Articles – Page 84

Back From Barcelona

Claire and I got back from Barcelona this weekend, after our short break away there with my mum and sisters. We were staying in a reasonable-sized second-floor apartment right in the middle (it was advertised as being in the “lively” district) of Barcelona: in an alleyway off a sidestreet to the famous La Ramblas.

Highlights of the trip include:

Drinking lots of sangria, eating lots of paella and tapas, and generally having a great time.
Visiting La Sagrada Familia, perhaps the longest-running building site in the world (a testament to Spanish construction speed). This huge basilica has been under construction for just shy of 100 years, and was, for the greatest part, designed by Antoni Gaudí, the Catalonian architect who pretty much invented organic architecture. Wandering around the place, it’s easy to believe that the architect “changed his mind” every time he viewed the site from a different angle, leading to several faces of the building that look very different in style.
Lounging on the beach and paddling around in the Mediterranean. It’s a hell of a lot warmer than swimming off Aberystwyth’s coast.
Going to the Museu de l’Erotica (warning: shitty website) and seeing the evolution of erotic entertainment, from ancient Greek, Egyptian and Chinese earthenware emblazened with pornographic pictures through to the birth of the “pin-up”, artefacts of BDSM play and the like from the last few hundred years, use of aphrodisiacs and birth control throughout history, and heaps of interesting… artwork. Sadly they weren’t selling prints.
Rambling down La Ramblas, with it’s restaurants, bars, and various street entertainment (human statues, jugglers, tumblers, people who do impressions, fortune tellers, comedians…). The place is a hive of activity at any hour of the day or night. After Claire, my sister Sarah, and I came out of a nightclub (called “Jamboree”: it’s really quite good) at approaching 6am, people on La Ramblas were still partying, and one man tried to give us flyers for another nightclub… no, no thank you: we’re going to bed already…
The stunning Barcelona public transport system. High-speed, on-time underground trains, integrated tickets for train/bus/underground/funicular transit, reasonable prices, accurate display boards, good maps… there’s a lot to be learnt from this.
Climbing the mountin and visiting the old fort at the top, a throwback to the Spanish Civil War, and probably one of the last forts of it’s type to be built: the advances and increased popularity of bomber aircraft make wide, open forts with high walls, mounted artillery, and well-defendable passageways became less useful in the age of the aeroplane, and by the second world war the technologies used will have started to become obsolete. But the fortress still stands, and it commands a beatiful view of Barcelona and the countryside (and sea) around it.

Not-so-good points include:

Getting food poisoning, probably from some strange-tasting tentacle-thingies in a dish of paella. Eight hours of throwing up later, all seemed well again, but it wasn’t pleasant at the time.
Theft of my mum’s wallet (containing several hundred Euros and her debit card) by a pickpocket on the metro. Thanks to Kit for helping us get the theft report helpline. The police station were particularly useless, though.
The electricity in the apartment would randomly go out, requiring the reset of the circuit breakers and the recalibration of the air conditioning.
The alleyway in which the apartment is smells bad and is filled with druggies. Friendly druggies, but druggies nonetheless. On several occassions I was offered the chance to buy drugs, right outside our accomodation (some might call that convenient), and at one point I was mistaken for a dealer by a guy looking for weed. Perhaps I should have been trafficking drugs along the alley? That’d have raised some funds.
Neglecting to take the digital camera we meant to, or the carrying case for the video camera. As a result, we have few photos (most of which require development and won’t be available for a few days, yet) and all the video footage is from inside the apartment (lots of short clips of us all, pissed on sangria).
Extended delays to our flight home.

Nonetheless; a great trip. Big thanks to my mum for organising it and to Claire for putting up with my family for a week. I’ll share some photos with you all when I’ve extracted them from (a) my phone and (b) the negatives.

Preston, Houghton Tower, etc.

