Sorry about the lack of posting yesterday, but I didn't get back from Hallowhedon until about 3 in the afternoon, and have been slowly going down with some kind of flu-like bug that fortunately didn't really kick in until I got home.
As of now I'm running a pretty high temperature, and have lost my voice. So my real focus (seeing as every joint aches, and typing this is quite painful) is on getting well again, before providing a run through of what happened. So that will probably be Friday before I can do that.
But sufficed to say, Hallowhedon was quite probably the most fun thing I've done in my entire life, with highlights including:
Robin Sachs and Tony Head performing a hilarious live commentary on the Buffy episode 'Band Candy'
Alan Tudyk performing his world famous stripper dance
The guests riding the mechanical rodeo spider
The various other attendees who I met throughout the event, who I'm really going to miss until the next con.
But anyway, that's only a sampling, of the fun and wacky events of Hallowhedon, look out for the next post where I detail it in full.
Not too much of a post today, I'm afraid, for you see I am off to Hallowhedon at The Thistle Heathrow. So, right now I'm busy packing for that as I have to leave later today and packing is not something I do with enough time to spare. Should get back on Monday and be able to post something about it then (if not, then I'll have something up on Wednesday).
Have a great Halloween everyone, and I'll view the stats of your visits later.
What can I say, Fallout: New Vegas comes out today (it has Felicia Day in it, fanboy squeal!) so I'm rather distracted (on a similar note I wouldn't hold your breath for Monday either). BTW, does this technically count as a post?
You know, looking at that I wonder how people could have ever thought that Zardoz was going to be a weird movie, what possible reason could they have had for thinking it might be strange? /sarcasm
Normally I wouldn't post on a Saturday, because it doesn't follow the schedule I laid out, but the world lost a great man today. Rest in peace Benoit Mandelbrot, you will be missed.
Just when I thought it was safe to do various activities, that Dolph Lundgren, David Hasselhoff and various others could harm me no more, this happens!
Just six glorious hours of Tesla coils playing various pieces of music from the original trilogy (with an occasional cut away to Jar Jar Binks being tortured ala Hostel). You could even have had it as a 'Battle of the bands' style series with the Emperor's Sith Lightning Musical Tesla coils vs. well... this:
Lucas seriously, you've got your whole '3D Unobtanium Plated Ultra special re-release' thing that you're planning, don't squander this opportunity, stop raping the franchise and give us the prequels we should have been given long ago, oh and more Itchy, because seriously the guy is a fucking legend:
A very brief update, because as of today, I'm back at university. This means I won't be able to update with the ridiculous frequency of the second half of September (an event which I will admit has left me with few posts left in my idea bank). Instead, the plan is to go for a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule on posting, because this gives me the most freedom in planning and publishing.
Ahh cyberpunk, what a genre, never before have writers found a medium where they can be so accurate about certain areas and yet so utterly wrong about them at the same time. Now this is not to say that I don't like cyberpunk, I like cyberpunk as a genre; Snow Crash is one of my favourite books, and I have this strange tradition of reading Neuromancer any time I'm going to an airport (don't ask, even I don't entirely know why, it seems almost Pavlovian:- airport = Neuromancer (I don't even have to be flying, I just keep a copy with me, and read it whenever I get the time)).
But that only covers books, what about films? Well, I've got to say, I just haven't found that many out there, perhaps I've just been looking in the wrong places but to my mind the only ones I could think of, off the top of my head were:
Keanu still remembers Johnny Mnemonic, to his everlasting regret
Cypher
Blade Runner
and Johnny Mnemonic, but the less said about that cinematic abortion the better.
But aside from this, I can't actually remember any others that I've seen, I'm sure there are and if I was reminded of them I'd think: "how could I forget that it's so obvious". But based upon this, you can imagine my surprise when I came across the following:
This almost seems too good to be true, a film of a genre I want to see more of, based on a short story that I enjoyed, by an author that I like and starring not just Christopher Walken; but Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe! What could possibly go wrong? Oh... it has Asia Argento in it as well... that's nice I guess, I'm sure that everything will continue to be fine though I mean how could it not?
