Year: 2006

I’ve got two tickets to the research showing of the uncut version of The House On The Edge Of The Park, tonight, at the Arts Centre, but Claire‘s discovered that she can’t go, so, I’ve got a spare ticket. Does anybody want to come along with me and hold my hand during the scary bits^*?

Here’s the blurb: this Italian (wouldn’t you know it) film was submitted for a BBFC UK cinema certificate in March 1981, but because of the scenes of rape and violence it was rejected. In 2002, in light of changing times, a version of the film was cut that did get a certificate, but this was almost 12 minutes shorter, as several scenes had been removed. Tonight’s showing is possibly the first ever UK cinema screening of the uncut version.

I’ve got these two tickets as part of a research project into the attitude of the BBFC in censoring some kinds of material. After the show, we’ll be asked to fill in a quick questionnaire detailing things like whether we approve of the kinds of things shown in the film being censored or not. It’s likely to be at least a little horrific, if the BBFC saw fit to censor it in the first place, but it’s got potential. The film could be shite, but it’s unlikely to be worse that most of the crap we watch every week at Troma Night.

If you want to come along (it’s at 5:30 at the Arts Centre) with me, leave a comment here, or give me a call. First-come, first-served.

^* Hand-holding is not mandatory.

EDIT: We have a winner! Gareth from work just shouted across to me that he wants to come.

It’s official: Bryn is a sneaky bastard.

So last night, I’m just settling down to a glass of cheap red wine and a stack of about 40 student CVs when a lady called Shelley Upton – one of the interviewers I’ll be working with – comes up to me and hands me a folded piece of paper with “Dan” written on it. “I’ve been told to give you this,” she says, with a very serious face.

Not knowing what to expect, I slowly unfold the paper. Inside is a message:

“I’m out of the game. – B”

As Claire said, and just like last year, I’m off to Gregynog to interview Computer Science undergraduates. I’ll be back on Sunday night. I guess that means that Troma Night this Saturday will be at Paul‘s.

Ele has a key to The Cottage so she can check up on Mario & Luigi, and I’ll be theoretically contactable on my mobile (although signal can be shaky out there) if need be.

Have a great weekend, folks.

Went to Gorilla Monsoon last night with Claire, as I’d indicated I would. It was all quite remarkably good, with a couple of impressive comedians including a bloke from Cardiff who didn’t tell jokes so much as rant loudly and quickly, yet was still very worthy of laughs and applause. It’s good to see Gorilla Monsoon back, but the crowd could still quite comfortably be larger if they pulled their collective fingers out and did some publicity, like getting their website populated with information…

Oh, and it’s Open Mic night – Bash The Banana or Ground Zero or whatever they’re calling it these days – on Sunday 12th November, so if you were disappointed with the fact that I wasn’t telling any jokes myself last night, come along on Sunday 12th and I’ll make up for it.

Listen up, folks, because this week’s Troma Night is a little unusual:

• 5pm: folks who want an early start gather at the Arts Centre for The Thing. Only for the brave.
• 7pm: a chance to eat, if you went to The Thing and you’re going to see the next film, too.
• 8pm: Troma Night starts, at the Arts Centre cinema, at our normal kick-off time… the first film: Severance. Which, it must be said, looks ace.
• 10pm: still at the Arts Centre, a mystery film! Wooo!
• Midnight: a vote will be taken as to whether Troma Night will end or if we’ll all retreat to the safety of the small-screen for another film!

Thanks Paul for the reminder about the films. If you haven’t got tickets yet, it’s not too late, but try to get them tomorrow daytime to maximise your chances, particularly for the stunning-looking Severance.

Things to bear in mind about this unusual Troma Night On Location:

• There’s no pizza scheduled. Don’t forget to eat, or you won’t be able to throw up.
• Please tell everybody who might not have read this blog post in time! I’ll be leaving a sign on the door of The Cottage, but I still wouldn’t want to be responsible for some fool turning up at 8 and standing outside one of the usual venues by their lonesome! Spread the word!

