Last week, I saw X-Men: First Class at the cinema with Ruth. The film was… pretty mediocre, I’m afraid… but another part of the cinemagoing experience was quite remarkable:
There’s a bit in the film where Xavier, then writing his thesis at Oxford University, and a CIA agent are talking. As they talk, they walk right through the middle of the Bodleian
Library, right past my office. It’s not just Morse and Lewis and the Harry Potter films that make use of the Library (at great expense, I gather)
for filming purposes! “That’s my office!” I squee’d, pointing excitedly at the screen.
Needless to say, the student-heavy audience cheered loudly at the presence of parts of Oxford that they recognised, too. It’s been a while since I was in a cinema where people actually
cheered at what was going on. In fact, the last time will have been in the Commodore
Cinema in Aberystwyth. But cinema-culture in Aberystwyth’s strange anyway.
A couple of weeks ago, the other Earthlings and I played our very first
game of Spirit of the Century. Spirit of the Century is a
tabletop roleplaying game based on the FATE system (which in turn
draws elements from the FUDGE system, and in particular,
the FUDGE dice). Are you following me so far?
Four sets of FUDGE/FATE dice. Each die is labelled with 2 “blank”, 2 “minus” and 2 “plus” sides, and all four are rolled to obtain a result between -4 and +4, on a probability
bell-curve trending towards 0. Neat.
Spirit of the Century is set in the “pulp novel” era of the 1920s, in the optimistic period between the two world wars. The player characters play pulp-style heroes: the learned
professor, the adventurous archaeologist, the daring pilot, all of those tropes of the era. Science, or – as it should be put – Science! is king, and there’s no telling
what fantastic and terrifying secrets are about to be unleashed upon the world. Tell you what… let me just show you the cover for the sourcebook:
Yes; that’s a gorilla flying a biplane away from a stricken zeppelin, fighting a masked hero. Meanwhile, a female mechanic clambers under the fuselage and man wearing a jetpack pulls
alongside, guns blazing.
Everything you need to know about the game is right in that picture, right there.
The character generation mechanism is different from most RPGs; even other fluffy, anti-min/max-ey ones. All player characters (for reasons relevant to the mythos) were born on
1st January 1901, so the first part of character creation is explaining what they did during their childhood. The second part is about explaining what they did during the Great War.
During each of these (and every subsequent step), the character will gain two “aspects”, which they’ll later use for or against their feats in a way not-too-dissimilar from the
PDQ System (which may be familiar to those of you who’ve
played Ninja Burger 2nd Edition).
The third chapter of character generation involves telling your character’s own story – their first adventure – in the style of a pulp novel. The back of the character sheet will
actually end up with a “blurb” on it, summarising the plot of their novel. Then things get complicated. In the fourth and fifth chapters, each character will co-star in the novels of
randomly-selected other player characters. This can involve a little bit of re-writing, as stories are bent in order to fit around the ideas of the players, but it serves
an important purpose: it gives groups of player characters a collaborative backstory. “Remember the time that we fought off Professor Mechk’s evil robot
army?”
Johnny Sparks is a character of my creation.
That’s exactly what Johnny Sparks did in “Johnny Sparks and the Robot Army”. When Professor Mechk released his evil robot army on the streets of New York City, Johnny Sparks –
government-sponsored whizkid – knew he had to act. With his old friend Jack Brewood (and Jack’s network of black market contacts), he acquired the parts to build a weapon powered by
lightning itself. Then, alongside Mafia child and expert pugilist Michael Leone, he fought his way up the Empire State Building to Mechk’s control centre. While Michael duelled
with Mechk, Johnny channeled the powers of the heavens into the gigantic robot brainwave transmitter at the top of the tower, sending it into overload. As the tower-top base melted down
and exploded, Michael and Johnny abseiled rapidly down the side to safety.
And so they have a history, you see! And some “aspects” for it: Johnny got “Master of Storms” from his lightning-based research and “With thanks to Jack” for his friend’s support.