So naturally with these thoughts in mind, I tracked down a copy of New Rose Hotel and eagerly sat down to watch it, and after an hour and a half, what can I say? Aside from possibly "can I have those 90 minutes back please?" Ok, that's a bit harsh, it isn't that bad, certainly not Johnny Mnemonic bad (sorry Mr Reeves but honestly, what were you thinking?), but it's just forgettable, don't get me wrong Walken gives a brilliant performance and is probably the only thing you'll want to see of this film. But Asia Argento can't act her way out of a paper bag, and as for her singing voice, I think I've found the background music for my own personal hell. As for poor Willem Dafoe, he really does get the short end of the stick, in most of his scenes he's stuck with Argento and any talent he displays just gets swamped by her inability to carry a scene; and in almost every other time he's with Walken who just dominates any scene he's in regardless of the situation.
Dafoe realise that he's stuck with Argento for another scene
As for the plot, well I'm not going to give you a synopsis here, my advice is to go and read the original William Gibson short story, go on I'll still be here while you do it... Done that? Good, we can continue. Adherence to the plot of the book is one area I can't fault this film on, it has it pretty much down to the letter, but this unfortunately is a bit of a problem because (being a short story) the plot runs out quite quickly, meaning that the director spends the last twenty minutes of the film showing us scenes from the start of the film but shot through a sort of filter, a "memory mist" if you will.
But in general, having been exposed to many bad movies in my time, I try and make a habit of taking away something positive from everything I watch, especially some kind of lesson that I can apply to future cinematic endeavours (for instance, Transformers 2 taught me that Michael Bay really needs some Ritalin), so here are the things New Rose Hotel taught me:
Asia Argento should never sing, it just sounds painful,
Any film with Willem Dafoe in it should carry a warning if it is going to feature him naked and thrusting
Run out of stuff to show in your film? Just show us the first half of the film all over again with a "memory mist" over the top of it
Not even Christopher Walken can rescue a bad movie
Well, that's it New Rose Hotel, watch it if you really want to, but in order to save you 85 minutes that could be put to better use, I present "The Best of Christopher Walken in New Rose Hotel" (because lets face it these are the only parts that you'll care about / ever mention).
Adverts, love them, hate them, they're a part of life. But it's so very rare these days to find an advert that has actual honesty in it, not a morass of marketing spin dreamed up by men and women drinking perfect mineral water from perfect bottles and wearing very small sunglasses. This advert, however, chooses a different path, the path of truth...
Seriously, wouldn't you buy something from this guy just to say that you had? I mean the guy mentions stains in an advert that isn't about cleaning products! Stains that look suspiciously like old blood as well!
Gather round lads and lasses! Gather round! Ye've been shanghaied for the latest post of the Ringworldian! In the far far blogosphere! Remember on a pirate blog, on pirate networks, on a pirate day ask no questions. Believe only what ye read. No! Believe half of what ye be readin', and an extra tot of rum for the first of ya landlubbers to tell me what I've been quoting!
Arrr! That pretty much be all I got for Talk Like a Pirate day, there be nay much more that... ARRRRR!!! Off the port beam a huge distracting thing!
I can't actually introduce this one... words can't even begin... just watch...
That must stand as one of the most bizarrely awesome things to occur on a TV series, and I say that having seen a lot of weird TV, I mean a lot. In fact I will go as far as saying, that is exactly what is needed for the next Batman movie; David Nolan if you ever read this, please, please include a Bat surfboard somewhere, I will pay you.
So, Lair of the Shadow Broker has been released, I've played it, what do I think?
Overall it's pretty good, the level design and story follow Bioware's usual highly competent standard; there are, however, a few niggling little problems that I have, which (for better or worse) I'm going to focus on (naturally there are spoilers ahead, so be warned):
Firstly, conversing with Liara, now I expected that this was going to be a core factor of the game, especially for certain players who romanced her in the first game, and then hooked up with another character in the second game. Now I had thought that there could have been some interesting tension that could develop during the missions if you brought along your new partner while on a mission with your ex; Bioware, however, seems to have disagreed with this idea, never really mentioning it apart from one small mention if you follow a very particular conversation path, in my case it was Liara telling me that "her sources have told her [I] have been trying to get into Tali's helmet", um Liara update your sources! I've been inside that helmet!
