According to Christoph Hartmann, the president of the game-publisher 2K, the Wii Market is “Flooded with Crap” – something that Wii owner could not have failed to notice.
Archive for the 'General' Category
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I’ve been slowly reading through Frank Key’s excellent new book “Gravitas, Punctillio, Rectitude and Pippy Bags” – the third of Franks books currently in print.
Those of you fortunate enough to live within range of Resonance 104.4 FM’s feebly low-powered radio-beacon may know Mr. Key from his Thursday evening radio broadcasts. If you’ve never heard his live show, pretty much every word he has ever spoken on the air has been collected by my friend “Marvin Suicide” and posted on the Resonance FM Podcast site. Just subscribe to it with whatever podcast-downloader you use… if that application happens to be iTunes, please consider using an alternative which is not so tightly corporately controlled… but heck, you can use that too.
Perhaps it’s too late to get this book as a Christmas present, but as Mr Key informed me once, true Dobsonists do not celebrate Xmas, they celebrate on Boxing day.
This rather sinister looking observation post is in a park in North London not far from my home.
Bach allegedly discovered the healing power of the ultra-dilute flower-essences in his products via some kind of telepathic study of the medicinal affinities of the plants he studied. What I find astonishing is not the that Mr. Bach was a blatant charlatan but that people continue to buy his worthless product.
Bach’s “Rescue Remedy” consists of 50% brandy dissolved in distilled water. Other compounds may be present in negligible trace quantities. It is based on the discredited “homeopathic” theory that chemicals present in trace quantities may have some sort of healing property.
The most expensive brandy sold by Sainsbury (a British supermarket) is £24 per 1000ml. That’s just under 2.5p per ml. Bach’s 10m product by comparison is just over £1 per ml.
That’s 43 times more expensive than the most expensive brandy sold by a typical supermarket.
Podcastle, the fantasy department of Steve Eley’s Escape-Artists podcasting collective has just entered the dangerous realm of slash-fiction with it’s latest production: “Red Riding Hood’s Child“. It’s not just regualr slash… you now the kind where Batman get it on with Catwoman. It’s furry-slash. If your idea of fun is being raped by anthropomorphic man-wolves then this story is definitely for you!
In case you are unaware of them, Escape Artists are currently world’s biggest genre-fiction Zine. Their subscription is probably as big as all of the print SF magazines put together. They’ve been going for about three years and currently have three channels. The original one was “Escape Pod” wich favours science-fiction, then came Pseudopod which caters for lovers of horror. Finally came Podcastle – for people who like their swords mixed with sorcery.
I’m not sure that I cared for the tale all that much, but it do think that Steve & friends ought to exploit this – perhaps it’s time for them to open up a fourth Escape Artists channel which features ONLY slash-fiction? I’d probably subscribe to that (I just wouldn’t tell anybody).
Just think how many slash writers would love to have their story read to the size of audience that Escape Artists can deliver. I’m convinced that Escape Artists could be the driving force behind a slash-fiction revival.
Silly TV Licensing advert, originally uploaded by salimfadhley.
This was taken outside the Foundry club in Hoxton, which I believe is just within the border of Hackney council, and definitely not within the purview of Enfield, which is approximately 8 miles to the North of the location of this billboard.
Perhaps the reason for this glaring mistake can be seen by a careful study of TV Licensing’s “database”: It seems that somebody has nicked all their CPUs and memory – it reminds me of the days of ram-raiders!
After what seems like almost 2 years of hype and promises, Bibble Labs have released this very short video demonstration of their next generation RAW photography program, this is a big deal because Bibble is just about the only commerical software I’ve ever bought for Linux, and also the only fully cross-platform raw-photography processing system.
Bibble 4 has a somewhat cranky interface, but is an exceptionally good program and is my current software of choice. The Bibble people assure me that anybody who buys Bibble 4 today is guaranteed a free upgrade to Bibble 5.
This photo was recently nominated as a featured picture candidate on Wikipedia, that means it might be seen on the home page of the world’s most popular online encyclopedia – there’s a debate raging as to whether this image is suitable:
Six months ago my baby daughter was born – that’s her in the middle of the photo in the middle of all that placental matter and birth-goo. Some people found this photo rather shocking.
It is explicit and graphic, and if you click on the image you can see the whole thing in rather more detail than you might like (especially if you are afraid of the sight of blood).
Some wikipedians felt that this image violated the privacy of the mother and the surgeons, despite the fact that it was taken with the consent of all present, except of course for the baby. Other readers felt that the photo was far too explicitly graphic, and not suitable for general viewing.
I like it – when my daughter is old enough she will see this photo and understand exactly what her first few moments of life outside the womb were like.
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Samsung re-define the gigabyte, originally uploaded by salimfadhley.
It’s awful when marketroids are allowed to pervert basic science, in this case Samsung’s willful ignorance: Everybody knows that megabytes and gigabytes are based on base-2 numbering, so one KB is not 1000 bytes but 1024 bytes. Likewise 1MB is not 1000 of those funny decimal kilobytes, but 1024 of the regular sort of KB.
This is just dumb, and I’m sure that someday in America they will get sued for mis-describing their otherwise perfectly good hard disk. I hope the marketing person who thought of this gets fired.
One of the most entertaining side-shows in the three-ring circus that is the American Presidential election is that of Larry Sinclair. In case you’ve not been listening to right-wing talk radio, I’d forgive you for not knowing who Mr. Sinclair is – he’s the guy who claims that claims he took cocaine and had gay sex with Barack Obama and is demanding that the Presidential candidate address his allegations.
Normally the right-wing, fundamentalist Christian talk-radio circuit would be the very last forum that might give a voice to an openly gay drug user. These are the same people who blame “the gays” for 9/11, the New Orleans flood and the falling dollar: This is especially significant when you consider that Larry is a sort of stereotypical gay male: He acts and dresses camp and he speaks with a vaguely comical lisp in the way that only fictional gay villians allegedly speak – in short he’s the sort of person that right wing radio would find utterly objectionable, so why are the wingnuts so keen to give him the benefit of the doubt
Larry claims that a few years back he went ‘cruising’ in a limmo around the Senator’s home-town of Illinois, and just happened to have a casual hook up with a man who would later become a Senator and later-still become a Democratic Presidential candidate. If true, these allegations would hand the ‘wingers a weapon that could politcally destroy Senator Obama – after all the only thing that American conservatives hate more than a drug user is a gay drug user…
Unfortunately, Larry’s claims are flimsy and preposterous. His court case against Obama was immediately dismissed for for it’s frivolity and lack of evidence. When Whitehouse.org, an America news-blog offered to give Larry the chance to take a lie-detector test, he failed it twice. And since his torrent of allegations began he’s not actually presented a shred of evidence to back up his outrageous claims. Nevertheless, American right-wingers are noted for their tendancy to belive preposterous things for which no evidence exists. A few of them have grown rather fond of Larry’s claims and cannot get enough of hearing him dish the dirt on Obama, even if more sensible bloggers have debunked just about every claim Larry has ever made.