And finally: if you were planning to see me tell gags on Sunday night, please read the update to my earlier blog post (I’ll still be there on Sunday, mind, and you should be there too).

Sunday, 8:30pm, The Angel, for Bash The Banana, the thing that is what Ground Zero was – just about the only open mic comedy gig you’ll find this far West, without swimming. And like last time, which went really badly, and the time before, which went really well, I’ll be picking up the microphone and telling a couple of gags. It’d be great if you felt brave enough to come along and show some much-needed support, particularly after the disaster that was my last open mic session! So come along to Aber’s most… variable… comedy night. It’ll be a blast. Hope to see you there.

Note: There is a small chance that I’ve misread my calendar and Sunday night is not Bash The Banana at all, but is instead Gorilla Monsoon. It’s still comedy, and it’ll be less of a gamble on quality, but you won’t see me performing. Unlikely, but possible. Just thought I’d warn you.

UPDATE: Matt’s comment (while originally in the wrong place) below suggests that this Sunday is Gorilla Monsoon, not Bash The Banana. Amazing that he manages to stay so well-informed, despite the landlord at The Angel telling me otherwise. I’ll still be going, and you should too, but you’ll be hearing no jokes from me. Damnit, these people need to keep their website up-to-date.

You are cordially invited to come and join the worst pub quiz team ever, Bringing Up The Rear, tonight at Bar E. We’re very selective: you actually have to be no good at anything whatsoever, so you don’t make us look too bad. Hope to see you there.

At long last, my DS-Xtreme arrived today: I originally ordered it quite some time ago after it looked like it was likely to be released before the equally cool-sounding NinjaCard, but the releases of both have been delayed for an extended period.

The DS-Xtreme is a combined media loader, music player, and passcard for the Nintendo DS and DS Lite. Put simply, this means that it can load applications (for example, homebrew – programs developed by geeky Nintendo fans – and game backups – because nobody likes carrying around a dozen cartridges with them wherever they go), play music (converting your DS into an MP3 player) and, as a big selling point, integrates a PassMe solution for getting around the copy-protection problems that can otherwise trouble people trying to do these things with their new toy.

Most impressively, the DS-Xtreme is the first media loader for the Nintendo DS to fit into the regular “Nintendo DS” slot at the top of the device, rather than sitting rather clumsily in the “Game Boy Advance” port at the bottom. This removes the need to trick the device into running, for example, DS code from the GBA slot, which is usually accomplished by “patching” software backups.

The packaging itself confused me, first. I opened it and my heart sank as it looked, at first glance, like there was only a USB cable in the box. Where was my cartridge? It later turned out that the cartridge is inset into it’s own little protective cardboard bubble at the bottom, and it’s a great demonstration of quite how small this device is that I couldn’t see it at first glance! This thing is really small – exactly the size of a normal DS game, so it fits into your DS or DS Lite without protuding out of the top at all: just beautiful. It only comes in white, which is a pity, because it’d look even more beautiful against a black “Euro” DS Lite if it were set in black plastic, but that’d be purely icing on the cake.

The port in the top of the cartridge, which can even be used when the device is plugged-in to your DS, is a standard “mini-USB” port. You don’t have to use the device while it’s connected to your console, of course, andyou could just use it as a 512Mb pendrive if you really wanted. But what really makes this thing special isn’t it’s storage capacity. I drag-dropped a few game backups, software toys and music files over to it (it mounted itself just like any other pendrive, no drivers or software to install) – the two tiny tricolour LEDs on the back of it flickered to let me know it was working – and popped it into my DS. Contrary to my fears, the integrated mini-USB port is sturdy and well-attached.
My DS’s firmware is already flashed using FlashMe, but this isn’t even slightly necessary. I turned on my DS and it booted to the usual screen: the top slot registered as containing a “DS-X”. Running this, I was soon presented with the beautiful DS-X menu system. It’s entirely touch-screen operated and very slick looking, with animations between screens and full-colour prettiness. The touch screen interface is a little sluggish, and it seems to take a few milliseconds longer than it should to do anything, but it certainly gets the job done. Plus, the entire UI is defined in XML files, and apparently it’s really customisable, so I might have a go at that.