Secondly, the fight with the Spectre working for the Shadow Broker. Now it wasn't a case of this fight being difficult, or easy, it was simply this: right at the start of the fight she tells me "You've never faced anything like me before", overconfidence in her abilities I can expect, but she knows who I am, I'm Shepard! I've beaten a Spectre before, I've beaten a Geth Colossus pretty much single handed, I killed a frakking Thresher Maw on foot! hell, I got spaced and it just slowed me down, you would think that she would know this already.
Thirdly, Bioware has made a big point of having your actions in the Universe have consequences down the road. So why exactly does the Shadow Broker and Liara seem to be six months behind with their information? I know they had to have dialogue available for people who want to beat the Shadow Broker, before destroying the Collector Base, but would it have been too much trouble (given that they know that most people playing will have already done so) to have some dialogue for people who do this afterwards? Hell they do make a tiny reference what with the Broker saying that he'll be able to use the Normandy to pick over the remains of the Collector Base after he kills me, but that's it, apparently despite finding out that I did that, no one found out that I severed all connections with Cerberus and told the Illusive Man where to stick it, even Shepard seems to forget this, he also seems to forget that the Council reinstated his Spectre status!
Fourthly, where exactly where the Renegade interrupts? didn't see a single one, saw plenty of Paragon interrupts, which seem to have been redefined as "Make strange overtures towards my creepy and Psychotic ex, while my shotgun armed current girlfriend stands nearby, ultimately forcing you to reload the game to ensure you haven't frakked things up" interrupts, but I suppose that doesn't role of the tongue as easily
Finally, why exactly did they have to take out my other team member for the start of the final confrontation? I know it must happen no matter who you take in there with you, but it's a bit disconcerting to see Tali get mocked by the Shadow Broker (without Shepard coming to her defence), followed by her being crushed under a beam (meanwhile Shepard is pushing the Asari with the Biotic powers that could block such a beam from crushing her! out of the way, as opposed to the Quarian in the fragile environmental suit).
So, that's some thoughts on Lair of the Shadow Broker, some of you might be thinking that I didn't like it, given that I've focused on the negatives, but that's not true, I enjoyed it, I'd like to see more expansions like this, and it was good to be back in the Mass Effect 'verse again.
I feel slightly ridiculous for the title of this post, 4chan doesn't need defending, hell it'll probably lash out violently at something else in the near future, and I hope I am never on the receiving end of what can be done.
But on to business; some people may have heard the story of William J Lashua, but for those who haven't, read the (probably most accurate portrayal) of the events here. All well and good right? After all this isn't the first time that anonymous has done something generally decent as thesewillprove [NSFW].
General Sherman: Father of modern trolling
Granted this is the first time that the reason for doing this was a human being, and the first time that the actions taken don't involve tactics that would make William Tecumseh Sherman proud. But apparently this isn't good enough for some people, case in point gawker.
In an article recently published, they asked the question "Is 4chan Turning into Internet Good guys?", now lets get a couple of things straight:
I regularly visit 4chan, I consider myself a /b/tard, and on occasion a /d/eviant (but the less said about that in public the better).
The person who wrote the gawker article is a self aggrandising douche nozzle.
The author in question is a man who criticises anons for their actions against Jessi "You done goofd" Slaughter, claiming that they had gone to far; but when faced with decent reasonable behaviour starts to throw his toys out of his cot, claiming that anonymous has gone soft. Now I'm not going to look for reason in all of this, down that path lies pointlessness and fail. What I am going to comment on is this strange perception that anonymous has a sense of morality, and that there is some organising force behind it.
Lets get something clear, anonymous doesn't have a sense of morality, it is neither moral or immoral, in all likelihood, it's probably one of the purest illustrations of amoral behaviour available. If you had to describe anonymous' sense of right and wrong in simple terms, I would suggest Alpha from Dollhouse as a good starting point:
"There are many parts of me who know that this is wrong, none who care, and six they just find it funny!" - Alpha (A Love Supreme)
We are talking about a group that is an event horizon for 'The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory', and people are trying to ascribe Black and White morality to it. But this segues nicely into the second part of the second part of this discussion...
