Burgeoning Ego

A Moving Experience

2010-01-08T13:26:00.000Z

So, I've been blogging on here for nearly eight years now, from September 2002 to the present day and, it's been fun. However, we've probably all noticed that it's not been happening on here, probably a hangover from those dark days at OXM where I almost got fired for shooting my mouth off about the otherwise-lovely Steve Brown's inability to manage me.

In attempt to revitalise my flagging enthusiasm, I'm going to be bidding adieu to this place and moving over to my own website, Funambulism. At the moment, it's just a Wordpress blog and a few associated elements but I've got a few plans as to what else to do on there. Hopefully, friendly readers, you'll come and join me over there?

(I am, however, going to see if I can keep auto-updating this blog to reflect what's happening over there - but it would be nice of you to move).

How can the sky hold so much water?

2010-01-06T14:14:00.000Z

Snowfall dominates the watcher, the Brownian dance of crystalline H20 swept by the winds into crevices and peaks, evanescent but hypnotic and alive in the mind's eye. The UK at the moment is living through its snowiest, and hence whiniest, period for 20 years. The mind is boggled at the immensity of this event - think on this, enough solid material is falling from the sky to cover a whole country to a depth of a foot in one day - and it never looks like it'll ever run out, just that some random temperature shift has chosen to drop a tiny sample of it on your head at that time. That must be a staggering amount of ice particles just floating around the world in the clouds, right?

Well, it's not. It's a fantastically tiny amount of water: 3,100 cubic miles or 12,900 cubic kilometres. That might sound like a lot, but that's only about 0.04% of the total fresh water in the world, which is itself only 2.5% of the world's water. It just looks bigger because ice, and in particular the gloriously space-inefficient snow, takes up a lot more room than liquid water and because us anthropocentric humans have a tendency to focus on the tiny part of the environment we inhabit, the exposed skin of the earth, and forget the ocean's depths.

This air-borne liquid is a tiny proportion of the world's total water, and an equally tiny element of the world's fresh water (which, incidentally, is going to be a source of conflict in the parched areas of the world over the next decade.) However, land-based fresh water is essentially one giant reservoir - with insufficient top up from this constantly replenished 0.04% of airborne water, it would empty relatively quickly (look at the disappearance of the Aral sea). If this system breaks down, even slightly, we're going to have an unimaginable world drought. And it might be.

J.G. Ballard's The Drought (AKA The Burning World) showed effectively and imaginatively what a world would be like if this tiny amount of Fresh Water vanished. The Drought has several parallels with Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, the most important of which is a theory of chemical polymerisation of water caused by chemical pollution - in Vonnegut's less-likely theory it's a new type of water molecule that causes a chain reaction in other molecules, like a catalyst or an exponential reaction, but in Ballard's book it's the destruction of the precipitation cycle by industrial waste that stops evaporation. The latter seems equally fantastical but in the last few years 'neustonic plastic islands have been found covering substantial proportions of the Oceans, including what was once the beautiful Sargasso Sea (a mid-ocean gyre with its own species of seaweed and a key location for ocean-going turtles.)

So this is to say: don't whinge about the snow. If it stops, we're dead.

Thoughts On Closed Systems and Video Games

2009-12-16T18:26:00.000Z

Predictably, Microsoft have just announced the new Games For Windows Live will also support full game downloads. Manufacturers, having taken over all the development studios, and recently the Indie and casual devs too, are now taking over the distribution channels too. It’s likely that we’ll see the first full, true AAA game distributed solely through the Playstation Network in the next year; full games are already available on the PSPGo. Even Nintendo distributes games through its Wii store. These all make it easier for consumers to get access to new and old games. So what's the problem?

The key issue here is that, like the App store and Xbox Live, these are closed systems which are bad from every angle, except the owners' profit – for example, developers' and third-party publishers' games will be competing against the manufacturer's own products that will be developed, marketed and streamed through the whole system with preferential treatment. Anything that is bad for competition is ultimately bad for the consumer, as it drives up prices.

For example, if GFW Live is bundled with new computers, that means new audiences will get access to Games On Demand, which is great for them in terms of ease of purchase - however, they won't have access to the range of choice and prices that the internet offers, and through that bundling they'll be tied into the Microsoft rather than the Steam model and network. Once they've emotionally or technically locked you in, they can charge anything they like - look at bank charges on overdraft limits or the premium cost of Xbox Live. Microsoft has done this before with Internet Explorer and used the glacial process of global law to destroy its competitor Netscape before competition authorities could effectively punish it. Their previous experience will hardly be a deterrent.

In terms of their competitors' disadvantage, manufacturers' ownership of AAA developers means that competitors are excluded from distributing those games, whether that's cross-platform or cross-digital distribution system. It's the same problem that Randy Pitchford raised with regards to Steamworks, but writ large. Gamers want to play on the system that has the widest range of games and features - we don't want yet another clunky downloader insisting on starting itself up as Windows does and swallering resources, just like we don't want to buy several consoles and a PC. To compete with this the other digital distribution companies are going to have to integrate social networks, match-making, remote saves and run endless promotions, just to stay in the running - and even then how can they compete with the big manufacturers' and Valve's AAA games?

Disentanglement of technology and openness of APIs/development at every level is the only fair option. It’ll be interesting to see if, for example, Sony blocks access to internet-flash games or merely fails to keep the PS3’s Flash software up-to-date, which would have the same effect of stopping indie development on that platform. Or if Microsoft allows indie, community or free games onto Games For Windows Live (I'd love it if they bought Kongregate and integrated that company's excellent flash games API into GFWL.) Or, even, if Valve unbundled Steamworks and its development studios from Steam itself.

It’s strange than an industry as advanced as games hasn’t distributed games digitally earlier but it's worrying that this vertical integration threatens to fragment the community. Ideally, someone needs to create a Kelkoo or Froogle client for games, that compares prices from other download sites, has the matchmaking/patching elements, and is bundled for free with machines; but only Microsoft could have realistically done that, and they haven't. With developers, third-party publishers and consumers all losing out from vertically-integrated closed-system game publishing, something has to change.

Star Trek Meets Monty Python

2009-10-01T10:44:00.001Z

A Quick Thanks

2009-09-21T21:29:00.002Z

This post is just a quicky to thank my excellent and highly savvy driving instructor Shola, who really pulled all the stops out to help me pass my test. He runs an Advanced Driving Instructor's blog over at http://www.ukadi.co.uk/ and if you live in North-West London, I'd heartily recommend him as a calm, safe, flexibly and very experienced instructor.

Monkey Island 2 in 3D using Cryengine

2009-09-21T15:34:00.001Z

Beautiful, though the music convinces you more than the imagery.

Science Is Real: They Might Be Giants

2009-09-03T13:40:00.001Z

Science. Is. REAL.

Imagining the Tenth Dimension

2009-08-20T12:56:00.004Z

So the tenth dimension is all the possible timelines from all the possible starting conditions of the universe treated as a point? My. Brain. Hurts.

Antikythera mechanism Video

2009-08-13T17:54:00.000Z

Via Rossignol.

Game Pricing

2009-08-13T15:14:00.003Z

(Some thoughts I supplied for a piece about on a big games website that got spiked because of politics...)

Question 1 (Of 1)

1. Do you believe that the recently rumoured price-hikes of triple-A games in the UK are justified. If yes, why? If no, why?

From an economics point of view, it’s entirely rational. If you believe, like a good Ayn Rand pupil should, that businesses do best when unfettered from regulation and morals, and that businesses doing best is best for the rest of us, then companies should be allowed to set their own prices, relative to the rest of the market, and see how the consumers respond to it.

