troma night

Watching Films Together… Apart

This weekend I announced and then hosted Homa Night II, an effort to use technology to help bridge the chasms that’ve formed between my diaspora of friends as a result mostly of COVID. To a lesser extent we’ve been made to feel distant from one another for a while as a result of our very diverse locations and lifestyles, but the resulting isolation was certainly compounded by lockdowns and quarantines.

Mark, Sian, Alec, Paul, Kit, Adam, Dan and Claire at Troma Night V. — Long gone are the days when I could put up a blog post to say “Troma Night tonight?” and expect half a dozen friends to turn up at my house.

Back in the day we used to have a regular weekly film night called Troma Night, named after the studio who dominated our early events and whose… genre… influenced many of our choices thereafter. We had over 300 such film nights, by my count, before I eventually left our shared hometown of Aberystwyth ten years ago. I wasn’t the last one of the Troma Night regulars to leave town, but more left before me than after.

Earlier this year I hosted Sour Grapes, a murder mystery party (an irregular highlight of our Aberystwyth social calendar, with thanks to Ruth) run entirely online using a mixture of video chat and “second screen” technologies. In some ways that could be seen as the predecessor to Homa Night, although I’d come up with most of the underlying technology to make Homa Night possible on a whim much earlier in the year!

WhatsApp chat: Dan proposes "Troma Night Remote"; Matt suggests calling it "Troma at Homa"; Dan settles on "Homa Night". — The idea spun out of a few conversations on WhatsApp but the final name – *Homa Night* – wasn’t agreed until early in November.

How best to make such a thing happen? When I first started thinking about it, during the first of the UK’s lockdowns, I considered a few options:

Streaming video over a telemeeting service (Zoom, Google Meet, etc.)
Very simple to set up, but the quality – as anybody who’s tried this before will attest – is appalling. Being optimised for speech rather than music and sound effects gives the audio a flat, scratchy sound, video compression artefacts that are tolerable when you’re chatting to your boss are really annoying when they stop you reading a crucial subtitle, audio and video often get desynchronised in a way that’s frankly infuriating, and everybody’s download speed is limited by the upload speed of the host, among other issues. The major benefit of these platforms – full-duplex audio – is destroyed by feedback so everybody needs to stay muted while watching anyway. No thanks!
Teleparty or a similar tool
Teleparty (formerly Netflix Party, but it now supports more services) is a pretty clever way to get almost exactly what I want: synchronised video streaming plus chat alongside. But it only works on Chrome (and some related browsers) and doesn’t work on tablets, web-enabled TVs, etc., which would exclude some of my friends. Everybody requires an account on the service you’re streaming from, potentially further limiting usability, and that also means you’re strictly limited to the media available on those platforms (and further limited again if your party spans multiple geographic distribution regions for that service). There’s definitely things I can learn from Teleparty, but it’s not the right tool for Homa Night.
“Press play… now!”
The relatively low-tech solution might have been to distribute video files in advance, have people download them, and get everybody to press “play” at the same time! That’s at least slightly less-convenient because people can’t just “turn up”, they have to plan their attendance and set up in advance, but it would certainly have worked and I seriously considered it. There are other downsides, though: if anybody has a technical issue and needs to e.g. restart their player then they’re basically doomed in any attempt to get back in-sync again. We can do better…
A custom-made synchronised streaming service…?

Homa Night architecture: S3 delivers static content to browsers, browsers exchange real-time information via Firebase. — A custom solution that leveraged existing infrastructure for the “hard bits” proved to be the right answer.

So obviously I ended up implementing my own streaming service. It wasn’t even that hard. In case you want to try your own, here’s how I did it:

Media preparation

First, I used Adobe Premiere to create a video file containing both of the night’s films, bookended and separated by “filler” content to provide an introduction/lobby, an intermission, and a closing “you should have stopped watching by now” message. I made sure that the “intro” was a nice round duration (90s) and suitable for looping because I planned to hold people there until we were all ready to start the film. Thanks to Boris & Oliver for the background music!

