Made Oota Refined Coal
Goddamn! I know I’m mocked far and wide for the frigid conditions within my flat, but all you thin skinned things should take a trip down to my folks sometime and feel true cold. I’m sitting here just now in the office cum spare room cum my old room and there’s a thick cloud of steam rising off my tea. Not just regulation steam either, but Icelandic hot springs quantities of the stuff.
I should have packed my thermal underpants!
McDowall and I were talking the other day about the phenomenon that is Facebook, and specifically about Facebook apps. More specifically we were discussing his idea that the classic game Uplink would make an excellent would make an excellent Facebook app.
I think there might be a lot of merit to his idea. The interface for the original game is 2D and fairly simple to replicate, and it could probably even be implemented in flash if the need arose. The game has a lot of depth, but is simple enough that casual players could quickly get involved. I think the game could integrate well with Facebook to allow people to assist or oppose other players. The game would revolve around increasingly higher tiers of jobs that required equipment and programs bought from within the game, and players could hack each other to steal their opponents’ hard won cash or programs.
Naturally of course McDowall could add a Paypal system for buying more in game cash, or exclusive programs and equipment and thereby increase his direct revenues. The only problem being he would have to pay some percentage of royalties to Introversion Software for making money off the back of their idea.
I’ve been saying for a long time now that history is losing its importance in the modern world. People have no need to learn about, or respect the actions of people that don’t appear on reality TV shows.
A case in point is the announcement today by the Polish authorities that someone has deliberately stolen the infamous sign Arbeit Macht Frei that has hung over the main gate of Auschwitz Death Camp since it was built by the Nazis.
In my opinion this is nothing but a blatant disregard for what is a powerful memorial to remind the world of the systematic, industrial scale evil of the Nazi regime. I can’t conceive of any good reason why anyone would want to take the sign, but I suppose holocaust deniers are too obvious a target.
This may be a high profile incident, but it seems to be part of a worrying trend. It’s only a few weeks since a student narrowly avoided a jail sentence for urinating on a war memorial. It seems like the memory of the estimated sixty million people who died in World War II is already fading away. Young people, especially those under twenty at the moment, seem to have little understanding of historically important events. Now I know, and freely admit that I have a degree in history and am therefore probably quite biased about the whole thing, but even those without my historical leanings have to admit that there’s an ongoing dumbing down of society.
I think it has a lot to do with the mentality of current generations, and by that I mean anyone not of my generation. Many of them, from the earliest age, seem unable to look beyond themselves, and most seem highly ignorant of anything that doesn’t include an opportunity for text voting.
I know of course that many of today’s kids are good people. They know a bit about history, and they’re as outraged as I am by the fading values of western society, but they’re quietly hiding out there waiting for things to get better, and all the time the lunatics are gradually taking over the asylum.
Get it sorted kids, and stop waiting for us adults to sort them out.
When it comes to weather Possilpark and Port Dundas tend to be a law unto themselves. It can be warm and sunny in the town centre, but when you climb the hill towards the Diageo brewery something magical happens. Sometimes I think it’s like entereing the zone in STALKER.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at this ominous sky I snapped today.
Sorry about the poor focus, but the wee compact isn’t the best unless it’s on a stable tripod, and Possil isn’t the best place to be wandering around with expensive equipment.
I don’t know why, but I’m SPECTACULARLY annoyed by an article that I’ve just read on the BBC News website. What makes my annoyance even more annoying is the fact that by rights the subject of the article should be very interesting. You can read it here. The gist of the article is that marine archaeologists have been studying a group of apparently man made artefacts that have been discovered off the small island of Damsey in Orkney.
The thing that specifically annoys me about the article is two quotes from two experts interviewed for the article. I can’t be sure of course if their words have been quoted out of context because of the high level and brevity of the article. For the moment though I’ll assume for now that they said what they said and that they meant what they said.
The first comment is from Sue Dawson, a geomorphologist from the University of Dundee who said the discovery is important, “so we can look to times when maybe environmental changes have been much more rapid and much more catastrophic in some instances and people have survived and adapted and it’s that adaption to climate change is one of the key things that we need to get to grips with.”
Second quote is fairly similar in content. Caroline Wickham-Jones said “The really interesting thing about this bay is the stories relating to things under the sea and sea-level change. Our ancestors were dealing with similar problems to ourselves and we’d like to see how they coped with it.”