Meanwhile Jack got “On Johnny’s wavelength” to represent the fact that he’s one of the few people who can follow Johnny’s strange and aspie-ish thought patterns.
Beer, crisps, and roleplaying. What more does an Earthling need?
In our first play session, Michael Leone (Paul), Jack Brewood (JTA), and Anna Midnight (Ruth) found themselves in a race to
rescue aviator Charles Lindbergh from the evil Captain Hookshot and his
blimp-riding pirates. Hookshot hoped to use the kidnap of Lindbergh as leverage to get his hands on some of Thomas Edison‘s secret research, which he hoped would allow him to gain a stranglehold on the world’s aluminium supply, which was only
just beginning to be produced in meaningful quantities. So began an epic boat (and seaplane) chase across the Atlantic to mysterious Barnett Island, a fight through the pirates’ slave camp and bauxite mines, a
Mexican-stand-off aboard a zeppelin full of explosives, and a high-speed escape from an erupting volcanic island.
Highlights included:
Jack’s afraid of flying, so while the others arrived for the first scenes of the adventure by seaplane, Jack trundled well behind in a cruiser. As a result, he completely missed
the kidnapping.
When Hookshot was first kidnapping Edison, his attempt was foiled when Ana threw a cutlass at him, severing the grapple he had tied to the scientist.
Michael’s a badass at barehand combat. When he wasn’t flinging wild dogs into trees, he was generally found crushing the skulls of pirates into one another.
Spirit of the Century encourages a particular mechanism for “player-generated content”. This was exemplified wonderfully by Jack’s observation that he “read once that there was
a tribal whaling camp on an island near here, called Ingleshtat.” He paid a FATE point and made an Academics roll, but because I wouldn’t tell him the target of the roll he only knew
that he’d “done well”, and not that he’d “done well enough.” He and the other player characters weren’t sure that his knowledge was accurate until they reached the
island (and thankfully found that he was right). Similarly, the motivation for the kidnapping wasn’t about aluminium until one of the players speculated that it might be.
Ana Midnight’s spectacularly failed attempt at stealth, as she crept via a creaky door into a building full of armed guards. Also, Jack’s fabulous rescue attempt, as he dived
and rolled into the building, firing his pistol as he went, while Michael climbed up the zeppelin’s boarding tower, leading to…
The tense (and, surprisingly, combat-free… barely!) stand-off and negotiation aboard Hookshot’s zeppelin, towards the end of the story.
There’s a lot of potential for a lot of fun in this game, and we’ll be sure to play it again sometime soon.
When I relaunched Abnibthe other week (which
I swear I didn’t expect to have to do, until people started complaining that I was
going to let it die – this genuinely wasn’t some “marketing” stunt!), I simultaneously brought back Abnib Chat (#abnib),
the IRC channel.
I blame Jen for this. She told me that she missed the long-dead #rockmonkey chat room, and wanted it (or something
similar) back, so I decided to provide one. Hell; if Jen wanted it, maybe other people wanted it to? And it’s an easy thing to set up, I thought.
Personally, I thought that the chat room would be a flop. I’d give it a go, of course, but I didn’t hold up much hope for its survival. When Abnib first launched, back in 2003, the Abnibbers were all students first and foremost.
Now, they’ve all got jobs, and many of those jobs aren’t of a variety compatible with sitting on an IRC channel all day. And at night? We’ve got money, nowadays, and homes, and
spice, and all kinds of activities that consume our lives on an evening. Many
of us get what our younger student selves would call an “early night” every day of the week, and there’s always so much to do that shooting the breeze over a laborious IRC
channel simply isn’t compatible with our lives any more.
Looks like I was right. Here’s the channel activity for the first fortnight of the new Abnib Chat:
#abnib participants in June 2011
Sure, the 1st of the month was busy, but not very busy: in actual fact, many of the people who were “around” were only around briefly, and one of those – Guest1332 – didn’t
even identify themselves.
