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There is just an empty space where there should be a brain

A busy week
Is ahead.

I have done quite a lot of the housework though the bathroom and hoovering remain to be done. After which I shall bin shed the black bag and cook slow dinner.

I have planted out most of the chilli plants which are over a foot tall and starting to branch well.

Tomorrow an ex colleague is meeting up with us for drinks after work. Tuesday is my Turkish exam (and drinks thereafter, though I will skip out of those early if not all together), Wednesday is a quiet evening except I believe there is some kind of football match which will interest my beloved. Thursday we are out at a gig (tickets for the Plant/Krauss finally turned up) and Friday is a probably collapse at home with a takeout.

The Inquisitor’s Library

The Dark Heresy game outlined here seems to be about to take off. In the interests of screwing around with new ways to manage information, I started a blog for this one rather than a wiki. We’ll see how it goes. I’m offering all the players posting access to the blog.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

Grrrrrrrrrr......
For some reason, teh interwebs have slowed to a crawl here at Chez Muskrat. I'm getting about a fifth to a quarter of the speed I used to get just a week ago. This has been going on for a few days now. "High-Speed Access"? I fear not.

It's amazing how soul-piercingly annoying it seems, waiting a mere 20-30 second for web pages to load, when you're used to three or four second delays. What do they think this is, 1998?

(The problem's not on the computer's side, as both laptops have the same connectivity slowness when doing anything 'net-related. And a-yup, I shut everything down and restarted it all, including all routers and Airport dohickey stuff. Would I sound like an idiot calling Charter and telling them "I think your internet is broken. They're tubes, right? The ones to my house seem to be blocked"? Probably.)

On top of this, I just updated my operating system to Mac OS X Moggie -- I'm sorry, I mean Leopard -- to take advantage of some new software, and also for Time Machine and Time Capsule coolness.

Unfortunately, every time I now open Eudora, it immediately "unexpectedly" quits. Or so the message tells me. Which is odd, as I now expect this every time I open Eudora, so it's not really "unexpected," is it, now?

Once I re-open it, it works OK for a bit, but seems sluggish, churning and, frankly, petulant and boorish. Then, more often than not, it will "unexpectedly" quit again.

This is all particularly frustrating since, in the wake of updating to system 10.5.2, I also updated Eudora to V. 6.2.4 (the most recent one for Macs).

Frickin brickin snickin frickin...

Is there any reason a Dual 2.5 GHz Power PC G5 would be having problems like this?

Otherwise, things are just ducky this weekend. How are you?

Current Mood: frustrated
Current Music: Cortege Macabre from "Grohg" - Slatkin/St. Louis SO

Surprise Sickness

In a sad turn of events, we're not going to the Indy premiere this morning because Jana is incredibly sick. Barf-o-rama. I just can't go see it and not be able to geek out with her about it afterwards, so we'll have to go as a family when it opens to the public.

I may take Stone to the reception later, though.

Fortunately I have an itty-bitty Ark of the Covenant to tide me over.

Life at Home with Nielsen Haydens

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010241.html

T: What's that playing on the speakers in your office? It sounds great.

P: Crooked Timber has a MySpace page, with four songs from their forthcoming next album.

T: Crooked Timber has an album coming out?

P: Crooked Timber! I meant Crooked Still.

T: You had me going there.

P: "And looking very relaxed, Michael Bérubé on vibes."

eBay auctions nonexistent PARANOIA product

http://www.costik.com/paranoia/2008/05/ebay-auctions-nonexistent-paranoia.html

An inexplicable eBay auction for the never-published and nonexistent PARANOIA mission Spin Control prompted a Mongoose Publishing forum thread detailing the "Spin Control" publishing history. In brief: "Spin Control" has been published in Alpha Complex Nights but, to date, nowhere else. The product in the eBay auction doesn't exist and has never existed. So what does this seller think he has 990 copies of? No idea.

