It’s like Proust with magnetic media or something. Not that I’ve read Proust obviously, I mean this is a universe in which there are 7 series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer available on DVD, how anyone finds time to read that stuff is beyond me.

This is the first type of blank tape I encountered (though mostly C60’s I think), we had a big stack of them as far back as I remember. They contained the remnants of my parents record collection which was stolen from their house in Bristol in the mid seventies. Most of the decent stuff, Beatles and Stones records etc. was on reel to reel tape which I only discovered in the mid ninetees while rifling through boxes in the atic, looking for books. These Memorex tapes had things like ‘Wings’ (I wouldn’t put it past my Dad to have held the classic Alan Partridge line to be true for at least some part of the late 70’s or early 80’s) and ‘Yes’ on them.

I don’t think I really understood what a blank tape was back then, we only had a single deck single function tape machine so recording from the radio or from other tapes or anything wasn’t possible. We did hook up the tape deck to the TV once to record the late night computer programs they used to broadcast in the early 80s, but couldn’t get it to work for some reason. Nevertheless, inspired by this I used to play audio tapes into our 48k ZX Spectrum in the hope that it would illustrate the music for me.

Attention product design fans! I’ve kept one of the cases from these tapes, it has a novel opening mechanism; the side kind of swings open like a clapper board as opposed to the standard book like opening, and as a result it’s much more robust than conventional tape boxes but doesn’t allow for paper inlays and is presumably more expensive to produce.

I’ve been using Bikely recently to map and annotate my cycle routes around our fair city it’s really intuitive to use and has the potential to become a great resource. Today they added elevation data, which is amazing, I had no idea my route my daily route involves a vertical range of 50 meters.

…well that confirms my suspiscions as to why going in is easier than coming home.

Hi,
I’m selling all my vinyl records. There’s a big list here.

Does anyone know the best way to post vinyl?

I’m probably going to be selling most of the stuff through discogs.com which in addition to providing good marketplace features seems a pretty serious competitor to allmusic these days esp. seeing all their pages are clean and ad free and their discographies tend to be much more comprehensive, although there’s a certain dance/electronica/hiphop bias at the moment that seems to be improving.

Percentages are useful but they’re also misleading. Saying there’s been a 100% rise in the incidence of heart disease amongst young women may sound shocking but if the incidence only used to be 1 in 500,000, the new figure of 2 in 500,000 it’s really not that bad, but then that’s not a news story…

The other, less well appreciated problem with percentages is the reporting of changes in percentage, here’s an email sent ’round my dept that does a good job of of explaining it (hope you don’t mind Gary if you’re reading this by some strange coincidence) …

If something - exam results, say - goes from 10% to 11% it is NOT “up 1%”.

I hope you can see, because the number are simple, that it is an increase of a tenth, which is 10% - or, in that example, “one percentage point”.

Exactly the same principle applies if you go from, say, 58.1% to 59.7%:
It is not “an increase of 1.6%” it is an increase of 1.6 percentage points.

You work out the % increase by dividing the difference by the lower figure - which in that case gives 2.75%.

So a rise from 20% of something to 40% is NOT “a rise of 20%” it’s a rise of 100% - in other words, a doubling.

Thing is, saying a change from 1% to 2% is a rise of 100%, whilst accurate, is pretty sensational. My preference wherever possible would be to use proportions i.e. ‘1 in however many’. For a change the best idea is proabbly to explicitly state how the proportion has changed eg. ‘up from 1 in 100 to 2 in 100′.

Obviously I’m assuming the goal here is to give people an accurate perception of the numbers not to have the most sensational headline.

(AKA overheard on the internets #1)

During a discussion about celebrities who might be suitable as popstars…
“a novelty version of “Rat In Mi Kitchen” with [Gordon] Ramsay ‘toasting’ and the word rat replaced by the word ‘c*nt’ would go down ‘a storm’.”

Our local book shop (yikes! What yucky website.) has some great books at the moment, I mean it always has some great books but it has some great editions at the moment, specifically some US Penguin Classics and some lovely abstract covered new edition Victor Gollancz sci-fi books, the new version of The Dispossed is particularly cool, they look nicely retro and have great texture as well as web 2.0 style rounded corners.

The printing of Candide they had, cover by Chris Ware, was so incredibly lovely that I spent £7.99 on it rather than buying the £1.99 version that you can get in Waterstones or wherever.

It has a little map inside the front cover and a bit about Leibniz (upon whom professor Pangloss is purportedly based) inside the back cover.

Also I knocked all their postcards over and they were very nice about it.

