So just a quick one before I go home. Faber finds is a new range of print on demand books from (surprise surprise) Faber. Basically the find out of print books and then offer them to be printed on demand. They don’t seem to have taken my suggestion to include John “Tripods” Christopher’s The Death Of Grass but they did send me a really nice personal email thanking me for my suggestion so maybe in the next batch…
Anyway, the cool thing is that every single book printed in the range will have a different cover, not every title, every actual book will be unique. All thanks to an algorithm that spews out randomly generated permutations within specified design parameters. The designer has a blog post on how it was done now that would be a great job.
this is the first potentially edible thing that I’ve grown from a seed.
[UPDATE! In a blinding display of one-upmanship Will, thinly disguised as Kate is “typing into the world of internet to bring you [his] story of non-pecuniary related food acquisition in the month of August” here]
Watched the film Cars last night. I’d seen most of it before on a poor quality divx but it was nice to see it in full with a nice crisp picture, well as crisp as our £120 cathode ray tube will allow. It’s not bad, but certainly one of the second tier Pixar films, though the lighting is incredible. Apart from the slow start and fairly bland characters my main problem was that I could never get over the fact that the world was populated by sentient motor vehicles. Who were all those fields of food for? Those quips about being “hot as a black leather seat”, none of the cars seem to have seats so what’s that about? Maybe the film takes place in the aftermath of the Stephen King film Maximum Overdrive the grizzly fate of humanity is a hazy memory and food production is just a kind of ritual they carry on doing for reasons they don’t remember.
I can’t remember where this is from but I emailed it to myself ages ago as a really good summary of what annoys me about the whole ‘political correctness gone mad’ thing that crops up all over the place…
Political correctness is a myth. It is a pejorative term used to give the impression that people who act or speak out against racism, sexism, homophobia, or class snobbery a) have the whip hand, and b) are censorious, unreasonable, petty, extremist killjoys. It is a sophisticated linguistic weapon in the arsenal of newspapers, politicians and other propagandists. Many purported examples of political correctness turn out upon investigation to either be entirely reasonable (unless one favours sexism, racism, etc) or apocryphal.
I’m clearing out my email, unstarring things that are dealt with, dealing with things that aren’t etc. so this may be the first of a series of random possibly un-attributed quotes/pictures/etc. that I’ve mailed myself over the years. a quick google search shows it’s from here.
I always get annoyed when internet comic nerds pick apart movie trailers, but then I find myself doing it when it’s something I care about. This is the first time so what the hell I’ll try not to make a habit out of it…
Reactions in order:
The look is quite generic comic book movie, special effects and finish wise. Maybe this is a good thing, part of the strength of the comic comes from the way it takes the look and strictures of the format and subverts them
correct font, attention to detail at least on a superficial level
The Dr. Manhattan scenes at the start are framed just like in the comic
Ozymandius looks too dark, it’s meant to be a surprise when MASSIVE SPOILER: it turns golden boy is the bad guy.
They’ve made Night Owl into Batman, all angsty, hopefully it’s shy, slightly over weight middle aged nerd angst rather than Batman angst. So far this doesn’t seem to be going too well.
The Dr Manhattan stuff looks good actually
“the visonary director of 300″ I really didn’t like 300 (mind you I probably wouldn’t have like the comic much either)
Dr Manhattan’s wearing pants :(
The mars thing looks cool
All in all the characters just don’t quite have that past it faded look
Can it be any worse than V?
What do you think?
I’m re-reading Watchmen tonight to cement the original in my head before the torrent of marketing bullshit that’s inevitably going to accompany this thing hits.
Not every post has to have a video in it.
But this one does because it’s a good example of how cool the West Wing was in it’s prime and it’s about map projection which is something I sometimes get exercised about. This is just a little aside that has almost no part in the broader episode…
I don’t even like Radiohead that much. I think they’re pretty good but I don’t own any of their CDs. However they (and their fans) keep on doing such great videos.
This one was made entirely using a laser scanner to generate 3D points rendering a kind of ephemeral flickering ghost world.
Skate the skateboarding game from EA is dead good. Better than Tony Hawk even. Well maybe not but certainly different from Tony Hawk. Less abstracted from actual skateboarding (not that I’m an expert or anything) There’s no crazy 3 minute combos and physics are fetishistically observed, half the joy of the game is rewinding and watching your collisions in slo-mo, seeing your avatar ragdoll off a rail and face-scrape along 10ft of tarmac can be genuinely wince inducing but is at the same time genuinely fun. There’s much more joy in motion and the learning curve is very smooth and gradual, very analogue, no moments of revelation like in Hawk where you figure out manuals and your score suddenly bumps another order of magnitude. A manual in Skate’s not a simple button press it’s a balancing act that takes days to get right consistently and then, I suspect, weeks to master. That’s the joy of analogue controls and simulated physics, there’s many more degrees of rightness.
My complaints: The incessant product placement (inevitable for EA I guess) and the graphical tone of the game, way too grungy, I’d like more retro 80s visuals as these are clearly totally now design wise (c.f. accompanying images) but then I guess the mass market might not quite be there yet esp. the US male teenager xbox mass market. The sound track’s alright too but it’s dominated by ‘exclusive’ tracks and it’s annoying it doesn’t just use audio off your hard drive (I knwo you can play your own stuff anyway but it should be mandatory to integrate it with the game so it pauses etc.). I guess a lot of EAs business model is about people paying to include their tracks and advertising.
If I’m sitting around outside at a cafe or a pub or restaurant or whatever, or sometimes when I’m cycling into work I’m struck by the amount of road space cars take up, both parked and moving and have often wondered how much space in London is taken up by cars. Well today I wondered it over lunch time and decided to make a stab at a Fermi estimate:
So 62% of households = 2231528.53. This is the number households in London owning at least one car (not including commercial vehicles, taxis, busses etc.)
small car dimensions (VW polo) 3.9 m x 1.9 m = 7.41 m² (Parkers)
large ‘car’ dimensions (Volvo XC 90) 4.8m x 2.1m = 10.08 m² (parkers)
So total area of cars in London if a VW Polo is the average size car = 7.41 x 2231528.53 = 16535626.4073 m²
… and if Volvo XC90 is average = 10.08 x 2231528.53 = 22493807.5824 m²
So the amount of space cars in London take up is somewhere around 16.5km² - 22.5km².
I reckon I’ve been quite conservative here. I’ve assumed that no households own more than one car, I haven’t accounted for commercial vehicles and I’ve assumed that the amount of space taken up by a car is limited to it’s physical dimensions ignoring related car paraphernalia and sub-optimal parking arrangements.
To put those figures in context, Hyde park is 1.4km² and the island of Nauru, home to 9000 or so people is about 21km².
First off Dan is finally doing that thing where he re-reads all his Steven King books so we don’t have to. It’s happening here in real time.
Other weblogs (not new) currently involved in similarly monomaniacal pursuits include 2000AD Prog Slog and the grand-daddy of them all, Tom Ewing’s epic journey through UK number one singles Popular.
I also found out Alex F has a live journal. It’s been going since May, and after I’d been waiting over a year for bloodless coop to be updated. I really should pay more attention.