Next, I ran the output through Handbrake to produce “web optimized” versions in 1080p and 720p output sizes. “Web optimized” in this case means that metadata gets added to the start of the file to allow it to start playing without downloading the entire file (streaming) and to allow the calculation of what-part-of-the-file corresponds to what-part-of-the-timeline: the latter, when coupled with a suitable webserver, allows browsers to “skip” to any point in the video without having to watch the intervening part. Naturally I’m encoding with H.264 for the widest possible compatibility.

Handbrake preparing to transcode Premiere's output. — Even using my multi-GPU computer for the transcoding I had time to get up and walk around a bit.

Real-Time Synchronisation

To keep everybody’s viewing experience in-sync, I set up a Firebase account for the application: Firebase provides an easy-to-use Websockets platform with built-in data synchronisation. Ignoring the authentication and chat features, there wasn’t much shared here: just the currentTime of the video in seconds, whether or not introMode was engaged (i.e. everybody should loop the first 90 seconds, for now), and whether or not the video was paused:

Firebase database showing shared currentTime, introMode, and paused values. — Firebase makes schemaless real-time databases pretty easy.

To reduce development effort, I never got around to implementing an administrative front-end; I just manually went into the Firebase database and acknowledged “my” computer as being an administrator, after I’d connected to it, and then ran a little Javascript in my browser’s debugger to tell it to start pushing my video’s currentTime to the server every few seconds. Anything else I needed to edit I just edited directly from the Firebase interface.

Other web clients’ had Javascript to instruct them to monitor these variables from the Firebase database and, if they were desynchronised by more than 5 seconds, “jump” to the correct point in the video file. The hard part of the code… wasn’t really that hard:

// Rewind if we're passed the end of the intro loop
function introModeLoopCheck() {
  if (!introMode) return;
  if (video.currentTime > introDuration) video.currentTime = 0;
}

function fixPlayStatus() {
  // Handle "intro loop" mode
  if (remotelyControlled && introMode) {
    if (video.paused) video.play(); // always play
    introModeLoopCheck();
    return; // don't look at the rest
  }

  // Fix current time
  const desync = Math.abs(lastCurrentTime - video.currentTime);
  if (
    (video.paused && desync > DESYNC_TOLERANCE_WHEN_PAUSED) ||
    (!video.paused && desync > DESYNC_TOLERANCE_WHEN_PLAYING)
  ) {
    video.currentTime = lastCurrentTime;
  }
  // Fix play status
  if (remotelyControlled) {
    if (lastPaused && !video.paused) {
      video.pause();
    } else if (!lastPaused && video.paused) {
      video.play();
    }
  }
  // Show/hide paused notification
  updatePausedNotification();
}

Web front-end

Finally, there needed to be a web page everybody could go to to get access to this. As I was hosting the video on S3+CloudFront anyway, I put the HTML/CSS/JS there too.

I tested in Firefox, Edge, Chrome, and Safari on desktop, and (slightly less) on Firefox, Chrome and Safari on mobile. There were a few quirks to work around, mostly to do with browsers not letting videos make sound until the page has been interacted with after the video element has been rendered, which I carefully worked-around by putting a popup “over” the video to “enable sync”, but mostly it “just worked”.

Delivery

On the night I shared the web address and we kicked off! There were a few hiccups as some people’s browsers got disconnected early on and tried to start playing the film before it was time, and one of these even when fixed ran about a minute behind the others, leading to minor spoilers leaking via the rest of us riffing about them! But on the whole, it worked. I’ve had lots of useful feedback to improve on it for the next version, and I might even try to tidy up my code a bit and open-source the results if this kind of thing might be useful to anybody else.

Note #17929

Sometimes, I miss Troma Night. Hanging out with my friends and watching awful/awesome films over pizza and beer.
If only there were a way to do it during lockdown?
Oh wait, there is: danq.me/homa-night/homa-night-2

On This Day In 2004

Looking Back

On this day in 2004… Troma Night XXI took place at The Flat. Six people were in attendance: Claire, Paul, Kit, Bryn, (Strokey) Adam and I and, unusually – remember that the digital cameras in phones were still appalling – I took pictures of everybody who showed up.

Troma Night XXI Attendees - clockwise from top left: Dan, Claire, Paul, Adam, Bryn, Kit — Cue exclamations of “didn’t we all look young”, etc.