...See, told you it did. Carrying on from our last area of focus, it is inevitable that we should deal with the question of organisational structure; after all, many people (who don't know any better) have compared anyone associated with anonymous as being like the average German citizen in the build up to Nazi Germany, naturally there must be some charismatic individual(s) controlling everything from the shadows - there must be a leader!
Such a conclusion is naturally fallacious. We are dealing with an organisation where no one knows who anyone else is, every single exchange of information purportedly comes from the same identity. Oh granted there are individual names that appear amongst these - case in point moot, but he's far to busy making soup to be a charismatic leader. So in essence, this is a group organised like no other in the history of civilization, an organisation where there is no clear leader, no followers, a grouping that even transcends mob dynamics, to be even closer to a more pure sense of an emergent system, like a swarm or a flock.
When you see starlings, or even bird behaving like this, you're seeing how anonymous is organised, in a flock there are no leaders, and no hard coded behaviour about what to do in a given situation, instead we get simple rules like:
Fly close to your neighbours
But don't crash into them
Follow the general path of your neighbours
and these simple rules can generate the behaviour that was illustrated above, a clear demonstration of the power of emergent behaviour in complex systems. If we apply similar rules as these to the actions of anonymous, we can clearly see that the behaviour becomes much simpler to understand (although probably still beyond the average Fox News pundit), there is no leader, it's simply a series of very basic social rules being expressed by a large collective.
In conclusion, happy birthday Mr. Lashua, hope you enjoy the cards.
It's already been mentioned (here in fact) that Christopher Lee can sing, quite well actually, much better than you would think. But if the last video of him singing was awesome, then him singing an earworm about the joys of alcohol is crowning moment of awesome, and potential fetish fuel as well, observe...
I may need to go have a cold shower, and a couple of very strong drinks after watching that, the only problem is what to choose what do you recommend Mr. Lee?
Why can't we have pizza adverts where a huge man wearing clothes way to small for him dances about, has a seizure and destroys somebodies home all because the pizza is so good.
Wow, what a wild series of accomplishments I've made on here in that time. I think it's exactly the right time to reflect on the many wonderful and splendid things I've done here such as...uh...um...well there's...Here have some George Takei being awesome to distract you while I think of something!
In all seriousness though, I will admit, I haven't posted very much on here, this will be my 31 post to this blog, implying a post rate of 0.59 posts per week. Now as to why this is, there are a number of reasons I could drag out in order to explain this, but ultimately, they're all going to be excuses when the real reason would ultimately be laziness. With the ending of the exams shortly though, I intend to become more active with my posting (whilst still intending to keep the same level of quality content). Possible posts forthcoming include
More "I'm Batman!" and "Holy Shit Christopher Walken!"
A planned trip to London Film and Comic Con 2010 (Shatner is a guest)
My thoughts on the portrayal of Artificial Intelligence in films over the years
I enjoy the Mass Effect series, I mean really enjoy it, its probably safe to say that I've sacrificed a few percent of my final mark for my degree with the time I've spent on it. So, it may initially seem surprising that the idea of a favourite thing of mine being adapted so that more people can enjoy it, is what I am officially considering my front runner for Worst Adaptation idea of the early 21st Century.
Allow me to expand on this; no film adaptation of a Video game has ever been a real success, and it would be naively optimistic to assume that Mass Effect will do any different. But in the mainstay, games that have been adapted already have had a major advantage over Mass Effect: none of them had as much freedom of choice available.
Everyone who plays Mass Effect plays the game in a different fashion, Choice is a major part of the game, and personally it's one of the big draws of the game, that for once your actions have definite consequences in the games' Universe. Whereas the vast majority of games that have been adapted have single linear path from start to finish, that can be easily adapted into a script, event A neatly ties into event B. This is not the case of Mass Effect, which follows more of a tree structure with the plot, from even before the game begins, you're faced with choices that will govern how the game turns out: what gender do you choose? what background? what specialisation? All of these allow you to tune the game to yourself, and how you want to play, and the choices become more and more frenetic after that:
Do you go to Feros or Noveria first?
