It's Been A While

I've not linked to an interview with, or article by, David Thomson for a bit. So it's a good job that a great new interview is on the 'Net. If only for the bit where he says he'd like to review video games:

Thomson: Well, I think it's a great moment for critics to talk about the medium as a whole rather than individual films. I think there's a lot going on in the world of screens--which is a much larger world than just movies per se and it's very interesting. I mean, at the moment I would almost rather review some video games than movies--not only because more people are looking at them and because my children are looking at them, which are good reasons, but because I think they're almost more interesting.

I reckon some magazine should take him up on this. I'd sure like to read what he'd have to say.

It Didn't. Well Not Often.

Suck. It's described over at KeepGoing.org as "the first great website". I don't know about that. I do know it was the first website I had to read every day. I remember being annoyed and impatient if that day's content wasn't up yet and I remember numerous conversations starting "I was reading in Suck... no it's not a porn site, but it's worth checking out anyway..."

I don't think anybody ever did go and check it out like I said. Things were different then, now everybody is down on the latest website and even the most computer-illiterate will tell you about some great online community if you let them. Suck wasn't interactive though, no comments. They did have a post-bag but that always seemed to be overtaken by regulars and people who seemed more in on the joke than you. But, then, sat in a small office outside a small town in some small country everyone seems more in on the joke than you, at least I was reading Suck.

Damn! Nostalgia for past websites already...

Someone Comes To Toon, No-one Leaves Toon

At exactly the moment when it was too late to change the title to my last post about Newcastle United's problems, I realised that I should have snocloned Cory Doctrow's new novel Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town. Luckily, it turns out that Craig "lovely hair" Bellamy has decided he's going nowhere.

"Whether I train with the kids is not up to me, but if that's what I am told to do then that's what I'll do," he said. "All I can do is act in a professional and respectful manner and see what happens after that."

It's a bit late for that "professional and respectful manner" I'd have thought unless the definition of it has expanded to include sending insulting text messages to your colleagues.

How Wrong Can You Be?

It's been a long while since the idea of Glastonbury or even the event itself has got me interested, never mind excited. And this year is no exception. The Guardian seem happy enough, though, and they're certainly filling space with it.

Anyway, Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream seems to have got the wrong end of the stick entirely, annoucing from the stage "We're a punk rock band and you're a bunch of fucking hippies" which is so wrong in its wrongness that it's really hard to know where to start. Let's just say any crowd which has been seen "justifiably bowled over by Coldplay" isn't going to be a bunch of hippies, fucking or not.

Especially when, in the review of Coldplay, you get this priceless bit: "During Speed Of Sound, Martin taunts "Crazy Frog, where are you now?"" The classy thing, to my mind, would be to not draw attention to that at all...

The Guardian On The Web

Recently the Guardian had an interview with web design self-publicist Jakob Nielsen. Naturally someone parodied the interview.

Personally, I don't quite get why Jakob is famous as a usability, er, expert: I guess he talked loudest and most and is a Doctor. He also looks geeky and sort of respectable at the same time, which can't hurt.

His own website, though, is ugly and unreadable. It must minimally meets some criteria and does no more. To be fair the content is good and in some cases, like Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design, excellent, considered stuff despite his occasional lapse into being merely opinionated.

By the way is it only me or does "The Guardian On The Web" sound like the title for a fun bit of pulp SF?

Evolution. Is There Anything It Can't Do?

So asks Doug over at Carl Zimmer's The Loom. Well, not so much ask, but rants on that very theme.

Isn't it amazing how everything seems to provide evidence for evolution? The brain shrinks in some form of pygmy homo erectus. Thats evolution! Ancient genes survive millions of years unchanged. That's evolution?! Women have orgasms. That's evolution! Although not all women have orgasms and they still manage to reproduce hmm luckily with the right spin...That's evolution! We live in a civil society with people working for cooperative goals. That's evolution! Unfortunately some people murder and rape. Just an unfortunate side-effect, but that's evolution.

What gets Doug is that there seems to be some sort of circuler reasoning going on here. Evolution explains everything and everything confirms evolution. Mr Zimmer takes this idea and runs with it explaining very clearly how this isn't quite the case, but that it's odd that evolutions success at explaining a great many things is being held against it. He concludes:

If a scientific theory can explain an aspect of the natural world, withstand scrutiny, and lead to important new insights into how the world works, we really shouldn't hold its success against it. No one's asking for evolution hymns—certainly no more than they're asking for gravity hymns or hymns to the periodic table of the elements.

But go and read the whole thing Zimmer explains it all with quite beautiful clarity.

Drink Around The World Tee

My T-Shirt Design For An Irish Pub Promotion 

Eamon at the Irish Pub wants to do a promotion where you get a free T-shirt if you drink one each from all the beers from different countries, listed on the shirt, that he stocks. This is my design, and it looks like it's going to be made...

Oh, I should add that the world map is the large map from the original Civilisation, I did this for fairly geek-oriented reasons, but also because, being a game, it has more land mass so the continents take up more space. Sometimes it's better to be iconic than accurate, I feel. I did, though, have to airbrush more colour onto the deserts and ice-caps to give it a little more contrast.

Don't Drink, Don't Play Games Of Chance (Including Raffles). What Do You Do?

It seems that the sales of religious books, in America, are booming. I'm sure there are plentiful reasons for. I can think of a few snarky ones right off the top of my head, including the strange need Americans seem to have for ostentatious displays of piety, despite, you know, the Bible mentioning that that sort of thing is wrong:

And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.

But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

-- Matthew 6:5-6

But it's not for me to tell people which sections of the Bible to pick and choose when they create their own personal interpretation of it (you know it's amazing how many miss these bits entirely, but that's for another day).

The religious books article has this to say about the boom, anyway:

[W]hile not all Christians were Bush voters, there was a common denominator linking politics and reading habits.

"The kind of things that make George Bush reassuring also make them find Christian fiction reassuring," she said.

I'm not sure how "fiction" was emphasized in that quote, but for the sake of all involved I'm hoping an eyebrow was so arched the speaker got cramp of the forehead, or it may be that this was said before the latest approval ratings were published...

"My first thought was Christian girls just want to have fun too, so why not do a variant of chick lit," Golan said.

Guidelines for authors are strict: "The stories may not include alcohol consumption by Christian characters, dancing, card playing, gambling or games of chance (including raffles), explicit scatological terms, hero and heroine remaining overnight together alone, Halloween celebrations or magic or the mention of intimate body parts."

You know if they ban DVDs and the Blues that's my whole private and social life gone in one paragraph, especially the "explicit scatological terms", because having an Austrian shelf-toilet means I barely talk about anything else. Who is really going to be reading this? I mean there's fiction and then there's fiction. According Wikipedia one of these is:

Fiction is the term used to describe works of the imagination. This is in contrast to non-fiction, which makes factual claims about reality. A large part of the appeal of fiction is its ability to evoke the entire spectrum of human emotions: to distract our minds, to give us hope in times of despair, to make us laugh, or to let us experience empathy without attachment.

Which is as good a description as any and the guidelines above are just a complete denial of reality. That kind of vindicates the second quote, doesn't it?

Well, yeah...

Women's brains switch off during sex. Apparently this is actual scientific research...

There was no mention of whether the results may have been affected by the fact the couples were being watched by a bunch of geeks in white coats while at least one partner had their head connected to a machine that goes bing.

Dog With Two Dicks

Really! Safe for work, by the way. Kind of cute and scary at the same time, as it's got six legs, too. Oh, and googling the above phrase is quite the education...