Troma Night was, of course, our weekly film night back in Aberystwyth (the RockMonkey wiki once described it as “fun”). Originally launched as a one-off and then a maybe-a-few-off event with a theme of watching films produced (or later: distributed) by Troma Entertainment, it quickly became a regular event with a remit to watch “all of the best and the worst films ever made”. Expanding into MST3K, the IMDb “bottom 250”, and once in a while a good film, we eventually spent somewhere over 300 nights on this activity (you can relive our 300th, if you like!) and somehow managed to retain a modicum of sanity.

Kit, Alec, Siân, (Strokey) Adam, Bryn, Paul, Mark, Claire and I consuming far too much alcohol at Troma Night V and Troma Night VI. — Copious quantities of alcohol might have been part of our survival strategy, as evidenced by these pictures from Troma Night V and Troma Night VI.

Starting out in Claire and I’s then-home, The Flat, Troma Night followed us to The Sharp and eventually to The Cottage, where – ignoring a few ‘tours’ to other people’s homes – it remained from then on. Fuelled by pizza, crisps, and beer, we made it through such terrible films as Manos: The Hands of Fate, the truly awful nightmare fuel that is Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy, and the so-bad-it’s funny action mess Carnosaur 3: Primal Species.

Troma Night XXI, captured on the Troma Night Webcam — Troma Night XXI was among those captured by the Troma Night Webcam, streamed out to the Internet in 1-megapixel, 4 frames per second glory (when it worked).

And what did we watch on this day 13 years ago? The Stendhal Syndrome, which turned out to be remarkably good, Beavis And Butthead Do America, which turned out to be remarkably unremarkable, and horror/sci-fi classic The Thing. But not until after a greater-than-usual amount of tidying up The Flat, I gather.

Looking Forward

In addition to running for over 300 weeks, Troma Night became, for many of us, a central facet of our social lives. The original attendees were all volunteers at Aberystwyth Nightline, but we were later joined by their friends, lovers, housemates… and by Liz‘s dates (who after meeting all of her friends, we usually never saw again). We quickly developed our own traditions and ideas, such as:

Our own “drinking game” with rules relating to particular tropes of the films we were watching (an early version can be found here),
Pizzas like the Alec Special – a Hollywood Special (ham, pepperoni, beef, mushrooms, green peppers, onions, sweetcorn) but without the onions and with pineapple substituted in instead – and the Pepperoni Feast particularly enjoyed by our resident vegetarian,

Bryn, Paul, Claire, Liz, and Kit enjoy Hollywood Pizza at Troma Night VI.5. — For those who – like me – insist that our regular Hollywood Pizza got greasier over this years, these photos from Troma Night VI.5 are pretty damning. Maybe it’s just that our tastes changed.

Paul spontaneously throwing a sponge out of the window to mark the beginning of the evening’s activities,
Alec bringing exactly one more can of Grolsch than he’s capable of drinking and leaving the remainder in the fridge to be consumed by Kit at the start of the subsequent event,
A fight over the best (or in some cases only) seats in Claire and I’s various small (and cluttered) homes: we once got 21 people into the living room at The Flat, but it wasn’t exactly pleasant,
Becoming such a regular customer to Hollywood Pizza that they once phoned us when we hadn’t placed an order in a timely fashion, on another ocassion turned up with somebody else’s order because it “looked like the kind of thing we usually ordered”, and at least one time were persuaded to deliver the pizza directly up to the living room and to each recipient’s lap (you can’t get much better delivery service than that).

Troma Night 4, back when The Flat was in its original furniture configuration. — Decisions about how Claire and I would lay out our furniture were eventually influenced directly by maximising the efficiency of our seating plan. This picture, from Troma Night IV, makes it seem quite spacious and relaxed compared to later nights.

Perhaps the apogee of Troma Night’s success, for me at least, was when some of us got to meet Lloyd Kaufman himself, over a beer and a bowl of nachos, in 2007: prior to the UK premiere of the fabulous return-to-form Troma masterpiece Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. This resulted in much fangirling on the part of Claire and, let’s be honest, by pretty much all of us who got the be there.

