Out with the old, and in with the sexy

I have got a couple of 'proper' posts in my mind, but a combination of brain failure and work tiredness is making it difficult for me to actually string some words together. Embarrassed by Andy's profligacy, however, I felt I needed to do something, so here's the highlight of my weekend:

Out with the old, scratched, second-hand and increasingly unreliable (but well loved, well used and much appreciated):

And in with the new, sleek, shiny, spacious and sexy:Hipster? Moi?

Just a quick one...

If you've got 15 minutes to spare, Bête de Jour has a cool little questionnaire about writing and viewing blogs, so you could go fill it in. Should the mood take you.

4 Ways to construct a blog post with no effort at all.

I mentioned Cracked.com's lists yesterday, but it bears repeating - I've been flicking through them all day, and they really are very funny indeed.

8 (Pointless) Laws All Comic Book Movies Follow

5 Ways Hollywood Tricks You Into Seeing Bad Movies

The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey

And, in particular: 50 Reasons Lord of the Rings Sucks, firstly because it's a funny list, and secondly because of the huge number of immune-from-sarcasm commenters providing frenzied responses.

Linkables 7/5/8

So, just a few links today (I'm trying to do the whole post-a-day thing, but it leaves me devoid of inspiration occasionally, so we'll see how much longer it goes on...).

A couple of images that must have taken an insane amount of time to put together:
An example of how flexible CSS can be, and a graphics-intensive game on about the simplest graphical tool around.

A cool gallery of lego historical figures. It focuses a little on obscure Japanese samurai, but theres a ton of them, so skip on if you get lost. They're pretty awesome.

I'd heard of the top two of these crazy psychological experiments, but not the other three. Cracked.com is generally excellent for these list-type articles.

Interesting (and long) analyses of Microsoft's attitude to online music sales and commercial distributed storage.

And finally, a freaking cool little retro escape-from-extinction game.

Try this at home, kids

1. Sit in a chair

2. Raise your right foot off the floor

3. Begin making clockwise circles with your foot

4. Hold your right arm in front of you

5. While still rotating your ankle, try to draw a number '6' in the air with your right hand

6. Watch as your foot changes direction.

I can't guarantee that it will work for everyone, but for me, it's pretty much perfect - I can't do the two actions at once...

Omphaloskepsis

Today, Charlie Brooker writes about occasionally feeling waves of existential angst, a description that interested me because I've had the same occasional feeling for many years now. I suppose it must be part of the human condition, since looking at the comment thread on the article, there are many other people who experience the same thing.

The realisation is very strange, and really comes down to recognising that I am a being with free will, and that most of the time I am on auto-pilot (as Brooker puts it). It's a frightening but exhillerating feeling that usually only lasts a second or two, and for me, it's got to the point where I can fairly comfortably cause it to happen to myself. I'll usually try it when dropping off to sleep, since it's better if there are no distractions. Then, I'll start to imagine being outside my body, watching myself, repeating in my head "I am real", and "I am not just a bodiless mind floating in the void" over and over again.

Sometimes it take a few minutes, sometimes it doesn't happen at all, but sometimes, I can force my brain into a loop, where I realise that I'm a real person for a split second, my brain compensates for it and calms me, and I counter it, usually with something like "No, but actually real", and imagine myself coming out of my body again. Doing this again and again causes the feeling to gradually fade in intensity each time, and it'll be a couple of weeks before I can do it again with any force.

I'm not a philosopher, and I don't really know how to describe the feeling (though it's certainly the same thing that Brooker and his commenters are talking about), and I'd be interested to know if anyone I know has experienced anything remotely similar.

Glass half full...

One of the continuous things that niggles me about modern life is the approach to soft drinks in pubs and bars. As both a non-drinker and a diet coke addict, the provision of non-alcoholic drinks in social establishments is something I encounter pretty much constantly, and my complaint usually boils down to the size of the drink served.