Bateman Top 12-1/2
This is the Bateman Top 12-1/2 chart for the week ending 19 May 2008:

This week	Last week	Artist	Title
1	4	Ladytron	Ghosts
2	5	M83	Kim & Jessie
3	6	Black Keys	All You Ever Wanted
4	7	Erykah Badu	The Healer
5	8	Opeth	The Lotus Eater
6	10	Thao Nguyen & The Get Down Stay Down	Bag of Hammers
7	11	Weezer	Pork & Beans
8	12	Stereolab	Three Women
9	14	The Fall	Senior Twilight Stock Replacer
10	15	Free Kitten	Seasick
11	16	Gabo & Orchestre Poly-Rhythmo	It's A Vanity (from African Scream Contest: Raw & Psychedelic Afro Sounds From Benin & Togo 70s)
12	17	Goldfrapp	Cologne Cerrone Houdini
13	19	Black Lips	Cold Hands
14	20	M83	Graveyard Girl
15	--	King Khan & BBQ	Waddlin' Around
16	--	Portishead	Nylon Smile
17	--	Mudhoney	I'm Now
18	--	No Age	Eraser
19	--	Atlas Sound	The Time I Spent With Nico (Quiet)
20	--	Cat Power	I Feel

One more post - free art!

ninjahijinx is a super artist (who does fabulous clothing, great pirates and awesome comics). Anyway, today and tomorrow,

ninjahijinx is having a free icon day! You ask for an icon, you get one!

found via

haikujaguar.

A kick in the teeth . . .
Recently, I've been playing Revolution! by Philip duBarry. A hand-made labor of love, Revolution is a "Euro" complete with scoring track and bid mechanic. What makes it fun, though, is that feeling of "damn, you!" that I get every time I tie someone for control of one of the game's locations (which are actually characters). The game's enough fun that I played twice on Friday (but then, I also played Can't Stop twice on Friday so maybe two plays in a day isn't that big of a deal).

Anyway, it's a cool game. It's completely hand-made. I'm having fun with it.

Word Nerdery
Um ... whoever posted this lolcat must haz been spying on me and my Dad over the years, listening to our horrible puns. Or something.

word geek lolcat

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: tom and jerry

Ceilí, and none of that jazz
Had a lovely evening at

megglesmcgoo's birthday last night. She (with

pinkymonster's help apparently), had the inspired idea of having a ceilí. As well as the enjoyable dancing, afterwards her very talented family (and others) stood up and sang, played guitars and generally entertained. Due to the previous bad night sleep, and having a strict deadline for NCT this morning, I had to be the bad cop, and drag people away too early, but I barely managed to make it home awake as it was.
ETA: Should also apologise to Meggles, Pinky and natural20 for forcing them to lie on the floor, whether they wanted to or not, but they'll thank me for it in the long run ;)

( This started out as a BTW comment, but turned into something long. )

Post-48

http://www.additiverich.com/morgue/archives/002452.html

The 48 Hour Film Comp weekend is now done. Jenni's Angels had an intense weekend, and got its final cut into the judges with all of four seconds to spare (!). I was in the writing team this year, and...

Boy's Friends

roughhouser has a fantastic group of friends. We went to a birthday party (Taurus birthdays) with a bunch of them yesterday. As soon as we arrived,

slaptyback placed a boffer sword in Fang's hands and proceeded to instruct him how to defend with it. Fang spent the entire party fighting with one opponent after another, grinning like a jack-o-lantern all the while. I think that was the best party Fang has ever been to. He was engaged and amused the entire time, he learned a bunch of tricks, and the men were all willing to duel with him for hours.

I have some very cute pictures of Fang and Houser sword fighting. I'll post some soon.

My son does have gamer in his blood - he could do worse than getting his geek out by running around in the woods and sword fighting. It's athletic, he'll need some good costuming and there are women who play too. Much better than video games.

Fang and the ninja double-teamed me and trapped me in a tree. I didn't fend them off successfully - ok, I got creamed - but at least I'm not one of those boring soccer moms!