And I still enjoy the occasional awful film. I finally got around to watching Sharknado the other month, and my RiffTrax account’s library grows year on year. One of my reward card accounts is still under the name of Mr. Troma Knight. So I suppose that Troma Night lives on in some the regulars, even if we don’t make ourselves suffer of a weekend in quite the same ways as we once did.

Update 26 July 2020: You might also be interested in Hollywood Pizza’s menu from the time.

Cosmo – Building A Watercooled PC (Part 1)

Recently, I’ve reduced my hours working at the Bodleian in order to be able to spend more time working on Three Rings and engaging in other bits of freelance work… and to increase my flexibility so that I can be available for childcare and to generally make things more-convenient for the other Greendalians and I. Unfortunately, on my very second day of this new working arrangement Nena (which I built in 2008) had her power supply blow up, which sort-of threw a spanner into the works. This, along with a scary recent hard drive failure in JTA‘s computer, I took as being a sign from the Universe that it was time to build myself a new PC to replace Toni, my primary box, and relegate Toni to be the new Nena. It was time to build: Cosmo.

Frame from the Basic Instructions comic "How to Justify Upgrading Your Computer"; click for full comic — This episode of Basic Instructions, which came out disturbingly close to the construction of Cosmo, somewhat parallels my experience. Click for full comic.

Given that I had a little cash to burn, I decided that it must finally be time to fulfil a couple of long-standing dreams I’ve had – things I’ve wanted to do when building my last two or three computers, but never been able to justify the expense. And so I set out to build my new “dream computer”: a beast of a machine which would present me with some fresh engineering challenges during construction. Key features that I wanted to include were:

Liquid cooling

Most computers are air-cooled: the “hot” components like the processor and graphics chipset are covered with a heatsink (which works just like the fins on a motorcycle engine: drawing heat away through contact with cool air) and, generally, a fan (to improve airflow over the heatsink and thus increase cooling). Air cooling, though, is inefficient (the transfer of heat from components to air isn’t very fast) and noisy (“hot”-running air-cooled computers are annoyingly loud), and so in my last few PC builds I’ve drifted towards using cooler and quieter components, such as processors that are overpowered for what they’ll actually be asked to do (like Tiffany2, who’s virtually silent) and all-in-one liquid coolers for my CPUs (like these ones, from CoolerMaster – note that these still have a fan, but the use of a radiator means that the fan can be large, slow, and quiet, unlike conventional CPU fans which spin quickly and make noise).

But I’ve always had this dream that I’d one day build a true, complete, custom water-cooled system: taking a pump and a reservoir and a radiator and cutting pipe to fit it all around the “hot” components in my case. The pumps and fans of water-cooled systems make them marginally louder than the quietest of fan-driven, air-cooled computers… but are far more efficient, drawing a massive amount of heat away from the components and therefore making it possible to pack more-powerful components closer together and overclock them to speeds undreamed of by their manufacturers. A liquid cooling solution was clearly going to be on the list.

Multi-GPU

And how to best make use of that massive cooling potential? By putting an extra graphics card in! The demands of modern 3D games mean that if you want to run at the highest resolutions, quality settings, and frame rates, you need a high-end graphics card. And if you want to go further still (personally: I love to be able to run Bioshock Infinite, Far Cry 3, or Call Of Duty: Ghosts at a massive “ultra-widescreen”, wrap-around resolution of 5760×1080 – that’s triple the number of pixels found on your 1080p HDTV), well: you’re going to want several high-end graphics cards.

Both ATI/AMD’s Radeon and Nvidia’s GeForce series’ of chipsets are capable of running in tandem, triple, or quadruple configurations (so long as your motherboard and power supply hold up, and assuming that you’ve got the means to keep them all cool, of course!), and as a result all of my last few PC builds have deliberately been “ready” for me to add a second graphics card, down the line, if I decided I needed some extra “oomph” (instead, I’ve always ended up with a new computer by that point, instead), but this would be the first time I’d actually design the computer to be multi-GPU from the outset.