And games-consumers will buy Modern Warfare 2 for £50+, where they wouldn’t buy Bookworm Adventures for the same price. It’s all about demand curves here; set the price high for Modern Warfare and you won’t cut out that many consumers, as they’ll forgo other pleasures to pay more for this; demand is relatively inflexible. Activision could have set the price at £60 and people would still have bought it in nearly the same numbers. However, try doing that for a weaker license or a first time game, and it won’t sell. Demand is relatively flexible, until the franchise is proved. When a franchise is this strong, you’re getting close to monopsony conditions and the publisher can charge whatever they like.

Whether it’s moral; well, publishers aren’t in business to be moral – they’re in business to maximise their revenues and they’re ethically and psychologically closer to venture capitalists than they are to developers, who want their games to have as wide a distribution as possible for fame / their message.

This turns hardcore gamers into early adopters. If you want to get the game on the day of release, you have to pay a premium; otherwise, you can wait a week or two and the standard discounting will kick in, and you can get it at the price you would normally have bought it – and you can keep that process going on, until a year down the line the people with lower price expectations scrabbling through second hand stores (if they haven’t already pirated it, which is a threat only to PC games, really). Notably, though, Call of Duty 5 has never been properly discounted and still sells heavily at a premium price – as does the original Modern Warfare – so Activision know that hiking the price of this iteration really isn’t a risk.

You Want To Be My Friend On Facebook?

2009-08-10T13:24:00.001Z

Awesome, painful song.

This is Turning into a Video Blog

2009-07-22T15:26:00.003Z

Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world (Please don't go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

Bloody Twitter and work are stopping me blogging, grr.

Blink and you'll miss us.

2009-07-16T16:55:00.001Z

650 Million Years In 1:20 Min.
by xchristox

Galactic Scale Mindf*ck

2009-05-20T14:08:00.004Z

Patience... this doesn't happen all at once.

Herzog's Penguin: Introduction

2009-05-13T14:13:00.001Z

"Is there... insanity, derangement amongst... penguins?"

Don't Eat The Rich - Bleed Them

2009-04-22T12:49:00.003Z

Alistair Darling has announced a new top tax rate of 50% for those earning more than £150,000 from next April.

Things we value; a stable society that produces the most happiness (freedom from suffering) for the largest number. Agreed? If not, no point talking. If so, read on.

Equality of opportunity offers the most likely route for the greatest number to achieve freedom from suffering. Concentration of resources in few hands allows them to manipulate systems that affect us easily, aggregating yet more resources in their hands, disincentivising others to challenge them and closing off opportunities for those who have skills to raise themselves up. Redistribution counteracts these centralising tendencies of certain economic systems and increases equality of opportunity throughout our lives. We want systems to be as open as possible with information on those systems as free as possible to allow the largest number to enter and compete in those systems, to produce in turn the most efficient results - all moves against this, whether oligopolistic or monopolistic, are anti-equality and hence anti-happiness.

In the old days, the poor paid taxes to support the rich, who didn't work. Now the middle class support the poor, and the rich dodge taxes. Moreover, the rich (and the middle class) do things that hardly constitute work (gambling with someone else's money) and, at best, do work that is no harder than the work anyone else does. If you argue, as you're likely to, that certain jobs are more _skilled_, I'd argue that it's the luck of the individual involved that they either a) were brought up in a situation that allowed them better education and more schooling or b) they were _genetically_ lucky, in that they had genetic advantages allowing them to prosper better. Neither are virtuous qualities that should be rewarded, but luck. I do believe that mantra "from each according to his means, to each according to his needs."

I don't think we should eat the rich - I think we should bleed the endlessly burgeoning fat from them. They'll still be incentivised to work to maintain their way of life, and just removing that money from them, even if it isn't effectively redistributed, is a move towards equality. America doesn't do that. The UK tries, but doesn't. I hope this change is a helpful move towards equality of opportunity, if not by redistribution, by sapping the fat of the rich.

My Recent Photos

2009-04-09T17:12:00.005Z

Recent Images, originally uploaded by Hot Grill.

1. The White Horse of Billericay, 2. Too Many Signs, 3. The Gap, 4. Beautiful Big-Eared Piggles, 5. Freaky Teddy Bears & Doll, 6. 170309 105, 7. Worm, 8. Mannequin, 9. The White Horse of Billericay

Oregon Trail iPhone Map

2009-04-03T11:49:00.004Z

I couldn't find a map online for Gameloft's excellent iPhone conversion of the 1982 game The Oregon Trail. You control a team of pioneers attempting to make the 5-6 month slog across the West to Oregon, battling bears, flooded rivers, broken waggons and , and meeting great names from the opening up of the west. Here's an in-game map I've stitched together myself; click on it for the original size.

Newswipe with Charlie Brooker News Clip

2009-03-26T14:34:00.001Z

The UK news is not only voyeuristic, it's also nationalistic and enormously biased towards the increased value of a white, English middle-class life. I'm rather tired of it.

Beatiful Tilt-Shift Movie

2009-03-24T11:50:00.001Z

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

These are real people, the video's just been sped-up and tilt-shifted.

McGoohan, McGoohan, McGone.

2009-01-15T18:27:00.000Z

Just remembered that Patrick McGoohan died yesterday. Farewell childhood hero, our rebel without reason (but not without a cause), now you're Number Zero.

I'm currently listening to "I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape" by The Times. S'alright.

I Won A Book!

2008-12-15T11:38:00.000Z

Congratulations to Dan Griliopoulos, winner of our Medical London competition. We asked for a piece of trivia connected with medicine in London, and Dan provided this:

The premier London medical story has to be that of Samuel Pepys' stone. Not the actual operation - which was long and painful (without anaesthetic) or highly dangerous (without modern medical techniques they had to cut up through the perineum to actually reach the kidneys where the stones were forming) - but his later love for the tennis ball-sized lump of crystalline urine. He'd carry in his pocket everywhere, show it to friends, and once considered spending 24s (a hefty sum) on a display case so he could show it off in his house. He also had yearly dinners to show his appreciation at surviving, where guests would drink and eat themselves into an absolute stupor, pretty much guaranteeing that they too would end up with similar kidney problems to his...
So a copy of the much-praised tome Medical London is on the way to him.

Stolen From LOL GOD

2008-12-07T21:15:00.000Z

On Dominos

2008-11-27T18:15:00.000Z

Clack-clack-clack, the dominoes fall, and not all of them are actually dominoes. Heath Robinson machines (Damn yanks, he predates your plagiarising Rube Goldberg) of this type can take any form and it's always damn fun to trace the threads of seeming causality and see if you can spot an origin.

For example, look at Vietnam; the whole reason Kennedy popped all those yanks in there was the Domino Theory; that the collapse of one country and its turning to Communism, was an infection and that more countries would topple. As Eisenhower said in '54 "You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences." The actual idea behind the fine words being that other local rebel groups would then have the moral and material support to take over their countries.

Isn't it nice to see that theory in effect? The domino set that is Modern Afghanistan and the Indian Subcontinent was created by the British Empire in its headlong retreat from its expensive colonies post-1945 and the random borders imposed on it created (like the trisected Kurdistan) a bunch of angry locals (specifically the Pushtun) pissed off at having to have passports to cross imposed borders into ethnically homogenous areas and take their laws from another ethnic nation. The endlessly pissed-off people there, armed by the Brits and Yanks, stopped the Sovs in Afghanistan during the 80s and stopped the communist Dominoes there, like they were in Africa and South America.