Claire and I are in Preston. Saturday evening we went to an orchestral concert at Houghton Tower, which was better than the year before last, but still not as good as the year before that. Live outdoor music, dancing, drinking, and fireworks are all fab, but my mum got a little more drunk than she might have intended: as characterised on the journey home, when she couldn’t seem to see the problem with being in the passenger seat of a car as we drove past a policeman… while she was wearing blue flashing lights on her head, swigging from a bottle of some Baileys’ clone, and alternating between shouting at my sister to get her head down in the boot and at pedestrians we passed.

In any case, Sunday was, comparatively, a day of rest. It’s intensely hot up here, and even taking the dogs for a walk is an exhausting experience. We bought some holiday essentials: a high-factor sun lotion to prevent Claire’s skin from completely charring while we’re in Spain, some shorts and dresses and other ‘light’ wear, etc. This afternoon we’ll be exchanging some currency, getting sunhats, and I’ll be stepping into the Oxfam bookshop to try to buy back some of the books my dad gave away to them in my absence (just days before I decided I needed them and came up here only to find them gone). And perhaps I can teach my folks to play Carcassonne this evening; who knows…

Looks like you’re having a fab time down in Aber – it’s a shame to be away during graduation week, but… Spain calls… – I saw the photos from the Animalarium. We fly at 8am tomorrow, so that’s a 4am start for a train to Manchester at some ungodly hour. Our tickets indicate that the five of us will be occupying almost an entire row on the plane, apart from seat D (right in the middle), in which some stranger will be very scared, I imagine. Fun. There’s nothing like playing “try to catch maltesers in your mouth” during turbulance.

Oh; if anybody in Aber is passing The Flat, could you check on Duality – I can’t remotely access her and I suspect that she’s crashed: if you can give her a reboot before this evening, that’d be much appreciated.

Off To Barcelona (Via Preston)

Claire (on a new blog!) and I are off to Barcelona, via Preston (for a concert by an orchestra & a fireworks display at Houghton Tower, as we did a couple of years back). Here’s the usual series of updates for everybody who remains:

Troma Night is on this and next Saturday. Sort it out between yourselves. I’ll be leaving a key to The Flat with JTA, most likely.
Naruto Night is off. Damned if I’m missing any Gantz. In related news, I have episodes 7-13 (the end of the 1st series), but I’m lacking 5 and 6. I’ll probably have them soon after returning, but could those of you with good sources for these things keep an eye open for me, please.
Geek Night is off. Not that I can stop you playing board games, it’s just that I suspect it’ll just be Ruth and JTA.
Whatever you use The Flat for, try not to leave it any more of a tip than it is: it’s quite disheartening to come back from a holiday and find your home messier than when you left. And if you’re feeling particularly nice, I’d love it if one of you would put the bin bags out on Tuesday morning.
Most of the ‘community’ domain names are up and working correctly again, including the Troma Night website and Abnib (finally got it up-and-running as it should be again, not least so I can read it abroad). Yes, I know comments aren’t working on my blog again, yet: I’ll get to it.
Claire and I can best be contacted by e-mail on my GMail account. I can’t promise I’ll check it from Spain, but I’ll try to at least once. And I will check it from Preston.
We’re back in town on the evening of Sunday 10th July.

So; have a great week, those that are left, and don’t forget Castell Rock this evening: support shouty Welsh bands! I’m really sorry I won’t get to see those of you who are visiting for graduation this week, but you’ll all come visit again sometime soon, right? Right?

The Scat Men

Don’t usually go in for these memes, but this one was too funny not to publish.

The Scat Men Stats

Formed:	29th June 2005
Split:	10th September 2011
Best Album:	‘Supremo’ 7/10 in the NME
Best Single:	‘Unstates’ 6/10 in the NME
Records Sold:	169,413 in total (84,172 albums, 85,241 singles).
Reputation:	Obscure
Groupies:	vikingjim recently won a contract with a blue conglomerate to market dildos towards the over 60’s market.
Other	After realising how shite ‘God Save the Queen’ really was, Queen Elizabeth II instated ‘Barge’ as the new national anthem. Another shit song for a shit country.