The music player plays MP3s and even Ogg Vorbis, although I’ve been advised that the latter are only supported up to a certain bitrate after which the tiny DS processor panics and starts stuttering. Nonetheless, it has all the features you’d expect in a touch-screen MP3 player, and if you don’t like it, you can always install Moonshell or something. Oh, and the little LEDs? They pulsate through different colours in time with the beat. For real.
The applications list rocks. It really does – the cartridge even goes so far as to load the icons for the games from the ROM, so if you’ve got game backups on there you can quickly identify them from their piccies. I tried some of the coolest DS homebrew on it (DSOrganise, DSDoom, and a couple of others) and everything worked fine: I was particularly impressed that I didn’t even have to switch DSOrganise version to accomodate for a different filesystem or anything. I also had a go at a few backup ROMs: Mario Hoops 3-on-3, Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2, and Star Fox Command. Everything ran smoothly, the savegame EEPROM write time was very acceptable (and the savegames are stored seperately on the card so you can backup/copy/trade/hack/whatever them easily), and I didn’t have to do any creepy ROM patching. Wonderful.

Highly recommended if you want a really easy-to-use (just works!) media launcher for the DS without any invasive surgery or sneaky hacks. The only downsides are the slightly sluggish interface (but hey, it actually uses the touchscreen) and the fact that because it uses the DS port, you’ll probably need extra hardware if you actually want to perform game backups from genuine ROMs.

So Claire, Ele, Matt and I were at the Scholars pub quiz tonight, where our team, the aptly-named Bringing Up The Rear, came in joint last place. Perhaps the most shameful part was the following question: “This week The Sun mentioned a country in a headline: ‘How Do You Solve A Problem Like…’ what?”

So we started thinking: we hadn’t seen the article in question, not being – thankfully – Sun readers, but it shouldn’t be so hard one you’d spotted the pattern. Obviously, we were looking for a country who’s name was like “Maria”, and which had been in the news recently. This is where the problem started.

You see, we all started thinking of words that looked like “Maria”, rather than ones that sounded like “Maria”. We came up with Syria and put it down as our answer, not realising until later, “Hey, Korea actually rhymes with Maria… and it’s a little bit topical these days.”

Yes, we are officially too dumb for the easy questions in our local pub quiz.

Troma Night‘s at The Cottage this week. Odds are, we’ll be watching the brilliant Thank You For Smoking, something particularly dire (there are calls again for The Deadly Bees: if people are serious then maybe, just maybe), and maybe a third film. Usual time, somewhat-usual place.

I notice that blog entries have become few and far between for the Abnib crowd for the last few weeks, since about the start of term. Did everybody suddenly get really busy? Or do people not feel the need to fill each other in on their lives when they spend more time in the same part of the world? Or perhaps we’re just in a “blogger’s lull”, with nothing to say. Strange, nonetheless. Maybe it’s time I launched another meme like my popular personality test…

Ick. It’s been years since I was last unwell enough to justify two successive days off work: I’m usually a hardy bugger against infections and whatnot. I blame the snotty group of freshers I was talking to at the weekend: I was feeling a little slow-of-thought and sniffly on Monday, but went into work anyway, which was probably my mistake (if I’ve infected any of you at SmartData, I’m really sorry!).

Yesterday I had a really nasty sore throat, headaches, and shivers, so I took the day off work and tried to be productive in other ways, such as tidying up the living room, with very limited success. Today I’m feeling a little better – road to recovery – but I’m still shivery and snotty and I’ve lost my voice too. Bugger.
Shit; now I’ve missed the bin lorry ‘cos I couldn’t find the energy to pick up the bin bags in time. Or any trousers. Urgh.