SSD/RAID 1+0 Combo

Toni featured a combination of a solid-state drive (flash memory, like you get in pendrives, but faster) instead of a conventional hard drive, to boot from, and a pair of 2TB “traditional” hard drives, all connected through the perfectly-adequate SATA 2 interface. Using an SSD for the operating system meant that the machine booted up ludicrously quickly, and this was something I wanted to maintain, so clearly the next step was a larger, faster, SATA 3 SSD for Cosmo.

Anybody who’s messed about with computer hardware for as long as I have has seen a hard drive break down at least once, and JTA’s recent malfunction of that type reminded me that even with good backups, the downtime resulting from such a component fault is pretty frustrating. This, plus the desire to squeeze as much speed as possible out of conventional hard drives, made me opt for a RAID 1+0 (or “RAID 10”). I’d tie together four 2TB hard drives to act as a single 4TB disk, providing a dramatic boost in redundancy (one, or possbily even two drives can be completely destroyed without any data loss) and speed (reading data that’s duplicated across two disks is faster because the computer can be effectively “reading ahead” with the other disk; and writing data to multiple disks is no slower because the drives work at the same time).

A few other bits of awesome

Over my last few PC builds, I’ve acquired a taste for a handful of nice-to-have’s which are gradually becoming luxuries I can’t do without. My first screwless case was Duality, back in the early 2000s, and I’d forgotten how much easier it was to simply clip hard drives to rails until I built Nena years later into a cheap case that just wasn’t the same thing.

Another thing I’ve come to love and wonder how I ever did without is modular power supplies. Instead of having a box with a huge bundle of cables sticking out of it, these are just a box… the cables come separately, and you only use the ones you need, which takes up a lot less space in your case and makes the whole process a lot tidier. How did it take us so long to invent these things?

Needless to say, the planning about building Cosmo was the easy and stress-free bit. I shall tell you about the exciting time I had actually putting her together – and the lessons learned! – later. Watch this space, and all that!

My Very Excellent Liz Just Brought Us Sixteen Pizzas

I hadn’t really talked about it yet, because I’ve been too busy… I don’t know… blogging about Marmite and beds and computers or something… but I had the most fabulous time at a New Year’s party hosted by Liz and Simon at their house in Macclesfield. There was drinking, and board games, and truly awful Troma films, and then at midnight we all counted down from 7, or 12, or something, and spontaneously broke out into a chorus of Auld Lang Syne. See: there’s a video and everything –

(can’t see the video? click here to watch on YouTube)

It seems that my mnemonic (as used in the title of this post) is broken, unless we reinstate Pluto as a planet and rename the fourth and eighth planets in the solar system to Lars and Septune, respectively. Which I think are better names, anyway.

It was a fantastic opportunity to catch up with folks I don’t see enough of, to talk about what had gone right (and wrong) about the year gone by, and what we were looking forward to in the year to come. Liz suggested that perhaps this should become a regular thing, a little like “fake Christmas” has begun to, and that seems like a good idea (and I’m pretty sure I heard Bryn volunteer to host it next year…).

By the way: do you remember how last year Paul, Ruth, JTA and I invented Argh! It Burns Night? We’re doing it again this year, and because so many of you expressed an interest in joining us, we’d like you to come too. It’ll be on the evening of Saturday 4th February (yes, we know this is a little late for a Burns Night, but the second part of Ruth & JTA’s honeymoon is going to get in the way otherwise): drop me an email if you want to come along for a night of haggis, whisky, and fanfiction.

New Computer #1 – Tiffany2

This weekend, I integrated two new computers into the home network on New Earth. The first of these is Tiffany2.

Tiffany2 replaces Tiffany, the media centre computer I built a little under four years ago. The original Tiffany was built on a shoestring budget of under £300, and provided the technical magic behind the last hundred or so Troma Nights, as well as countless other film and television nights, a means to watch (and record and pause) live TV, surf the web, and play a game once in a while.

The problem with Tiffany is that she was built dirt-cheap at a time when building a proper media centre PC was still quite expensive. So she wasn’t very good. Honestly, I’m amazed that she lasted as long as she did. And she’s still running: but she “feels” slow (and takes far too long to warm up) and she makes a noise like a jet engine… which isn’t what you want when you’re paying attention to the important dialogue of a quiet scene.

Tiffany2 is virtually silent and significantly more-powerful than her predecessor. She’s also a lot smaller – not much bigger than a DVD player – and generally more feature-rich.