We’ve all got new ways of communicating now. Some folks are using Twitter (I occasionally read the feeds of those who write in a way that I’m permitted to see, but I don’t “tweet”
myself). Others use Facebook (for a given definition of “use”, anyway). Others still continue to blog (that’s the medium for me: I think I’m just a little too wordy for
anything less). In any case; we’re like Abnib: The Next Generation, and we’ve got reliable transporters and replicators and all kinds of cool shit, and hanging around in
an IRC channel just feels kind of… backwards.
Perhaps I’ve been watching too much Star Trek recently.
Anyway – unless people object to that, too (seriously?), I’ll be turning off Iggy later this month: so if you’ve got something important to say to him, say it soon! I’ll leave the
“Chat” button on Abnib because it’s lazier than removing it, and you never know if somebody might find a use for it, but I think it’s time to declare the channel “dead”.
“Thanks to these changes,” I said, “The Bodleian Libraries websites CMS can now support the use of Unicode
characters. That means that the editors can now write web content in Arabic, Japanese, Russian… or even Ancient Egyptian!”
The well-known "man standing on two giraffes" hieroglyph.
It sounded like a good soundbite for the internal newsletter, although of course I meant that last suggestion as a joke. While I’m aware of libraries within the Bodleian who’d benefit
from being able to provide some of their content in non-Latin characters – and Arabic, Japanese, and Russian were obvious candidate languages – I didn’t actually anticipate that
mentioning Ancient Egyptian would attract much attention. Everybody knows that’s meant as a joke, right?
Streetlights of the 2nd century BC were powered by enormous slugs.
“Is that just Demotic symbols, then? Or can we use all hieroglyphics?” came back the reply. My heart stopped. Somebody actually wanted to use a four thousand plus year old
alphabet to write their web pages?
It turns out that there’s only one font in existence that supports the parts of the Unicode font set corresponding to Egyptian hieroglyphics: Aegyptus. So you need to ensure that your readers have that installed or they’ll
just see lots of boxes. And you’ll need to be able to type the characters in the first place – if you don’t have an Ancient Egyptian Keyboard (and who does, these days), you’re going to
spend a lot of time clicking on characters from a table or memorising five-digit hex-codes.
Papyrus was important, but the Egyptians' greatest achievement was the invention of crazy golf.
But yes, it’s doable. With a properly set-up web server, database, CMS, and templates, and sufficient motivation, it’s possible to type in Ancient Egyptian. And now, thanks to me, the
Bodleian has all of those things.
Well: except perhaps the motivation. The chap who asked about Ancient Egyptian was, in fact, having a laugh. In the strange academic environment of Oxford University, it’s hard to be
certain, sometimes.
Crocodiles can easily be caught using sleeping bags.
I do find myself wondering what scribes of the Old Kingdom would have made of this whole exercise. To a scribe, for example, it will have been clear that to express his meaning he
needed to draw a flock of three herons facing left. Millenia later, we treat “three herons facing left” as a distinct separate glyph from “one heron facing left”, perhaps in a similar
way to the way that we treat the Æ ligature as being separate from the letters A and E from which it is derived. He couldn’t draw just one heron, because… well, that just wouldn’t make
any sense, would it? So this symbol – no: more importantly, it’s meaning – is encoded as U+13163, the 78,180th character in an attempted “univeral alphabet”.
Starting step in the creation of "vulture and asp soup".
To what purpose? So that we can continue to pass messages around in Ancient Egyptian in a form that will continue to be human and machine-readable for as long as is possible. But
why? That’s what I imagine our scribe would say. We’re talking about a dead language here: one whose continued study is only justified by an attempt to understand ancient texts
that we keep digging up. And he’d be right.
All existing texts written in Ancient Egyptian aren’t encoded in Unicode. They’re penned on rotting papyrus and carved into decaying sandstone walls. Sure, we could
transcribe them, but we’d get exactly the same amount of data by transliterating them or using an encoding format for that specific purpose (which I’m sure must exist), and even more
data by photographing them. There’s no need to create more documents in this ancient language: just to preserve the existing ones for at least as long as it takes to
translate and interpret them. So why the effort to make an encoding system – and an associated font! – to display them?
