I think I was bitten by a bug while I was in college. There were many things being shared over DC++, ranging from episodes of Scrubs, meh, Grey’s Anatomy, bleh, and Battlestar Galactica, omg it’s really this good!!

I also found more obscure stuff, like bad quality Real Media files of most of Daria, which were awesome. And the entire series of the old X-Men animated series. I watched them all (not Grey’s Anatomy). Even though I nearly killed myself watching Battlestar Galactica for 2 days straight - with just Tim Tam’s and Nutri Grain for sustenance (bleh) — I think the most damage came from the X-Men.

There was something about the X-Men cartoon series that I found deeply connected to being 13. Anyway.. I’ve recently subscribed to Marvel digital comics, and have been delving into the infinitely deeply and richer (and more perilous) vastness of the Marvel comic collection. Given the bug, I’ve also been stopping by comic shops and picking up a Hellboy (by DC) volume or two every weekend. I’m up to six now.

They are absolutely fantastic works of art. I highly recommend them.

When buying Hellboy today, I stumbled upon a book signing with Gary Russell who’s written the new Doctor Who series.

So I had to buy it.

I’ve also been reading books with just lines of text, they’ve been emotionally intense.

~Tim.

Another thing that bothers me about wordpress is it’s code base. Every now and then I dig around the php files to see how things are done, it bothers me that things are so messy and seemingly hacked. A perfect example of this is the way wordpress implement it’s import export feature. Yueuck! Php can be a really messy language when it feels like it.

Now that I’m actually writing code and dealing with xml documents daily, these things bother me. If there is one thing I can’t stand it’s dealing with xml documents in an unstructured way. If there is one thing I love about C# it’s how I can just use xml and xpath so naturally. Note: there are plently of things about C# that do bother me.

Anyway, back to wordpress. Implicit in my frustration at wordpress and code blocks, is math markup and the web in general. Ideally I want to be able to type latex directly into the post editor and have it rendered correctly with no image links to think about. I hear there are plugins for this too.

I’m seriously considering moving to a new CMS. Something smart and well designed. Something that has a design philosphy behind it. It would probably feel like over kill just for a blog, but what the hell. I’ve no idea when I’ll get the time to look into this though, so I’ll probably just stick with this. I might have a look at drupal again and whatever else I find when I can though.

I already have one that does that I made a breakout clone with, but this one will be better. If I ever get it to that stage that is. I want it to use an embedded Lua interpreter for all the game logic. I also want it to use guichan for the gui. It’d be nice to be able to load the Gui from Lua scripts. That sounds pretty ambitious, so maybe I wont get that far. I definitely want to have the game logic for each level run from Lua scripts though. Some objects could have scripts attached to them that run when something happens. eg. triggers, or OnDeath scripts for various characters or whatever.

I’m thinking of the way nwscript does it or metaplace will do it. Metaplace got me motivated to experiment, since it’d be nice to learn Lua, so I can be ready to toy around in it when it hits open beta.

So far I’ve got a bare skeleton of an engine, it loads SDL and paints any game “objects” from a list. Objects so far are sprites and text.

Also I’ve finally noticed that wordpress has proper tag support now. So the archives have a tag cloud now. I tagged a few older posts, but there’s no way I could be bothered doing all of them.

I’d never bother with any of this just for the sake of this blog, but since it all comes free with the theme and wordpress, that’s pretty slick. Open source wins again I suppose. Now I just have to get around to upgrading Ubuntu to Gusty.

This is both a revelation and a problem in that I stay up real late surfing like I’ve never surfed before. When I first had my sudden hungering for blog-eye (late night blog reading), I was pissed with most of the feed readers and seriously considered writing my own. I made up a long list of all the things I’d want in one. When I started to realistically plan it, I culled it down a lot to the easiest bits. Then found that google reader satisfied most of them, with the added bonus that I wouldn’t have to do any work.

There is one major problem the shits me though. I can read endless amounts of posts, but what if I want to keep track of particularly good articles? Bookmarks completely suck. StumbleUpon (which I use for site discoveries) doesn’t seem suitable for individual posts.. Blogging about them myself takes too much work. I just need a new feed of good things. Oh the pain! Maybe something could be whipped up in Yahoo Pipes. But how the hell would I submit an article? Ideally it would be a single button on firefox that adds it to a feed, but I can’t be fucked figuring it out. I’m sure it could be done, just fetch the referrer or something within a pipe which will add it to the existing feed?

However it doesn’t really satisfy me, I’d want to be able to add tags too. Maybe I can work something out with wordpress here… It has some pretty groovy plugins, maybe add a new category that doesn’t show up, but is listed separately?

Anyway as an example of my dilemma I present a list of interesting articles I’ve been reading (that I could find again). The John Pilger ones are exceptional as always.

• How Truth Slips Down the Memory Hole
  ~ by John Pilger / July 26th, 2007
• Rebellion in the British Army
  ~ by John Pilger / June 8th, 2007
• The History Of (Meier’s Own Brand Of) Civilization
  ~ Gamasutra
• Resident Evil: Promoting Tolerance
  ~ Leigh Alexander - Sexy Videogameland
• On Race in Resident Evil 5
  ~ Heroine Sheik
• The Aberrant Gamer - ‘Sundering the Mind’
  ~ Game Set Watch. Silent Hill 2.
• The Aberrant Gamer: ‘Sympathy for the Devil’
  ~ Game Set Watch. Silent Hill 4.
• Racism in Age of Conan’s Hyborian Age
  ~ Destructoid
• HGS 07: Clive Barker on fat people, Jericho, and videogames as escapism
  ~ Destructoid
• The Question I Hate the Most
  ~ Save the Robot - Chris Dahlen.
  This is about “video games as art?”

