Life doesn't get better than this..

A lazy summer day in a prime seat in the Blues Bar, sipping Guinness and listening to a hot new act: Kawme "D", and occasionally looking back to see the Aussies lose their grip on the Ashes..sigh..pity it had to end.

Woof! Woof!

Throw us a sausage..

Discworld: Which Ankh-Morpork City Watch Character are YOU?

75

It's amazing the difference a few juduicuously placed characters can make to a layout: in this case a 75 in the right place means the right hand column of this blog is seventy five percent of the width of the browser window. It might be about right..

Occasionally I notice strange similarities between two seemingly different books. In this case "The Player Of Games" by Iain Banks and "The Dispossessed" by Ursuala K Le Guin. They might be interesting books to read alongisde one another.

The similarites are in both setting and plot: a lone representative of a more socially advanced culture visits and has an enormous effect on a much more socially regressive culture. Shevek is a Physictist from Annares, an anarchistic culture based on a moon orbiting Urras: a much more capitalistic culture, and we see it through his eyes. Likewise, The Player of Games centres around Jeanu Morat Gurgueh, a game-player of the Culture: which is a post-scarcity society in which money is no longer needed as a medium of exchange because an individual has acess to all the material things he/she could reasonably need due to advanced technology. Gurgeh is visiting the Azadian Empire, which is a frankly revolting and feudal society even by 21st Century Western standards, and again: we see the society through his eyes, seemingly seeing our own by proxy.

The books even share similar flaws. Although they present a sideways view of our own society, and are intellectually interesting, pointing out the links between langauge culture and society in that both protagonists come from an idealistic society with an artificial language (Pravic, and Marain), it must be said that both authors have a quite leaden prose style and the books can be a struggle to read, but are worth the effort because they make you see our current societies in a completely different light, as someone from outside might see them, which is always a valuable thing, even if you disagree completely with the premises of the protaganoists of the books..

The one interesting difference is that the society in the Dispossessed is based on soldiarity in the face of scarcity - their social model of mutual co-operation is a neccissity if the Annaresti culture is to surrvive. However, the Culture is the way it is for exactly the opposite reason. When anybody can have anything, possessions become meaningless..

On Actually finishing something.

Ok, so I finished writing Part One of my perpetual graphic - novel in progress. Nine pages, taking two years. That's an awful output rate. I'll never be a pro, but its great fun all the same. Writing the words and waiting for the image to come. It's a form of meditation. And the buzz you get when it clicks is great: just as good as coding a neat subroutine, as bad as the blues you get when you are creatively constipated.

Its so lang since I actually finished something, I'm amazed. As I'm leaving my job for University at the end of this month, I really hope it's a turning point. I look at all the unfinished projects I have: the space opera game, the rougish mutiplayer job, the Angels and Guard IF I wanted to write, and I have this image of a giant Space Bat and Crystal Dragon lost in endless, crazily lit tunnels that's annoying me, too. After eight years of production hell on and off and many published games, it's time to have some fun, and try and enrich the commons.

Coming back down to earth, I Now have the problem of whipping up a tool that will take a structured comic script and post it , panel by panel to a blog. Time to head over to BadByteBootstapBlues and brush up on my XML-RPC.

Shoot the sploggers.

That "Next Blog" button on the nav bar has been all but useless for a long time now, due to the predominance of splogs - blogs full of spam. Depressingly predictable. It will be interesting to see how Googles now "flag" system works. Will people actually weed out the commons, or are there so many splogs that people will give up? There must be a critical point. OTOH, the sploggers will simply start removing the toolbar from their blogs, but I'm sure Google has thought of that one.

Browsing the profiles, I also noted that a lot of the blogs of people who had the same interest as me were created late in 2004 when bogging was hot, had three or four and then the blogger gave up. Methinks Google really need to think about meta-moderation of the blogsphere. As well as "Flag As Objectionable" how about "Flag as defunct" to send the inactive blogs to a virtual graveyard, waiting to be resurrected or not, out of the orbit of the nav bar. It would help to sort out the signal from the noise.

Sound of their breath fades with the light.

Watching Donnie Darko for the first time recently on terrestial television, I had the experience for the first time of recognising songs that I had listened to many times on the soundtrack CD actually in the film.

Its interesting to contrast the images and feelings the naked songs and lyrics produce against the images and actions in the film itself. "Under the Milky Way Tonight" always evoked for me a certian world-weariness, and passivity: an ennui with existence. However in the film, Donnie is anything but passive - it plays as the film moves to a climax, and it fits perfectly there, too. Interesting.

This dissonance is probably not a novel sensation to anyone over 12, but it's new to me. As I get more blasé about the fact I can hear much better, it's little moments like this that reach out and remind me just how magical what I have gained really is. At one point in his life, Beethoven would have given everything for what I now have.

On Holiday

The first time in a long time that I've been able to completely relax..

And heres a 'photo of the entrance to the building itself.

Electra

A detail from the floor of Milburn House in Newcastle - Upon - Tyne. It's an interesting building..A Reading University production of Elcetra, is incidentally, still one the best plays I've ever seen..