Projects
Dvorak
The improvised card game.
The Foldover Game
Blind communal prose.
Back on the Orion Express
Still coming soon.
Bookpile
The Insult
Rupert Thomson
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Haruki Murakami
Worldwar: In The Balance
Harry Turtledove
Incidental Music
Eric the Gardener (acoustic)
The Divine Comedy
Gubba Lookalikes
Half Man Half Biscuit
Other Blogs
AngryBlog Blast! Blue Ruin Digital Trickery Found HumanLint Interconnected Life as it Happens MomBlog UK Off-Topic Venusberg Wherever You Are Yao's DOT.Home [UK Blogs]
Supporting Cast
Alice Chrissy Dan Dave Dunx Eperdu John Lori Nik Paul Raven Riana Sandy Simes Tracy Yao
Before
As Above at Stormloader
Banner-advert-ridden drivel.
Weeks Beginning
20.11 27.11 04.12 11.12 18.12 25.12 01.01 08.01 15.01 22.01 29.01 05.02 12.02
17.02.01
An old one, but still amusing if you've managed to forget most of it since last reading it, as I seem to have; The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord:-
My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones.

Despite its proven stress-relieving effect, I will not indulge in maniacal laughter. When so occupied, it's too easy to miss unexpected developments that a more attentive individual could adjust to accordingly.

If it becomes necessary to escape, I will never stop to pose dramatically and toss off a one-liner.

I will not grow a goatee. In the old days they made you look diabolic. Now they just make you look like a disaffected member of Generation X.

16.02.01
WikiNomic is beginning to pick up speed, albeit still rather clumsily. "But sometimes I'd feel more fulfilled..." - try the excellent "Morrissey Gets A Job" colouring book.
15.02.01
Kodo; a strange meta-conversational game from Tyrethali. A downright superb typo in the rules, too:- "...whoever ahs the most when the game ends wins."
"That reminds me of the time when I was lucky enough to find something worth writing about, not as though that's ever stopped me smoking."
Extract from a blog entry, Foldover-style.
Hm, just when I thought this job was getting dull, I'm assigned to debug the GayBrighton.com purity test. Testing the thing (it being a fairly generic set of questions, although I may have skewed my result by sleeping with women), it turns out that I'm merely 9% impure. It's probably working alright, then. I managed an online game of Settlers of Catan against him and him last night. A fine game, which I'd managed to avoid thus far despite various earnest recommendations - the strategic, competing colonisation of a small island, with land hexagons producing various resources at the roll of a die, and plenty of careful trading. Extremely simple to play, but with much scope for elegant strategy. I'm impressed. The expansion games look intriguing, too. I may have to invest.
"This programme contains strong language from the outset." has always seemed a bit of an odd thing to warn people about - would they sit and watch the first ten minutes of a programme that contained unspecifically-timed swearing, if naughty words were that upsetting to them?

The BBC's producer's guidelines for programme content make for fairly interesting reading, anyway, most notably the statistic that "seventy per cent of homes do not contain children and many viewers expect a full range of subject matter throughout the day".

14.02.01
A mildly amusing fake Tube poster, although it's not as good as the proper fake posters they've got dotted around the Underground at the moment, saying things like "9th February 2000 - Nothing Happened" and going on to explain how some hypothetical disaster was averted through the actions of alert staff. Amusing.
Valentine's songs, you say? I'd go for Strangelove's Beautiful Alone, My Life Story's Silently Screaming, Morrissey's I'd Love To, The Divine Comedy's Tonight We Fly, the Bonzo Dogs' Fresh Wound, Devant's I Think About You (I quite agree) and the Dandys' Dirty Weekend. And loads more Smiths and Morrissey, naturally, such as Back to the Old House and Alma Matters. But I'll shut up. "3 Valentine's cards for the price of 2", in some shop I passed earlier, which seemed quite, quite wrong. I think these chaps probably had the right idea. In a quote which seems to have been removed from the page, unless I read it somewhere else, Indian students were complaining about such assaults being tantamount to "culture police". I'm not sure, myself - I'm all for societies evolving by themselves, but when it's something as crass as the commercialised homogenisation of world culture, I can't help but feel the need for Thought Police.
The CIA World Factbook lists "World" as a country (although, disappointingly, not "Universe"), and it makes for some intriguing statistics. I'm impressed that Earth manages $5.6 trillion of imports and exports every year, particularly. We must know some very scrupulous alien traders. [via Momblog UK]
13.02.01
More than just a throwaway comedy sketch - the mighty Armstrong and Miller have actually registered and put some content up on milk-online.co.uk. They've also got a mockingly cutting-edge site of their own, written in the personae of Martin Bain-Jones and Craig Children; "Well - yes, Martin... but that's the beauty of the internet - it's a fluid medium - you can always update things later... that's what the man at the design consultancy said..."
12.02.01
An article in today's NewScientist about house-cleaning and lawn-mowing robots followed on from a thought that struck me on my way into work this morning, as I gazed out onto hedgerows littered with drink cans, cigarette packets and even the odd AOL CD - that it'd be impressive to have an army of tiny robots unleashed on the countryside, programmed to shred and collect discarded cardboard, plastic and metal, taking it all back to central depots for recycling. They'd get hit by cars a lot, no doubt, but any debris would just be detected as litter and gathered by the next drone that passed by.

I daresay it'd be more achievable than trying to teach people not to instinctively throw things away the second they've finished with them. And hunting down the robots that had gone rogue after a non-fatal car smash, raging around the countryside assaulting road-signs and wildlife, could well be a new and fashionable replacement for fox-hunting.

This impressed me - a fine heap of Roguelike-game resources, including some very intriguing resources for writing your own Nethack-style game, should the ambition take you. Surprising to see how many variants are actually floating around these days, really. [via Interconnected]
I was raging at some spectacularly ill-informed journalism in the Observer yesterday, reporting on the news that humankind has rather fewer genes than we once suspected, and how - contrary to what we all thought yesterday - we aren't soulless genetic automata, living in a world on the brink of letting criminals off for having a naughty genetic structure, after all. Or something.
"Take the example of colon cancer. People say there is a gene that predisposes us to the disease. [...] But that gene is found in cells in every part of the body. However, it is only the colon where we find all sorts of toxins and bacteria that provides the harsh circumstances that final causes that gene to finally break down and for cancer to spread."

In short, it is not a colon cancer gene but a gene that affects our ability to respond to the environment.

So it's a gene that causes cancer only in the colon, but it's not a colon cancer gene. Any gene that has an effect on our bodies is by definition something that affects our ability to respond to our environment. Bah.
More or less everything by Kevan Davis.
As Above is part of the Uncertain Organisation.

kevan@somethingorother.com