The Scat Men Member Profiles

bryn_s bryn_s sounds like a delicate cross between a recently castrated chicken and Johnny Rotten.	restlessboy Unable to pick strings individually, restlessboy had to resort to beating the shit out of all of the strings at once to contribute in any way to The Scat Men’s din. And even then…
reaperkit It is fair to say that reaperkit is a stroppy old bastard. They’ve threatened to pack The Scat Men in after they received a death threat from the ghost of Mother Thersea who reportedly said in a whispered tone “I’m trying to rest in piece here yer prick! Cut with the bollocks before I smear yer pod in shite!”	scatmania scatmania’s manages to make an epileptic speed freak from Inverness look co-ordinated.
eskoala eskoala posesses the unique ability to detune pianos by simply looking at them.

Single Releases

#	Title	Date
39	Outgnaw Deflower Enfaces Lyingly	Aug 2005
39	Risky Decimate	Sep 2005
26	Unstates	Oct 2005
31	Glamor Clutch Civilize Carotins Fallouts Dishfuls	Nov 2005
31	Repoured Myeloma Usance	May 2007
22	Stage Aroused Talcky Patch Blocked	Jun 2007
30	Cilium Anurous	Aug 2007
25	Sunups Tocsin Wooler	Sep 2007
N/A	Unawaked Firms	Sep 2008
40	Parers	Oct 2008
N/A	Overlent Croceins Depicted	Dec 2008
N/A	Bocks Briskly Boras Rebuff Feminist	Feb 2009
N/A	Nauplii	Mar 2010
N/A	Turacos	May 2010
N/A	Crossed Abstract Showroom Khaddar Treks	Jul 2010
N/A	Barge	Oct 2010

Album Releases

#	Title	Date
74	Supremo	Jun 2005
33	Ceboids	Mar 2007
27	Nibs Rooftree	Jun 2008
N/A	Enduring Unusual Wissed Chicle Subbings	Dec 2009

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Abnib Gallery

As you may be aware, Jon is developing the next generation of Abnib (preview – looks fab, eh?). To coincide (and integrate) with this, there’s now an Abnib Gallery, to which Abnib-ettes can post photos relating to the activities of themselves with other abnib-ettes: a place to collate our photographs of the fires we have on the beach, the things we get up to at Troma Night, etc. etc. I’ve put some of my pictures up there already: if you’re on the Abnib/Troma Night website and you want a login (so you can add photos, vote, leave comments, etc.), just drop me an e-mail or leave a comment and I’ll sort you out with access.

Fab storm last night: Claire and I went out in it to see the lighting from the prom, and got completely soaked.

Sewage Leak Update

I see that the council are still recommending that people don’t swim in the sea off Aberystwyth, with signs all along the promenade, after a pollution incident at the weekend, although they’ve allowed access to the beach again. I called the hotline number and determined that the sewage leak most likely occured at the pumping station near Rummers.

My suspicions were confirmed today when I took this photograph on my way to work:

A JCB digging near the sewage pump by the River Rheidol

Catch-Up: Back In Aber

Yeah; more catch-up stuff. Server was down, and I was lazy. Get over it.

Having returned from Preston/Manchester/Milton Keynes/London, this week has been spent back in Aberystwyth. Thursday’s Naruto Night had us in front of Future Boy Conan, an early Miyazaki cartoon series, among other things. Friday’s Geek Night saw us play two of the games I brought down from my trip to Preston: Man O’ War, a classic Games Workshop tabletop battle game, and Scotland Yard, an early-80’s deduction game which I’d always enjoyed as a kid. Ruth in particular seemed to enjoy disassembling the probability tree of the former, forming long mathematical chains of possible moves in her notes in order to catch “Mr. X”.

Saturday should have seen JTA, Ruth, Claire and I acquire a couple of rubber dinghies and ride the tide as it escaped down the River Rheidol and out to sea, but a major pollution incident (involving a ruptured sewage pipe near the river) put us off somewhat. Another time, then. Nonetheless, we had a good Troma Night, with the better-than-expected Ocean’s Twelve and the pretty awful Teenagers From Outer Space (which featured very few teenagers, none of which were from outer space). Hilareous watching, though.