Current Music: clock ticking

Just once around the sun
So it is a complete coincidence that the post I've been meaning to write all week happens to get posted exactly one year after I last updated this journal. I've never been very good at regular posts - usually something has happened in my life that I feel is worthy of comment (such as my conversion to the Apple religion last year). As a quick update, I've stayed in my current job only because it took me resigning for the boss to shake things up significantly and the obstacles that were there before have been removed and I have direct control over the destiny of our product and therefore the company. Great power, great responsibility and all that, but I'm looking forward to it. Saving as much as possible, such that summer holidays are limited to my Dad's 60th and friends getting married in Spain, but still loving London and career-wise I've made some big leaps that will give me a chance to pretty much go where I want after this job/company runs its course.

The main reason I had been planning to post was prompted further by

ocultado's comment on

coffee_lifeform's journal about the Wii Fit. I bought this two weeks ago, and to be fair at the time I really felt like it was something only

rustynails9 would use. To say it has made an immediate impact on me would be an understatement.

In concept, the Wii Fit seems gimmicky - much like brain-training, the idea that a games console could make you fitter (or smarter) seemed pretty alien to me. This, after all, is a hobby that defines physical lethargy is many ways. It stayed in the box until

rustynails9 asked me to set it up one evening that she'd be late home from work. There's a simple body test during set-up that checks your weight, height and balance and then gives your BMI rating, along with some pointers about where your posture is holding your centre of gravity. Now, I've always known I was overweight, unfit and despite joining a gym lacking the commitment to try to improve both, but to have your games console tell you you're half a stone heavier than you thought and that by standard BMI calculations you are technically/clinically obese, even if its just decimals on the wrong side of that line, is something of a shock.

I spent some time messing around with the various basic exercises, but not particularly committed to getting anything out of them, more to unlock the additional ones not as yet available. There's a simple step-aerobics exercise, a hula-hoop session and a short jogging run . Bizarrely, I didn't feel self-conscious at all completing these, or indeed any of the following sessions, and it is probably because it felt more like I was playing a game and completing the actions to progress. The fact that my body may be benefiting probably never entered my sub-conscious after years of training in 'beating' games. Funny thing is, I worked up a decent sweat doing it, 'played' for 35 minutes or so, and genuinely felt good afterwards. I resolved the get up early the following morning to try it out before getting into the usual working day routine.

Needless to say, when I woke up the next morning, I literally had to haul myself out of bed early because all those ideas seem less brilliant in the face of an extra hour's lie-in. I was almost instantly rewarded by the Wii telling me I was now 2 pounds lighter than when I had started the day before. Awesome, or so I thought. The very next screen it highlighted the fact that bodyweight can fluctuate by 2-3 pounds over the course of a day, so the weight 'loss' was probably not valid. But come back every morning, it tells me, and it will be more accurate. And so I have. I missed one morning this week and was genuinely annoyed at myself, and the motivation to follow it up with evening gym sessions is strong, even if work only accommodated one of those this week.

It is harder to get moving at the weekend because I don't have to, but I hope I've learned something about myself and my motivation this weekend and will work on putting that right. I've already started to work on breaking bad habits of what seems like a lifetime - skipping breakfast resulting in morning snacks, over-eating at lunch or dinner as a result. Trying to keep an eye on what I eat a bit more, though an overhaul of diet in general is really required and trying to balance out carbs, proteins etc. (starting from having zero knowledge of how good/bad my diet is) is probably next in line. It might be a bit early to say, but 10 days in I certainly have better motivation and more energy during the day. And now even the Wii concedes I'm 2 pounds lighter than when I started.

So, I thought I might make use of LJ more as a diary on how its going. I've set a target for myself over the course of 3 months and we'll see if I can get there. I'll also post anything I've come across diet-wise (and I don't mean deprivation diets, I mean diet balance).

Of course its entirely possible the next post you'll get will be in 2009 ;)

*Boggle*
This is why I should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever read the posts left in the "comments" section after political articles on CNN.com.

