Part of me was idly thinking about the modern idea of Convention over configuration and idly wondering what some languages' anthropomorphic opinions on more important things than convention are...

Java: Yet more meaningless XML over convention.
C: Write it your self over convention.
Old-school LISP: vast sequence of hand-tooled, organisation-specific macros over convention.
C#: Microsoft's current convention over any community convention.
Machine code: the CPU is the convention!
BASIC: if you're writing stuff in BASIC that needs configuration, run away!
Python: the convention may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.

Despite having had the last couple of days off, I hadn't managed a NineWorlds writeup yet. That I basically went *plonk* on Monday is part of the reason, but hey, here I am now. When you look at the list of stuff I did, you may understand. Also, this is probably missing many things I can't remember. Note to self: write notes.

So, awesome things already mentioned elsewhere: The @9Waccess communication tags. Started off with a blue and a yellow, later finding out that the yellow wasn't so useful for how my head works, but that the red ones are very handy for the mid-con "and now I'm just shattered" periods. Blue one also acted as a conversation starter earlier, as many folks weren't aware of them. Will be bringing my set along to Loncon3, and if I'm organised enough today, will bring extras for others :)

Cosplay: All the cosplay, all the time. Felt like almost half the people were in cosplay sometimes. I only had my Jayne hat, but wore it for all of Friday and Sunday, and got a fair few "nice hat" and "Man walks down the street in that hat, people know he's not afraid of anything" got repeated a few times. Special mentions to the folks in the full Aliens marines; the full-blown Alien; the woman with the crocheted facehugger (and the alien pod bag, and the Wonder Woman crocheted costume); a Gamora; and so many more that my tired brain can't remember properly.

And now to the panels. I'm going to be a little bit brutal here, as there was a few items I was less happy with. Overall, *loved* them, and judging from digging around Twitter a bit, one person's "amazing panel" is another person's "boring, done before", but I'll chime in myself anyways. The full schedule was pretty crowded, so there's a few things I missed (one on time travel for instance), but I think I saw a good set:

• Thursday
  
  
  • Fanvids and gaming: played Slash with some folks, doing a somewhat more hardcore variant that involved each detailing every pairing, which worked well. Fanvids were silly: 80s intro style versions of Stargate for example...
  
  
  • Cheese & Cheese!: Readings of various cheesy work, and some eating of cheese. They ran out of folks on the list, and asked for more, so I got to read Original Message to the crowd, which was much fun :)
  
  


• Friday
  
  
  • Symbolism and Metaphor of Buffy: very good, very interesting. Realised just how long it's been, and resolved to rewatch all of it sometime...
  
  
  • From Killer Drones, To Cuddly Robot Companions: More about the history of robotics, but still a good talk by @SciWriBy
  
  
  • Prop Weapons Construction: Basically, making fake guns from foamboard and a craft knife. Very good, very hands-on (as in every audience member got to cut stuff!). Had a gorgeous replica Halo shotgun he'd built.
  
  
  • Writing Better Characters: mainly around video games, but I was there more thinking from the PoV of narrative role playing games. Many recommendations of things I hadn't heard of/played.
  
  
  • Looking Forwards: Supposedly about the future and books of the future, but kinda boring. Skipped out of there for the fanwork recs panel which included the utterly awesome Steve Rogers at 100: Celebrating Captain America on Film
  
  
  • The Mechanisms: Awesome steampunk band telling cyberpunk tales of dystopian futures. Stuck around for "Ulysses Dies At Dawn", but then had to get some food before I fell over, so missed their second set.
  
  
  • Last year's best fanvids: Trying to remember this much. Suspect there was some good bits in there, but was a bit tired by that point. I may have only been there briefly...
  
  
  • Nine Worlds party: Had the awesome Queen tribute band Rhapsody who did an excellent set. Was bouncing around wearing my Jayne hat :)
  
  


• Saturday - started off fairly broken because of all the things on Friday
  
  
  • Cyberpunk: exploring society in the corporate machine age (.net): Seemed very interesting, but I was rather dead at this point, so skipped out for coffee and collapsing.
  
