Sauerkraut Soup

The worst thing about Django so far..

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:23:35 GMT

...is that you stop the development webserver using ctrl+break. And break requires fn+pgdn here on my notebook. And the fn key hasn't been working since I installed Windows 7 on it :P

The SCIENCE! of Faerie

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:42:42 GMT

When I was a young lass I wanted to know
If Elves could be physicists, and if so
Whether I would meet them if I went to University.
So I travelled far into to the Realm of Faerie
Where dwelt a Unicorn of SCIENCE!

Oh, you can take the word of Unicorn of SCIENCE!
Upon his theories you can place reliance
Well, at least at speeds below that of C
He'll know whether there can ever be,
Such a thing as an Elf of SCIENCE!

Oh yes, he was a true Unicorn of SCIENCE!
A Professor at the Institute of Thaumaturgy
Directly opposite the School of Exotic Metallurgy
With cited papers on the law of conservation of virginity.
Indeed he was a Unicorn of SCIENCE!
And this is what he said...

'Oh, there ain't no such thing as an Elf of SCIENCE!
Upon this theory you can place reliance
Well, at least at speeds below that of C
We know now there cannot possibly be,
Such thing as an Elf of SCIENCE!'

Well I confess I was disappointed then
But I didn't return at once to the Realm of Men
Instead I began doubt what the Unicorn had said
Wondering if his existence had been firmly tested
When I was accosted by an Elf of SCIENCE!

Oh, you can take the word of an Elf of SCIENCE!
Upon her theories you can place reliance
Well, at least at speeds below that of C
She'll know whether there can ever be,
Such thing as a Unicorn of SCIENCE!

Oh yes, she was a true Elf of SCIENCE!
A tenured Researcher at the School of Exotic Metallurgy
Across the quad from that Institute of Thaumaturgy
Researching room temperature mithril superconductivity
Indeed she was a Elf of SCIENCE!
And this is what she said...

'Oh, there ain't no such thing as a Unicorn of SCIENCE!
Upon this theory you can place reliance
Well, at least at speeds below that of C
We know now there cannot possibly be,
Such thing as an Unicorn of SCIENCE!'

Now my head was really starting to spin
So hard that they called up the one next of kin
I had there on campus, to take care of me
And try to explain yet again all I could see,
Him being an Angel of SCIENCE!

Oh, you can take the word of Angel of SCIENCE!
Upon his theories you can place reliance
Well, at least at speeds below that of C
He'll know whether there can ever be,
Such a thing as an Angel of SCIENCE!

Oh yes, he was a true Angel of SCIENCE!
For here at this most Unseen University
He had disproved the existence of all Faerie
For which they'd made him Doctor of Philosophy
Indeed he was a Angel of SCIENCE!
And this is what he said...

'Oh, there ain't no such thing as a Angel of SCIENCE!
Upon this theory you can place reliance
Well, at least at speeds below that of C'
He said as he slyly winked at me,
'There is no Angel of SCIENCE!'

Falsepositived by the Credit Card Antifraud bots (again)

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:58:06 GMT

Notes:

If anything the robot voice reading out the urls of people I bought things from was even more indecipherable than normal. I think she would be more comfortable if I actually used my credit card to shop physically in actual meatspace or something. It was so indecipherable I had to press the button to be transferred to India.

'The computer is down. You'll need to call back later'. Actual quote, from actual Indian call-centre guy. If it was really true, lord that must have been embarrassing thing to have to say. If it wasn't true they should have thought of a more innovative and original excuse for him to use.

I get the impression that the thing that set the robots off this time was me buying multiple games from Steam in multiple transactions. On the Steam account I've always used.

Of course it was the transaction after those that got (incorrectly) clobbered, a regular payment that always happens for that amount, every single month on exactly the same day.

Since they seem to be determined to keep the Antifraud bots employed, they need a 'pending check with card holder' state for online credit card transactions, rather that just declining and then leave you to clear up the resulting payments mess. Maybe they do, maybe nobody uses it.

It's not news that the Antifraud Robots are dumber than a box of rocks. But I'm beginning to suspect that they're actually just a random number generator programmed to pull the transactions to decline out of a hat.

Dear US Congress

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 10:44:07 GMT

You should pipe the names of all your members through an Umlautify filter prior to attaching them to a Bill. This makes things much more Metal when the Bill is referred to in the Press.

They get Meta

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:20:45 GMT

Hmmmm, a TV commercial just appeared on my TV, advertising TV commercials.

Fear my powers of Central Banker Mind Control!

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:47:44 GMT

Oh dear, the Federal Reserve appears to have decided that my whacky financial wheeze of a few days ago, is like the bestest thing ever, and is actually something they should be doing.

Clearly, I have now (extra) doomed us all!

Muuuuuahahahahaahahaha.