I despair for the general level of education and understanding in the American populace. (And this isn't a party-specific thing; I refer to supporters of Clinton, Obama, and McCain alike.)

But I was particularly taken--for values of "taken" that mean "horrified"--by the person who said he supports Clinton, but will vote for McCain if she doesn't win the primary because he "doesn't trust Obama's left-wing backers."

Supports... Clinton... Doesn't trust... Obama's... left-wing... back... backers...

ERROR! ERROR!

Current Mood: head-splodey

Tweets for Today
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Destructive Jenga?
Yesterday, Gina and I bought a Wii. And then we proceeded to blow about five hours playing the Wii with friends. The best game of the day? Boom Blox. Definitely Boom Blox.

Watching Alex and Pat play, two people who are as non-gamer as you can get, I could immediately tell why the Wii is a success. This is a system for those who want to dive right in and have fun.

100 Movies, #8: Diary of the Dead, directed by George Romero (2007)
So is there anything left to do of any particular interest with Romero's mythos of the living dead? And is there anything left to do that's worth bothering with when it comes to mock-verite film making? Yup. This is not a great movie, but it is a good one with some outstanding moments, and I'm glad I saw it.

The framework is exactly what Romero's been using all along: one day right about now, for no reason anyone will ever learn, the dead start coming back to life. They're mindless, slow, and completely focused on eating other people, who will join the slow carnival in their turn. "Now" back then was the late '60s; now it's the mid '00s, but people are still people and they still use whatever tools come to hand, in whatever ways seem wise and moral to them when they're driven mad with fear and can't think straight and are watching their own friends and loved ones become the enemy too. In this case the group of protagonists is a bunch of film students making a cheap horror movie for one of them to direct as his senior project, and their advisor. They trek from University of Pittsburgh across Pennsylvania in search of home and imagined shelter.

The film is presented as the edit made by one of the survivors, for information and warning. What distinguishes it from works like Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield is that these folks have good gear and know how to use it pretty well. (These are in general people at a higher level of self-awareness and competence than in other films in the same general category, without the particular intensity of revealed whacked-out-ness that makes The Last Broadcast such a thing.) There's very little tilting or zooming, and the editing actually does juxtapose multiple sources in the interests of clarity, where possible. The narration is too heavy-handed for its own good, alas; it would have been better with half the voice-overs stripped out, and perhaps some brief comments from others besides the main assembler added to the mix.

The major theme of Romero's life work is, I think, that while we don't exactly deserve painful death at the hands of the walking dead, we don't especially deserve anything better. Never mind potential, look at what we're actually doing, what we're always actually doing, and say with a straight face that we deserve the mercy we never bestow. No change in that here, but the manner of presentation is different. The story ends on a different kind of a beat than his previous work, almost a dialogue.

There's lumpy stuff in the mix. Besides the narration, I have real trouble believing some of the character backgrounds, some of the pacing feels draggy or rushed. But there are some really marvelous pieces, too. I am glad to have the emerging community of black survivors, and the note-perfect argument between the lead documenter and his girlfriend, and the limits of the panic room, and a bunch else. Very much worthwhile for horror fans.

Weekend Updates with added Farts and Slugs
Weekend's been fairly good so far. Friday night at the pub was very good fun - even if conversations did get a bit railroaded by going OTT on our silly song naming quest (repacling 'Love' with 'Slug' and 'Heart' with 'Fart').

Yeah, we had plenty of new and amusing song titles for a group oif slightly tipsy people in a pub...for example...

Listen to Your Fart by Roxette
The Fart's Filthy Lesson by david Bowie
The Last Beat of my Fart by Souxsie & The Banshees
Achy Breaky Fart by Billy Ray Cyrus
Fart Shaped Box by Nirvana
Two Farts by Phil Collins
Fartbreak Hotel by Elvis
Somethings Gotten Hold of my Fart by Gene Pitney
Sergent Pepper's Lonely Farts Club Band by The Beatles

Slug Bites by Def Leppard
Slug Shack by The B52's
When You Slug Someone by Bryan Adams
Whole Lotta Slug by Led Zeppelin
Hounds of Slug by Kate Bush
Modern Slug by David Bowie
Where is the Slug by Black Eyes Peas
Slug Me Tender by Elvis

...you get the drift I'm sure...