Two-headed snakes: the original skipping rope.
Don’t get me wrong: I approve. I think Unicode is awesome, and I think that UTF-16 and UTF-8 are fantastic (if slightly hacky) ways to make use of the breadth of Unicode
without doubling or quadrupling the amount of memory consumed by current 8-bit documents. I just don’t know how to justify it. All of those bits, just to store information in a language
in which we’re producing no new information.
What I’m saying is: I think it’s wonderful that we can now put Egyptian hieroglyphics on the Bodleian Libraries websites. I just don’t know how I’d explain why it’s cool to a
time-traveling Egyptian scribe. Y’know; in case I come across one.
Apparently I could be a scientologist, so says the Belief-O-Matic. Okay, it’s
not at the top of the list, but it’s still almost within the “top 10” guesses.
Following up on my earlier blog posts about how data on polyamorous households is recorded in the census (see parts one, two, and three), as well as subsequent queries by Zoe O’Connell on this and related topics (how the census records data on other relationships, such as marriage between same-gender partners and civil
partnerships between opposite-gender partners), there’s finally been some progress!
No; that’s a lie, I’m afraid. We’re still left wading around in the same muddy puddle. Zoe’s Freedom of Information Act request, which basically said “Okay, so you treat this kind of
data as erroneous. How often does this happen?” got a response. And that response basically said, “We can’t tell you that, because we don’t have the information
and it’d cost too much to work it out.” Back to square one.
Still: it looks like she’s not keen to be beaten, as she’s sent
a fresh FoI request to instead ask “So what’s the algorithm
you’re using to detect this erroneous data?” I was pleased to see that she went on to add, effectively, “I don’t need an explanation: send me the code if you need
to,” which makes it harder for them to fall behind the “It’s too expensive!” excuse yet again.
Anyway: it’s one to watch. And needless to say, I’ll keep you all posted when anything changes…
Man, I play so much of this game. Whether you’ve got an hour to spare or just three minutes, there’s nothing like firing up Beat Hazard and blasting aliens to the sound of your
favourite music, turned up nice and loud. And with the new DLC, Beat Hazard Ultra, it’s even more awesome (although the new points
system takes some getting used to).
If Asteroids was invented today, by somebody who enjoyed Dance Dance Revolution, this would be it. Kick-ass.
A few years ago, I talked about a pet hate of mine that still seems to be prevalent: that is – that when
people send me a screenshot, they’ll sometimes send me it in a Word document, for no apparent reason. They could just send me the picture, but instead they send me a Word
document containing the picture, thereby increasing the file size, requiring that I have a program capable of viewing Word documents, and making it more-complex for me to
extract the picture if I need to use it somewhere. And on top of all of that, it takes longer for them to do it this way: everybody loses!
Today, I saw somebody take the abuse of screenshots to a whole new level. My first clue that something was amiss was when the email arrived in my Inbox with a 300K TIFF file in it. “Well, at least it’s not a Word document,” I thought. And I was
right. It was something more convoluted than that.
My only explanation for the contents of the file is as follows:
Print Screen. The user took the screenshot using their Print Screen key. So far, so good. They captured their whole screen, rather than just what they were trying to
show me, but we’ll let that pass.
Open Paint. The user opened Paint. At this point, they could have pasted, saved, and emailed the file to me, and still been doing perfectly well. But they didn’t.
Resize canvas. The user expanded the canvas to an enormous size. Perhaps they didn’t know that this would be done automatically, if required. Or maybe they thought
that I could do with a lot of white space in which to make notes on their screengrab.
Paste and reposition. The user pasted the screenshot into the Paint document, and positioned it near the centre, making sure to leave as much whitespace as possible.
Y’know, in case I was running out of it on my computer. They could still at this point have just saved the file and emailed it to me, and I wouldn’t have complained.