Bear of very little financial brain

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:56:29 GMT

So I gather that the world economy and all of us with it, is going to seize up with rigor mortis by the end of next week (if not sooner) because everyone and their dog is calling in their short term loans to anyone who isn't the Federal Reserve or the ECB or someone similarly central banky, reducing the interest rate they offer on the loans to those central banky people to virtually nothing at all whilst pushing up their short term rate for everyone else up to a level that WILL NUKE THE SITE OF ALL BUSINESS and OUR JOBS and THE NEXT PAYMENT OF OUR WAGES EVERYWHERE from ORBIT. That's if they're prepared to still lend at all to average schmoe companies that actually do real stuff in the real world.

If that's so, why aren't the central banky guys taking advantage of this arbitrage opportunity of a lifetime by taking up these offers of loans to them at such cheap cheap prices and then turning around and lending it all back out short term to those average schmoe companies at somewhat less than the LUDICROUS KILL THEM ALL rate, but still more than they had to pay? Wouldn't that make us all (with our taxpayer hats on) some dough on the interest rate spread, whilst simultaneously saving the world BY RE-ORBITING FINANCIAL MARS TO BECOME A NEW EARTH at the same time?

Or is that what they mean when they say they're 'injecting liquidity'? Or was that what the bailout thing, that didn't pass because everyone hates it for being the slush fund of a guy who looks very undead, and also being seven hundred billion hectares of taxpayers money long, was for?

Clearly I don't really get it. Or SOCIALISM or something.

Methinks they want us to spell ASUS without the 'U'

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:24:40 GMT

So I took delivery of an Eee PC today.

And indeed it is indeed very cute, and very Pearl White, and my fingers are are just about small enough for the UK layout keyboard complete with '£' sign, and it has the renowned stupidly large black bezel around the screen and everything!

But ummm, well the out of the box text editing experience lacks just a little something for we English speakers here on the right hand side of the Atlantic Ocean.

OpenOffice is very nice and all but it would insist on trying to make me conform to USAian spelling conventions by drawing squiggly red coloured, ahem I mean, *colored* lines under my words. This despite my having specified all the 'yes I am actually in Britain' options when starting the machine up for the first time.

Okay right, so the lil' cutey is not smart enough to poke the right settings into its individual applications when you set it up at the beginning, no biggie! I figured I'd just set them manually in OpenOffice's options, and proceeded to do so. This worked wonderfully, I could hit the spellcheck button and now receive a hearty 'document contains no errors!' message. Unfortunately my document at that point consisted of 'rfhdsflj jkljl;, zomnggu. Qaserts' and other such meaningful gibberish. Oh dear.

I look at the options again and notice that the 'English US' setting has a little 'tick+abc' icon, whilst the 'English UK' setting does not. Uh-Oh. A highly intuitive and obvious indicator -- to those of use who have been using computers continuously for the last 25 years of our lives and are thus used to their cryptic little symbolic ways -- that there is no 'English (United Kingdom)' spelling dictionary installed.

I was beginning to have nasty flashbacks to the first several release versions of Mac OS X which had the much touted feature of a spellchecker available in the standard operating system textbox, meaning every little app got spellcheck. However Jobs & Co. didn't deign to include any other English spelling dictionary than your Standard American one, so that this feature invariably drove every non-American English speaker in the world up the wall anytime we tried to type something and we got redlined for it.

Back to the Eee. Does the machine's 'add/remove programs' online update doohicky give any options additional spelling dictionaries? Nope, doesn't look like it. What about OpenOffice itself? Does it have it's own 'get more dictionaries' widget? Well I couldn't see one but...

...by that time I'd reached for the Google, and thus learned that OpenOffice does have such a widget, but instead of placing it anywhere near where you specify your language settings, or on some 'Tools' or 'Update' menu, it's actually under File/Wizards. Yeah, okay if they say so. *sigh*

I fire it up.

The relevant OpenOffice document opens, I click the hyperlink that says 'English' to navigate to the big press-button in the middle of page 5. Yes I said, The relevant document opens, and I click the hyperlink that says 'English' to navigate to the big press-button in the middle of the page 5. What? You are surprised that this functionality has apparently been coded by the developers of the software as the OpenOffice equivalent of a Word Macro? Well clearly you know nothing about modern consumer software design! Nothing!

Pressing the big grey button on page 5 launches an actual dialog box, the text of which suggests that it's a big no-no to install any more than 10 spelling dictionaries whilst implying that's precisely what's going to happen if you let it proceed. I laugh at it's grisly warnings and click 'next'. And I was quite right to do so, for the very next screen it gave me a button to download a list of spelling dictionaries, and told me to select the ones I wanted to install.

Doing this, I discovered that as well as your usual array of Frenches, Germans, Spanish, Catalan, Urdus, and Swahilis, I could choose from English (Australia), English (Canada), English (New Zealand), English (United States - even tho' I already have it), and English (South Africa).