Usually nowadays you can get a pint of diet coke in a pub, thankfully, as I have been told in the past that the pub in question "doesn't serve" or "isn't allowed" to serve soft drinks in pints. In bars and clubs it's a different story, though, usually it'll be a half pint, but sometimes it's just a plastic cup, or cocktail-sized glass, and often for the same price of (or even more than) a pint in a pub. Clearly it's up to the particular establishment to determine how it wants to sell its drinks, but to have such limited options on size seems to be deliberately obtuse. I'll sometimes resort to drinking water in places like that, if it becomes too expensive and fiddly to keep getting tiny one-gulp glasses of coke.

The second way that the size of the drink can be restricted is with the level of ice included. I'm not totally anti-ice, by any means. In the summer, a few blocks of ice in a drink can be very nice (though no substitute for the drink itself being cold), but the way that ice is used in drinking establishments at the moment, all year round, seems to be as a deliberate method of restricting the amount of liquid served.

It's rare that you'll be asked whether you want ice or not, and you usually have to be pretty quick, clear and forceful about making your preference clear if you don't want any. Usually, if you don't state a preference, you'll get the glass filled to the top with ice, and then the gaps filled in with coke. Is there anyone, anywhere in the history of drinking who considers this a satisfactory way to serve a drink? At the very most, a glass should be filled 1/3 full of ice, and even then only in the summer. Filling the whole thing and then adding the drink cuts the amount of liquid served down to between 3/4 and 1/4 of the available glass-space. In any other situation the drink would be replaced (imagine being served a beer that was 1/2 head), but in this case, you actively have to insist to get the drink you order.

In some places, they will serve without ice if asked, but will leave a gap at the top of the glass to ensure that you're not getting any extra by doing this. The gap left varies, but can be up to an inch. I rarely argue about it, but it does seem ludicrously tight of a pub to deliberately withhold from topping up a drink that's being served just to save the tiny amount of money that it might cost (and at the risk of future sales too).

My main problem with these situations is that there seems to be very little thought from the bar staff. When I order a pint of diet coke, it's because I like the taste. If I wanted to quench my thirst, I'd get a glass of water. There's really no logical reason for filling the glass up with ice first without asking, but they do it anyway, without really thinking about the customer experience they're providing. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's worked behind a bar (*ahem* Bambi), but it really does seem negligent for people to deliberately give you as little as possible of the drink you want.

And there is a special circle of hell reserved for bartenders who serve regular coke when diet coke was ordered...

In the absence of a womb...

... the only method I have to feel something growing within me (and, indeed, without me) is to try to force hair to emerge from my face. So, as is my right (and, indeed, my duty) as a man, I have been deliberately (as opposed to lazily) not-shaving for two and a half weeks. The result is less than impressive.

However, rather than the exquisitely sculpted goatee I had dreamed about since I was a small child, I appear to have constructed a patchy mess of itchy fur, the like of which would not look out of place on a twelve-year-old's lip. In addition (as with all previous times I have attempted to construct a natural facial covering), I have been the object of ridicule amongst friends and co-workers, and yea, even amongst the common men and women on the street.

This post is simply an affirmation that I will not be swayed from my epic task, that I shall not falter, even in the face of such overwhelming condemnation, that I shall continue to refrain from shaving-related activity for at least one more week. I shall also continue to use inappropriately flowery language (and excessive parenthesising) when blogging.

In celebration, then of this resolution, I give you three links and a photo, which is to say: two web comics, a tshirt and a distressing visage:

Dinosaur comics inspiration.

Dinosaur comics t-shirt.

Penny Arcade comic.

Also, yes, I bought a headset. And no, I have no one to talk to on it.

Odds and Evens

So I was playing poker this evening (deeply unsuccessfully as it turns out), and this situation came up:

2 players left in pre-turn, dealer (D) and non-dealer (N), flop showing K K J.

N goes all in, D matches. Both show their hands, N has A 2, D has K 8. So D has three kings playing N with two kings ace high. So far, so forgone conclusion.

Turn: Ace.

River: Ace.

N wins with full house, Aces over Kings, at odds pre-turn of 1 in 330.

Pretty amazing, and yet still 42,000 times more likely to happen than winning the lottery.

I wasn't involved in this hand, since a couple of hands before I'd gone all in (£11) on a Queen high, and was called by someone with a straight. Yep, I'm that good at poker...

As a disclaimer, my probability abilities are almost non existent, so the above numbers may need some correction :s

Edit: Yep, as expected, I fucked up the probability calculation. I think it's closer now...