After which we returned home and watched Ichi The Killer before I crashed out for a very restless night sleep of not feeling all that great. Luckily I was sans headache on saturday morning and after dropping off three large boxloads of videos to some local charity stores Jasmina and I headed into town on a fruitless birthday shopping trip (fruitless because there wasn't anything I really wanted so we settled on her treating me to a meal and aiming to get me to decide by next weekend and try then instead). Last night was spent doing a bit of C7 work and watching Hellboy with Natasha as she'd watched the Hellboy 2 Trailer I had up here the other day and thought it looked good but had never seen the first one. Still very enjoyable even on the 6th or 7th viewing for me :)

Becky then joined us and watched Natasha's 15-20 minute slot on Film24 the other week where she interviewed Stephen Morris (Joy Division Drummer) and the main man behind the films creation (who's name I can't remember :/) on the enw Joy Division documentary which I really want to see (being a big Joy Division fan).

Today is Gameforce day at The Black Horse in London Town for an afternoon of game playing before heading off for a bite to eat at Oriental City. Then the weekend is somehow over once again and it's back to work tomorrow... these things always seem to disappear so quickly!

100 Movies, #7: Jurassic Park, with commentary by Mike Nelson and Weird Al (2007)
This was unquestionably the highlight of my day offline, my first time using Rifftrax. Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and sundry others write commentary, and Mike delivers it, in files you download to play in sync with your DVD. Or, in my case, you snag the thing from a Bit Torrent site with the extra sound embedded, laugh yourself hoarse, and go to the Rifftrax site and donate the amount the audio would have cost plus a premium for being a sleaze about it. (I should note that they have one of the very best no-nonsense approaches to that I've yet seen, welcoming contributions and saving the scold. I suspect it's profitable to do it that way.)

Anyway.

The real question is of course "Is it funny?" And the answer is "Oh yeah!" I'd put the pace of the commentary and its quality up with good late Joel or early Mike stuff from MST3K. It was fast, but not too fast, and while I've heard that Mike can get kind of mean in some commentaries, he didn't in this one. Weird Al was also very fine, and I feel confident guessing that a bunch of those net fandom jokes were his own. They had some good banter, and the whole thing was just very, very highly satisfactory.

I watched it twice. I'll probably watch it again tomorrow. I have missed this kind of humor.

No Time
I left L.A. this morning, arrived in S.F. this afternoon, handled a crisis that was waiting here, rushed off to the Star Wars game down south, and have just returned from that. The Indy premiere is tomorrow morning at 9AM.

I'll try to find time to post more tomorrow, but I'm not sure when that'll be. For those who had trouble seeing my photos on Flickr, Jana and I visited a fellow I know who works on C.S.I., and had the chance to tour the sets. It was quite fabulous, but involved a 7 hour drive each way, so I'm beat.

More later.

Notes
- When your voice croaks and dies in the middle of a rendition of 'Total Eclipse of the Heart', it's a definite sign that you may be coming down with something.

- Sorry about being offline yesterday; I got distracted. And Ikea is the Devil's Sandpit.

- I'm tired of editing now.

- The first two episodes of Dexter were all right, but it needs to go further before I'm convinced it's TV-worth-watching.

- Man, Superman Returns was weak sauce.

- Happy birthdays

bunnitos!

- I spit for playas, not haytas. Dig?

- Eurovision roundup tomorrow. Honest.

Current Music: GOTYE - Coming Back

Last 24 hours of Twitter Posts

08:28 Waking up in our oddly-shaped hotel room. See flickr.com/photos/binary88 #

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