This was the first time I’d built an ITX form-factor computer (Tiffany2 is Mini-ITX): I wanted to make her small, and it seemed like the best standard for the job. Assembling some of her components felt a little like playing with a doll’s house – she has a 2.5″ hard disk and a “slimline” optical drive: components that in the old days we used to call “laptop” parts, which see new life in small desktop computers.

In order to screw in some of the smaller components, I had to dig out my set of watchmaker’s screwdrivers. Everything packs very neatly into a very small space, and – building her – I found myself remembering my summer job long ago at DesignPlan Lighting, where I’d have to tuck dozens of little components, carefully wired-together, into the shell of what would eventually become a striplight in a tube train or a prison, or something.

She’s already deployed in our living room, and we’ve christened her with the latest Zero Punctuation, a few DVDs, some episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess, and an episode of Total Wipeout featuring JTA‘s old history teacher as a contestant. Looks like she’s made herself at home.

(for those who are sad enough to care, Tiffany2 is running an Intel Core i3-2100 processor, underclocked to 3GHz, on an mITX Gigabyte GA-H61N-USB3 motherboard with 4GB RAM, a 750GB hard disk, and DVD-rewriter, all wrapped up in an Antec ISK 300-150 case with a 150W power supply: easily enough for a media centre box plus some heavy lifting if I ever feel the need to give her any)

Troma Night Adventure

Because I promised you some Aber-nostalgia.

Do you remember the RockMonkey Wiki? Many years ago, Ruth bought the domain name rockmonkey.org.uk as a gift for Andy K, who’d been nicknamed “Rock Monkey” for longer than anybody could remember. He decided that what he wanted to host there was a wiki engine, and I helped him get one set up. Soon, every Abnibber and Troma Night veteran was using it, filling the pages with all kinds of junk.

Soon, Jon launched the wiki’s first WikiGame: a maze exploration game using littered with Dungeon Master Java screenshots and monsters aplenty (monsters like Tubgirl and Lesbians and The Splurg). This kicked off a series of other WikiGames, mostly by Jon, Andy R, and myself (although Andy K started about a dozen of them and Ruth got some way through developing her first).

My biggest contribution was probably TromaNightAdventure, a text-based adventure in which the player attempts to explore Aberystwyth to collect (at least) three Troma Night stars, some pizza, some beer, and some films. It was an epic quest, far larger than I’d meant for it to grow, with multiple non-linear ways to win and a scoring system that told you exactly by how much you’d beaten it (some, but few, people managed to score the maximum number of points).

The screenshot above isn’t from the RockMonkey Wiki. It’s from my relaunched version of Troma Night Adventure. That’s right: I’ve dug up the final backup of the RockMonkey Wiki, extracted the relevant content, knocked together a mini version of the wiki engine and the WikiGameToolkit, and re-launched the game. It’s read-only, of course: this isn’t a real wiki; the real wiki is long-gone. But it does have a few extra features than the original, like a pictorial inventory and a nippy Ajax-powered interface. If you’re looking for some nostalgia about the old RockMonkey Wiki or about Troma Nights back in Aberystwyth, here’s your ticket:

Go play Troma Night Adventure 2.0 (now with features!)

Lloyd Kaufman introduces Citizen Toxie – The Toxic Avenger IV for Troma Night 300

Lloyd Kaufman’s video introduction for the first film at Troma Night 300 (Friday 16th April 2010), Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV. With thanks to “Travis” at Troma Studios and Matt in the Hat for making this possible.

Also available on YouTube.

Troma Night 300 (Hindsight)

For those who couldn’t make it to Troma Night 300 on Friday, but don’t want to miss out on the experience: here’s what you missed (along with lots of links to some videos for you to watch – note that some videos might be considered NSFW):

7:30pm – we had planned to kick off with some Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers, in the traditional fashion, but we discovered that I’d misplaced my copy and so we instead had a few shorts from around the Internet, including:
- 8-Bit Dr. Horrible (Act 2 part 1) – a world of awesome (assuming you’ve seen and enjoyed Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog)
- What happens next after you save the damsel in any 8-bit platformer
- The Department of Internet Hate
- Broken Wear – I have no idea what this Japanese man is selling, but I’ll buy three
- Graffiti Penis
- Auto-Tune the News #11- Pure Poppycock

8:00pm – in exaggeration of the tradition, everybody present threw a sponge across the room; meanwhile, simultaneously, Paul threw a sponge out of the window of the Commodore Cinema and clear onto the roof of the nearby shopmobility scheme portacabin.