Except they didn't really, as the dominoes just fell a different way, to nationalist fundamentalism, so they needed another knock. Clack. Which pushed that fundamentalism into the NW frontier province of Pakistan proper, knocking out America's ally in the region, Musharraf. So now, there's no real government in Pakistan, as Bhutto's corrupt widower and an equally corrupt nationalist prick who also happens to be the country's richest man (remind you of anyone?) battle it out for the increasingly wormy soul of the nation, while the once-disciplined army falls apart. Clack.

Now it turns out that the terrorists who buggered up Mumbai yesterday were probably Lashkar-e-Toiba, a terrorist organisation who've declared Hindus and Jews as enemies of Islam and backed by elements of the Pakistani army, to destabilise India and Afghanistan. (Because Destabilising your neighbours is a damn good idea, right?) These elements only got away with it, because the massive Pakistani army doesn't know what it believes any more and the politicians are too obsessed with power to hold it to account. Meanwhile, now India looks unstable and its Prime Minister looks angry. No-one has time to worry about Thailand, where the army is getting restless and a vocal urban minority is trying to destabilise the democratically-elected (rotten-as-riverwood) government.

In fact, the most stable places in the region look to be the autocratic (Burma), communist (China), and the post-communist (Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and the rest.) Once the democrats and fundamentalists have worn themselves out and all the pieces have fallen, they'll still be standing, ready to knock them back the other way.

Shameless Plug

2008-11-24T18:13:00.000Z

Which Champion Are You? | Champions Online Official Site

I'm not handling PR for this particular MMO (though I am for its predecessor, City of Heroes), but I'm interested to see how it goes. They've got a nice What Hero Are You generator on the website, though it seems to have read me rather too well.

Raised on a steady diet of comic books, you grew up to be an unstable lunatic, whose wacky ambitions are only matched by your delusions of grandeur. You're too crafty to get caught, otherwise you'd certainly be locked away in the loony bin!
Take the quiz!

My Questions Answered!

2008-11-24T14:16:00.000Z

Ask OxSciBlog: Higgs Boson - University of Oxford

As you've been busy sending in your questions for Oxford scientists I thought we ought to start giving some answers:

First up is a question from Daniel Griliopoulos which is answered by Alan Barr from Oxford's Department of Physics.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Q: What's going to happen if they don't find the Higgs Boson?

[Also regarding that; to this layman, it just looks like physicists are trying to bury something they don't understand (gravity) in another fundamental particle, am I being unfair?]

Alan Barr: The Higgs mechanism was proposed by Prof Peter Higgs of Edinburgh (and others) to explain why many of the fundamental particles in the Standard Model of particle physics have mass. The experimental results obtained so far – for example at the Large Electron Positron collider, which was the predecessor to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN – are fully in agreement with Higgs’ theory. A further prediction of Higgs’ theory is the existence of the particle which bears his name, but which has not yet been directly observed.

If the Higgs particle (also known as the Higgs Boson) is not found after many years of successful operation of the LHC, then the theory in its simplest form cannot be correct. This would be a very important discovery, and would inspire further research, and alternative models. Alternative theories of mass generation would have to be found, and those theories would be guided by the measurements of the LHC experiments, ATLAS and CMS.

Despite being a description of the source of mass, the Higgs theory has surprisingly little to say about gravity. To incorporate gravitational interactions into the Standard Model would require further theoretical advances. Some progress has been made through routes such as string theory, but a quantum theory of gravity remains elusive.

It is an important feature of science that we do not bury things we do not understand. Instead we address them directly and attempt to understand them. Based on the results of existing observations we construct models which we use to make predictions about future measurements. This allows the theories to be tested against empirical evidence – which is exactly what we will do with the Higgs theory at the LHC.

Technorati Tags: higgs boson oxford science questions

On Getting Mullered

2008-11-24T13:45:00.001Z

BBC NEWS | The Reporters | Robert Peston

Then there's the plight of all those overseas businesses that manufacture cars in the UK.
They're being mullered by a massive contraction of available credit and a collapse in sales.

(My bold)
The premier journalist for these days of collapsing economies, Robert Peston, uses a phrase I've only heard in pubs and student haunts, where it means "badly damaged or drunk." What a strange word it is too and, of uncertain, recent derivation; how odd for a BBC journalist to be using what is still considered an outsider, slang word. The peeps over at World Wide Words find an OED entry saying it was used earliest in UK prison slang in the 1950s to mean "badly beaten up", with the OED editor Jonathan Green thinking it derived from the same root as "mulled", as in wine, from some odd indo root meaning "die". Elsewhere, I've seen the derivation as that coming from Gerd Muller, who played football for Germany in the 1970s (third-highest scoring striker of all time.) My feeling would be that the word will have been popularised by this, but was already in circulation amongst lags by that time.

Considering how recent the common usage is and the crucial "er" in the middle, I'd think it must come from a famous name of the era; the only two I can find easily are a chess-player and a radio physicist, so I doubt it was either of them. I'd suggest Franz Muller, an infamous murderer of the 1860s, who not only beat up a banker then threw him to his gruesome death from a moving train but then became even more famous for the strange cut-down beaver hat that he wore and left at the scene, which became oddly popular (Winston Churchill was the most famous wearer).

The Big Picture

2008-11-19T18:00:00.001Z

This is rapidly becoming my favourite daily website. These things are straight out of Dan Dare:

Peering into the micro world - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Probably the most beautiful video I've seen this year.

2008-11-18T18:20:00.001Z

A Sea Biscuit's Life from Bruno Vellutini on Vimeo.

Also, this is cool: an image of the relative occurence of words in my blog... Jew seems to feature quite strongly...

100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers

2008-11-11T11:37:00.001Z

Fragmentary Day

2008-10-30T18:05:00.002Z

I stopped blogging for a long time, I don't know why, comfort perhaps. Stimulus to restart? "Holocause is Coming", "All Jews Must Die" and "Juden Mord" written in chalk on the road outside my house in Golders Green - not targetted at me, but at the local community. I thought our area was wonderfully mixed - Hindus, muslims, jews and Eastern Europeans - turns out someone disagrees.

Uncomfortable with fiction where necessity is for realism.

I'm reading Norwegian Wood at the moment. Haruki Murakami is really the paragon of lonely, alienated writing - makes me feel cold and alone just reading his wonderful communication of bachelor tedium.

Glad at my suppression of overly-snobbish disgust instinct at African woman carefully-but-gruesomely handlessly-eating fruit from a plastic bag and spitting pips on tube this morning.

Got scammed on my company credit card - smooth, fluffy feeling of calmness has been replaced by cold depressed anger.

Oh, god, driving lesson. Turning into a free-travelling grown-up is so much work, especially in these dark days.

God Hates Signs

2008-10-30T12:03:00.001Z

westboro baptist church and me, originally uploaded by Burstein!.

Post 1.001 - Conversational Fragments

2008-10-28T12:36:00.002Z

Auden is darkly, depressibly comic, eloquent, concerned both about the wider world and the horrible authorities in it, and with the very, very personal and embarassing. He's like an Elliot without the unnecessary stretching for benchmarking references... It's a sad poem, of a man past his prime or never in it, lusting in the carefully-instituional structures of yesteryear... I found myself walking through Kings Cross yesterday and, catching sight of a flapping wing feeling sudden joy at some life other than the massed shoulder-pressed humans, before I realised it was a stuck shred of paper flapping in the tube-train's gale... ...Even the parks are homogeneous - pigeons and ducks, reptilian wonders... I just want the wooded edge of a cornfield and a me-shaped hole to swelter in... It sounds perfect, glorious, but I couldn't move there because of the terror.... It feels like there's inevitable erosion of enclaves coming, always; even Byzantium fell.

