From an e-mail. Original source unknown.
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Gorilla Monsoon Mailing List
The Gorilla Monsoon Mailing List is finally becoming usable, after a lot of kicking of the Monsooners by yours truly. If you’re in Aber, and interested in stand-up comedy, and weren’t on the mailing list because it was impossible to persuade anybody to put you on it, the problem has now been fixed and you can sign up like a normal person. Now go do it.
A Wild Wiikend; Part One
We got our Wii at about half past seven this morning, and – excepting breaks for lunch, to attend Gareth‘s guest lecture at the university, and to handle tech support calls from my place of work – we’ve been playing it ever since. Here’s some of what we’ve been up to:
Wii Sports
Comes with every Wii bought outside of Japan, this set includes Tennis, Golf, Bowling, Baseball, and Boxing. They’re all suitable for up to four players on the same console, and all
make full use of the capabilities of the wireless, motion-sensing Wiimotes. The Tennis is particularly good and very immersive:
it’s easy to find yourself leaping to try to reach the ball as it goes barely above your head. Here’s a video I captured earlier of Jimmy
and Claire beating the crap out of each other in the square ring.
Hmm; my attempt to include the video failed. If you’ve got Flash 8 or above, watch it here. It’s worth it.
Wii Play
Nine different minigames; all very simplistic, but some of them are pretty good fun. We enjoyed in particular the "Laser Hockey" (an enhanced air hockey table), the "Where’s Wally"-like
"Find Mii" game, the cow-riding game, and the mini tanks game. The duck hunt-alike is a bit of fun too.
Red Steel
Very fun single player; reasonably good multiplayer too: yakuza fun. Can be pretty hard to get used to the controls, though.
Zelda: Twilight Princess
Which we haven’t played yet. Watch this space.
We’re off for curry soon, but if you wanna come around and we’ll all play Wii together, later, that’d be cool. You know where we are.
Happy Wiiday To Me
We’re off to get a Wii!
Hemi-Demi-Semi-Drabbling
You’re probably already familiar with the concept of a drabble (if not, where were you in February?), a piece of fiction of exactly one hundred words. Today, I was introduced to the concept of a hemi-demi-semi-drabble: that is, a piece of fiction totalling exactly twelve-and-a-half words. Seeing as, no matter how I try, I can’t ever seem to write a piece of fiction totalling more than seven or eight thousand words, this appeals to me. Surely I can manage twelve-and-a-half?
Here’s my first:
The Goddess
Seeing her there, I finally understood how beaut- no; she was a goddess.
And here’s another:
Courting Disaster
Coldly, the judge made his verdict: guilty. Disconsolate, the defendant cried out, “Noo…”
It’s harder than it looks. Give it a go.
Troma Night – 9th December 2006
The next Troma Night will take place on Saturday at The Cottage. Following last week’s success, we’ll be following a similar structure this week. But; there is a difference: all Troma Night folk (and everybody else, for that matter) are invited to start early this week at the Arts Centre to see The Host. The plan is as follows:
- 5:30pm – if you wanna, join us at The Arts Centre for The Host, a brand new Korean action/comedy/thriller/horror film. Yes, I did mean to put all of those genres there.
- 8:00pm – Troma Night properly begins, down at The Cottage. Pizza is ordered; drinks are poured; Gareth is teased.
- 8:05pm – The first film will be The Matrix, with a RiffTrax from the same people as supplied the hilarious one last week for The Fifth Element. If you don’t believe how funny it’s going to be, go watch a 2-minute sneak preview… Pretty sure I’ve got the synchronisation down to a fine art after last week’s technical shenanigans, too.
- 10:30pmish – The second film will be either, depending on whether people want something good or something bad, The Poseidon Adventure, a classic disaster movie and one of my favourite films of my childhood (in anticipation that we might watch it’s remake in the new year sometime and compare the two), Legend Of The Mummy 2 (mummified servant of ancient rain god wreaks hell on bad actors), The Shepherd (U.S. made-for-TV sci-fi in which a husky voiced loner spends most of his time wearing sunglasses to help him remember how great his family were), or Cyborg 3: The Recycler (mentioned it last week, go read about it there).