Right; I feel caught-up, now. Time to get back to work on Troma Night Adventure 2…

Catch-Up: Concerts

Yes, it’s true, I’m bad at blogging. But as we all know, weblogs suck anyway. Regardless: here’s the long-awaited catchup of my whereabouts and doings of the last week (as all I’d previously said is that I’d left and that I’d got back again.

Claire and I went to Preston a week last Thursday evening, for a busy weekend of travelling around and attending concerts on what turned out to be the hottest weekend of the year so far. At the Old Trafford Cricket Ground, Manchester, on Friday, we saw REM, who are absolutely stunning live, it turns out: on stage, they throw a lot more energy and a lot more emotion into what is (in recordings) quite quiet and sombre tracks. A wonderful concert, although we did get somewhat crushed when we were (at the start) within spitting distance of the bands, and so we had to retreat back before the end. Supporting them were Idlewild, who turned out to be brilliant, Feeder, who were very good, and The Zutons, who weren’t so good. Claire was more impressed by the latter, but I think that may just have been because she could look down on their saxophonist (not in height, of course, but in saxophone skill).

Then, on Saturday, we travelled down to Milton Keynes to see Green Day at the Milton Keynes Bowl. The bowl is, to all intents and purposes, a large grassy crater just outside of the city, in which they’d erected an enormous sound stage. Green Day were supported by a handful of pretty nondescript pseudo-rock bands, much of which we slept through with our t-shirts over our faces to help us breathe in the sticky air until the sun set. Green Day themselves were brilliant – aside from a slight problem with the video link (the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound meant that by the time we could hear what they were singing we’d already seen them mouth it): they could have done with repeater projectors as well as the repeater speakers they had – a royally rockin’ gig. A good selection of stuff from their new album and older material, lots of crowd enthusiasm, a few bottle fights, all the stuff you expect from a nice, loud concert. We spent the night at a draconically-run travel lodge-like place a little way between Milton Keynes and London.

And on Sunday we went into London (well; if you’re going to travel 700 miles around the country anyway you might as well take a minor diversion if you pass a place of interest) to go to the National Science Museum, which was good as ever. Their new “Hitch-Hikers’ Guide To The Galaxy” exhibit wasn’t very impressive, but I don’t know what I expected from it, though.

The highlight of the trip has to be a conversation between Claire, my sister Becky, and I in the cafe at the Science Museum. It went thusly:

Dan: Claire doesn’t like carrot cake.
Becky: (to Claire) Have you ever tried carrot cake?
Claire nods
Becky: (to Claire) And did you like it?
Claire nods
Becky: (to Claire) So… do you like carrot cake?
Claire shakes head

Unfathomable.

Claire’s Birthday, and Preston

Well, Claire and I are in Preston. We travelled up here last night (after a few false starts, including getting to Mach before realising we’d left the Green Day tickets blu-tacked to the wall “so we don’t forget them” in Aber and having to turn back). Claire’s been made out to be a bookworm again, with a heap of new reading material to keep her occupied for the coming year.

Visited my mum’s house. My sisters are typically hilarious. They’ve got a new chicken (after the last ones were eaten by foxes) + chicks, and a new guinea pig (called Pork Chop, which I think is a fantastic name for a guinea pig), and the puppies have grown up so it’s complete mayhem of the excitable 3-month-old doggy variety. They’d decorated a cake for Claire’s birthday, which read “Happy Birfday [sic] Mini Melton” and had an (anatomically correct) picture of her, with an arrow and the word “You” pointing to it.

This evening, we’re off to see Feeder and R.E.M. at the Old Trafford Cricket Ground, which’ll be fab, and then tomorrow, we’re travelling down to Milton Keynes to see Green Day (& friends), then we’ll spend Sunday in London before returning to Aber. This puts Troma Night in the hands of those of you still in Aber. Bryn has a key to the flat, and I’ve changed my password on Duality to something you’ll be able to guess: to determine it, look at the large yellow sign in the kitchen – there is a mis-spelling on it, and there is a number on it. Type the mis-spelled word (in lowercase) as it appears on the sign, followed by the number. If you have any trouble, text me. And if somebody could record/download the Dr. Who episode (as Claire and I will miss it), that’d be great.

