Category: diary

At work, and playing PSO in my spare time. Have just bought three Michael Moore books, TV Nation, Downsize this and Stupid White Men, for £16 from HMV. Which can’t be a bad thing for such good reads. Reminds me I should find a dvd of Bowling for Colombine

sorry, just a phrase that came up a lot at the weekend. Not in that sense though. Good fun weekend in London, including a trip to the basement of Selfridges, which is a shrine to wasting money on electrical goods. And thus somewhere I can happily pray at.

Have owned PSO for 2 days now. got it on day of release. Was not able to buy a broadband adaptor to play it online, due to Oxford as a whole not stocking it. Have resorted to the far more sensible option of buying it online, and should have it soon. Truely great game. Deceptively simple.

Found a nice paragraph in an old book the other day: Doomed to walk the earth alone like Kane from Kung-Fu, I live my life like a slothful Michael Knight, show up, help a few people, then bugger off

And another: I got into wrestling for the same reason the “intelligensia” got into football in the post “fever-pitch” era. Nostalgic memories of childhood, mixed with the discovery that it actually had got a lot better in the interim.

The key to the creative production of a mass of items is to let the flow of the creation be guided by a chaotic principle the world that is then filled with these items is more likely to be of artistic interest than one which is uniform or limited to a finite number of shapes. Imagine a beautiful english landscape. Now picture that landscape if it consisted solely of the shapes from the game Tetris, laid out to resemble that landscape.

Now I can’t wait for fabbers to be in general circulation. Fabbers are devices that can create things from a set of instructions. It is the future of western commericial society. You have a fabber unit at home. You download a set of instuctions to create an object. It gives you a shopping list of raw materials. You feed them into the fabber, it then creates the object.

At first, these objects will be very simple, like tetris blocks. I would imagine that, for instance, to create a fairly flat plastic fork would not take too vast a set of instructions. But for more complex items, it could take a lot longer before we get to that stage.

Also feeding into this are the problems of Intellectual Property. Is it moral to claim IP rights on the design of a plastic fork? Whilst people will claim rights, there will also be a whole structure and language there to allow people to create, for themselves, a massive variety of objects. I’d like to make a wind up radio with fork patterns all over it, coloured to just the right tone to fit in with my living room. Whom should I pay for coming up with that idea? Why should I pay for coming up with that idea?

In times gone past, if enough people wanted my wind-up radio with fork prints the colour of my living room, it would have gone into mass-production. In the 50-60’s, this item might have been made in a factory in my country by relatively poor people. Whilst making my faddish radio may not have been the realisation of all their life dreams, the nationwide desire for my radio may have helped to feed and clothe them. In the present day, the radio may well be made in an impoverished third-world country. In this country the people may have no desire to even listen to my twisted creation, but again, the meagre pennies they get for constructing it may be a difference between life and starvation for them.

Now, if I make this item in the comfort of my nicely co-ordinated living room, what happens to the person who in years gone past would have made it? they can’t afford a fabber themselves. Hmmmmmm.

I’ve felt like Rez this week. if you haven’t played Rez, the better you do, the more solid you are, the worse you do, the less solid you are. I’ve just been doing well and not, in equal measure. It’s just been heavy going at work. Evenings are fine, very chilled. But work is just, a lot of work.

More importantly, now only two days to the release of phantasy star online. Mmmmmmmm in a homer drool sense

had a very enjoyable visit to see my friends t n b last weekend. Our gaming time mainly involved playing Burnout 2, which is pure evil gaming genius. Ultra-violent and destructive in an exceedingly pleasant way.

1.012 episodes in, and I have to admit that it rules. He is part Jerry and part George, and sounds like George Steinbrenner.
Suspiciously like him. There is just a tone to it, that I love.

Away and back again, second episode just as good 🙂 Did get everything fine from tescos, it was like I had dreamt I had been shopping, woken up to find it was a dream, but all the food was there. Well, quite like that but with a fivers delivery charge.

placed my first online tesco order today. They are threatening to deliver in under 24 hours, and betwen 7 and 9pm tomorrow. It would be very handy if they did. Intrigued to try this out, as if it all works out well, it could make our food shop a hell of a lot easier than present, which involves walks and taxis.

24.02.03 More walks

Sunday walk down by the river, walked to Iffley Lock, and then Sunday Lunch at The Prince of Wales in Iffley Village, which I can heartily recommend, top-notch roast. Pretty cheap too. Fast service and the best roast potatoes bar none.

I got game

And have been taking a lot of random pics. Good fun. Also playing more Crash, GTA3 on the PC, and a bit of Pokemon.