Print Screen again. For some reason, the user pressed Print Screen again at this point, thereby taking a screenshot of themselves manipulating a screenshot that
they’d already taken. Maybe the user has recently watched Inception,
and decided that “a screenshot within a screenshot” was more likely to make an impact on me. We need to go deeper!
Open Photoshop. Paint obviously wasn’t going to cut it: it was time for a bigger graphics program. The user opened up Photoshop (waiting for a few minutes while this
beast of a program warmed up).
Create a new document and paste again. Now the user had Photoshop open, containing a picture of Paint being used to display an (oversized) screenshot of what they
wanted to show me.
Crop. This was a good idea. If the user had cropped the image all the way back down to the screenshot, I might not even have worked out what they were doing. Sadly,
they didn’t. They cropped off Paint’s title bar and half of its toolbar. Then they added another few layers of whitespace to the bottom and right, just to be really sure.
Save as a TIFF. They could have saved as a PNG. Or a GIF. Even a JPEG. They could have saved as a PSD. But no, for some reason, an uncompressed TIFF was the way
forwards.
I N C E P T I O N. A screenshot of a screenshot within a screenshot.
Back in 2009, I predicted that Windows Vista/7’s new “Snipping Tool”, which finally brought screen captures to the level of more-competent operating systems, would see the end of this
kind of nonsense. Unfortunately, Windows XP remains the standard at my workplace, so I doubt that this’ll be the last time that I see “matryoshka screenshots”.
"Gay Pride March Ends City Celebration", in the Oxford Mail
From the article –
Friends Dan Q and Paul Mann, of Kennington, decided to mark the [superheroes] theme by dressing as characters from the silver age of comic book heroes, the Flash and
Kickass, far left.
Mr Q, 30, said: “We wanted to take part in the march because first of all it’s an excuse to dress up, and also to show that Oxford is home to gay, lesbian, and bisexual people and
they should be represented.”
Apart from the obvious fault with the age of our characters – Kick-Ass (here correctly hyphenated) is a very new comic book character, designed in from only 2008
– which could have been corrected with a quick Wikipedia search, the article’s not bad. I’m reasonably pleased with my soundbite quotation, there: the journalist we spoke to caught me
off-guard so I just reeled off the first thing I thought of, but it’s not bad, at least.
Ruth managed to carefully avoid appearing in any press photographs, but I think she’ll have been hard-pressed to avoid all of
the shots my the Pride photographer, who ran around enthusiastically in a pink day-glow jacket, snapping away.
Dan and Paul.
The Oxford Pride parade was fun, with the exception of the Catholic protest on Cornmarket, with their calls to
“repent” from our “sinful lives”, and it was nice to lounge on the grass at Oxpens and listen to the music at the fair. Paul came second, by my estimation, in the fancy dress
competition, and then I leapt around on a bouncy-castle/slide-thingy and sent all of the alcohol in my bloodstream rushing to my head.
On this day in 2003, I first launched this weblog! That means it’s eight years old
today! I’d bought the scatmania.org domain name some time earlier with the intention of setting up a vanity site separately from my sub-site on the avangel.com domain, during a rush on
cheap domain names perpetrated by some of the friends I’d lived with in Penbryn, but never found a significant use for it until this day. It was at about the same time that I first set up (the
long-defunct) penbryn-hall.co.uk, a parody of Penbryn’s website launched as an April Fools joke against the hall, which eventually got me into some trouble with the management committee
of the halls. Some friends and I had made it a tradition of ours to play pranks around the residence: our most famous one was probably 2003’s joke, in which we made a legitimate room inspection out to be an April Fools joke,
with significant success.
scatmania.org in August 2003. The theme is simplistic, and the blog itself is powered by a custom-built PHP engine back-ending onto a stack of flat files. It worked, just about, but
it wasn’t great.