Umm, guys? I think you're missing somewhere off that list there. And no I'm not referring to English (India).

I guess that's what happens when you conquer half the world over a century or two. Everyone hates you forever more and takes their revenge for your hideous crimes against humanity by hiding the dictionaries. Even after you've upgraded their Word Macro to that latest version in the vain hope that it might reveal what's hidden....

...what's hidden, *in plain* sight fifteen screens lower, on the same wiki page that told where the 'Wizard' hangs out, are actual linsk to an actual manual download of actual real actual files. Wooooweeee!

I download, I go back to the Word Macro, and as advised use the option on the post button-on-page 5 dialog to install dictionaries from a file, after having specified the Unix path to where I downloaded the thems through good old keyboard entry as the 'browse' button doesn't appear to do anything. Anything at all.

'Not a Dictionary File'

Hmmm, maybe it needs it unzipping first?

'Not a Dictionary File'

What about if I point it to the file with extension .dic *specifically*?

'Can't Unzip File'

Aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!1!!11!!!

...

Well I guess that all goes proves the old adage if you want something done by a Word Macro, you'll just have to buckle down and do it yourself manually. With cd, ls, mkdir, nano, less and mv. Hey, look on the brightside, it could have cat and vi.

Or Windows Vista.

...

More Google-Fu having revealed the magic key combination to bring up an XTerm equivalent (Ctrl+Alt+T) on the Eee PC, I hit the Unix command-line the better to perform the software surgery for installing the darn things I just downloaded. Of course what the surgery required is, I haven't precisely determined at this point in the proceedings. I've found some crufty HOWTOs and forum posts from a couple of years ago and version 1.something of OpenOffice on where to put the dictionaries when OpenOffice used a *different* spellchecker and not really revised since then because, hey, we've got this swish new Word Macro that does it all automagically now!

I press forward installing in the wrong place under the wrong directory name! But I do remember to use sudo so they actually can be copied without running afoul of this users lack of permissions! Onward I go as my copying to the now determined to be correct location, is disrupted by my using relative paths involving symlinks to somewhere completely different. Boldly I proceed to being tripped up by the fact that 'sudo some-funky-openoffice-script' won't work because tho' /usr/sbin may be part of root's path, it's not part of the path of the user I'm sudoing from. Finally I get everything in the right place, run the right scripts, and go back to OpenOffice, tweak the options again, and yes, yes, Yes! I have an English (England) spellcheck.

Pity that this dictionary seem to think 'rationalize' is an actual word even if it will now let me type 'rationalise' as an alternative without throwing a hissy fit.

So my first impressions of the ASUS Eee PC...?

It is *indeed* 'Easy to Lean, Easy to Work, Easy to Play' for those values of Easy that involve dicking about at the Unix command line, understanding file permissions and ownership, what sudo is and does, reading man pages and online HOWTOs that assume you know your way around the default filepaths of an OpenOffice install so don't tell you what actually they are, and a certain dose of sheer bloody-mindedness. Or alternatively Easy for those of you in English speaking countries where they prefer spelling ASUS without the 'U'.

:)

It's not safe to walk the Streets of Edinburgh this night...

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 18:21:19 GMT

...without be accosted every 50 yards by advertising boards pimping -- in association with a chain of bakers not actually open at this hour -- The Edinburgh Evening News's Free Doughnut promotion.

Aaargh.

When attempting to stop a bank run...

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 11:34:09 GMT

..repeatedly and urgently telling people not to panic in heavy tones of reassurance, just causes even more people to freak out and panic.

Sheesh, already. It's not rocket science, all you officially reasurring people.

A spectre is haunting the Servers - the spectre of Nerfism!

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 06:53:58 GMT

So today's entirely unoriginal early morning hypnopompically induced blinding insight, destined to evaporate into 'what was I thinking?' within a mere three hours, is:

"You know all that political 'debate' stuff? Yeah, well it's entirely, exactly, completely the same as class balance and current and future and desired patch 'debate' on a MMORPG's official boards. Only with like, more real world implications man! And vice versa!"

Yep, obviously I'm in dire need of an urgent coffee infusion or something here, before I go and do something really stupidly embarrassing like start posting on TerraNova.

...but, nevertheless, watch out for the eternal floating PvP vs PvE balance flamewar. It been really very very nasty recently, and it's now getting to the point where instead of just driving you insane, it'll drive you insane, spit you out and then kill you dead.

Literally.

Even for those of us lucky enough to be playing current FotM classes on the stable servers.

Meanwhile, elsewhere

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:16:00 GMT

The random livejournal of o_playas, informs me:

It's a drummer Vladimir Vasilkov and his boys. Unreleased material
from USSR, good done!

___

The crowd roars. The crowd howls.