I mentioned to my family that the computer game that’s occupied me most of late is Microsoft Train Simulator. My dad seemed pleased, but the rest of my family seem to want to award me an anorak. Once she’d checked to see that I wasn’t joking, the dialogue with Becky went as follows:

Bex: Microsoft Train Simulator?
Dan: Yup.
Bex: Trains?
Dan: Uh-huh.
Bex: So… what? You plan train routes, manage finances, that kind of thing…
Dan: No, it’s not like Transport Tycoon. You drive trains.
Bex: You… drive trains.
Dan: Yeah; you drive different kinds of trains along real-world routes to a schedule.
Bex: So… do you like; earn money and you can buy better trains? Or unlock secret areas?
Dan: No.
Bex: Wh… bu… <disapproving silence>

Well; I’m guessing she won’t be wanting a copy, then.

SmartData (And French Visitors) Night Out

SmartData and friends (including our French exchange students and some of their friends from placements around the UK went out for a few drinks and a dance on Friday night. Here’s a piccy which I think pretty much sums up the theme for the evening:

Good Stuff

Well; everything’s going notably well this last day or two: Naruto Night I, our new weekly Thursday Night anime night, went off well: only Paul, JTA, Claire and I were able to make it, but that’s pretty much the number we got to the first ever Troma Night, and look what a success that turned out to be… Anyway; Paul and I will try to get a web site set up, because we think this has potential.

Work’s going well, but that’s just work. Claire’s got some good news, but I think she’ll want to share it with you in her blog when she gets round to it.

And, after a few days of stalling, I’ve made a little more progress on TromaNightAdventure2, the sequel to my original RockMonkey WikiGame adventure game. My planned format has changed a little, and it won’t be featuring as a WikiGame directly any more, but… you’ll see: I’m hoping to formally announce progress and a release date next week.

Off to work. Don’t forget, no Geek Night tonight.

Naruto Night

Okay, okay, so I took my time to look at and get into Naruto, a most fantastic anime series. Thanks to Rory and Gareth for showing me the movie, and Paul for providing episodes.

We’ll now be having a weekly “Naruto Night” (to go alongside Tuesday’s “Knightmare Night”, Friday’s “Geek Night”, and Saturday’s “Troma Night”), on Thursday nights, starting tomorrow at 8pm. At each of these we’ll watch about 6 episodes of the Naruto series… assuming Paul can keep me supplied with them. And… I don’t know… eat ramen or something.

Tomorrow we’ll watch episodes 2 through 8, unless anybody comes along who’s never seen any before, in which case we’ll start at number 1. If you’re in two minds, come: it’s fab. See you there.

In other news, Geek Night this week will be rescheduled to Sunday night as Claire and I will be going on a “SmartData and friends and clients and friends and various French exchange students” pub crawl on Friday night. Which you’re all welcome to, if you like – I’ll happily introduce everybody to everybody – and if hanging out with drunken geeks is your thing, come along.

My head feels wheelful.

HSBC Account

HSBC have closed my bank account with them: a bank account I’d had with them since they were Midland Bank, back when I was still in high school. I hadn’t used it for, well – anything at all – for the last 9 months or so, and didn’t know it had been closed (they’d never told me) until I decided to check my balance last week and had my card stolen by a machine.

I went along to see them today, mostly out of curiosity as to what had happened. The cashier sent me to customer services, who seemed quite confused when they were unable to access my account details on the computer. They eventually found my details and had explained what had happened. The final balance, they informed me, was minus 6 pence.

Me: I’m not sure I can settle that six-pence debt all at once. Perhaps I can take a loan with you, and pay you back – I don’t know – eight monthly installments of a penny each, to clear it.

Her: That won’t be necessary.

Me: Umm, okay then… I could probably spare about sixpence… <checks wallet> Would you take a cheque?

Her: We’re happy to write-off the debt.

