Palfrey's life

(This is being written on a Tube/at a Tube station on my netbook. If I'd gotten around to tethering my phone, I'd be posting from a Tube station)

I've just spent my evening in the basement of the Regent pub in Islington with the London Hackspace crowd. There's a really vibrant geek crowd running around London right now, and the continued existence of the Hackspace bunch is just one manifestation of this. For those of you entering into this conversation cold, a "hack space" is literally a shared environment where a bunch of people can come and hack, in all of the old senses of the word (people playing around with stuff, be it software, hardware, circuit bending, social stuff, whatever). Everyone pays membership and that money goes to the hiring of the space and possibly even buying some bits of larger shared equipment. This makes it all more social which is nice, and also allows for the sharing of ideas and equipment, which is also very useful.

Right now, the London Hackspace (like AFAIK, most of the UK Hackspaces) is in a very preliminary stage, and is more a matter of a bunch of geeks in a pub basement, but it's still a lot of fun. Tonight, some BBC folk were around filming and things, so the place was about 3 times as crowded as the last time I turned up (and in a windowless, non-air conditioned basement with big thick walls, that's not so good), plus there was a whole bunch of random equipment that various folks had donated (mostly from tinker.it I think), so folks could dig around and find either useful stuff or things they could cannibalise. I acquired a bare metal speaker unit and some large capacitors, which will probably get re-purposed as little sculpture soon enough. I also ran into a couple of ex-Bristol folk (one CS person from the year above, and Max who was at Churchill in the same year as me, and later ended up as Amarok's second hacker, which is kinda small world), which is amusing, along with Matt (? names not swapped, think so) who I know from poly stuff. Also there's some other folks whose names I can't remember, but I pimped Big Geek Day Out (an unEvent going to Bletchley park in a while) as well as Hide and Seek, and some of the sensor networks stuff, so should probably see some results from that eventually. Oh, and the pub serves Belle Vue Kriek on tap! Fun evening all in all :-)

(I'm also pretty sure I wore the right t-shirt today, which says "Johnny was a chemist's son / but Johnny is no more / What Johnny thought was H₂O / was H₂SO₄" which not only got read out by two people while in ICSF at lunchtime, but also by one of my colleagues later on, and almost by one of the folk at the Hackspace)

One of the results of my recent US trip would be the acquiring of a copy of "Soon I Will Be Invincible", which I started reading a few days ago, and has since resulted in significant losses of sleep, but hopefully that should be fixed with my having managed to complete it earlier this evening travelling on the Tube. Needless to say, it's a very good book, and you all should be reading it. It's about superheroes and supervillains, and they're all fairly typical as the genre goes, but the way it looks at them as real people, as people who have to deal with the day-in, day-out consequences of their fantastical powers, is nothing short of brilliant.

One of the major characters is the genius supervillain Dr. Impossible, who is a little bit superpowered (lab accident of course), but whose major asset is his mind. As the story starts, he's in a prison for metahumans for the 12th time, having been once again defeated by his nemesis ColdFire while trying to take over the world yet again. He describes the bits of the prison around him as being run according to "Gilligan island rules" i.e. they think that anything could be used to make some sort of weapon (and he could), so the prison guards are very careful about what he gets anywhere near him. This works up until a couple of idiot rookie superheroes try to interrogate him regarding the disappearance of ColdFire, and he promptly outsmarts them and escapes to begin his latest plot.

Our other viewpoint is the ex-NSA cyborg Fatale - wounded in a horrific traffic accident, rebuilt as a super soldier, eventually kicked out over what are described as "personality issues". She's the newest recruit to the superhero team the Champions, who have reformed in order to recapture Dr. Impossible. The rest of the team are formulaic in some ways - a Punisher/Batman no-powers physical type; a fairy; a half-alien princess; a mystic; a beast-man - but their interactions and squabbling is brilliant. The bits from Dr. Impossible, talking about his plans, his vast ego and the past events that led him to this point are also excellent, and you all should be buying and reading this right now.