Now I’m not an archaeologist, and I’m certainly not a geomorphologist. In fact as a historian I generally spit on archaeologists, much the same way as they spit on Channel 4’s Time Team program, but even I can see that the answer is fairly obvious. Early man when confronted by rising sea levels pulled up sticks and MOVED SOMEWHERE ELSE. It was NO BOTHER to him what so ever. It might seem incredible to us, living here in the future, but he didn’t have to inform the land registry, or close his account with the Gas Board, and he definitely didn’t have to fill in Form 27b/6. If his house was in danger of getting flooded he didn’t have to worry about insurance premiums, or his plasma TV getting wet.
Long term rising sea levels and climate change are an issue that will plague generation after generation of humans, but only because so many humans are short sighted and greedy. It’s the thousands upon thousands of people that when given the choice between buying a four bedroom house in a new development on a reclaimed flood plain, or a smaller urban semi-detached in the suburbs chose the big house because it’s big. It takes as special kind of stupid to build houses on historic flood plains, diverted river courses and reclaimed land and then wonder why people complain when their up to their armpits in smelly brown water. It’s not like most of these people in their identikit George Wilson Homes specifically need good fertile land like that.
The Work seems to be suffering from a case of internet flakey-shakey-connection-itis lately, which wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that much of my job revolves around two web apps. Honestly though that’s not a problem either as it’s left me plenty of time to float about reading Armageddon by Max Hastings while getting paid for it. The Work’s front line IT has been outsourced to a call centre in Portugal which tends to remote desktop first and asks questions later. The end result is that the majority of people in the office can’t get onto the internet. The retards across the hall are in a serious flap because they can’t get on the Hello Magazine site, or check up the latest shoe prices on Ebay.
All in all this would be a fine winter’s day if it wasn’t for one, single solitary fly in the ointment, and that fly is the phrase “the internet is down”.
No, you cretins, the internet is not down. The internet does not go down. The express, designed purpose of the internet is NOT TO GO DOWN. The internet was designed to maintain interconnectivity in the face of a nuclear war it doesn’t choke because you’ve looked up too many pairs of Prada shoes.
Though I might.
Lately I’ve had an idea about a TV show, but this time it’s not one of my usual ideas where I bang on about screen writing, character and plot development. It’s actually an idea that I had a while ago when I was working late night in a call centre, but it’s been rattling around on my mental backburner since then.
The root of the idea came while I was watching reruns o f Weir’s Way late at night on STV. It really captures the landscape of Scotland and the Scottish people in the early seventies when it was filmed. It also is highly educational, and it’s readily apparent the affection, and knowledge that Tom has for his subjects. I think I learned as much about the history of Scotland from watching Weir’s Way as I did doing my degree.
I think it would be a good idea to follow in Tom’s footsteps, and see the places that he saw and tell stories like he told. A simple and straightforward show where one man and a bobble hat tell the story of Scotland and its people.
I know that Neil Oliver has already done a very successful series that covers similar ground, but for all of his enthusiasm I think he lacks some of the pathos that Tom injected into every show. Not that I could do any better, I’d probably do worse in fact, but it’s an idea.
More than anything else though I think that we need more television series devoted to the history and people of Scotland. Maybe, just maybe, recent generations might rediscover some pride in their nation that goes beyond the twee Braveheart bullshit that we trot out for the American tourists.
It seems that the occasional bouts of importing and exporting that I’ve done on this blog due to various problems has created some unwanted duplication of the articles. I’ve had a trawl through and sorted them out now, but it’s cut down my post count a bit.
Ho hum I guess I’ll have to write more posts to make up for it.
I love a good zombie game, and I also like to see what people have been up to with the google maps API out htere in internet land. What could be better though than to combine the two like the wizards at Class3Outbreak.com have done. I don’t know if you’ve seen this doing the rounds on bloggin sites, but it’s pretty cool. It’s basically a simulation of the effects of a zombie outbreak in Washington DC as seen from the birds eye view provided by Google maps.
You can’t control the zombies or humans directly, but you can manipulate settings such as number of civilians, number of zombies. Prevalence of armed civilians and infection rate. It’s really interesting to leave it running and watch the mayhem the develops. In an odd way it reminds me The Game of Life as it’s left running for the player to be an observer, and not a direct participant in events.
Today is one of those kind of days that I like to call nowhere days. A nowhere day is a day that’s the same length as a normal day, but seems to be completely devoid of simulating activity. You kind of get up in the morning, and you spend the day picking at random activities, but you never quite manage to find something that holds your interest for long. Normally what happens is you end up poking, poking and poking at various things, in my cases computer games and the internet, until eventually it’s time to go to bed.
I wouldn’t mind so much if this was a work day, and I was only feeling kind of meh because I’d, for once, managed to complete all the mundane tasks the Boy Blunder had come up with, but the fact that today is Sunday and I’ve spent most of it mooching about makes me sad.