Palfrey's life

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.

So, I'm currently 3 episodes behind on Doctor Who, and I'm wondering if it's worth it anymore. To give some background, one of the changes I've been making over the last few years is to give up on TV series when I'm just not enjoying them anymore, rather than continuing out of sheer stubborness. That's not to say I won't watch some things out of stubborness (Gilmore Girls Season 7, House Season 8, etc) but I've only got so much time, and if a series isn't fun anymore I should stop.

Series I have given up on:

• Dexter - gave up after realising I had all of Season 4 on my server, and no interest in watching it.


• Big Bang Theory - somewhere in the middle of Season 6, I was no longer having fun. I possibly should have given up a season earlier.


• Heroes - Season 3 I think? It was just repeating the same old stories and wasn't any fun anymore.

There's probably a couple more, but Doctor Who looks like it's likely to join them. Peter Capaldi is fairly decent, but I suspect I was watching the Matt Smith run out of sheer stubborness, and now it's just not fun anymore. There's some entertaining bits in there, but there's so much good TV out there these days and I don't have enough time to watch it all, so some things have to go. The only reason I think I'm watching now is the long history with the series, and I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't watch a new series with the same sorts of stories, which is always a sign you should stop watching something.

I suspect there will be a fair number of comments along the lines of "No! You must! It's brilliant!" and probably something about "All British sci-fi fans watch Doctor Who!!!", and I think I now need to group those under the opinions on other series I don't like e.g. Supernatural, in that my preferences differ from others and that collectively we watch different things, and Doctor Who is now about to get grouped under "stuff I no longer watch".

End of a (personal) era. C'est la vie.

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.
  
  

WARNING: Spoiler alert. I'm specifically spoiling about things in 2x22 ("New York"), but may well jump around elsewhere. I'm not specifically intending on spoiling other earlier episodes, or touching on big plot items, but I'm also making no effort to not do so if it serves my point. You have been warned!

So, I've been curious for a while about the notion of the real world behind Glee. Or, in other words, what actually happens, away from all of the flights of fancy. It seems to me like a fascinating discussion within the diegetic world of Glee, and most probably in other series. There's probably a good word for what I'm talking about, but I don't know what it is yet. Feel free to enlighten me!

All of Glee is (fairly) realistic, but not connected. This is very much in the mainstream musical tradition from which it draws, but I'd like to explain further what I mean (again here with the lack of vocabulary, being a non-scholar in this area). It's realistic in the sense that pretty much everything *could* happen (in the sense that given sufficient planning and orchestration making all those singers and dancers appear out of nowhere could be done), it's just not connected (e.g. if someone breaks up with someone else, the chance of them having a bunch of their mates around to do a dance number about it implies a level of narcissism not present even in the average teenager).

This implies to me that the diegetic elements are split: there's what actually happens, and there's the flights of fancy and musical theatre emphasis. Both are needed to build the full story, but I'd still like to see them occasionally split and know what the darn term is for the split!

( spoilers... )

Thoughts anyone?

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... )

So, I'm in the market for a new flatmate. Actually, I should have tried to locate one quite some time ago, but my (limited) efforts have failed so far, partially because there wasn't that much pressure to locate one, but I'd still quite like to pay less rent...

So, here's the situation. I'm currently short one flatmate, and paying all the rent. This is bad, but given that's possible, I'm willing to be flexible on the level of rent paid. The only restriction here is "no randoms". Ditto for no friends-of-friends: if I haven't met you already, don't bother. There's more uncertainty in that sort of situation than I'm comfortable with, and I'd rather live alone than with someone I don't know.

Officially speaking, the rent is £617 pcm and utilities are ~£50, but quite frankly at this point, make me an offer! Preference will be given to folks who I know better/willing to pay more/move in sooner, but lower offers may well work!

It's in Bow, just around the corner of Bow Road station (prod me for full address if you don't already have it) and the transport links are great (DLR, H&C, District within 2 minutes, Central 10 minutes, many buses inc. 24 hour). It's a lovely flat!

There is the little issue that I'm probably moving out in mid-September when the rental agreement finishes as I'm intending on buying somewhere, but the estate agents we're dealing with seem pretty happy with letting me/whoever else stay on for as many years as you'd like, so you could stick around for as long as you like after that.

Um, help!

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... )

Tonight I was at the launch thing for Soho!, a board game about being editors at a small London literary magazine. I'm not entirely sure if I managed to piss some people off slighty, but it was pretty much that or shut up entirely and I'll pick honest criticism over that any day.

The core mechanic was not bad. You're wandering around London, trying to track down a bunch of writers in pubs, while navigating via various means of transport - walking, boris bikes, taxis - and that basic idea of switching between different methods was pretty good. There's a trade-off in that there's a continuum between slow methods that can go anywhere (walking) through to fast methods which will run into the one-way system and more obstructions (taxis) with bikes as a middle option.

The problem was that there was all this other crap: lots and lots of extra rules tagged onto this mechanic; overly complicated methods that take many turns to switch between transport modalities; an awful lot of board changes without sufficient player moves inbetween; etc.

I had a bit of a chat with the author, and he admitted that it's entire playtesting was him and his girlfriend repeatedly going over it again and again. It's possibly quite funny to readers of Smoke (the literary magazine this is being done off the back of), but it's not worth it for the rest of us. Given the cool shit going on with boardgames in London, this was somewhat disappointing...

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?

Today has been a day of ups and downs:

( Read more... )