People who put those things on their emails to find out when you read them. What business of yours is it whether I’ve read your message to the off-topic mailing list? “looks like Oodle have hit the jackpot” why would you care if I read that asinine comment or not? If I don’t read it are you going to have to come to my desk and repeat it?

Also, the concept of character encoding.

I can’t have been the only one who on hearing this immediately thought of this…

Also, Shami Chakrabati rulez!!!

Also, really looking forward to the forthcoming book on the history of ‘the galaxy’s gratest comic’. Weblog here.

This is a bit of place holder for a pub conversation or something, in the emantime I really need to to re-read Umberto Eco’s essay about cult films focussing on Cassablanca*, then I need to re. watch the 3 Evil Dead films (specifically noting the differences between 1 and 2 and why 1 is better in spite of being in many ways worse) and then I need to coagulate it all into a coherent response to this excellent article about role playing…

“it may transpire that it is precisely the disjunctive nature of rpg narrative, its nature as a series of awkwardly-connected cool scenes that enter into a dialogue with an entire history of previous cool scenes, that makes roleplaying worthy of critical attention.”

Then it switches to talking about films and how narative in cinema is, since the 60s french new wave, increasingly about mashing genre flick tropes with eliptical art house framing techniques (as in narative not scene) cf. Michael Man (sort of), and how this is kind of like the cool scene parade of the typical RPG session (or indeed (i’m adding this bit, it’s not alluded to in the article), in a much more limited way, i.e. only cool action scenes, some video games e.g. God Of War). I think Eco would like me to mention the way Cassablanca is essentially a series of loosely bound pivotal moments, people are able to pull their favourite bits out and that’s what makes a ‘cult’ film (”Oh man I love this bit where the eyeball flys into her mouth!” Evil Dead 2, not Cassablanca, not the cut I saw anyway). The zenith of this cool bits style of cinema is, as the article points out, silver age HK cinema. (as far as i know this is a completely personal catagorisation system I think of golden age as mid to late 70’s Shaw Bros. etc)

“This path finds its ultimate outlet in a cinema dear to my heart, the genre-splicing, style-crazy movies of Hong Kong’s classic period from the late eighties to mid-nineties. Their veerings from low comedy to high melodrama to violence and back to sentimentality are initially off-putting to many Western gamers.”

I think he meant audiences there, cos I recon teh set of HK movie fans and the set of gamers have a pretty large intersection.

Also, loads of stuff about genre.

Also, what about Dogs in The Vineyard and other nu-RPGs? which seem to do a better job of putting proper old school narative and characters into the stories…

So anyway, place holder.

A dissenting note comes from Umberto Eco, who wrote that “by any strict critical standards… Casablanca is a very mediocre film”. He sees the changes the characters undergo as inconsistency rather than complexity: “It is a comic strip, a hotch-potch, low on psychological credibility, and with little continuity in its dramatic effects”. However, he argues that it is this inconsistency which accounts for the film’s popularity by allowing it to include a whole series of archetypes: unhappy love, flight, passage, waiting, desire, the triumph of purity, the faithful servant, the love triangle, beauty and the beast, the enigmatic woman, the ambiguous adventurer and the redeemed drunkard. Central is the idea of sacrifice: “the myth of sacrifice runs through the whole film”

[wikipedia]

E|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
B|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
G|-----2-3-2-------2----------------------------------------------2---|
D|-3-5-------5---3---5-3-1-5-3-1-0-3----0-------0-1---0-1---3-3-5---5-|
A|----------------------------------------3-1-3-----3-----------------|
E|--------------------------------------------------------------------|

E|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
B|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
G|-------2-3-2------2---------------------------------------------2---|
D|-3-3-5-------5--3---5-3-1-5-3-1-0-3---0-------0-1---0-1---3-3-5---3-|
A|----------------------------------------3-1-3-----3-----------------|
E|--------------------------------------------------------------------|

E|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
B|---------------------------------------3~-----3-4-4--4--3---3~-3----|
G|-3---------------2-3~------2-5~------2----3-5-------------5------5--|
D|---3-5-6-7~--3-5------3-5--------3-5--------------------------------|
A|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
E|--------------------------------------------------------------------|

E|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
B|-------3--1-------------------------------------3~-----3-4-4--4--3--|
G|-0--0-----------------------2-3~-----2-5~-----2----3-5--------------|
D|--------------3-5-6-7~--3-5------3-5------3-5-----------------------|
A|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
E|--------------------------------------------------------------------|

E|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
B|---3~-3--------3---3------------------------------------------------|
G|-5------5~------------3---------------------------------------------|
D|-----------3~----3--------------------------------------------------|
A|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
E|--------------------------------------------------------------------|