Palfrey's life

(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.

Spoiler warning: Unless you've already completed Halo: Reach, there will be spoilers within. I'm going to spend some time wittering on about other stuff first, but there will be spoilers later on. If you're intending on playing it, I'd advise doing so before reading this. I'M NOT KIDDING HERE. I WILL BE SPOILING THE ENTIRE PLOT INCLUDING THE ENDING.

New vocab warning: There will probably be words here you haven't seen before, or at least haven't explored properly. For some of you this won't be true (congratulations, have a gold star), but for the rest of us, don't worry. They're not that scary, and they actually turn out to open whole new areas of really cool conversation (for heavily geeky values of cool), and I'll be linking to Wikipedia as appropriate and/or discussing the terms.

( Read on... )

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!

(It's a working title, but as good a name as I have for the moment)

My household does a fair amount of cooking. Admittedly most of that tends to be Alan, but that's mostly because he gets enthusiastic about it, and also because he tends to be home first (working 10 minutes up the road will do that). Last night was a bit of an exception, with me at least having the idea for what to cook, but then both of us cooking together.

A while back, Alan made casserole, and there was a whole bunch of it leftover, but mostly juices and less content, so I got some of the pork dumplings from the local chinese supermarket and added them in, and it worked pretty well. We hadn't had them in a while, so last night we made a pseudo-casserole with them in. Aside from the dumplings, everything else was just stuff we already had in, so I'll try and detail the things I think were important in the recipe as opposed to those we added in because we had things or had to replace for stuff we didn't. Quantities will be vague, alter to taste and available ingredients.

Base:
- Half a bag of pork dumplings. Not sure quite how many this was (it fed 3), and these were ones with chives.
- 3 peppers, cut into eighths. Quarter them, then chop the quarters in half.

Sauce:
- 1 carton chopped tomatoes. Tesco is doing these for 59p each and then buy-1-get-2-free, so we've got a lot of these in right now.
- Two stock cubes. We used one beef and one chicken, mainly because we only had one beef left :-(
- ~1.5 pints of boiling water
- Herbs and other flavourings to taste. We added some garlic oil (made couple of days earlier from excess garlic and olive oil), soy sauce, rosemary, and a decent quantity of red wine.

Find an oven-suitable dish, fill with base components. Mix all the sauce components together, cover base components. We made the first pint of sauce, figured it wasn't enough, and made up another 1/2 pint from water, soy sauce and red wine. It should be fairly liquid as quite a bit will boil off. Make sure the dumplings are all covered, as otherwise they'll dry up, but the peppers can stick out. Cook for ~30 mins at about 200 C (this is particularly vague, as our oven is somewhat overspec'ed and tends to cook stuff far more rapidly than expected. Short version: keep an eye on it).

This worked very well, and fed three rather hungry people. Red wine + tomato + stock = tasty. Next time, I'd like to try it either with butternut squash cubes or aubergine cubes instead of peppers.

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?

So, most of you have probably heard about the Digital Economy Bill, and how it's massively fucked up. Various of you have been campaigning, going to demos, writing to MPs, the whole nine yards. I've decided something I'm going to do about this: I will base my voting for the next election entirely on the Digital Economy bill, and how potential MPs/parties deal with it. So, my voting criteria is 3 categories:

1. What does the potential MP do? - have they publically opposed the bill? Did they vote against it?


2. What does the party do? - has their party publically opposed the bill? What was the recommendation of their leadership regarding voting


3. Existing political preferences - if there's nothing else (unlikely) I'll vote according to other issues

So, I will initially choose my vote only from candidates in category 1, proceed to category 2 if there's nothing obvious, and only then to category 3. This is more of a template for these types of voting decision than something explicit for here, given the major parties all having a position and some having some level of opposition (although I will go with actions, not words, as the words in opposition have been contradictory and rather half-hearted).

