message. [via Raak@MCiOS]
More or less everything by Kevan Davis.
As Above is part of the Uncertain Organisation.

kevan@somethingorother.com