GMAs

2008-10-17T09:48:00.000Z

Trade hails its media darlings | Gaming Industry | News by MCV

It also featured a very special Games Media Legend award which went to Future veteran Steve Jarratt, the man who launched Edge and Official PlayStation Magazine.
The winners were decided by a vote that was thrown open to MCV’s entire readership.

Having lost out to Imagine’s GamesTM last year, Future’s Edge claimed the Best Magazine crown. And the market’s leading publisher scored another win with Tom Francis of PC Gamer being named Best Specialist Games Writer, Print.

Gratz Tom, Steve, Edge and Ellie! Sorry Log, they should have made a special Ricky Grover award just for you.. :(

John Cleese on Sarah Palin

2008-10-15T15:48:00.001Z

"I used to think Michael Palin was the funniest Palin".

Awesome put-down (Thanks Johnny Minkley).

Height on a Log scale

2008-09-29T11:17:00.001Z

He used a logarithmic scale. A Log scale. How beautiful is this?

xkcd - A Webcomic - Height

Also, that cat at the top-right is the size of several hundred million galaxies. :-o

Awesome little Gif

2008-09-16T12:27:00.000Z

I remember being astounded by the first music video to feature this technology, it seemed like a bright future of plastic surgery - now it's being used to turn Gordon Brown into Stalin and Mr Bean. Is the future any less bright?

Ego-Blogging

2008-09-16T10:46:00.000Z

IGN: Multiwinia Review

My multiwinia review goes up; can understand how some people enjoy it, buy I'm personally unlikely to go back to the game; too shallow and unfair for someone who loves complexity and justice. :)

One of the reasons I love my job

2008-09-01T14:54:00.004Z

Quotation

We are pleased to submit the following quotation:

1 x Stork @ £550 per day

Mileage is charged at the rate of 80p per mile
We have public liability for £2,000,000.

Yes. I love my job. Apparently the stork is quite placid, though it won't carry things.

Hee-hee

2008-08-28T16:23:00.001Z

Ukulele Orchestra of GB - Shaft

2008-08-26T13:52:00.001Z

Dreamlords, Yawn

2008-08-15T15:27:00.000Z

Dreamlords: The Reawakening Review - Page 1 // MMO /// Eurogamer - Games Reviews, News and More

Last night, I travelled home angry. I nicked a seat on the tube, I bullied stumblebums out of my way; I was generally a bundle of passive-aggressive geekery. Why? Not because my day had been bad or because I'd messed up in the office. It was because the Chancellor (boss) of my Convergence (guild) had kicked me out, after I'd pressed the "mistrust" button on Dreamlords' rudimentary web interface.

Another day, another dollar.

A Room With A Private View

2008-08-12T09:02:00.001Z

A Room With A Private View, originally uploaded by Hot Grill.

I think this is in Slough... If you know for certain, you're a betjeman than I...

Out Of The Ocean

2008-08-06T09:36:00.001Z

Bioshock: Why 2K Boston Aren't Making BioShock 2

2K Boston, with help from 2K Australia, made BioShock. And what a great game it was. But they're not making BioShock 2. Somebody else is. Why somebody else and not 2K Boston? Ken Levine (pictured, emerging from the ruins of Rapture clutching the last remaining...Coke Zero!) explains:

I'm always excited when someone uses one of my pictures...!

Eye Contact

2008-07-29T16:57:00.001Z

Ritting

Rattling along underground in a vicious humour, all around me are temporarily like me; none can see the blue of the sky. The tube disgorges beneath Kings-Cross and we all barrel out, the stick-wavers, the 20-20s and me. There's probably some of my kin around too, but we never make eye contact, head for the city. There's a city in all of our eyes, great towers of rhodopsin raising up, the rods and the cones, an empty city that collapses at the touch of light. In my city the architect's plans went awry, or he lacked imagination and my city looks all samey, not enough variety in those towering discs. As in the eye, so in the world and my world, outside the vitreous humour (if it's really there) also has lost something from that failure; colour.

Champers

2008-07-24T09:40:00.000Z

My cat champers has been dead for at least seven years now. I still miss him.

2008-07-21T09:48:00.003Z

According to my timesheet at work, last week I worked sixty five hours, not including freelance. If I'd been at Future, I would have begrudged every moment of that stolen time, in my penury and misery, but here in the glossy, happy world of PR it's varied, exciting, and interesting; my only irritation is that I can't spend every hour of every day with Maria - oh, how low this onetime bachelor hath sunk... Anyway, that week of schlepping was tolerably pleasant because it included a day trip to Paris to see the really interesting city-building MMO Cities XL and 2 1/2 days on the Hop Farm at the War & Peace show (large numbers of scary men in military/Nazi uniforms or 1940s civvies walking around buying cheap machetes and "decommissioned" machine guns, mortars. And one very brave Vietnam war protestor) demoing Men of War, a very cute and clever realtime tactics / roleplaying game that reminds me of nothing so much as a non-pausable Hidden & Dangerous II. Now, back to the working week...

The Warslow Beef Restival 2008

2008-07-11T09:29:00.002Z

My creation, originally uploaded by Hot Grill.

1. The Last Thing The Field Mouse Sees, 2. Possibly The Most Beautiful Flower Ever, 3. God, Macro Flowers Are Great., 4. The Cutest Dog In The World, 5. Foxglove Cascade, 6. Linen Flowers, 7. Butterfly Flower, 8. Dov's Schnozz, 9. Bad Barman, 10. The Cutey, 11. Farm Fun, 12. Angry Bud

Created with fd's Flickr Toys.

Totalitarianism Just Jumped The Shark

2008-07-07T10:41:00.001Z

BBC News | Enlarged Image

How StarCraft Beat Chess

2008-07-02T12:23:00.002Z

Eurogamer Front Page 02/07/08, originally uploaded by Hot Grill.

Look, I just wanted to use a Wired-style complete hyperbollicks title, okay? God, I hate forumites. Anyway, my big interview with the creators of StarCraft is online over at Eurogamer, finally. Childhood ambition complete (tick!)

Eurogamer Front Page 02/07/08

Frank Sanazi : Strangers On My Flight

2008-06-25T09:21:00.001Z

Ooh. Now, that's tasteless.

The Real Lawmaster

2008-06-24T17:08:00.001Z

Dark Roasted Blend: Mystery Photo: One Seriously Empowered Motorcycle.

A knocked-up Vespa with a recoilless M20 rifle on top, used by the French to suppress the natives the world over. Surprisingly effective, apparently. Joe Dredd wannabes can probably make their own fairly easily.

Good Critique of Modern Games

2008-06-24T11:28:00.001Z

Lookspring » Ralph Baer changed my Powerpoint
Margaret Robertson's powerpoint show from NGLD is a good basic summary of the challenges facing modern game developers - she's actually bothered to think rather than throwing her hands up in disgust and shame like so many of us (me included).

41st Least Hideous: Games Journalist

2008-06-20T15:39:00.002Z

Oh, the pride. I'm the 41st least hideous person in the games industry. Out of 50. Eesh.

Ladybird Lovers #3

2008-05-29T11:44:00.001Z

Ladybird Lovers #3, originally uploaded by Hot Grill.

Sorry about the recent silence on here - soon to be rectified, as soon as I rebuild my frazzled PC.