Or do you go and rescue Liara?
Do you kill the Rachni queen or not?
Do you leave Alenko or Williams behind to die?
Do you do all the side quests?
Do you romance Ashley/Alenko or Liara?
Or do you bide your time, hoping they make a certain Quarian mechanic romanceable in the second game?
Do you let the Council die, or sacrifice the Alliance fleet to defend them?
These are just some of the choices available, and everyone I've spoken to had a differing set of responses, to these questions, meaning that everyone has a different version of what the "true" Mass Effect story is, the odds are dramatically against the screen playing managing to make anyone happy, I predict many comments of "They clearly don't understand the real story of Mass Effect" being made when the film gets released (hell I'll probably be making them as well).
Then there are the actors, who are they going to cast? If they don't have the original voices, then there will be a lot of complaints made by people, and they'll be right. Every character already has a voice associated with them. There's also the problem with how the cast will look, in general, with the majority of the rag tag bunch of misfits that you put together being aliens, CG is going to be extremely prevalent, but for the humans how are they going to work on that? Will they use actors who look vaguely like the characters? Or will they decide to use CG for the humans as well? If so, will they just use the CG from the game? Carrying on down this avenue of exploration, will they reason that most of the film has therefore been built for them already? If so, why not just use someone doing a play through of the game as the film?
This is something I can really see them considering, and the reason it won't work, is that the story of Mass Effect is one that needs to be interacted with, in order to get the most worth out of it.
Wow, it has been a long time since I wrote anything here, 20 days to be exact. Truly this is a testament to just how busy my existence has become! (I truly enjoy kidding myself don't I).
Truth be told, I have a massive back log of things that I want to post about, but haven't really had the motivation to write them up. Instead, I've been busying myself with the following things:
Learning the Android API (which is actually very nice, and generally a pleasure to work with),
Huge tracts of University work, which unlike last term feel more soul destroying than fun challenges to improve my knowledge
Playing Just Cause 2, and both Mass Effect games (which have rapidly become new favourite games, despite trepidations I had about them before playing).
So ultimately an average day over the past 20 days or so has consisted of getting up at about 6:30, getting to Uni for 8:30 lectures from nine until one, then staying on campus until about five either drinking in Falmer bar, or working on various projects, getting home about 7 and then gaming/learning Android until roughly 3am, before collapsing in bed ready to start it all over again in three hours time.
Hopefully, however, this should change over the next couple of weeks as I head into the time of year where exams loom their ugly heads; freeing up more of my day to spend on other things (such as this place).
Carrying on our trek through the landscape of Christopher Walken's non-acting talent, we now come face to face with what could be described as the creme-de-la-creme of Walken's talent; his ability to entertain children:
I don't know about you, but if I want to build a time machine and hire Christopher Walken to go back in time and read me the Three Little Pigs as a bed time story.
We saw evidence of Walken's singing ability previously, and we even got a sneak preview of his dancing abilities there in. But those minor moves pale into nothingness in comparison to what we have here, Christopher Walken proving he is as much an epic dancer as he is an actor/singer:
I don't think Walken even realises he's being filmed at some points, it's just what he does when he thinks he's alone in a hotel lobby.
In what is going to become a series of periodic funny 1960's Batman clips, here is what is considered by many to be one of the funniest Batman clips in history:
I miss this method of problem solving by Batman, being able to say "Quick Robin! Hand me the appropriate piece of Applied Phlebotinum for this scenario!", and knowing that it would be an extremely specific solution to the current situation.
Contrast this with the modern "Dark Knight" who's answer to being grabbed by a Shark would probably be to yell "WHAT ARE YOU!" at it in a gravelly voice, before hitting it with a batarang.
They laughed at me when I suggested it! Laughed! LAUGHED! AHH HA HA HA HA!! AHH HA HA HA HA!! (This may have had something to do with being in clown college at the time), but now, now I'll show them, I'll show them all!
Fuelled by nothing but my genius, and the desire for a convenient way to create a single serving of good coffee. I Christopher Dykes have created:
The Coffee Bag!
you see, it's like a tea bag, but instead of tea, it contains...
