Hallowhedon and Illness

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.

I'm off to Hallowhedon!

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.

All kinds of creepy

Okay, I'm gonna establish a few things before I get onto the meat of this post

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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!