8:05pm – “Kit, order the pizza!” As was the case in years gone by, Kit – in attendance by speakerphone – asked “What does everybody want?” and, via Scotland, relayed our order to Hollywood Pizza. Meanwhile, trololololololololololo man sang in the background (a comparatively recent tradition).

8:10pm – Matt in the Hat provided a video, “live by satellite feed”, that he’d acquired with the help of “Travis” at Troma Studios, to introduce our first film:
- Watch the introduction! (this is awesome)
- We watched The Toxic Avenger IV: Citizen Toxie – one of my personal favourite Troma films (hell, one of my personal favourite films in general)

9:00pm – The pizza arrives, and as a few of the more-squeamish attendees didn’t want to have to eat their pizza while watching people being dismembered (wusses), we paused the film and watched a few more Internet shorts, this time of fluffy little cute animals:
- Labradors sliding around on snow
- A woman taking her pet kangaroos to the beach
- A dog chasing it’s own shadow

10:15pm – The first film ends, and while people queue for the bathroom, we have a few more Internet shorts, including:
- Pixels – I love this!
- The Internet Explained
- Trailer for “In Our Garden” – I’m sure this trailer doesn’t do justice to how much potential this film has…
- Sandwich (Parry Gripp) – for those who aren’t aware, Parry Gripp is the singer for Nerf Herder, perhaps most famous for the Buffy The Vampire Slayer theme
- Young Girl Talking About Herself (Parry Gripp)

10:30pm – Our second film again sees an introduction supplied by Matt in the Hat:
- Matt’s video introduction – nobody, not even me, had seen this video before it was shown at Troma Night, but it had us rolling on the floor with laughter. I’ve had to modify the video for YouTube (imagine that the pint of Guinness isn’t there), which reduces its impact somewhat, but I hope that putting it online will afford those of you who weren’t there the opportunity to enjoy it almost as much as we did.
- The Deadly Bees (MST3K edition) – a Troma Night classic and a particular favourite of Adam’s – he owns several different copies of this film. We have some technical difficulties towards the end of the film and switch to the original version to finish off, but this doesn’t make the film any less awful.

12:10am – we wrap up with another screening of Matt’s introduction to The Deadly Bees, for those that don’t leave the room fast enough to avoid watching it again (the cowards): the final frame is left as a freeze-frame on the screen until everybody departs

All-in-all a fantastic Troma Night by anybody’s account: a huge thank you to everybody who made it special by coming along, by taking part remotely, or by sending well-wishes (Kit’s blog post, Liz’s blog post, comments on my announcement).

It was particularly important to me to have a Troma Night like this one, as this is likely to be one of my last Troma Nights in Aberystwyth: as I indicated last year, I plan to leave Aberystwyth during 2010. I’m currently looking into a possible window of opportunity that would give me the chance to move to Oxford within the next nine weeks, and it’s very unlikely that I’ll be around for another dozen Troma Nights here. In some ways, Troma Night 300 was – for me – a send-off of the concept of Troma Night in Aberystwyth (although you can be sure that we’ll be kicking off Troma Night Oxford once Ruth, JTA, Paul and I are settled there).

In other news, Alec’s LiveJournal account has been mysteriously deleted: did anybody else notice that?

https://danq.mebe around/2010/04/12/troma-night-300/

Matt In The Hat introduces The Deadly Bees for Troma Night 300 (Censored Version)

Matt In The Hat‘s video introduction for the second film at Troma Night 300 (Friday 16th April 2010), The Deadly Bess. This version is necessarily censored to comply with YouTube’s position on penises, but the original video didn’t have this censorship: and nobody at Troma Night knew what was coming until it was right in their face… Read more about the event…

Also available on YouTube.