This will be my *only* criteria. If the crazy bastard George Galloway (being one of the candidates for the local seat this time around) is the only category 1 MP, then I will bite my tongue and vote for him. Who's with me?

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

I'm a "loyal" customer of Southeastern - loyal in the sense that short of learning how to drive (or taking the coach that doesn't go particularly nearby), I need to use them to periodically get to/from my parents. Today however, they've managed to cock up in two particularly bad ways.

Admittedly, the first part isn't today-specific, but I've hit it repeatedly while trying to plan things today. They've recently introduced a thing called the HS1, a high-speed rail link whose primary aim is fast Eurostar travel on the English side, but also provides domestic routes as well. Said domestic routes are more expensive than the conventional trains (which are also running, but with a reduced timetable relative to pre-HS1 times), and you need a special ticket, which I didn't have. So, I want to figure out how to get back from my parents (just north of Canterbury) to London, either via traintimes or the National rail service. Neither have any notation noting which trains are HS1, and only grepping the PDFs on Southeastern tells you which are them. If I screwed up, I'd get fined for being on the wrong train... As the HS1's go to Stratford International which is nearer home than the other London termini, I would have actually quite like to have taken one. So, that's fail number one.

Fail number two involved my managing to locate one of the remaining non-HS1 services, specifically the 15:05 from Chestfield and Swalecliffe towards Victoria. Firstly, the station announcements claimed it was only going to Whitstable (next station along). Not wanting to wait for another hour, I figured I'd get on it anyway and hope that Whistable (as a slightly larger station) would give me more options. Had a quick gander at the National Rail site on my phone, and we've got new data. Now, it's going to Faversham (an even bigger interchange station one more along), but cancelled from there on in. It dutifully turns up, and I get on. The train itself claims it's a normal Victoria service, and I'm feeling moderately optimistic. It promptly goes past Whistable, past Faversham, and proceeds to do what it was meant to do originally and go to Victoria. A nice turn of events in the end, but the level of disinformation is rather disquieting, and indicative of larger issues.

All in all, a bit of a fail day for Southeastern, but at leas I'm home now (well, until I head out again shortly!)

Update: Forgot also to mention the fail heading up on the 23rd, when they kept cancelling stations my train was going to, while we were on it. This was ok up until they cancelled the one we were heading for...

(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.

I've just finished today reading "Yellow Eyes", one of the "Legacy of the Aldenata" books by John Ringo. I've been a fan of these for a while, but I will now not be reading any more of his work, partially due to some of the main content of this book, but especially the "authorial afterword" which was several steps too far in my opinion.

In all fairness, I knew what I was getting into. The books are basically about humanity with the aid of some pacifist aliens trying to defeat another alien species (Posleen) that's invading enmass (and I mean *millions*). That a series of books written about and glorifying near-future war is written by a right-wing gun nut is practically a given. I didn't mind this, because they were *fun*, and provided they stuck to new and novel ways to kill the Posleen, I was happy to keep borrowing them from ICSF's library. Boys with toys, etc.

Yellow Eyes stepped over a line and started espousing what I would regard as bonkers opinions on certain current-day political issues. Well, I say issues, they're kinda AFAIK non-issues outside of the US, but they're still bitching. ( Cut for book spoilers )

However, the message of various bits of the book is that "rules of war" (especially the Fourth Geneva Convention), the International Criminal Court and things like various countries not needing an army any more will result in the death of humanity as a whole. I was able to skip over a lot of this until near the end, when it became much more storyline-critical.

The authorial afterword gets even more nuts, claiming that the ICC, the EU and various other things are the direct descendants of Marxism-Leninism, and has a bunch of massively flawed bits wittering on about "American national sovereignity" and so on. It's pretty much a variant of "you'll have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands", but with fractionally better use of language.

So, yeah. Nutjobs. Having looked up the co-author on this one (Tom Kratman) it looks like he may well be substantially responsible for the new slant here, but it's enough to put me off reading any more of it ever again...