Edit 2: Via the magic of finding-a-photo-on-my-phone, there is now visual documentation available above :D

Poll dancing.

During the last general election I was away from home, so today was the first time I've been able to go and cast my vote in person. I got up and left the house 15 minutes early and headed over to the community centre on the local estate, accompanied by my mum. It was very quiet and relaxed - a few people already there, on the way to work, but no queues - and we wandered up to the desk to collect our forms.

No ID required, just the production of my voting card, and verbal confirmation that I was in fact who I claimed to be, and I was on my way to the booth. The whole thing reminded me a little bit like an exam - the silence, the colour coded pieces of paper with bold clear instructions on, and the constant threat that any wrong move might invalidate the whole thing. I successfully negotiated placing my four crosses (two for mayor, one for local council, one for London Assembly) on my three pieces of paper, dropped them all in the box, and headed back outside.

As far as the mayoral contest goes, I've not been as diligent as perhaps I should have with regard to investigating policies and reading manifestos, but given that the whole thing has become so media heavy and personality-based that I'm surprised text-voting isn't valid, I don't think my lack of specific knowledge will look out of place. My vote is, of course, secret, and it would be a drastic invasion of my privacy for anyone to question me about it, but suffice to say, if any smug, floppy-haired, Tory buffoons are elected tomorrow, it'll not be by my hand.

Linkables 30/4/8

I never realised there was so much correlation between the words 'fuck' and 'bitch'...

The title of the article says it all, seriously freaking creepy potential anti-rape adverts. And here's an analysis of the images for good measure.

You don't have to become an alcoholic for alcohol to ruin your life.

Via an interesting ask.metafilter question about language, an analysis of why Chinese is so hard to learn.

Hey, you know that whole diet coke and mentos thing? What if we like, got lots of people to do it at once? That'd be really freaking cool, right? Right.

A few really interesting flash games:

• Qink, in which you need to cover a 2D representation of a cube with colours. The rotation weirdness gets annoying after a while, but it's a really interesting exercise in spatial thinking. [review]
• Scorching Earth, in which you need to control fires to burn as much ground as you can. An example of a type of thinking which apparently does not come at all naturally to me. I can solve the levels, but not without a lot of trial and error. [review]
• Sonny, pretty much the perfect flash RPG experience. [review]

Update

Just a quick note to say that I'm still alive - I've just been having a little week-long sabbatical from the blog. It wasn't necessarily planned like that, but I failed to post for a couple of days, and then got into a weird place mentally over the weekend, leaving me feeling entirely uninspired for a while longer. Happily the others posting here have been doing a great job in my absence, notably Joe, with his first post on the blog. He's been registered as a writer on here since pretty much the very beginning, so I wouldn't expect another post from him for at least eight months or so.

I'm also excited about the prospect of drink-your-milkshake, which Bambi mentioned previously. Hopefully we'll be able to get a good number of reviews up there, and update frequently enough to be worth keeping track of. A blog isn't the ideal way of organising reviews, giving no real searchability, or accreditation. But then every time I wonder about what the best structure for storing reviews might be, I end up designing a database-driven reviews site. And then I think that I should write one. And then I remember that I already have. Don't go there, seriously, it's horrible. I wrote it before I'd even heard of javascript, and you can tell...

I've got a couple of longer posts in mind, and along with reviews and links posts, I'll be trying to get back towards a post a day as we go into May. That's all for now.

The Big Reviewski

Just a note to say the first review on a new blog devoted to reviewing is now up at drink-your-milkshake.blogspot.com. The actual review can be found here.

This venture is borne out of the fact that I like films and music, and I like reviewing things, and after seeing a few blogs which contain only reviews I thought that a separate blog just for reviews was something I wanted to try. Added to that there's the fact that I'm really quite proud of the film reviews I've written on this blog so far. Not necessarily in an "I think I'm great" kind of way, more that I think they flow quite well and that they're the main outlet for my own writing at the moment. Reviews will be posted in tandem on both the new blog and this blog to start with, or at least a link to each new review on the other blog will be posted here. The reviews already on this blog will be copied over to the other blog too.

So, add Drink Your Milkshake to your list of blogs. You know you want to.