- Midnight; we’ll either call it a night or we’ll watch another film or we’ll play Nintendo Wii. We’ll work it out when we get there.
No American Dad this week, because the next episode broadcasts on Sunday, but we’ll be at The Arts Centre anyway.
Usual rules apply. See you this weekend.
My Favourite Criminals
Sometime over the weekend – probably on Sunday night – my Nintendo DS Lite, DS-Xtreme, and a pair of Claire‘s sunglasses were stolen from her car, parked outside our house. We noticed this on Monday morning when we found Claire’s car door ajar and her glove compartment emptied onto the passenger seat. Needless to say, I wasn’t pleased, but did feel at least a little bit stupid to have left expensive electronics in plain sight in the car in the first place. Interestingly, the radio (far more valuable) was left, suggesting that this might have been the works of an opportunist thief "just passing"; possibly a child or somebody else who was able to identify a Nintendo console at a glance.
Of course, we called the police, who sent an officer round to investigate the scene and to take statements from anybody who might have seen or heard anything suspicious during the window in which the crime might have occured, but without much success. He advised us that even if they were able to get an intact fingerprint sample, the odds of a match or of recovering anything was minimal. No insurance that we had would cover the theft. So, I resigned myself to being DS-less until sometime in the New Year when I might be able to afford a new one.
This evening, I came home from work to find a carrier bag wedged clumsily into the letterbox. Inside, I found Claire’s sunglasses and my DS and DS-X, wrapped up in a tea towel. The stolen goods have been returned.
I have no idea who stole them in the first place, or what prompted them to return them, and while I can’t forgive them for the former, I certainly thank them for the latter. While it’s unlikely that you’re reading this – whoever you are; congratulations – stealing from a car under a streetlight in a residential area is both brave and stupid to the point of brave stupidity, but it’s even braver to sneak back to return what was taken, knowing that it could heighten your chances of "being caught" if your victim didn’t care much for your sudden honesty.
Thanks.
You Can Hang Out With All The Boys
This made me laugh out loud. Thanks to Faye for finding and sharing it.
The Independent Scrutineer
Today I have mostly been listening to The Independent Scrutineer, Pagan Wanderer Lu‘s new EP. It’s very highly recommendable, and well worth the fiver I paid for it.
Unlike his previous releases, The Independent Scrutineer comes on a properly pressed CD (rather than a CD-R) and in a shiny jewel case with full-colour printing, though I know that in
time I’ll miss the look and feel of the handmade folded brown paper, handwritten/newspaper cuttings CDs.
But that’s not the only thing that feels more “professional” about this release than his previous EPs… it sounds brilliant. With a cleaner, better-edited sound, PWL makes for
genuinely fantastic listening. It’s still characteristically Lu: Repetition 2, my favourite track of the disc, still has it’s quirky discordant moments, but now they sound more
funky than ever. Repetition 1 is clean and sharp and just slightly more openly emotional than many of his songs, and —- and Knight -> King 4 remain the
fabulous ballads they were born as. There’s nothing new, strictly speaking, here, but the presentation, but it’s easily worth taking the time to listen to even if you’ve got a full
library of pirated MP3s already.
Our New Hospital Sucks disappointed me a little. It’s a great song, but I think the best I’ve ever heard it was live, which is somewhat unusual: it just feels like it’s trying too hard to be loud and not hard enough to be smart. The Memorial Hall is a wonderful (and sad) song, but I preferred it when the time-signature transition in the middle was a little more obvious: a little more “raw”. Perhaps PWL’s just finding his feet in this exciting fast-paced world of “having real CDs cut and not having to burn them himself,” or perhaps I’m just being a little bit nostalgic.