COFFEE!!
mwwahahahaha! mwwahahahaha! YES!! I'm terribly sorry, I'm getting a bit carried away here, it's the Mad Scientist in me, that thunderstorm we had last week brought about an evil genius relapse, where was I? Oh yes! the coffee bag.
Testing began at 11:18 01/04/2010, and initial results did not indicate any coffee like fluid being generated:
After approximately 40 seconds, a spoon was used to agitate the water and increase the interaction between the coffee and the water:
This, most probably combined with the increased thermal potential of the water, led to the degeneration of the sealant on the bag:
By 11:20 the loss of bag integrity, resulted in the combination of coffee grinds and water in an unregulated environment, producing a beverage unsuitable for human consumption:
Results: Inconclusive.
Conclusions:
A larger amount of coffee is required in the bag, to produce the correct effect,
A better sealant, which is not as affected by increased thermal activity will need to be discovered.
Christopher Walken is awesome, we all can agree on that one. But there are a few things that the man has done that quite honestly not too many people have seen. Sure everyone knows about the man's acting talent, but did you know that he can sing? Well this clip proves it spectacularly:
Wasn't that awesome? Of course it was, its Christopher Walken! The clip comes from the film Romance and Cigarettes, which I haven't seen yet (I didn't even know about it until I found out about Christopher Walken singing), so I don't know if I can recommend the rest of it, although I have just seen that Steve Buscemi is also in it, so that's a double dose of awesome right there.
There are some things that every time traveller should know: how to find the toilets on the TARDIS, how to say "please don't eat me" in Morlock, were to buy a Mr-Fusion (tm). All of those things are important for the aspiring chrononaut, but lets examine another possibility, supposing you find yourself back in time, why the sheer level of knowledge that you as a modern man from a technologically advanced society possess could make you a God! or at the vary least a massive fortune.
The only problem is: how does some of that technology work? In particular, what are the basic building blocks of that tech? I mean it's all well and good to show Queen Elizabeth I the "light bulb" you just invented, but how exactly were you planning on powering it? Yeah, suddenly that Godhood and massive fortune are slowly sliding towards poverty and poor hygiene.
Well fear not gentle reader, this handy guide, found on google after about 30 seconds of work shall leap to your rescue, providing you with all of the information you'll need to bring about a technological wonderland in ages past. Containing such useful information as:
A pendulum that swings for one second has an arc of approximately 1 meter
Aluminium was once more valuable than gold
Milk is pasteurised by heating it to 99.999% of it's boiling point
Insulin can be extracted from the pancreas of dogs and pigs
You are remembering to take credit for these discoveries aren't you?
Lately I seem to be just posting amusing youtube videos, and I'm going to continue that solemn tradition here by offering some 1960's "Adam West" Batman for you:
If you didn't laugh over that, you're officially dead inside, or Christian Bale. Although other people say that the nuns are the funniest part of this clip, for me it's the ducks.
Man, I nostalgia-d (I have no idea what the past tense of nostalgia is, come on people work with me here) hard when I saw this, I haven't written anything in qBasic in years:
I'm gonna have to dig out some of my old code again (and find a copy of qBasic again), only thing is I can't remember if I commented anything.
Wow, its been ages since I last updated, things have been ludicrously busy for me, as of my last update I was supporting the protests against the cuts at Sussex University. Well, not much has changed there, Michael Farthing and his cronies are still bloated plutocrats, we're still protesting and we'll keep doing so.
Over the past 48 hours, very interesting events occurred, on March 2nd, students at Westminster Uni occupied the offices of their Vice Chancellor, and brought the proposed cuts there to a halt. 24 hours later, a protest was held at Sussex, while the UCU voted on strike action against the uni. The full details of the ballot can be found here, but to summarise quickly, there was an overwhelming majority in favour of strike action against the proposed cuts.
Meanwhile, at the protests, the well reasoned and tactful response of the University to the peaceful occupation of Sussex house (details here), can be summed up by the following:
a ridiculous level of police presence, for at a relatively minor protest. In total, present on campus where six riot vans, thirteen police cars, policemen in full riot gear, dogs, CCTV vans, and the gigantic evidence gathering camera of fail. The mind boggles at what the cost of deploying all of this equipment cost, and how many crimes took place in central Brighton, because the majority of the police were occupied in the needless task of defending a group of people who only want protection because they refuse to be held accountable for their actions.