Large Jam Collider

2008-05-12T12:17:00.001Z

CERN Podcast | Chris Morris

Chris Morris, creator of the Day Today, Blue Jam, etc, in front of some crazy bit of kit at Cern in Geneva, where humanity's first black hole is going to happen. Thanks to brother Dov.

The Comic Strip : G.L.C. The Carnage Continues (4of 4)

2008-05-01T10:53:00.001Z

The main reason why you should vote for Ken Livingstone today is his portrayal in this classic Comic Strip. He's played by Robbie Coltrane playing Charles Bronson playing Ken.

Photo-blogging

2008-04-29T11:32:00.001Z

My creation, originally uploaded by Hot Grill.

Various photos I've taken recently.

Cities From The Air

2008-04-19T02:41:00.002Z

For most cities from the air, the weather takes a more dominant role than any topographical or construction oddities; sunlight bleaches the landscape, snow blanks it out, clouds blank out even that blanking out. Once you're in the city, the homogenisation continues; you're lumped in the back of a vaguely-recognisable car marque and hustled through unfamiliar traffic before a dolled-up desk assistant at your hotel takes a credit card number and dispatches you to an internationally-acceptable hotel room, distinguished only by the leaflets on the business desk and the brands of toiletries / beverages supplied.
But there's a brief window, between weather and hustle, where you see the city for what it is, just as the plane swoops in: Dubai was empty desert punctuated by giant “f*ck-you”s built by sheikhs with too much oil; Vegas was a single gleaming street amidst suburbs that stretch out into desert shacks; Vancouver (or was it Toronto?) tastefully stretched into the mountains, demure and quiet, L.A. distastefully sprawled to the limits of its land-mass, London looked like Eastenders, and so on.
Moscow teases you with its size, interrupting endless woodland with fields and estates. The latter vary from tiny collections of shacks on massive allotments to housing estates comprised of country Estates and mansions, to a single gleaming dome of gold I caught sight of looming above the treeline; nearly all are brand new. When you finally get near the city centre, it's a terrible combination of 70s blocks of flats, amazing monolith Soviet official buildings and weird tasteless new buildings built presumably with oligarchs fattened on fleecing the state. All of these are encircled by a solid steel band of unmoving traffic that fades at night and midday but never really disappears.

Elf (Dick's)

2008-04-15T12:32:00.001Z

Quint from the Disney Presentation! Disney's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's KING OF THE ELVES! -- Ain't It Cool News: The best in movie, TV, DVD, and comic book news.

WALT DISNEY’S KING OF THE ELVES, based on the Philip K. Dick story about a gas station attendant who receives a knock on the door one rainy night. It’s a group of elves. Small, maybe a foot tall each. They are all green, with leaves and foliage growing off of them.

They beg him for shelter from the storm. Despite his better judgment he allows them to stay and as reward he is made king of the Elves.

Not one of Dick's finer works then...

Star Trek: Time Warp

2008-04-15T12:28:00.001Z

Rexona | Futurisk

2008-04-09T11:11:00.001Z

Best. Deodorant. Advert. Ever.

The real-life staring contest

2008-04-07T13:19:00.002Z

'Mind Gaming' Could Enter Market This Year

Two players sit across from each other at a table, focusing on a small white ball. The objective is to make the ball roll toward your opponent and away from you, using only your mind. Headbands measure the players´ alpha waves, and the ball rolls away from the player with the calmest mind.

Of course, the logical next step is the removal of the ball. Then you just have two wirey, intense people sitting opposite each other, trying to remain as calm as possible, staring into each other's eyes... and.... must... not... blink!

(I'm really happy that Wikipedia has a whole useful entry on the rules for a stare-out contest.)

Fafblog is BACK! YAY!

2008-04-01T14:57:00.001Z

Fafblog! back to save the universe.

"Screw this dump!" says Giblets. "This universe is old and fat and smells like smelling and Giblets is busting out!"
"Should we go over the wall or take the tunnel?" says me. I been diggin a tunnel.
"Nuts to the tunnel!" says Giblets. "What we do is we make like we're sick. Then when God comes in to check on us we punch im in the liver an run out the door!"
"They'll be on the lookout so we're gonna need disguises if we wanna make it the resta the way," says me. "If we bop Europe an Australia on the head we can sneak out in their continent costumes!"

Classic Pepys

2008-03-27T22:04:00.001Z

Sunday 26 March 1665 (Pepys' Diary)

At noon home to dinner, my wife and I (Mercer staying to the Sacrament) alone. This is the day seven years which, by the blessing of God, I have survived of my being cut of the stone, and am now in very perfect good health and have long been; and though the last winter hath been as hard a winter as any have been these many years, yet I never was better in my life, nor have not, these ten years, gone colder in the summer than I have done all this winter, wearing only a doublet, and a waistcoate cut open on the back; abroad, a cloake and within doors a coate I slipped on. Now I am at a losse to know whether it be my hare’s foot which is my preservative against wind, for I never had a fit of the collique since I wore it, and nothing but wind brings me pain, and the carrying away of wind takes away my pain, or my keeping my back cool; for when I do lie longer than ordinary upon my back in bed, my water the next morning is very hot, or whether it be my taking of a pill of turpentine every morning, which keeps me always loose, or all together, but this I know, with thanks to God Almighty, that I am now as well as ever I can wish or desire to be, having now and then little grudgings of wind, that brings me a little pain, but it is over presently, only I do find that my backe grows very weak, that I cannot stoop to write or tell money without sitting but I have pain for a good while after it. Yet a week or two ago I had one day’s great pain; but it was upon my getting a bruise on one of my testicles, and then I did void two small stones, without pain though, and, upon my going to bed and bearing up of my testicles, I was well the next. But I did observe that my sitting with my back to the fire at the office did then, as it do at all times, make my back ake, and my water hot, and brings me some pain. I sent yesterday an invitation to Mrs. Turner and her family to come to keep this day with me, which she granted, but afterward sent me word that it being Sunday and Easter day she desired to choose another and put off this.

As far as I recall, being cut for the stone involved an incision in, of all places, the perineum and then a lengthy procedure to take out the blockage from the relevant organ (bladder in this case, I believe) through that slot. Without anaesthetic or antiseptics. Eek.

Ego-Blogging

2008-03-27T21:50:00.001Z

The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar Re-review // MMO /// Eurogamer

LOTRO looks absolutely, astoundingly right. Characters look correct, the world is beautifully crafted and enemies match the best drawings that the Tolkien Legendarium has attracted in sixty years. The Shire looks as good as the movies, Bree (though bigger than we expected) is gloriously rickety, like an old medieval English town, and the build of the Elven and Dwarven towns nail ethereal and indomitable respectively.

My re-review of LOTRO is up, at last. If you've never been arsed enough to read any of my writing and you count yourself a friend, would you kindly have a gander? It's not brilliant, but it's surely solid.

Shuffle Sex

2008-03-24T10:07:00.001Z

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language

I think my most embarassing one has to be the entire Best of Bonzo Dog Doodah Band following in quick sucession - nothing kills the mood like the Intro & Outro ("Please welcome - Adolf Hitler on vibes") and then trying to save a situation by miming to "In The Canyons of Your Mind". I seem to remember the lovely girl in question ("And arent;t they all lovely girls, Ted?") collapsing into unrecoverablew fits of giggles for some reason...

E-Cigarette

2008-03-19T13:39:00.002Z

Heh. Reminds me of the fags in Fifth Element - y'know, the ones that are all filter and no ciggie and are in a red box warning you of imminent death on the wall. (Thanks Alec!)

Identity Crisis.