Humphrey Lyttelton: A Tribute

Despite having been a registered contributor to this blog for quite some time, I've never quite managed to get round to writing a post. This is not a fact I'm proud of, and I've received no shortage of chastising for my failure to get involved. But here I am, albeit in somewhat melancholy circumstances.

Humphrey Lyttelton can be described as nothing short of legendary, and when I read tonight of his passing, I felt a very real sense of loss. I have many many memories of enjoying "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue" (the self prescribed antidote to panel shows) in many many places, and in fact only last week laughed and laughed with my parents as we travelled from Liverpool to London enjoying no less than four episodes, back to back.

For several years I was a proud member of Sefton Youth Jazz Orchestra, and every monday night in the car to rehearsal we would giggle away as Humph and the team did silly things. Of course we were always disappointed when "Quote Un-qoute" replaced the show, and those terms never had quite the same sense of joy. Learning to know and love Humph was a very definite part of the development of my sense of humour: the innuendo, crudely disguised insults and general stupidity all seeping into my subconscious. Many of us will continue to emulate him for many years to come, and of course imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Indeed, the part ISIHAC has played in shaping many of the televised panel shows we have today is plain to see. It even almost infiltrated our Students Union when a small group of us attempted to start the Mornington Crescent Society, although sadly with no success. I could write for a long time about my favourite games, from radio paper-scissors-stone (or cow-bomb-lake) to “one song to the tune of another”, but I will leave you to your own memories, or to find out for yourself if you haven’t yet experienced it.

Humph is of course also famous for his jazz music, and he and his big band continued to tour the country until very recently. Around six or seven years ago, I had the absolute privilege of playing in a support group for his big band, when they performed outdoors near Formby Beach in Liverpool. This is a memory on which I will look back very fondly, and will hold as some small compensation for never having achieved my ambition of going to a live recording of ISIHAC.

Since it’s my first post, I’m going to stop myself from rambling on, but how better to end than with one of the great man’s very own closing gems…

“…and so, as the jersey of time is tumble-dried with the Comfort of eternity, and the farmer of destiny wonders how his cow got into the washing machine…

…it’s time to end the show.”

You and I have unfinished business

The news I've been waiting on for what seems like years. Probably because it actually has been years.

True, it's not exactly an unequivocal statement that Kill Bill is going to be released as it was originally intended any time soon, but at least I know that it's definitely going to happen at some point. The closest I've got to seeing Kill Bill as Tarantino originally intended is watching both films back to back, which was fantastic as each film is counterbalanced by the other excellently, leaving you with a sprawling, brilliant four-hour epic. A shame that sprawling, brilliant four-hour epics aren't moneyspinners.

Linkables 21/4/8

I've been having some cool gender-politics related conversations with a friend, so have a few links to interesting discussions on the subject:

• Firstly an analysis I found ages ago into how men and women approach discussions differently, which has some interesting insights into the ways 'arguments over nothing' arise.
• A look into the history of the engagement ring, and its popularity explosion simply as a result of advertising. Also touches on whether the man giving the woman an expensive ring is appropriate any more in modern relationships.
• An article clarifying some of the soft numbers being batted around about pay disparities between men and women.
• I can't remember if I've linked to it before, but this is a great article explaining some of the social and biological reasons behind seemingly unbalanced numbers that come up when comparing education, intelligence or performance between men and women.
• On a lighter note, a look at some of the adverts that maybe wouldn't get past the censors (or the good-taste police) nowadays.

It's not really connected to the above, so I'll link it separately, but I found this list of anecdotes about pro-lifers breaking through their own protest lines to get abortions (often unashamedly hypocritically) an intriguing read.

A cool little compilation of all the mashups and conversions of the Zidane-Materazzi video from the last world cup.

I always want a wikipedia style database for song-lyric-interpretations, and this is the best I've found so far.