Nonetheless, a brilliant CD. My minor gripes with it are most likely my general pickiness, and certainly don’t make the compilation itself any less enjoyable. And you can even listen to plenty of it online before you decide that it’s worth five of your Earth pounds.
Additional: What the fuck is Knight -> King 4 actually about? We’re very befuddled by it, lovely though it is. Answers on a postcard. Or in a comment would do, too.
Last Night’s Troma Night
I was going to write a post about how brilliant last night‘s Troma Night was, but Jimmy‘s beaten me to it.
The highlight for me must have been when the commanding officer of the “special” forces team in Primal Species shouted at his team after a training exercise because they took 15 seconds longer to complete the practice mission than he felt they should have: “15 seconds is a long time. They could kill 15 hostages in that time!”
I chirped up with, “What? They can only kill one per second?”
Jimmy responded, acting, “One…” blam “…mississippi, two…” blam “…mississippi, three…”
Troma Night At The Cottage
Troma Night tonight is at The Cottage. I’ll dig up as many seats as I can, but be advised that stragglers will end up on the natty wooden chairs so if you’re late – bring a cushion! Apart from that; usual rules apply.
We’ll be playing The Fifth Element, but with an unusual twist – we’ll be playing a Mike Nelson RiffTrax over it! For those of you who we haven’t raved to about this already – about half the folks behind the fantastic Mystery Science Theater 3000 now record dub tracks for mainstream movies and sell them over the internet: we’ll be starting an MP3 simultaneously with the movie, and so Mike Nelson and co will be saving us the bother of taking the piss out of the movie by doing so for us. It’s a Troma Night experiment, but if it’s successful, we’ll put a few more RiffTrax’d films on future Troma Nights.
What else? Well; I’m still open to suggestions: I’d like to put on one of the awful flicks that Jimmy‘s kindly supplied second, though:
I’m thinking either Nightmaster (teen ninja stupidity), Carnosaur 3: Primal Species
(terrorists release genetically-enhanced dinosaurs, special forces have to save the day), or Cyborg 3: The Recycler (cyberdellos and
mechano-whores scavenge cyborg parts and sell them).
And finally: if you’re behind on your American Dad, we’ll be doing our usual thing of watching the most recent two episodes starting
at about 7pm.
See you later!
A New Look
I decided to apply a new look to my blog and to the rest of Scatmania. I’d had this one in the pipeline for ages, but I only just got around to putting the last tweaks onto it to put it live. There’s still a little bit to do, including some code optimisation and a few improvements to the graphics.
Crucially, though, the changes are in the backend: what now represents version 4.5 of the ScatEngine WordPress plugin is actually starting to become useful (it now integrates a few of my favourite antispam solutions and some other tools I use from time to time). Fun fun fun.
Here endeth the attention-seeking (and the test to see if my blog still correctly cross-posts to my LiveJournal…)
Abnib Real Ale Ramble 2006
In case you hadn’t guessed, the destroyed tent I posted a picture of to my blog a few days ago wasn’t Jimmy‘s at all, but another tent we saw while on the Abnib Real Ale Ramble. Jimmy has since gotten his revenge by ensuring I play Medieval II: Total War, which has occupied most of my life since we got back. Pictures from the entire weekend, mostly taken on JTA‘s (borrowed) camera, which had a habit of turning itself off without warning, are available on Abnib Gallery.
In the end, it was only Ruth, JTA, Claire and I that went to Llanwrtyd Wells for the Real Ale Ramble this year. Claire and I borrowed Jimmy’s tent and camped on the local rugby pitch, where the toilet/shower block (which doubles as the local scout troop hut) was unlocked for us. Of the three nights we camped, there were only other people camping there on one night: three tents appeared a little way from ours during our first day’s rambling, and disappeared again the following morning. The temperature was tolerable, given our heavy-duty sleeping bags, but the torrential hailstorms made camping a more exciting experience than we had anticipated, and it almost became necessary to re-peg the tent during one of the more violent storms.