2008-03-19T10:37:00.004Z

For any users of Skype out there, my username is Griliopoulos. Duh. For MSN, it's iddleyiddle at hotmail.com. For Google Talk it's daniel.griliopoulos at gmail.com. On Xbox Live I'm OXM Grill (but email me first, as my list is always full.) On Lord of the Rings Online, I'm on Snowbourn and my name's Warslow Wobbleguts. If you're on any social networking site, my full name's my name. If you're on any other site with profiles, I'm likely to be on there with the name Griliopoulos.

Legacy Names
On Planetside, I was Picoc. In City of Heroes, I was both of the heroes Y'gor and The Bomb,and some arbitrary villain. I'm Kip Brasken in Guild Wars. I can't even remember my name in Tabula Rasa. I had a thousand names in World of Warcraft, among them Grittle and Ungolim on Daggerspine and Grill on Bloodscalp. There were a couple of characters in Everquest II and some in Ultima Online, Shadowbane, Auto Assault (dead), D&D Online, EVE Online, Final Fantasy XI, Hero Online, ForumWarz, Kingdom of Loathing, RuneScape, Toontown and many more that I forget...

With this many identities, it's a wonder that I exist at all any more.

Achievements Quandary

2008-03-13T14:11:00.005Z

Xbox 360 achievements let you get points that total up to mean exactly nothing. Hence, I feel no obligation to play games for achievements and even feel a little disgusted with myself for playing games with achievements. Hence, I don't want to play Xbox 360 games.

However... I also get a feeling whenever I'm playing a game that doesn't have achievement points (PC or even Wii) that I'm wasting my time because I could be getting points. No matter that I don't want to, no matter that I think they're a worthlessI grinding measurement towards inevitable death, I still get that urge to get them when I'm not playing 360.

I'm finding it almost impossible to play any game for more than an hour at the moment. Help!

...Watchmen Character Art

2008-03-06T17:44:00.001Z

!!!!!

Watchmen

...to help pass the time, here is your first look at some of the Watchmen characters.

2008-03-04T15:43:00.003Z

Do coat hangers sound as good as Monster cables? - Boing Boing

The cables made by Monster Cable (the company that enjoys suing other companies that have the word "monster" in their name) sound no better than coat hangers, according to a man who ran a blindfold test to compare the quality of audio running through each.

Ha! I remember when these guys made some HDTV cables for the Xbox 360 which they proceeded to charge five times the cost of other perfectly-acceptable generic cables for (around £80 I seem to remember). When they came in, I noticed that they had 1) proprietary optical connections, which made them fairly useless and 2) no HDTV-SDTV switch meaning they were actually much worse than the official or generic HDTV cables.

The Smell of Space

2008-02-29T14:52:00.001Z

HSF - International Space Station

It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space.

Magarita The Movie

2008-02-26T18:02:00.001Z

SCI FI Wire | The News Service of the SCI FI Channel | SCIFI.COM

Mikhail Bulgakov's supernatural novel The Master and Margarita is being adapted for the screen by Stone Village Pictures and producer Scott Steindorff, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Master and Margarita begins in pre-World War II Moscow, where the devil appears as a mysterious man who insinuates himself into a literary crowd. Amid a series of deaths and disappearances, the devil brings together the title characters, a despairing novelist and his devoted but married lover. The story shifts to the setting of the master's rejected novel, Jerusalem in the time of Pontius Pilate, and then to a supernatural world where satanic forces have taken over Margarita's life.

That's It.

2008-02-24T19:27:00.003Z

I had a horrible moment on saturday morning, about 2:30a.m. where I woke up suddenly and couldn't catch my breath. My temperature musta passed 40C. My hands, legs and feet were initially all pins and needles, then went plain numb and useless, which (along with the weakness and shaking) made it very difficult to dial for the ambulance. I knew it was just flu, but I don't know anyone around this area, my housemate's away and I didn't like those symptoms so I seriously didn't fancy dying from a cold; it'd be so humiliating.

So the paramedics came, checked me out and said I might need some antibiotics. They drove me to Lewisham hospital where it was my privilege, feverish and tired, to wait for four hours before a doctor turned up. There was a nice woman there who'd got drunk with her boyfriend, at which point he'd kicked her out of the house, then grabbed her by the hair and used her head to beat out a rhythm on the floor; he was in prison. There was also another exhausted flu sufferer and a man who's leg had spontaneously stopped working.

By the time, I'd finally got to see a doctor the fever had quieted (due to lots of paracetamol, water and fresh air), so he just looked me over, said I had viral flu, but there was nothing they could do for me. Well, actually, he said "Take nurofen", which I observed to him was basically ibuprofen + nice packaging = placebo effect, woo, and if I knew about the placebo it was unlikely to work, so could I save £7 and just buy the 90p generic ibuprofen instead?

I'm not 100% yet, but I have to go back to work tomorrow. I can't afford to spend any more time in bed, as I'm getting better far too slowly now and I know there's loads of stuff waiting for me, so I'd better go back in tomorrow. Ho-hum.

Grow Flu

2008-02-21T15:24:00.001Z

GROW nano vol.3

While I've been sat at home, cultivating this Flu (last night I thought I'd try that old party game of "Waking Up Every Hour Shaking Like A Leaf") I've been playing the lastest in the excellent ten-minute GROW series, which Alec pointed out.It seems the series creator On is similarly bed-bound and has made a excellent illness-recovery game. Ace, give it a try. (Cough, splutter, wheeze.)

One Flu Over The Cuckoo's Lungs.

2008-02-20T15:45:00.001Z

Influenza can also be transmitted by saliva, nasal secretions, faeces and blood.

F*ck you, G*d. I've not been near any of that shit which isn't my own and yet you let me lie here, gibbering at the pretty elves dancing on the ceiling, while my lungs try and escape through my mouth.

I wish I believed in you so I could blame you, you massive arse.

Family abt 1888 (2)

2008-02-18T10:03:00.001Z

Family abt 1888 (2), originally uploaded by Dimitri Kissoff.

The Welsh side of my family, circa 1888.

Harlan Ellison on the WGA Strike Settlement

2008-02-15T20:36:00.001Z

Pinched in it's entirety from Warren Ellis' blog. Awesome vitriol.

Warren Ellis » Harlan Ellison On The WGA Strike Settlement

HARLAN ELLISON ON THE WRITERS STRIKE SETTLEMENT

YOU HAVE MY PERMISSION TO RE-POST THIS ANYWHERE:

Creds: got here in 1962, written for just about everybody, won the
Writers Guild Award four times for solo work, sat on the WGAw Board
twice, worked on negotiating committees, and was out on the picket
lines with my NICK COUNTER SLEEPS WITH THE FISHE$$$ sign. You may have
heard my name. I am a Union guy, I am a Guild guy, I am loyal. I
fuckin’ LOVE the Guild.

And I voted NO on accepting this deal.

My reasons are good, and they are plentiful; Patric Verrone will be
saddened by what I am about to say; long-time friends will shake their
heads; but this I say without equivocation…

THEY BEAT US LIKE A YELLOW DOG. IT IS A SHIT DEAL. We finally got a
timorous generation that has never had to strike, to get their asses
out there, and we had to put up with the usual cowardly spineless
babbling horse’s asses who kept mumbling “lessgo bac’ta work” over and
over, as if it would make them one iota a better writer. But after
months on the line, and them finally bouncing that pus-sucking dipthong
Nick Counter, we rushed headlong into a shabby, scabrous, underfed
shovelfulla shit clutched to the affections of toss-in-the-towel summer
soldiers trembling before the Awe of the Alliance.