I first heard of Jonathan Coulton through the song at the end of the game Portal, which he wrote. It's an excellent song (which you shouldn't listen to unless you've played the game, since it'll lose half of its meaning and impact), and so I finally looked up more of his stuff. He's best known for his cover of 'Baby got back', and his original song 'Re: your brains'. All his stuff is available on his site to listen to and buy, so definately check it out. The song that has most captured my imagination is 'Code monkey', and it appeals to me simply because it's told from the point of view of someone working in a random coding job, and as a fellow code monkey, I can appreciate the pain and empathise with the narrator. Whether or not you are in a similar situation, you'll hopefully get something out of the song, anyway, displayed here with a brilliantly put together background montage from some anime show:

Free writing

I've just stumbled upon this website. For anyone wanting to have a go at a bit of unrestrained creative writing without even having to think about what your topic is, I recommend it. Reading through other people's responses to the single word you get is pretty interesting too.

D'you want anything from the shop?

This is from a couple of weeks ago now, but I've been meaning to link to this wonderful news since I first read it.

Initial thoughts: "Blood And Ice Cream" equals best trilogy name ever. I'm not so struck on the film title at the moment though (it has a little too much in common with the third Pirates Of The Caribbean film title in my opinion), but it is a working title, and once I know a bit more about the film's content it may grow on me.

Needless to say, this film's now taken residence up at the top of my most anticipated films list. I haven't lost faith in Simon Pegg even after Run Fatboy Run (which I admit I found fairly enjoyable when I first watched it, but have since gained a significant dislike and disdain for), and with Edgar Wright at the helm it's bound to sit proudly alongside Hot Fuzz and Shaun Of The Dead. I can't wait.

Travel stories.

Having recently been surrounded by the new politeness campaign from tfl, I was wondering whether it had had any effect on the attitudes of people on (particularly) buses. Here are three occasions in which people demonstrated that they maybe need a little more prompting than the rest of us:

1) The girls on the back of the 493 bus who played Sean Kingston's 'Beautiful Girls' over and over again for 45 minutes at the full tinny volume that their phone would allow. They'd occasionally sing along, but mostly they'd just have shouted conversations over the top (I did mention this in 'most annoying song' of 2007 previously, but I thought it bore repeating).

2) The bloke who jumped onto a 430 and ran straight to the back of the top deck without paying. The driver kept the bus at the bus stop for five minutes, as the passengers got more and more frustrated. The driver shouted up for a while asking the guy to come down and pay (which he refused to do, mostly using the words 'fuck', 'off' and 'mate') before finally giving up and continuing with the journey. On this occasion, the driver had the last laugh, though, as three stops later a ticket inspector got on (as I got off) and headed straight upstairs at the driver's request.

3) My dad was on a train when a ticket inspector came onto the carriage. As he passed the toilet, a woman sitting nearby pointed out that there were two guys hiding in there. The inspector opened the toilet with a key and chucked the two (ticketless) teenagers off the train. After he'd left, though, the woman who had pointed them out came under a fair amount of verbal abuse for the rest of the journey from people in the carriage apparently suggesting that she was a 'grass' and shouldn't have revealed that they were hiding there.

4) Finally, I was sitting on a 430 bus last night on my way home when a man got on and sat in front of me (at the front of the top deck). He stuck his feet up on the ledge in front of the front window, rolled himself a cigarette, cracked open a can of special brew and then turned his iPod up so loud that I could hear the beat from his music through his headphones, even though I was listening to my own music. He then started to tap his feet against the front window in time with the music, to sing loudly along with it, and finally to start weeping. I really wanted to get a photo of him to put up here, but I wasn't entirely sure how he'd react to (even stealthy) use of a mobile phone camera, and since I didn't want to end up with a knife in the neck, I left him to it without any photographic record.

Lexical

If you use facebook and don't have the facebook blog on your feed reader, you really should add it. It's massively useful for keeping track of the latest bits and pieces of development. It's only updated once a week or so (and seems to have a delayed-reaction over RSS), but the features it points out are usually fantastic. We've seen reactions to application spam and privacy concerns, introduction of wider political views, friends lists, links to other web 2.0 sites, and now the latest widget, the facebook lexicon.

This allows you to produce a display showing the number of times particular words and phrases appear on people's walls throughout facebook over time. So you can see how often the phrase 'new year' appears, or compare it to 'christmas' and 'easter'. It's not particularly useful for statistical analysis (except, obviously, of the words people use on facebook walls), but it's a fun tool and you can produce interesting results.