Scatmania

Those who (for reasons of their own) enjoyed the cold dead fingers wallpaper I produced a week ago are invited to buy, if they wish, a Cold Dead Fingers badge!

£1 to anybody who wants one. All proceeds will be donated to a local volunteer-run nocturnal telephone listening service. 14 available. The box is by my PC, so if you want one, just take it (and leave a shiny pound coin in it’s place, for those telephone stars).

If you don’t understand the reference, just ask, and I’ll tell you that I can’t tell you why I can’t tell you what it’s about. Just buy one, and wear it proudly, knowing that you’ve done A Good Thing.

Abnib now supports “feed hiding” of the “community” feeds (RockMonkey, Troma Night, Gallery). Just click the “hide feed” link at the bottom of a post of the type you don’t want to see. This feature by demand of Jon.

In other news, Blue Dragon is proving somewhat popular, with 7 registered players (plus me, but I don’t play on account of the fact that sysops who play their own games tend to do well, even if they’re not cheating, and get accused of cheating regardless of how well they do), and a couple more about to sign up. If you’ve not given it a go yet, there’s still time to get in and cause some damage before the “top players” pull too far out of reach… and if you are playing, you’ll see that a few new areas just became available to you…

This photograph taken using a camera phone in Notting Hill station, London.

Following up my thoughts earlier about old-school online games, I did some investigation into what became of fab old games like Legend Of The Red Dragon. It turns out that there was an effort to revive this particular one as a web-based game called “Legend Of The Green Dragon”. Well; as it was open-source I took a copy and adapted it with heaps of suitable “Aberisms”. It’s Abniberific.

Click here to play Dan’s “Legend Of The Blue Dragon”

Feedback appreciated. Usual address.

Additional: In answer to a much-anticipated question - when playing Blue Dragon, you’ll only have so-many turns in which to do things each “day”. However, there are two Blue Dragon “days” in each “real world” day: midnight in Blue Dragon will be occuring at (about) midnight and mid-day (GMT) each day, and between those times you have all the turns you need to do things in the game world.

Geeky post with little value to most people: ignore if you don’t want to learn a little about the history of the BBS, “Doors”, and the subculture around them. This post is written for folks like Ruth, who seemed interested, and others, who seemed possibly-interested.

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Don’t you hate those tried-and-tested “quiz” memes and things. Well, here’s a variation on the theme.

1. Post this meme to your weblog or journal.

2. Stick a nail bomb in a rucksack.

3. Blow yourself up on a London bus two weeks after I do.

“These aren’t suicide bombers - they’re just cry-for-help bombers!”

There’s a stunning interview you can listen to on BBC World Service with Gary McKinnon, the Briton who hacked into US military and research computers in order to hunt for evidence of UFO activity. In the interview he talks about how he did it, what he found, and how he was caught, as well as his feelings over the fact that he may be extradited to the US for up to a 70 year prison sentence for somewhich which, in the UK, he couldn’t get more than four years. It’s well worth listening to. You’ll want a copy of Real Alternative installed (like Real Player, except good).

Claire and I cooked thai food for Ruth, JTA, and Bryn last night. Paul, too, but owing to a communications breakdown he didn’t know about it, so he missed out. Unable to decide between making a sweet red Thai chilli and a black bean dish, I decided to make both, which immediately compounded into a problem when I realised that I was cooking both meat (for us normal people) and a vegetarian dish (for Ruth) of each.

So, hot-desking (hot-hobbing?) six pans later on, we all got fed - about 40 minutes late. Got to steam some pak choi over the noodles: I’m not sure that I’ve ever knowingly tried pak choy before - Claire pointed it out in Morrisons and said, “what’s this?” and I had to confess that I didn’t know, save from what it said on the packet (”ideal for stir-fry”). A quick scout around the web revealed what to do with the thing. Anyway; it turns out to be a fab-tasting vegetable.

After this, Bryn left, and the remainder of us had a game of Settlers of Catan, which Ruth won. Again.

My torrent of the entire first series of Gantz, a wonderfully destructive anime series we’ve been watching at Naruto Night, has been making good progress over the weekend. The numbers keep fluctuating, but we could have a copy of it within as little as the next 30 hours or so. It feels a bit of a waste having to download the entire series just to collect the two episodes I’m missing, but this was the only working torrent I could find that included these episodes at all.

I’m kinda impressed how tightly the TV series hugs the comic books (I’ve gotten hold of them, too). Dialog, framing, everything. Not so impressed as I was, though, by the stunning Sin City I had the joy of seeing last week, which didn’t even have the benefit of being animated to help the director to get the feel of the hand-drawn work from which it stems. See Sin City.

Meandering now, but should be working.

Last night’s Troma Night was War of the War of the Worlds night, in which we’d planned to listen to the War of the Worlds radio play, watch the 1953 film (which is very, very good for it’s age), listen to the Jeff Wayne musical adaptation (which, in my opinion, remains most true to the original story), and watch the new (2005) version of the film. Not many, if any, people took up Paul’s offer to read the H. G. Wells book in advance.

Was it just me; or was the pizza particularly good last night?

Running out of battery power on Paul’s MP3 player during “Dead London” (close to the end), in the Jeff Wayne version, threatened to end the night early. Quick thinking from Paul enabled us to get “back on track” with freshly-downloading copies of the final three tracks within a few minutes, but we were still unable to watch the final, new, film. Perhaps some other time.

Claire and Ruth had a little too much to drink, one suspects, which is at least partially responsible for them wittering through some of the second half of Jeff Wayne’s musical, until Paul and I got pissed off enough to tell them to stop (bad), but, much later on (after we’d run out of Troma Night material) collapsed into a happy drunken post-tickle fight giggling heap on the sofa(better). The absinth(e) my sister Sarah brought back from Benidorm smells like aftershave and tastes like petrol. But if you knock back a shot of it, it’s impressive how quickly it hits.

We drank plenty of the absinth last night, too, at Geek Night. JTA found it difficult to count how many sheep he was trying to trade (Settlers of Catan), before going home and bashing out a drunken blog entry. Paul watched from afar, ocassionally stopping to add a little to the RockMonkey page on Absinth, which remains, complete with spelling mistakes and other messy bits. I got excessively giggly, and ended up debating with Ruth the merits of snorting spirits (thankfully we had the sense not to try this with absinth(e)). And Ruth, despite spending most of her time laughing the small stuffed toy pig I keep on my desk, managed to pip me to the post and win the game just before I executed my master plan. The bitch.

Claire’s dad was visiting this weekend, but hasn’t come to see us this morning: instead, he’s gone straight home, and we’re not sure why.

Looking at the weather, I think the chance of a barbeque tonight is somewhat reduced. Any other suggestions are welcome.

"According to a survey released on 26 November 2003, one-third of US visitors to Scotland believed the haggis to be a real creature."

Thanks, Wikipedia.

Edit; 5th July 2007: Thanks, Wikipedia. Thwikipedia.