My Guild did what it did in 1988. It trembled and sold us out. It
gave away the EXACT co-terminus expiration date with SAG for some
bullshit short-line substitute; it got us no more control of our words;
it sneak-abandoned the animator and reality beanfield hands before
anyone even forced it on them; it made nice so no one would think we
were meanies; it let the Alliance play us like the village idiot. The
WGAw folded like a Texaco Road Map from back in the day.

And I am ashamed of this Guild, as I was when Shavelson was the
prexy, and we wasted our efforts and lost out on technology that we had
to strike for THIS time. 17 days of streaming tv!!!????? Geezus, you
bleating wimps, why not just turn over your old granny for gang-rape?

You deserve all the opprobrium you get. While this nutty festschrift
of demented pleasure at being allowed to go back to work in the rice
paddy is filling your cowardly hearts with joy and relief that the
grips and the staff at the Ivy and street sweepers won’t be saying
nasty shit behind your back, remember this:

You are their bitches. They outslugged you, outthought you,
outmaneuvered you; and in the end you ripped off your pants, painted
yer asses blue, and said yes sir, may I have another.

Please excuse my temerity. I’m just a sad old man who has fallen among Quislings, Turncoats, Hacks and Cowards.

I must go now to whoops. My gorge has become buoyant.

Respectfully, Yr. Pal, Harlan Ellison

Dream A Little Dream Of Me

2008-02-13T09:54:00.001Z

deludedangels: 02/2008

jess and i have gone swimming. rich is there too, alternating taking work phonecalls with doing butterfly strokes. in the corner of the shallow end of the pool is The Greek from season 2 of The Wire, eating an omelette with fennel in it. i am translating the season into Italian for the producers, and his next line is meant to be "look what they put in my omelette - why do they put fennel in an omelette?" and I am shocked. "Do you mean to say the writers have presumed that an elderly gentleman of European origin such as yourself would not like Fennel? How absurd!" we decide to change the line for the Italian dubbers, knowing that such a thing would entirely destroy the whole series' credibility in the Italians' eyes.

I wish I had dreams like Chrissy. Rather, I wish I could remember my dreams like Chrissy - with my current hip/back-pain and insomnia, I can't say my dreams haven't been pleasant or simple.

Fargo Meets Woody Allen

2008-02-12T16:13:00.003Z

SCI FI Wire | The News Service of the SCI FI Channel | SCIFI.COM

Sony's Columbia Pictures has acquired screen rights to Michael Chabon's alternate-universe novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union and set Oscar nominees Joel and Ethan Coen to direct, Variety reported.

I've not read the book but I will now. Wikipedia makes is sound like a fairly standard alternate history-cum- detective novel, but what the Coens will do with that will be a funny Fargo packed with us Jews and Eskimos. Can you imagine a better gift to a pair of comedy clowns with a sense of the macabre than assassinated chess geniuses and an alcoholic cop fighting rabbis?

There's also some really, really politically-controversial scenes in the film, on the basis of its plausible alternative history where the Jewish refugee state is Alaska, not the Middle East. SPOILER:

The dome of the rock getting exploded by the Beth Din?!

Armchair Generals

2008-02-11T15:21:00.001Z

Gameplayer - Australia's Premier Gaming Website
Feature: The Armchair Generals - Official Xbox 360 Magazine

It's no fun being the odd one out. As the only team member with an attention span counted in hours rather than seconds, I'm regularly taunted in the office for loving PC strategy games. The other team members treat me as if I'm backward and nerdy; and it's true I do love strategy games, tactical combat games, turn-based games. Yet there's a shift going on, a shift of strategy developers towards consoles, both in the numbers being developed for the Xbox 360 and how they're being altered to fit it. Soon there will be more strategy games on the console than beat 'em ups, an unthinkable thing five years ago.

A super-long feature I did on console strategy games as my Parthian shot at OXM has gone on-line. If you like sending thousands of men to death and/or glory it's an involved and in-depth read - read the Gameplayer version though, as it's more legible. It involves interviews with Michael de Plater from Creative Assembly, Jim Vessella, Associate Producer on the forthcoming expansion Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath, Jim Bottomley, Lead Designer of Vivendi’s recent PC hit World in Conflict, Barry Caudill, Executive Producer at Firaxis Games talking about Civ Revolution, James Carey from Creative Assembly, and Mike Kawahara and Jim Ngui from Namco, developers of Mark of Chaos. That's a lot of developers!

NOTICE, South Bank, London

2008-02-06T16:44:00.000Z

NOTICE

To Shop Assistants

STORE MUST OPEN PROMPTLY
at 6.00 a.m. until 9.00 p.m. all the year round.
-
STORE must be swept, counter, base shelves and showcases dusted. Lamps trimmed, filled and chimney cleaned, pens made, door and windows opened.
-
A PAIL of water and scuttle of coal must be brought in by each clerk before breakfast, if there is time to do so and attend customers who call.

Any employee who is the habit of
SMOKING SPANISH CIGARS,
GETTING SHAVED AT A BARBER'S SHOP,
GOING TO DANCES, AND OTHER SUCH PLACES OF AMUSEMENT.

will surely give his employer reason to be suspicious of his INTEGRITY and alround HONESTY
-
Each employee must pay not less than ONE GUINEA per year to the Church and attend Sunday School every Sunday.
-
MEN are given one evening a week for courting purposes and two if they go to prayer meetings regularly.

After 14 hours works, spare time should be devoted to reading good literature.

1854

I've gotta resubscribe to Wired

2008-02-04T16:00:00.001Z

Gallery: Inside the Navy's Armed-Robot Labs

The Navy's MDARS-E is an armed robot that can track anything that
moves. Told that I was the target, the unmanned vehicle trained its
guns on me and ordered, "Stay where you are," in an intimidating robot
voice. And yes, it was frightening.

Dystopian Bias

2008-01-30T14:07:00.001Z

Judge Dredd Writer: My Nightmare Vision Of A State Gone Mad Has Come True (from Sunday Herald)

"It's not funny anymore. I find it hard to write Judge Dredd now, I really do."

...Grant and Wagner would read tabloid newspapers to find social trends such as youth gangs, unemployment, overcrowding and neighbour rage that they exaggerated and placed into the future.

"It's pretty horrific when you realise that what you've written, admittedly an extrapolation of a trend, has got stronger and stronger," said Grant. Going to Glasgow airport and seeing police officers armed Judge Dredd-style confirmed to Grant the state of society. "We are living in a dystopia, and pessimistically I can only see it getting worse. I think the world that we, and I include myself, are bequeathing to our grandchildren, is a horrible, horrible place."

(caveat: I read a lot of Sci-Fi.) I have to agree with Grant that our society resembles more closely the dystopias that early generations imagined than it does the utopias - but that's because there's very few utopias involving humans in Sci-Fi. Indeed, the numbers of dystopias massively outweighs and has always outweighed the utopias in all forms of writing, from Asimov to Borges to Corinthians. The elements where writers have conceived of positive things has been in man's innovations, which our current society excels in - the do-all terminal of Ian Banks' Culture novels, touch-screens, consumer-led location and organisational systems. Yes; the sh*tty bits of Britain have got no better and we're more aware than ever of those crapulences; but we're more aware because, firstly, we focus on the negative more than ever in the media and, secondly, Grant originally sourced those story ideas from the press - indicating they were a problem at that time too!

SHARIABOT SAYS KILL

2008-01-28T11:25:00.001Z

Asharq Alawsat Newspaper (English)

Cairo, Asharq Al-Awsat- A controversial new electronic device could revolutionize the field of Islamic jurisprudence and allegedly issue more accurate Shariah fatwas [religious edicts]. The device, currently in production in France, will be known as the 'Electronic Mufti' and will depend on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to issue opinions on contemporary Muslim affairs and matters.