  
  • Dragons vs Werewolves vs Vampires vs Warlocks: The Ultimate Deathmatch Smackdown: Awesome, awesome, awesome! One of my favourite panels. Werewolves and Vampires were fairly weak, but Warlocks had Scott Lynch doing variants on the theme of "Warlocks rule!" and Elizabeth Bear (Dragons) smacking him down repeatedly. Very very funny. Panel members kept repeatedly slipping between "they do X" and "we do X", leading to the possibility that Scott Lynch is in fact a hidden warlock, which is just funny.
  
  
  • In Conversation with Reiner Knizia: So, game designer, should be interesting, but I just wasn't feeling it. Brain was still a bit fuzzy at that point.
  
  
  • GoT: Season 4 in Review: 4 (deceased) cast members talking about season 4, and just generally the experience of being on set during Game of Thrones. Twitter seems to indicate some more hardcore fans didn't like it so much, but I thought it rocked. Miltos Yerolemou is damn cool.
  
  
  • Some food was gotten early at this point, then caught a bit of Quantum Battlestar Deep-Space Voyager Tardis Wars: The Million Dollar Space Epic. All of the bad puns (including a meta "Your puns are weak old man" Star Wars one). Worth seeing properly at another time.
  
  
  • Whedonverse Sing-Along: Very, very cool. Singing through "Once More With Feeling" and then Dr Horrible (with yours truly being on stage for the latter). Dr Horrible had a pair of folks, him as Captain Hammer, her as Dr Horrible, doing impromptu acting for the end scenes, which was amazing. Then we got to sing the Firefly theme :) Songbook covers were cool as well.
  
  
  • Ducked into the Steampunk cabaret, but the sheer level of horrible puns was too much (cockney steampunk music-hall parodies: just say no)
  
  
  • Edible Knitting: knitting cord bracelets from strawberry laces: Caught the last half an hour or so, and made a bracelet. Crochet (or at least the very basics) is now less scary, and we were encouraged to eat our mistakes, which is always good :)
  
  
  • The Duke Mitchell Film Club: Saw some of the very silly movies there. Good folks.
  
  
  • Rock Club: Got horribly delayed by Bifrost's lack of realistic timing. Thankfully I decided to have an early night (only like 11:30pm) instead, which was a good plan.
  
  


• Sunday
  
  
  • Neuroscience of Swearing: @SciWriBy back for more, this time with experiments involving dumping an arm in cold water and seeing if having a swear word to say increased people's average times they could stay in there (it does). I'm now curious about how things that aren't swear words currently could be made ones. Current candidate: "sturdy"
  
  
  • This was followed by Illusions and Brains by @DCorney who has managed to get computer systems to see some of the same optical illusions as humans do. Apparently it's a side-effect of being able to disambiguate scenes.
  
  
  • Spock vs the Sorcerers: F or SF? The Genre Deathmatch Smackdown!: More of the same as Saturday's one, but slightly less dramatic. Fantasy was losing very badly, although the Baron Harkonnen doll and the creepy Eye of Sauron toy didn't help things. That, and Geoffrey Ryman being very eloquent.
  
  
  • Food in Science Fiction: Everything from pills to hydroponics, to a fair amount of childrens books. Not bad, although the room felt like we were being broiled.
  
  
  • Epic Fantasy: the panel of prophecy!: Heavy on the authors talking about their own stuff, which when it's folks like Scott Lynch and Elizabeth Bear is no bad thing. Got a few recs out of it as well.
  
  
  • Applied Mathematics: Poetry for Geeks: I'd run into Dan Simpson earlier in the con, watching on a Netrunner game, so was interesting to see the poetry side. Lots of meta-stuff and playing with the medium, which was good.
  
  

If you go along to a tech event (like say OpenTech this last weekend), one of the first things you'll probably be directed to on entering (other than the bar) will be a stack of sticky labels and some pens. This is intended to solve the dual problems of not everyone knowing everyone else, as well as some of us possibly knowing each others Twitter names but not what some folks look like out in the real world. It does fix the problem pretty well, but there's a few flaws.