"GOOD done! Good DONE! GOOD DONE!" they chant, raising their aether torches to the skies, sending light and shadows to dance out onto across the cavernous stage. Yes, indeed, Comrade Valsilkov is a popular man!

And here he strides, no, here _they_ stride, Vladimir and his boys; into the flickering light, Unreleased and Material at a last! Boys from the USSR igniting their image across a billion telescreens of the World Soviet. From Omsk to Tel Aviv. From Vancouver to Magnetogorsk, from the great shipyards of High Orbit to Nova-Gagaringrad upon the Farside.

Time is now, time is now but for lightspeed's delay!

"GOOD DONE! GOOD DONE! GOOD DONE!"

The howl, the roar, the crashing psychic wave of the operant telepaths tuning their minds, live via lens and robot wisdom. Even the great Vladi, even his steam driven metal boys of iron, pause and struggle, surprised by the power of a moment. Only tho' a moment. Now no longer.

Shoulders square, thews ironed, arms outstretched in the aehter's gloom glow to his steam clanking armour clad boys of the Jazz-Funk Soviet, he advances in a 7/8 time, emphasis on the off-beat, as the great Doom Drums descend from the central committeed sky ready to kick!

Ready to

"GOOD.."

Stomp. Ready TO

*whiteburstblinding*

"...DONE! GOOD..."

POUND

"DONE!"

Ready to...Ready to...Ready to...Ready to

"GOOD DONE!"

Now his hands upon the hammer. *lightflash* His hands upon the hammer. His hands upon the hammer. *LIGHTFLASH* His hands upon the hammer, BOYS! ARMOURED STEAM RIDING BOOOOOOOOYS!

...

Meanwhile, in that backwater of civilisations, the Michigan Autonomous SSR, that very same night, whilst the greatest wrought iron funk drummer that dialectical materialism ever spawns pounds out the socialist-jazz-realism rhythm defining his generation, five young women, acting in rebellion, skip out of watching the aethercast on the telescreens erected by their comrades outside Peoples Motor Factory No.12.

Instead, gathered beneath the smiling Icon of Mother Lenin, at the great Church of the True Fake Jesus two miles distant, they plot revolution!

A revolution in the noise of music sounds!

For these five women, their internal organs fashionably removed just five weeks earlier, are to form the first, and the arguably the greatest, of the Peoples' Cyborg Detroit Steam-Whistle Bands; launching and riding the wave of proletarian vanguardism in Marxist-Phlogisticated Funk that sweeps across the whole of the Solar System for the next decade and half.

A future wave that absorbs even the great Vladimir Vasilkov and his Steam Armoured Boys into its thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

The musics of the Soviet, is never the same again!

In Reruns: Craving

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 12:34:42 GMT

From January 1998.

Reposted because mmcirvin reminded me of his fabled Magnum Opus (written at age 10) Watch Your Brain as part of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day.

...

James "Kibo" Parry wrote:

WATCH MY BRAIN!!!

___

We were watching the brain.

It was a disturbing sight.

In the previous seven days billboards had sprung up across the nation, screaming the message at any passerby who had failed to integrate into their psyche the necessary survival skill of editing out advertising. The trailers had ran on TV, as many as seven times during a single commercial break. It was on all channels, from the mighty networks down to the tiny stations that not even the loving relations of those who worked on them bothered to watch.

All this with one united message, "WATCH MY BRAIN!!!"

It had started in the news media months before, at first a tiny infection here and there, but quickly gathering pace as the newsmen hungry to find something, anything, to fill the as yet empty continents of time and newsprint that had always massed threateningly in their futures. Desperately they pushed and pulled and worried at the thing, convinced that somewhere in this mass of rumour and confusion there was a real story.

They interviewed each other hysterically in rabid little circles, over and over again, knowing in their hearts that this time they were onto something big.

Soon it was everywhere, people were discovering that they their closest friends had known about it all for months, that the real cognoscenti had been discussing it earnestly on that internet thing for years. Your worried parents would call your up in the small hours asking you to explain it all to them.

Somehow it was always much too complicated to describe in simple terms. The experts agreed with this assessment, as did the growing phalanx of "WATCH MY BRAIN!!!" consultancy practitioners, "WATCH MY BRAIN!!!" therapists, and "WATCH MY BRAIN!!!" new-age evangelists.

Polling evidence was mixed; one day watching the brain would be the greatest boon to civilisation and industry the world had ever seen, the next it would be the biggest menace to both ourselves and our children that had emerged in the last three decades. Political debate was heated, there were calls to regulate, to deregulate, to raise taxes, to lower taxes, to not even consider voting for those other guys who were soft on the watching the brain issue.

The President announced a new national "WATCH MY BRAIN!!!" strategy consisting of having a firm strategy on the matter. Congress condemned the President's strategy and commended to the people a "WATCH MY BRAIN!!!" strategy of their own, built upon the much sounder basis of having an _exceedingly firm_ strategy toward the issue.