Engineer Dr. Anas Fawzi...describes the device as "a very large capacity computer on which all the information that is relevant to a given [historical] figure is uploaded; everything that has been mentioned in history books or chronicled documents that indicate his/her responses and attitudes towards all positions adopted in his/her life. Through a process that relies on AI, the computer then simulates responses based on the available data so that the answers are the expected response that the person in question would give if they were alive," said Dr. Fawzi.

Would a simulated prophet, the product of sometimes-conflicting historical records, be coherent or plain insane?

HAHAHAHA. We're all dead.

2008-01-24T17:01:00.001Z

'Safe Ebola' created for research

HAHAHAHAHA. We're all dead.

DON'T ASK WHY I'M SEARCHING FOR THESE THINGS.

2008-01-24T00:01:00.001Z

Sexual lifestyle of long distance lorry drivers in India: questionnaire survey

The table shows that 87% of subjects (4949 men) were sexually promiscuous, of whom only 11% (563) used condoms during commercial sex. The percentage using condoms decreased with increasing age. In the 21-30 age group (n=1766), 78% of unmarried sexually promiscuous men (331/425) reported having 31-60 sexual partners during the past 12 months.

It appears that Indian lorry-drivers are some of the most promiscuous people in the world; combine this with relaxing in a cab all day, eating crap food from roadside caffs and being hero-worshipped by legions of of Lorry-Spotters and one might say they have the world's most fun, irresponsible lifestyle.

People are Too Much about buses.

2008-01-21T15:44:00.001Z

The other side of Greenwich, originally uploaded by Hot Grill.

Claire Pendrous Pro User says:
DVLA details for this old Volvo bus are:
Date of Liability 01 12 1996
Date of First Registration 23 11 1979
Year of Manufacture 1979
Fuel Type Heavy Oil
Vehicle Status Unlicensed
Vehicle Colour MAROON

Hot Grill Pro User says:
Where the hell did you get those details from?

budgie2007 / Rich B. Pro User says:
This Volvo Ailsa B55 with Alexander 79-seat body was one of a batch of 20 of the type delivered new to Central SMT between October & December 1979. It was number AH25 in that fleet.

Budding Photography #2

2008-01-21T14:38:00.001Z

Grasshopper's Suda 51 Interview // Eurogamer

Budding Photography

2008-01-17T14:06:00.001Z

No More Heroes director SUDA51 talks punk, violence and Wii games.

The event I was doing on Monday and Tuesday was hosting interviews for Suda 51 at the Wii flat. But, see! People are using my photos! Excitement!

Bananas + Ham + Cheese = MMM, mmm!

2008-01-15T22:48:00.001Z

Heavy Metal Madness: You Are What You Eat

Thatsa tasty, uh, banananaanana. (Hmm, gotta learn how to stop saying that word...)

Pulpit Rock.

2008-01-08T13:26:00.001Z

Preikestolen

The next place I want to go walking. Hmm. 600m up, a random lump of stone 25m by 25m, floats above a Norwegian Fjord. Looks nice, nu?

Technorati Tags: pulpit rock norway

Why I am not a vegetarian (work in progress)

2007-12-24T00:26:00.000Z

After a discussion with my brother as to why I still eat (free-range) meat, I came up with the following. Criticism and arguments welcome in the commments please!

Principles
1 The most important thing in any life is to be free from pain
2 The next most important thing in any life is to have your desires satisfied
3 There is no life after death, for man, animals, plants, rocks or anything else
4 All things die.
5 A death which the individual does not forsee and is free from pain is the best death. (From 1 & 2 3.)
6 A life which is free from pain, involves the satisfaction of necessary desires and ends according to 5 is called humane. (From 1 & 2 & 3 & 5)
7 The length of the life does not matter, as long as it fulfils all conditions of 6.
8 If an animal or human is raised and dies in a humane condition, it is the best life. (From 7)
9 Animals' desires are simple and satisfiable.
10 All things considered, animals desires in the wild are satisfied less and they suffer more pain than animals' lives in humane captivity.
11 Free range farming and the use of a regulated abattoir is more humane than a life in the wild.
13 For an animal, a life on a free-range farm ended sharply in a professional abattoir is the best life.

Caption Competition

2007-12-21T13:29:00.001Z

Log: "You're all on TV!"
Dov: "Blimey, you can house my sea from here."
Boss Nonnu: "Open the pod bay doors, Hal"
Meerling: Hillary Clinton's rejuvenation deemed a success. "Now I'm as pretty as Obama!"
Dov: "The fumes bring on a state of euphoria before overcoming the victims"
Me: *New!* The Bad-Taste Pod can defend against the most awful decor. Orgasmatron attachment extra.

These pods are absolutely awesome, especially for the orgasmic look they imbue this woman with. Boss Nonnu commented that in "in a decade, we'll all be working inside one" and I have to agree; one day things like this will shielding us against the mental vampires of big government.

Apparently, it actually uses air to measure your body's volume.

Naruto Episode 32

2007-10-29T22:44:00.000Z

Or the one in which Ino watches Sakura get beaten to a pulp while she has a series of increasingly irrelevant flashbacks about what great friends they used to be.

Naruto is increasingly ace. It also reduces me to tears on a worringly ferquent basis.

Sick of Cake

2007-10-25T21:24:00.000Z

Look, I'm tired of your pathetic cake jokes, m'kay? I mean the vast majority of them aren't even jokes are they? They're Proustian madeleines, reminding you of something very personal only you and the elect understand; they're just you saying the word cake and then giggling like a schoolgirl doped up with nitrous oxide and poppers (innocent m'lud, I have access no to NO2). You make me ashamed of my virtual friends, you really do.

So I'm going to supply for you, my lovely overly self-referential chums, a near-complete set of cake and baking-related puns, just so we don't have to mention the c-word again. Between us we might raise the tone, leaven the atmosphere, even come up with something not half-baked. There is little margerine for error, so don't tell your friends these jokes are stollen and work on a knead to dough basis; most importantly avoid loafing about like bloody spongers (the Devil makes food c*** for idle hands, according to Eccles-iatisicals anyway) and if you can't think of one that doesn't provoke an icy/frosty response, make a joke about something simnaler. If you can't think of anything, petit force yourself - it's all grist to the mille-feuille after all.

(Sanity says: shit, this is degenerating rapidly. Finish him!.)

It's a piece of c*** really. Just remember that Jaffa C***s are really tax-dodging biscuits.

The Departed Re-cut (Wind in the Willows 2)

2007-10-11T14:31:00.001Z

Jonty

2007-10-07T15:38:00.001Z

Jonty, originally uploaded by Hot Grill.

I've been playing with an auto-rotascoping tool at www.befunky.com which produces some awesome results. Click through to my Flickr page to see more.

Fry's Delight

2007-09-27T15:21:00.001Z

Stephen Fry » Blog Archive » Let Fame

Let the pheme f be the gene of celebrity, the base unit of fame; its only function is to replicate itself by planting the awareness of a given famous person, x, into the host minds of the masses, m. The pheme of x, f(x) does not demand that you like x, respect them, admire them or even know much about them, only that you are conscious of them enough to pass on the pheme in some manner.

Holy crapola. Steve Fry's first post on Smartphone wasn't simply a one-off - the man thinks and opines at length all the time, on topics you wouldn't expect a light entertainer to discuss, especially not with the erudition displayed here. A genuine insight into the mind of a genius.