1. My handwriting sucks.
2. Most badges aren't visible at any decent distance
3. They're annoying, especially if you end up having to remove a layer of clothing because the aircon isn't coping with many geeks in a small space and then the sticker needs moving...

Enter a solution I've had in my head for a while, but just got around to building this week:( Read more... )

Earlier tonight dylanbeattie started tweeting a few things with the #compoundmovies hashtag. Basic idea is that you take two films, where the first ends with the same word as the first word of the second and mash them together, and some of them are pretty funny.

Of course, this obviously lends itself to automation, and my suggestion of trawling IMDB got the response from him that they've already supplied the data for me, so no trawling needed. However, IMDB contains far too many movies, most of which have names I don't even know the meanings for, and generating the data for this from the IMDB data will take an insane amount of time. However, there's also Wikipedia, which despite some complaints I'd heard about it's API, appears to be pretty easy to use.

So, here we go, a #compoundMovies generator. Either run it as "compoundGenerator.py imdb" if you've got lots of time, or as "compoundGenerator.py wikipedia <some category name>" (without the "Category:" bit). I tried it out on "British_films" and got back a few interesting things:( Read more... )

I've been listening to all the talk about the cuts recently, and hearing the various ways it's going to screw over various people I know. I've just had a quick dig through all the so far listed stuff myself, and although I agree it's a fucked-up situation and I'm annoyed that I indirectly voted for this, I'm not seeing much that'll hit me. I'm seeing a rise in tube fares, possibly a bit more tax, but not much else. This is partially due to getting out of academia at what turns out to be pretty much exactly the right time, but my other things of a financial nature are also generally in the best state they've ever been, which is a big insulating factor here.

Net result is that this all feels a little distant. It'll probably feel less so once I actually see all this kicking in and the consequences hit my friends, but for the moment it all seems unreal, and that's what I'm wondering about. If it seems unreal for me, given I'm listening to various folks and hearing about what this will do to them, how does it feel to others without that level of political interest/social groupings? More importantly, how can it be made to feel more real (short of a coup d'etat and rewriting of the budget) so maybe we get more people annoyed and possibly shame the Tories out of a bit more of this crap and/or make sure the fuckers don't get back in next time?

Ideas anyone?

(For those of you in the pub earlier some of this will be familiar, but here's the longer version for the benefit of everyone else).

After yesterday's post, somehow the time when I should have been sleeping last night instead had my mind running around plotting the possible conversations that could occur from discussing such matters (this is something I seem to do reflexively when bored). I eventually reached a discussion about the game Fat Princess. It's basically a Capture the Flag variant, except that the 'flag' is an enormously fat princess who can be fed further slices of cake in order to make her heavier and ergo harder to steal. Not having a PS3, I haven't played it myself, but it comes up in discussion on various video game sites every so often, and it seemed like a interesting variant gameplay-wise on a rather tired genre.

I started considering a male equivalent of this, given that the 'joke' can be considered in somewhat questionable taste given the intersection of standard gender roles and weight. A "fat prince" quite frankly isn't as funny, and making any of the other related male archetypes obese (knights, wizards, loveable rogue, etc) also didn't work. Somehow I ended up with the idea of vast sumo wrestlers, and instead of the multiple players trying to save the princess, I'm thinking the best defence is a good offence.

So here's the plot/game running through my head in the wee hours of the morning: it's the nearby future, and sumo wrestlers have gotten even bigger. They've also gotten rather sedentary, and no longer care about the traditions of the sport. It's therefore up to their handlers to save the traditions and bring victory once again to their metabolically-challenged masters. Hence, the cattle prods.

Basic gameplay is as follows: two handlers and their associated wrestlers, who given no other motivation will simply sit there. A handler can however prod a wrestler with his cattle prod, and if he prods them enough then the wrestler will get a bit pissed off and start to turn towards the source of the minor irritation (they've got too much bulk to be really harmed, but they can get annoyed). If you keep on prodding the wrestler, they'll go into a bestial rage and charge straight forwards until they either hit something suitably solid or get bored after a bit. Effectively you're herding your wrestler such that they eventually shove the other one out of the arena, and thus get a traditional sumo victory! Of course, you can also prod the other wrestler and distract them if you're feeling creative...