And now almost without us even noticing, the moment had burst upon us. Here we were, watching the brain.

ACTUALLY WATCHING THE BRAIN!!! A WHOLE CONTINENT UNITED AS NEVER BEFORE IN THE SINGLE PURPOSE OF WATCHING THE BRAIN!!!

We knew that for years to come we would be able to ask anyone where they were when they watched the brain and they would be able to answer in vivid detail. We knew that everyone looked upon this time in exactly the same way that we did.

...It was at that moment that the phone in the callbox across the street began to ring. Distracted from the spectacle of watching the brain, I excused myself to my companions, and negotiated my way between the ranks of gridlocked traffic to pick it up.

I brought the receiver up toward my ear.

The voice on the other end of the line whispered precisely three words before hanging up.

"SEE SPOT RUN!!!" it said to me.

Suddenly I realised that it was _this_, not watching the brain, that would be the solution to all our problems. From that point forward I knew that this was something that the world had to know.

My one duty was get the word out.

Aide Memoire

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 09:10:58 GMT

I'm putting this notion of wizwom's here, who mentioned it in this thread of james_nicoll, to make sure I remember it when I need it later.

...

"PG rated seduction-bot."

That Old Timey Pushbutton Future of Yesteryear

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 08:45:17 GMT

Clearly, the only thing more futuristic than Steam-Powered Zeppelins, are Steam-Powered Zeppelins of THE ATOM; built and maintained by the ether-Mechanics -- sterling heroes of the engineering sciences all! -- of the Venusian Forestry Commission out of their Clockwork Treetop Research Aeries in the Southern Highlands of that world.

And it's taken me far too long to realise this obvious fact.

...

(Edited: rev.1)

My Muse Speaks!

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 20:27:44 GMT

Unfortunately she just says "Mumbai Chocolate Breakdown" repeatedly, and I really don't seem to be getting any clues about where to go from there.

*sigh*

Deus ex machina

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 22:23:24 GMT

FABRICMAN! descends from the gods on wire pulleys and bits of string, swaying from side to side as if possessed by the demon drink. And the drink of demons. High like a sealing wax junkie man. He rotates, he spins, he twirls with uncontrolled acceleration. As was foretold, all voodoo like straight-up, no messing.

"Behold, I am FABRICMAN!" he squeaks as nasally as a squeaky nasal thing. He smashes into barrels and crates, and cannons, and battleships, and the whole Fifth Army Communications Corp (based out of Proxima Centauri) and it's downloadable demo in 1080p HD widescreen Bannanovision, denting his top hat; "FABRICMAN I am!".

"FOR HE IS FABRICMAN!" screams the chorus in mournful Etruscan Greek, his mad uncontrollable careenings of angular momentum knocking over the strategic woodstove located on 87 Canceri B and setting fire to five cubic gigaparsecs of seriously quantum geologic time.

"BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!" he squeakily declaims, flames shooting from his burning frockcoat and soiled trousers, his iambic pentameter pegged so far into it's red zone that it lights up a solid icosahedron of spacetime no less than six hectares long. Gyring, gimbaling, wabelike. Possessed of un-denormlised state vectors.

"FABRICMAN!" the chorus chorus, "FABRICMAN!"

"FABRICMAN!"

"FABRICMAN!" they gurgle.

His sealing wax and string wired pulleys now burst in a shattering burn through, gone with throttle-up, filled with the blinding heat of a thousand exploding suns.

"OOOOOOOOOHHHH! Pretty!" exclaim the chorus.

"For I am FABRICMAN! The ENB!" intones FABRICMAN! in a rapidly red shifting pitch of sublime roared squeaking such that all dogmen and other werewolves may hear, plunging away from us in a direction that manifests itself only as the quintessence of the Platonic Form of 'down'...

.
.
.

...: FX: heavy thud :

: curtain :

A Masters degree...in SCIENCE!

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 17:41:53 GMT

Through the power of Google, and pompe talking about Gadgetismus, I have just discovered that that Ford claims to employ a Chief Nameplate Engineer for the Ford Edge. However I suspect this may just be yet another Macromedia Flash requiring instance of Brand Engineering on their part.

Update: This interesting Ford fact has now reminded me that my official job title is 'Software Engineer', despite being accredited by precisely nobody, nor having any sort of degree...in SCIENCE...or NOT-SCIENCE of any kind, and also despite fundamentally not believing there is any such animal as 'Software Engineering'.

Programmer, damnit! A position for a Skilled Craftsman/woman, capisce?

I usually try to blank that unpleasant circumstance from my consciousness, lest I start sending intemperate email to the Human Resources Department (all one of her) pedantically explaining how this is all just not right which would mostly likely cause her to sarcastically offer me a pay-cut in exchange for changing the title all deadpan like, 'cos she has that sort of sense of humour.