This, however, was not the end of the heavy handed response,as certain of the officers escalated their response culminating in violence against the protesters.
The BBC has published an article on the protest and occupation, and mentions that the police arrested two students for "allegedly" shoving a security guard. Yet there is no mention in the article about the blatant police brutality on display above, and there is nothing alleged about the massive overreaction that was displayed by the police throughout the entire incident; from bringing enough equipment to fight a small war, to provoking peaceful protesters with dogs, all the way up to violently assaulting people exercising their right to self assembly, the entire incident is a stain on the reputation of Sussex police.
I'm a student at Sussex University, I take pride in this fact. Over the last few months, however, my feeling of pride has waned as a mercenary element has made itself incredibly apparent in the form of the University's vice-chancellor Michael Farthing.
This is a man who earns over £120000 pounds a year yet claims that there isn't enough money to continue the University at it's current level. A man who is cutting my departments funding gave away one of my labs (oh yeah it's personal now) and seems to feel that he's the messiah.
I'm not going to go into a major amount of detail over this, for more information, just go here, but protests having been ongoing for a long time. What I am posting about the statement below, about what is quickly becoming a Crowning Moment of Awesome for the protests, just read on:
This is a statement from the group who have occupied the conference room in Bramber House:
We have occupied the top floor of Bramber House, University of Sussex, Brighton. There are 106 of us.
The decision to occupy has been taken after weeks of concerted campaigning during which the university management have repeatedly failed to take away the threat of compulsory redundancies and course cuts.
We recognise that an attack on education workers is an attack on us.
The room we have occupied is not a lecture theatre but a conference centre. As such, we are not disrupting the education of our fellow students; rather, we are disrupting a key part of management’s strategy to run the university as a profitable business.
They’re occupying everywhere in waves across California, New York, Greece, Croatia, Germany and Austria and elsewhere – and not only in the universities. We send greetings of solidarity and cheerful grins to all those occupation movements and everyone else fighting the pay cuts, cuts in services and jobs which will multiply everywhere as bosses and states try and pull out of the crisis.
As the entrance for people to come in has been blockaded, people will be meeting in solidarity with the occupation at 5.30 today outside Bramber House so come along and show your support!
If you know any members of the press, copy the following statement into an email and send it to them!
Contact: Solomon Schonfield
Telephone: 07906 565 925
Email: sussexstopthecuts100@googlemail.com
STUDENTS AT UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX OCCUPY CONFERENCE CENTRE
Over 100 Students occupy in protest against proposed cuts in Higher Education
After a demonstration attended by over 300 staff and students, with speeches from Simon Burgess Labour candidate for Brighton and Kemp Town, Tom Hickey of the UCU National Executive, Paul Cecil President of the UCU Sussex branch, Jon Mason of Unison and Pat Hawkes of Brighton and Hove City Council, students at Sussex University have occupied the main conference centre of Falmer Campus in protest against the proposed cuts of over 100 jobs and dozens of courses. Students have taken this action in solidarity with those staff and students who will undoubtedly be effected by these cuts. Over £250 pounds have been raised to support the strike that UCU will be balloting on in a week's time. The police have been called to eject the peaceful protesters, the second time this has happened in the last month. Students outside of the conference centre who have tried to join the occupation have so far been refused entry by the police.
Photos will follow.
The occupation continues.
ENDS
If you would like more information about this topic please contact Solomon Schonfield at the details given above.
Damn I wish I hadn't had a lecture at the time they had headed in.
Okay, I'm gonna establish a few things before I get onto the meat of this post
I do not consider myself a prude, despite using terms like "Man Reaction" (purely because it's funny), or think of myself as one to get freaked out by peoples lifestyle choices.
Although some people wouldn't think so, studying Artificial Intelligence means that you get to look at certain very strange concepts, and the idea of a sexbot is nothing new to me, in fact I've listened to several talks on whether this would be a good idea in the past.