Me: I’m not sure I could live with myself knowing I’d cost you that sixpence. I mean; I’ve been with HSBC since before it was HSBC… almost ten years, now –

Her: <getting a little scared now>

Me: – and you’ve been great to me. There was that time you refused to give me a student account for no apparent reason, so I took my business to NatWest. And then there was that time I argued with your technical support staff about your facist web browser compatability policy for your online banking. And that time you keep posting me new Solo cards, one a month, for fun. And that time just five minutes ago that I queued for almost 12 minutes just to be told my account had been closed and the bank hadn’t even written to me to tell me. After all of that, how could I possibly steal sixpence from you?

Her: Is there anything else I can help you with, sir?

Dan 6 – 0 HSBC

Finished Psychonauts

I’ve just finished Psychonauts, so I can have my life back. It’s a surprisingly good third-person platform/shooter/RPG from for the X-Box and PC, from some of the minds of people who made Full Throttle and Grim Fandango.

Taken at it’s simplest level, it’s a jolly 3D romp through twisted landscapes in the style of American McGee’s Alice, but it’s a particularly well-balanced one: a wide variety of “psychic powers” – levitation, psychic blast, invisibility, psychokinesis, and pyrokinesis, to name a few – ensure that there are always a variety of ways to solve any given puzzle (climb the ropes, or bounce up using levitation, or float down from elsewhere on the map, or find another way to get the object you need…). Sadly, it suffers in many of the ways that console games – and many modern games – do in that the scope for adventuring is still somewhat limited: there are no puzzles, for example, based on persuasion of the NPCs, or on solving mazes, or on finding unusual uses for objects or combining objects. What puzzles exist are typically of the “find item”, “take key to door”, “deduce riddle” and “spot pattern” varieties.

But on another level, the game takes a deep (and, sometimes, dark) look into the human psyche, in a way that’s sometimes as funny as the political mentalities of Beneath A Steel Sky, and sometimes as chilling and disturbing as Eternal Darkness. You play a young psy-cadet at a psychonaut training summer camp (the psychonauts, it is barely explained, are mentalist crimefighters). At the start of the game you find yourself running around the real world, but as the game goes on you begin to spend an increasing amount of time in the “mental realm” (inside people’s heads), and that’s where it starts to become a little more clever.

Early in the game, during an exploration of your characters’ own repressed memories, you encounter ‘interference’ from another psychic, and there’s an interesting intermingling of character presences which isn’t fully explained until far later on, resulting in strange, dreamlike, fractured scenes. Later, you find yourself inside the head of a conspiracy theorist who’s driven himself mad with his incessant paranoia: in his mind, running through his subconscious, you find yourself surrounded by objects that seem to be watching or photographing you, and agents in disguise track your every move. In another mental realm – the mindsphere of a manic-depressive actress, you witness her life re-enacted on a stage, where the changing lighting reflects the mood swings through which the pictures of her history are repeated. In one scene, turning the lights to the “happy” side reveals the freedom the young actress felt at being able to leave home and do her own thing: turning the lights to the “depressed” side shows the suicide of her mother, throwing herself from a tall building… and later, as you’re clambering through her memories and fears, if you fall from a particularly treacherous ledge – if your volume is high enough – you hear her “depressed” voice mutter, “Just like mother.”

It’s sweet, and funny, and dark, and it plays like a dog on all but the beefiest of PCs. But it’s a wonderful little jaunt and a fun little adventure, despite it’s somewhat linear storyline and slightly repetitive puzzles. It’s got reasonable replay value, too, as there’s always the option to go back and “do things better”, although this doesn’t help relieve the game of it’s image as just another console platform game (which are infamous for trying to increase gametime by encouraging the player to redo things “for a better score”).

Dan And Alex

Dan & Alex comic

People have been asking me if these comics are actually related to my co-worker, Alex. Of course the answer is no: I would never say anything so unflattering about such a great and able worker as Alex, nor would I ever call him RetardBoy. And obviously these comics aren’t based on actual events: it would just be wrong to imply that these conversations actually happened in any way, shape or form.

Honest.