An Open Letter to the UK Parliament.

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 07:50:27 GMT

Look, I know you're on your hols, but damnit, something has got to be done.

You know he's got to go, I know he's got to go. The whole country, indeed the whole freakin' world knows he's got to go. There are probably alien tribes inhabiting nearby star systems banging their heads against walls because he hasn't gone yet. Everybody but Mr. Tony Blair himself knows he needs to be spending more time with his family. A lot more time. Starting yesterday.

So DO something already.

Please.

Yes, it's unfortunate that the byzantine internal wrangling of the Labour party doesn't seem to be cutting it on this one, but there it is. Time to stage an intervention.

Sure, a no-confidence vote that actually succeeds is completely out of the question, I understand that. Too much of a nuclear option -- ~~christmas~~elections! scary! me ~~turkey~~backbencker! party broke! expensive! -- okay fine. But can't you come up with something else? I don't know, something like:

'Notwithstanding our utter confidence in Her Majesty's Government, honest guv, and in order to prevent the country's tarnished reputation being even further dragged through the mud, and to avoid us all waking tomorrow to find we've been signed up for whatever lunatic military or foreign policy scheme President Bush has cooked up over the barbecue this week, and so we don't keep having to disgust our foreign friends by confessing that no, Tony's not gone yet, and no we don't know when he's going; this House requires and expects that the Right Honourable Anthony Blair MP resign the office of Prime Minister (or First Lord of the Treasury, or whatever we're formally calling it these days) and hereby petitions Her Majesty the Queen to appoint some other qualified MP-like-dude-of-the-majority-party to the above office.'

...only more Parliamentary and possibly using actual real sentences. Yes, I realise that mostly likely means Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, and he makes you and all the pundits and a bunch of people out here in the country cry, but we'll all deal with it. I know we will. We survived the Earl of Bute as PM. We can weather Gordon for at least a while. Some people even like him so I hear, and he does have the small slight advantage of never having been Home Secretary, so we may hope he doesn't bear the ancient curse of insane evil that afflicts all that have touched the eldritch dread of the Government Department that Drives Men Mad.

If you have to get Mr.Speaker liquored up to rule that sort of thing in order, then do so. Or, if you can't stomach that one, think of something else. Anything else. For crying out loud you've got a whole unwritten constitution and all that 'parliamentary sovereignty' stuff you keep boring on about whenever anything to do with Europe comes up, work with me here.

I mean, you used to be good at this sort of thing, you even got rid of Kings you didn't like and everything. Okay, I admit a Civil War or asking Holland to invade isn't exactly ideal -- though come to think of it, is their PM any good? Would they need additional naval transport to get to Westminster? -- but you got smoother at it. Go and suddenly discover that Tony's girlfriend is divorced and an American or something. Or have him disastrously invade a country in the middle-east on dubious grounds and completely screw the whole thing up...

...Oh, right, sorry.

Just DO IT, and do it NOW, give him the ol' heave ho, before we all become so ashamed to admit our British citizenship that we start pretending to be Canadian. You wouldn't like us when we're Canadian. Don't make us pretend to be Canadian.

C'mon UK Parliament, you can do it! Get yourself out there on that field and make our country proud! We're all rooting for yer!

...

Yes, I even emailed it to The Times, sans linkage, just call me disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. Completely the wrong length, format and style to ever be printed of course.

'The same thing we do every night, Pinky'

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 09:06:48 GMT

I just had a sudden epiphany.

When people talk about Karl Rove being Bush's brain. They don't mean Karl Rove is Bush's brain, they mean Karl Rove is Bush's Brain. Which of course makes Dubya the one with the red nose who says 'Narf!' a lot.

I mean the two dynamic duo's even look similar to each other. How did I ever miss that?

Instantly, much that was mysterious to me about y'all in the USA's political discourse, including the whole 'guy you'd want to have a beer with' thing, becomes much much clearer.

I hereby apologise for my years of obtuseness.

Soooooo bitchy, Muse guys, just so, so bitchy :)

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 12:54:49 GMT

I feel the need to say that Muse's 'Supermassive Black Hole' is the most deliberately hilarious self-referentially pretentious recursive p*sstake of a track I've heard in years. I laugh my head off every time I listen to it. You go girlfriends!

I also giggle like a little girl -- like a little girl dressed all in pink -- every time some disgruntled Muse fan, for whom the joke seems to have gone sailing far far overhead, complains it sounds like Britney Spears...

...Oh really? Ya think? ;)

Why I'm not reading much Science Fiction any more

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 05:24:04 GMT

When I was a child our house was full of books.

Once I learned to read, which took me longer than it should have done due to my difficulty in getting my head around the radical concept that when a certain combination of letters was written on one page, and the same combination of letters was written on another page, they freakily both represented the exact same word, I read everything with voracious omnivority.

And that 'everything I read', was all those books in that house stocked full by my parents.