Ruth & JTA, meanwhile, set themselves up at Ardwyn House, a B&B near the self-catering cottage in which we stayed last year. I’ll leave it to them to describe the comparative life of luxury they were allowed to live there. Still; it must be said that our campsite had a higher showers-to-guest ratio than them, so perhaps we win after all. On our final night, after returning from the pub, we all had a great and very tense game of Illuminati in the library (yes, their B&B had a library) and drank champagne to celebrate Ruth & JTA having been together for approximately three years. Again, suppose that’s more something for them to blog about.
We did the 15-mile ramble on the first day, which remains, like last year, about twice as hard or more as the 10-mile walk (which we did on the second), even without a broken foot. The pouring rain of the previous few days – accompanied by scattered showers on the first day – resulted in very wet conditions, and at times the mudslides made it difficult to stay in the same place, never mind making progress up an embankment. On several humorous occasions one or another of us would lose our balance and hurtle down into the mud, but we were prepared for this with waterproof or semi-waterproof clothing pretty-much all round. The number of “beer tokens”, each worth half a pint of beer (also exchangeable for hot and cold drinks and, sometimes, soup) was reduced this year to three per day, but the enforcement had been relaxed, and on the second day I recall that Ruth drank three pints of Cambrian Ale without handing over a single token while we sat at a picnic bench by a river.
The evenings took us, predictably, to the Neuadd Arms, for a great number of interesting beers (Over The Edge, Red Dragon, Cambrian Ale, Russian Stoat, and a few others come to mind as being well-worth-tasting) – and some equally interesting conversation with strange and unusual people: we met a man who’s life was taken over by bonsai trees, a woman who graduated in Biology from Aberystwyth in 1985, and a lecturer who’d “disappeared” from his classes to come along to the festival, among others – but also, this year, to the Stonecroft Inn, where, in a gazebo out the back of the pub, they had a fabulous selection of ales, ciders and perries to try, as well as a flamethrower-like space heater that felt wonderful to stand in front of after a wet day in the hills.
Norman, the 70-something old man who beat us around both walks last year, was around again, and still managed to get around the walk faster than us, although we might have beaten him on the second day were it not for the abandoned beer tent at Station 1 and, therefore, the temptation to hang around for a second drink before hitting the trail again. He is, as I put it at the time, “a one-man walking machine,” before I realised how stupid that sounded. A few other familiar faces were to be seen, too: folks we’d seen last year giving knowing nods as if to say, “Ah, it’s you again.” Although, more often, they were saying things like “You’re camping? In this?”
One final highlight of the weekend that I’ll share with you is of a meal at the Neuadd Arms. On their menu they list a number of curry dishes, all rated by heat with a series of “radiation” symbols by each, from one to three. Except for their Phaal, which has five, and promises a medal to anybody who can clear their plate. Claire, being Claire, tried it. She didn’t manage to clear her plate, but that’s probably for the best, because the room was starting to feel warm and tingly as a result of the heat exuded by the dish. We all tried a taste of it, once she’d admitted defeat, which was quite painful – but tasty. Claire’s promised to get herself into “curry training” for next year.
Right; time to start planning the Abnib Real Ale Ramble 2007!
Further Reading
- Ruth writes happy things about her and JTA surviving three years
- JTA composes a belated post summarising his favourite points
Wii Have A Problem
Found this website – Wii Have A Problem – which is a blog dedicated to problems that people have had with their new Nintendo Wii as a result of “the human factor” (what we’d call PEBKAC if it were a desktop device with a keyboard).
In any case, it’s funny: the most commonly-occuring problem people seem to be having with their Wii is that they or their drunken friends let go of the controller (or the strap breaks)
sending it hurtling into something expensive and breaking it… like their TV screen.
Let that be a warning to you all for when Claire and I get our Wii next week.
Back From The Real Ale Ramble
Yay, we just got back from the Abnib Real Ale Ramble 2006. I’ll post some pictures soon.
Oh; by the way, Jimmy – we had a bit of an accident with your tent. See below.