It’s to blog! We blog because we can Really it’s just a scrapbook online. Who needs a good reason to keep a scrapbook?

And really I don’t give a shit that stumbleupon was bought by ebay. Google already knows everything about my habits, a lot more then SU does. Ebay probably only bought SU for the data. They want to make more intelligent targeted ads. I’m against that on principle, but in practice I don’t give a shit. It just doesn’t spark any anger. Maybe somewhere someone’s written a good article on why it’s bad, I’d possible look at it.

Taking things to their Sci Fi conclusion… There is the argument that maybe then our ads would be more tasteful. It’s not a very good one, when privacy and abuse of information are at stake. Still, imagine a world where we wouldn’t get horrible banner ads for finding high school friends (I never want to see any of them again), etc etc. Surely intelligent advertising would know that I don’t give a shit about most of the things they try to push. But… If this was possible it still wouldn’t happen, ad networks would instead use their power to push on us unreasonable wants and desires, whether we want them or not.

Imagine if an ad network knew you were against the war, and bombarded you with propaganda which pretended to be left, but was really just soft right (aka BBC, ABC), but not only that, it was targeted, specifically crafted to persuade you based on the way you think. If advertising networks became that sophisticated there is no way that they wouldn’t used politically. Explicitly or implicitly.

I guess I answered that question myself. Targeted ads are a bad idea, but as long as there is still distributed accessible communication channels, aka blogs, indie news, Democracy TV, etc, I’ll continue to ingore the ads. If ads get more sophisticated in their manipulation, I’m positive I’ll get better at ignoring them.

I still don’t give a shit about Ebay/SU though. I don’t have an emotional investment in it.

I’m heading to my homeland today. 2 hour trip, motorbike screaming just to maintain 100kph.

I’m visiting a friend I haven’t seen in maybe a year? maybe more. Should be fun.

Uni is a little crappy lately. I dropped a class, got to make it up next semester. They’re all very nice to me about it though. I’m still behind drastically in one of my classes (which I should have finished completely by now).

My sis is moving in for a few months. Haven’t lived with her in years.. Should be good.

And my big news, is that I’m committed to visiting New Zealand over the winter break. If only for a few weeks. I aiming at a month. Lots wandering around aimlessly. Maybe I can rent a bike there? Price could be an issue though.

If I like it too much, I might not want to come back.

I just need to get away. Do something on my own for a change.

I’ve been gaming too much, to avoid study. That’s why I fucked up my class so much.

But still… I’ve finished 4 seasons of Pro Evolution Soccer 6. The lynchpin of my team is Zinedine Zidane. I wouldn’t let him retire. In the game he just turned 38, even at 38 he’s amazing.

Speaking of which, I saw the movie “Zidane”, it’s excellent art movie. A full game from Zidane’s perspective, no dialogue as such. He gets sent off in the end, but creates an amazing goal. He drags his feet when off the ball, as if he’s playing with an imaginary ball. So subtle.

I haven’t shot archery in weeks. I’m getting back into though.

Ballet just finished for the term. 2 week break. I’ll miss it.

I’ve decided I need to do exercise of some sort in the mornings or I do nothing of use with my day. Cycling, yoga, or a jog, maybe even swimming, but that seems like too much.

I’ve been downloaded and purchasing tons of music lately. I bought a Sophie Koh cd, should be arriving soon. Some Veda Hille CD’s arrived. I’ve got some new Nina Nastasia albums, and I’m expecting some more Tujiko Noriko. It’s funny I think most of my music lately seems to be by women artist. That’s a turn around. I actually remember saying I couldn’t find any music by women artists. Shows how hard I looked.

For maybe 6 months it sat in my desk draw doing nothing.

I was bored of Animal Crossing fairly quickly, Mario Cart was too arcade for me. As was Sonic Rush (which I loved but was disappointed with. It’s just not the same when your not 13). Dual strike was still good, but the conversations took too much time and felt to condescending.

So I gave up on it. Most of the games didn’t appeal to me. I though about getting the browser, but I can’t justify $70 for a web browser when there is always a pc sitting in the next fucking room. New Super Mario, tempted me, but I’m too poor to risk another Mario Cart or Sonic Rush brick.

Then strangely I decided to give it another go. I bought Another Code second hand recently. In spite of the average reviews, and the short play time, I liked it. I can see why it got average reviews, since reviewers don’t think much of stories and that’s it’s only notable feature. This gave me hope that games of this ilk might add a point to me owning a DS.

A notable exception to the ‘games I was interested in owning’ front, was Phoenix Wright. Unfortunately they sold out as soon as it was released here, and no one ever ordered more. Until this weekend, when lo and behold I discovered three new ones at EB. Even though they said they’d never order it in again. It seems funny so far I still haven’t had much time with it, but I like it.

So my adventure game spark was lit by Another Code, but I never expected to find one that wasn’t targeted at otaku spin-offs. Then Hotel Dusk is released here, so now my life is interspersed with the goodness of touching again, occasionally, when I have time.

I also use it as an alarm clock since my phone navigating it’s menu.

It’s an improvement.

This is my weekly artist list.

Recent tracks list.