Without sounding like I'm a sociopath in a sweater-vest the sheer complexity of correctly programming a machine to perform this task is tantalising, and certainly something I've pondered doing as a future career (usually after watching too many episodes of Dollhouse).
That established, I read an article on the Telegraph today, which, while certain parts are interesting, other parts just contain high-octane nightmare fuel. The story is about a robotic sex toy that can "communicate" with it's owner. Now, this in and of itself is not the scary part, that gets reserved for the following lines:
"a young unnamed doll with a naïve personality"
I mean wow, just wow can any one say paedophilia starter set. That's the kind of thing that Chris Hansen would want to have a talk with you about. The second is this immortal line:
"Inspiration for the sex robot sprang from the September 11, 2001 attacks, he said, where a friend died and he vowed to store his personality forever."
Yeah, that's just wrong. I mean, why would you do that? I mean I understand, he lost a friend under tragic circumstances, but what would have to go through your mind to generate that chain of logic, I mean it just seems to end up like this in my brain:
Given:
The Death of my friend,
and that I didn't want my friend to die
Then:
I will design a system to store my friends personality forever.
Therefore:
A high-tech sex toy is probably the best thing to get to work on.
IT JUST DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!
I don't believe in an afterlife but, if I'm wrong, I'm fairly certain the inventors friend is desperately trying to find some way back from the dead to kick the ever loving crap out of the guy. I mean is that what you would want as your legacy? "I died so that someone can get some virtual nooky!".
I mean, okay I haven't lost a close friend in a terrorist attack, but even I know that if you're going to improve a scientific field so that others don't have to go through your loss, you work on something like cryogenics, or the ability to download a human brain into a computer, or advanced cloning, not a sex doll!
Why is that going on holiday has made me more productive? Maybe I am actually solar-powered. Anyway, I've managed to get interested in the fields of cryptography and cryptanalysis. Obviously, I can't make much progress in learning about this field, but I've already got several books on order from Amazon, for when I return.
I have, however, managed to make some progress, having written a program to break any shift cipher like ROT13, or the Caesar cipher. Such ciphers work by moving the encoding alphabet along and wrapping round the missing characters; so the ROT13 cipher looks like this:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M
So the message "Hello, World!" becomes: "Uryyb, Jbeyq!". Decryption is done by performing the reverse. The small number of possible shift cipher's means that the decrypting can be done by brute force alone, and this is exactly what the program I'm writing does. The difference is that after that the program uses a dictionary of words to find the decryption attempt with the most words which are actually valid. This means that the system will be able to operate automatically. I'll put the code up when the program is completed.
I've gone back and updated the way that the filename formatter would work on the command line, and it turns out that on the command line, it's a lot simpler than I'd previously thought. So here's the ammended version:
perl -e 'print join("\\ ", @ARGV)' [FILE NAME]
I also feel no shame in using yet another "diff" based pun in the title.
Writing the file copying routines for the "diff for folders", I've come across the small problem of converting from the non-escaped versions of file names that readdir produces, to the escaped versions that the shell commands need. I have, however, managed to produce a imho pretty nice oneliner to do this.
join("\\ ", split(/ /, $fileName));
Which takes a file name like "some random file.txt" and converts it to "some\ random\ file.txt". Obviously, this won't work directly from the command line yet, but when I've got more time I'm going to adapt it to do so.
For me, diff is one of those utilities that, although I don't use it frequently, I would be lost without. In essence, diff checks the content of two files and compares them line by line; showing you where there are differences between the two.
Now unfortunately, diff is also one of those utilities that suffers from Unix-itis, the tendency for a command line utility to have an interface that could charitably be described as esoteric (I could cite awk and sed here but I won't). Getting diff to show he difference between the content of two directories is an "interesting" problem, as this page shows. Comparing the content of two folders though is actually one of those problems that personally occurs quite often. Therefore I've decided to write my own program, to perform this task automatically.
Now, as usual, I've decided to write the program in perl, and have managed to put together a working prototype, but there is still work that needs to be done. I've gone with a GUI for the interface design, but want to put in command line options as well. Over the course of the next few days, I'm planning to solve the few bugs and glitches the prototype has, as well as add increased functionality, and stability.
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