In my initial blog post, I took care to point out that this wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination my first foray into blogging. In actual fact, I’d run a weblog, The Åvatar
Diary, for a few years back in college: a few fragments of this still exist and are
archived here, too. I suppose that this means that, ignoring the occasional gap, I’ve been blogging for almost thirteen years. The Åvatar Diary died after an incident with a rather
creepy stalker: remember that this was in 1999, back in the day when Creepy Internet Stalkers were still new and exciting, and I panicked slightly and shut the Diary down
after my stalker turned up in person somewhere that I’d hinted that I might be in a post.
I didn’t mention the new site
launch, to begin with, hoping that folks might just “pick up on it” having re-appeared (I’d been promising to launch something at that domain for ages). Later, I launched Abnib, in an attempt to unite the LiveJournal users with whom I associated with those of
us who hosted our own blogs. Abnib still runs, after a fashion, although I’m likely to let it die a natural
death as soon as it wants to.
scatmania.org in November 2005. The site looked a lot more professional by now, and was beginning to sport the thick blue header that was it’s hallmark all the way up to 2010.
Looking Forward
So here I am, eight years later, still blogging on the same domain. The frequency with which I write has waxed and waned over the years, but I still find that it’s just about the best
way for me to keep in touch with my friends and to keep them posted about what’s going on in my life: it’s unintrusive and can be dipped in and out of, it’s accessible to everybody, and
– because I host it on my own domain – it’s under my control. That’s a million points in its favour over, say, Facebook, and it’s nice to know that it’ll exist for exactly as long as I
want it to.
A recent screenshot of scatmania.org. Whoah: this has all gone a bit recursive.
It also provides a great “starting point” by which people find me. Google for me by name or by many of the aliases I go by and you’ll find this site, which I think is just great: if
people are trying to find me online I’m happiest knowing that the first pages they’ll get to are pages that I control, and on which I write what I want to: I’ll bet U.S. Senator
Rick Santorum wishes that he had that.
I enjoy blogging about geeky stuff that interests me, things that are going on in my life, and my occasional and random thoughts about life, the universe, and everything (with a
particular focus on technology and relationships). It’s put me in contact with some strange people – from pizza delivery guys who used to bring me food on Troma Nights back in Aber to
crazy Internet stalkers and confused Indian programmers – and it’s helped me keep in touch with the people closest to me. And because I’m a nostalgic beast, as this and similar posts
show, it’s a great excuse to back-link my way down memory lane from time to time, too.
This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone
by.
Things are crazy busy again. No time to blog properly, so here’s a picture that I scribbled on.
Incidentally, I was actually at the concert where this photo was taken, back in 2005. But that’s not actually me in the corner. I was just inspired to make the joke by this comic.
After my blog post a few days ago about the imminent death of the oft-neglected
Abnib, I received a surge of complaints by IM, email, and comments. It turns out that a higher-than-expected number of you are actually using the site on a daily
basis.
So I’ve extended its life by a further two years, at least. I’ve also done some quick hacking to put together a new, more-maintainable framework for it. I give to you all:
Abnib 7.0!
Abnib 7.0. It's survived being shot in the head twice now, so we can be sure that it's not a zombie.
Features not in 6.0 but now present include:
Easier to maintain; so when new blogs appear or old ones disappear, there’s a chance that it’ll be kept up-to-date.
Really ugly new skin thrown together in a few minutes.
Combined RSS and OPML feeds, to make it easy for you to switch to a better aggregator, as I assumed you all already had.
It’s a little faster to update itself and a lot faster to use.
Abnib Tweets, for those of you who are of the twittering persuasion. I’m not, so if there’s anybody I’ve missed
you’ll have to let me know.
Abnib Rockmonkey – a random daily snippet from the long-dead Rockmonkey wiki.
Abnib Chat, the return of the abandoned chat room. Hey; if people still want Abnib, maybe they still want this, too… but I
shan’t hold my breath! And no, the old Rockmokney bot, Iggy, isn’t there, so there’ll be no random cries of “Surfboard!” unless you bring them yourself.
Update: Wow. So far the chat room’s seen Matt R, Ruth, Bryn, Claire and me. Just not at the same time. It’s just like old times (although Iggy, who I just reinstated,
is yet to say “surfboard” even once…)