There's a lot more possibilities that can be added to the basic concept (prodding the other handler to stun them temporarily; lures for wrestlers - I'm thinking a ham sandwich with mustard; setting the entire thing on a platform that shifts according to where the enormously fat wrestlers move; etc) but the basic idea sounds quite fun. This sort of action game with the ability to set stuff in motion but then be forced to deal with the consequences of your choices is ripe for unintended consequences and emergent gameplay scenarios IMHO.

Currently I'm in possession of a number of excess items. Excess, in the sense of "I don't need them any more" and I'd like to remove them from my household in some manner. Now, some of these I could just put on eBay, but some of them I'd have difficulty transporting, or I'm just feeling lazy. Any reasonable offer will be accepted, prices start at 1 "beer" (or equivalent). Note that I may well accept offers well below the actual value of goods, especially if someone's willing to turn up at my place and take the sodding things off my hands...

• Season 4 of Will and Grace (DVD boxset) - good condition, watched once


• West Wing DVDs - first 11 episodes of Series 1, good intro to the series


• Illyama 24" TFT (One of these to be exact) - still in perfectly good condition, it's just a lot smaller than my current model..


• Acer Aspire One A150 (512mb RAM, 120GB HDD, blue case) - the screen is buggered, as in "massive crack down the diagonal", but the rest of the system is fine. Would make a decent server


• Bog-standard white telephone. Nothing particularly notable. It makes calls, and we've got a spare one


• Signed paperback copy of "Little Brother" by Cory Doctorow. As this was accidentally sent to me after joining the Open Rights Group (I already have a hardback copy and I'm pretty sure I ticked the "don't send me one" box), this item is available on payment of a reasonable donation to them

Think that's about it. Let the bidding commence!

I'm annoyed. After putting my money where my mouth is to some extent, earlier stating that I'd vote for candidates opposing the Digital Economy Bill Act, which due to public statements to that effect easily gets me voting for Jonathan Fryer, I've still been considering voting tactically.

Given the state of play in my local seat, a LibDem vote will almost certainly be wasted. And I'm desperately hoping that against predictions, the Conservatives don't possibly get enough seats such that they can ignore the popular vote once again. Voting tactically would be the right thing to do, because I want First-Past-The-Post to be a distant memory, and this may be the last chance for a long time to get rid of it, and voting tactically for Labour would be the use of my vote most likely to get that.

I even wrote an earlier version of this post saying I was going to vote tactically, arguing for rational choices over my conscience, and I found something useful out of that: I can't stomach it. No matter what the arguments, it would result in something I just can't do. If I vote for the LibDems, and it's wasted, I can live with that, even if the Conservatives get in. Life may be a lot more shit, but I'll have a clean conscience. If I vote for Labour, and they got back in, I don't know. Even if they don't get in, even if things go the way I'd like in part due to my vote, I'd still have issues that I can't resolve.

So, I'll be voting the same way I always have (barring London mayorals, where Ken has my support), and agreeing with Nick (except on Nuclear power).

In related news, what's everyone doing election night? I've got the day off afterwards, and I'd like to stay up and watch the whole silly thing. I'm considering the event at the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club. Anyone else up for that?

Still another day of work between now and then, but I will be there!

(The title is partially a wish to test Facebook's importing capabilities, as all my public entries here get automagically dragged in)

I started reading "The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fforde this morning, which so far is a damn good book. Major reason for this post would be a space larger than Twitter for this quote from it:

"They sequenced a Stella's Seacow last week. How do I even get one of those through the door?"
"Grease its sides", I suggested, "And show it a plate of kelp?"

That sums up the book a bit - little bit surreal, but considering consequences of odd actions. I'm currently being very amused.

Also, I appear to have agreed into heading along to a Maelfroth event (LARP-related pub meet) this evening, which sounds like a fun idea right now, but over the longer term may be a really bad idea. Yes, I do want to LARP at some point, but timesinks I already have in abundance.

Additionally, I've just borrowed Maus from ICSF, which looks good, and something I've wanted to read for a bit.