Of fiction, which covered most of the volumes, my father bought, and borrowed from the library, Science Fiction -- most prominent author Mr. Philip K. Dick, his death in 1982 was news in our house -- and my mother bought, and borrowed from the library, both Science Fiction and Historical Romance -- most prominent author Ms. Georgette Heyer, who had died the year after I was born.

Of literary fiction, ummm, errr...well there wasn't very much about on the shelves. I remember Lady Chatterley's Lover boring me to tears, James Joyce making no sense at all at all, and The Naked Lunch, and Last Exit to Brooklyn putting me off my feed in horrid fascination. However, it turned out that Shakespeare could write a darn good Historical Romance Comedy, so he got a pass.

Non-fiction was pretty much what you'd expect from the parents of child born in the early seventies, works of radical feminism, eastern mysticism, writings of heretics and saints, books about black holes, high energy particle physics, and materials science, plus anarcho-syndicalist propaganda pamphlets, and The Joy of Sex. Oh and lots of non-fiction history texts.

So a lifetime's fiction reading habits were set. Inevitable that it would be pretty much 50/50 Science Fiction and Historical Romance forevermore (spoke the raven).

A decade ago, I got on the internet as the era of the World Wide Web was busy eclipsing the era of USENET. The very first weblogs would have to wait another year to get their hip catchy moniker and slashdot.org variously didn't exist yet, or was actually useful. As far as I recall -- I could be wrong -- spam had not yet quite made the jump from USENET to email.

By then my Science Fiction reading had broadened into Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Historical Romance was taking in some non-Historical Romance as well. Some Horror had been added. Literary fiction was still dead to me. Dead I tell you. Don't you dare call my beloved Mr. Shakespeare, writer of Romantic Comedy, a literary dude. Just don't.

We finally managed to get shot of the Tories here in .uk, but unfortunately that getting shot also involved acquiring a Tony Blair of our very own. Slick as hell, and quite, quite self-deluded even then.

The years passed and we all switched our web search engines from Lycos to Altavista to Google, as Lycos, then Altavista became infested with crud and advertisements. My Romance diet broadened again to become pretty much anything that wasn't chick-lit or contemporary. But with Horror retreating back to the hell from which it came, the eternal 50/50 Science Fiction/Romance split continued to hold pretty much true.

Spam had made the jump to email long ago, and so we all ended up implementing email filters and trained ourselves to quickly shove anything that got through the filters and still looked like spam manually into the bitbucket. Usage of the blink tag had disappeared but we got advertising popups in compensation. Virii begat spyware. The length of time allowed for adverts on TV here in .uk steadily increased.

Then the USA got kicked in the nads by a bunch of murderous suicidal nobodies, and promptly went batshit insane. Being the bunch of inveterate suck-ups we are, Britain came out as batshit insane in sympathy. The era of the dot.com became the era of the blog as blogs went all political.

Invasions, occupations, insurgencies and New Orleans flooded and left to die.

Today, Google is as useless and stuffed with crud as Altavista was way back then, the era of the blog became the era of podcast, became the era of Yootube. Spam jumped to blog comments, to blog trackbacks, with email now almost unusable. The arms-race between ever more intrusive web-advertising and browser counter-measures continues to escalate. Spyware and other malware is endemic and distributed by Sony or your favorite video game publisher. Your new game's console wants to nickel and dime you. The batshitness insanity quotient is so stifling even here in .uk I can hardly breathe. Pretty much everything purporting to be information get put to the internal 'What are they trying to achieve by telling me this?' question.

I now have forty channels on the TV I hardly ever watch where once I had 4, most of them fully advertising enabled, or sponsored into oblivion.

And for the last couple years the amount of Science Fiction I'm reading has dwindled down to match the amount of literary fiction I'm reading. Yes, down to a big fat none at all.

It's at this point I'm supposed to bemoan that today's crop of Science Fiction authors just don't cut it like the old timey Science Fiction writers did. That they just can't keep up with today's pace of change. They're all so pre-millenium and 911 or succumbed to the general bathshit insanity of the Zeitgeist or something equally ridiculous. But that's not it at all.

The problem is me.

The thing is, Science Fiction, at least for me, is a radical genre. Radical in the sense of being fundamentally about making you change your thinking. It's the essence of the standard sf trope were the world is described pretty much as is, but with one small change that fundamentally and radically alters everything. The genre, in it's platonic ideal form, keeps on forever nagging us to question whether our thoughts about the nature of the world are the ones we should be having.

Romance is, well, not a radical genre. At least not in that sense.

But consider the ambient amount, volume and pressure to change my thinking from non-Science Fiction sources; whether about my brand of toothpaste, my electricity provider, my long distance calling provider, my attitude to politician X, politician Y, frothed up bogus issue of the day Z, my opinion of my side, my opinion of the other side, on TV, on the radio, walking down the street, on blogs, discussion boards, free or paid, advertising or content, a flood that is ever increasing, increasingly hysterical, increasingly subtle, increasingly urgent, increasingly blunt, increasingly insane.

Cajole, threaten, promise, bribe, persuade, persuade, persuade. Must change thinking. Or else. Everywhere from everything, in every guise.

Remind me, how ever did we manage to get rid of that blink tag again?

So as the number of these voices pouring into my awareness -- trying to make me think differently than I do at present -- expands exponentially towards an inevitable Singularity, my mind's firewalls and filters against these attempts to headjack me have now started interpreting Science Fiction, being a radical genre that attempts to make me think differently, as yet another form of unwanted advertising and routes my consciousness around it accordingly. Just like all those web-ads none of us ever see, the TV ads we mute or Tivo around, or the escaped spam we delete in less than a second just on a vague impression of the subject line.

Call me Mr. False Positive.

What an interestingly weird backdoor way of fscking with my head.

Or perhaps I'm just getting old.

Lubricating Lucius: An Excerpt

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 18:45:06 GMT

Inspired by Bam's review of Liberating Lucius (rev.4)
...

Warning - Sensuality Rating: TBD

DR. JENNY INTEROCITER: Lucius look, I know I'm one of your oldest friends, but someone has got to level with you. It can't go on like this...

LUCIUS: What are you saying, Doc?

DR. JENNY INTEROCITER: Do you know how many women *looks Lucius firmly in the eye* on this ship have come into my office after a night spent with you, complaining?

LUCIUS: Oh c'mon Jen, I don't smell that bad...

DR. JENNY INTEROCITER: *continues to look Lucius firmly in the eye*

LUCIUS: ...do I?

DR. JENNY INTEROCITER: ...All needing treatment? _Intimate_ treatment?

LUCIUS: *looks aghast*

DR. JENNY INTEROCITER: *as if speaking to a small child* No Lucius, it has nothing to do with smell. Nothing. No, I've had six different women, and one female presenting hermaphrodite...

LUCIUS: ...What!?!?! I haven't done anything with any of the herma...

DR. JENNY INTEROCITER: ...IN HERE in the last month -- and how many times have I told you really should pay more attention to your partners? -- and each and every one of them, each and every one, I've had to treat for *she winces* serious chafing.

LUCIUS: Chafing?

DR. JENNY INTEROCITER: Yes, Lucius, CHAFING, uncomfortable and painful soreness. Uncomfortable and painful soreness due to a lack of sufficient lubrication, you thoughtless bastard. Oh, they all said they started out wet enough, apparently you're not completely useless, but they didn't stay that way, and you never even *thought* to break out the water based lube, now did you? Not even ONCE.

LUCIUS: ...water based...? *breaks off as he realises Dr. Interociter is clamping his right hand to her examination table* ...HEY, what are you doing Jen...

DR. JENNY INTEROCITER: Well it stops now, even... *she heaves his heavily muscled form up onto the table and clamps his other arm down*...if I have to attend to your training personally...*she removes her glasses, undoes her hair, shakes it and suddenly becomes a wild temptress in that exceedingly irritating way*...we're going to stay in this room, you...*she rips off his futuristic pants with one powerful cybernetically enhanced yank*, me, *she peels off her lab coat, revealing breasts that are quite likely annoyingly pert* and your friend and mine Nurse Edward, who THIS TIME if you bother to concentrate...

NAKED NURSE EDWARDS: *entering holding an XXL size bottle of water based lubricant* Hi, Jen! I see you've got our patient right where we want him!

DR. JENNY INTEROCITER: *nods to nurse edwards*...you might actually notice has a little more equipment down below than the average female.

NAKED NURSE EDWARDS: *grins proudly*

DR. JENNY INTEROCITER: ...And all three of us are going practice this thing...

NAKED NURSE EDWARDS: *squelches lube into her hands whilst laughing evilly*

DR. JENNY INTEROCITER: ...until you've demonstrated to my and the Captain's -- yes, he will be getting the saved video stream -- satisfaction that you can get this thing right. Capisce?

LUCIUS: *stares wordlessly transfixed by a Dr. Jenny he never realised existed*

I'm 'Not Touching The Cat'...

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 22:22:48 GMT

...*right now* IYKWIM, AITYD.

via Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels

Short Shameful Confession...

mlist@yclept.clara.co.uk — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:24:35 GMT

I installed Poser 6 today.

So obviously, given that I have no idea what I'm doing, my first attempt with it just had to be an interpretation of that much loved classic work of art 'Somewhat Annoyed Chyk, With Much Pointy Finger'


Lo Fi		Hi Fi

...at which point I discover, as you can see above, that the version rendered with all the quality setting set to max comes out much too soft and fluffy as compared to the one created with the settings I was using for the test render.

Hmmmmm.