Troma Night 300

This Friday’s Troma Night will be Troma Night 300! It’s hard to believe how much time I’ve spent at this, our weekly film night. I wonder how many pizzas, in total, have been eaten? How many awful films we’ve groaned at?

I’m planning that for this special Troma Night we’ll temporarily revitalise some of the old traditions. I’ve already been in touch with Kit, and he’s happy to phone in the pizza order for us (“Kit, order the pizza!” // <sighs> “What does everybody want?”) in the traditional style. I’m hoping that Paul will be available to throw a sponge through a window (if he’s working, of course, we’ll try to arrange for him to fling a sponge around the cinema projection booth while we simultaneously throw a substitute sponge at The Cottage). We’ll aim to start a little early with a Flash Gordon short, for those who miss watching those before their Troma Night experience, too.

As for those of you who are no longer around, you’re welcome to join in from afar, too. Alec: why don’t you buy yourself a four-pack of beer and drink exactly three of them? “Strokey” Adam: perhaps you can arrange for somebody to molest you with unwanted physical contact on Friday evening? Liz: you ought to get a date for the night, introduce him to all of your friends, and then never see him again. See: traditions are great!

In other news: if you haven’t yet played Lost Pig (And Place Under Ground), you should. It’s a fun, puzzle-oriented piece of interactive fiction that’s full of charm, with a wonderfully lovable (and not your usual) protagonist. It’s a lightweight bit of adventuring that’ll take most of you under an hour, so go play! Install Gargoyle (for Windows or Linux) for the simplest-possible play experience, and have fun!

The 17 Blog Posts That Weren’t

It may come as a surprise to you that the stuff I write about on my blog – whether about technology, dreams, food, film, games, relationships, or my life in general – isn’t actually always written off-the-cuff. To the contrary, sometimes a post is edited and re-edited over the course of weeks or months before it finally makes it onto the web. When I wrote late last year about some of my controversial ideas about the ethics (or lack thereof) associated with telling children about Santa Claus, I’m sure that it looked like it had been inspired by the run-up to Christmas. In actual fact, I’d begun writing it six months earlier, as summer began, and had routinely visited and revisited it from time to time until I was happy with it, which luckily coincided with the Christmas season.

As an inevitable result of this process, it’s sometimes the case that a blog post is written or partially-written and then waits forever to be finished. These forever-unready, never-published articles are destined to sit forever in my drafts folder, gathering virtual dust. These aren’t the posts which were completed but left unpublished – the ones where it’s only upon finishing writing that it became self-evident that this was not for general consumption – no, the posts I’m talking about are those which honestly had a chance but just didn’t quite make it to completion.

Well, today is their day! I’ve decided to call an amnesty on my incomplete blog posts, at long last giving them a chance to see the light of day. If you’ve heard mention of declaring inbox bankruptcy, this is a similar concept: I’m sick of seeing some of these blog articles which will never be ready cluttering up my drafts folder: it’s time to make some space! Let the spring cleaning begin:

Dan’s April Fools’ Jokes This Year

After JTA and I’s monster plan for a great April Fools’ joke got rained-off this year (maybe another year), I just had to go ahead with two smaller April Fools’ gags this year.

The Photocopier Prank

A nice simple joke at the expense of the people in the office building I work in (and far less complex than last year’s prank against the same): I found a document online, printed it out, and stuck it to the photocopiers.

It instructs users that the photocopier has been upgraded with voice controls, so you can just “tell it” to copy, collate, staple etc. and it’ll follow your instructions. The document goes on to explain that it’s in “learning mode” right now and it might not get everything right while it learns your voice, so be patient and take the time to repeat yourself slowly and carefully.

I haven’t got eyes on the copier, so I’ve no idea how many – if any – people it caught.

The Abnib Announce/Joke Of The Week Prank

For the last few years, I’ve run two a text-message based mailing lists (I’ve got unlimited texts as part of my mobile contract, so it’s as-good-as free for me to do this). The first, Abnib Announce, lets people in Aber know about Troma Night, Geek Night, and similar events. The second, Joke of the Week, goes to a far wider audience and shares, every Friday, the best (by a loose and arguable definition of the word) of the jokes I’ve heard over the previous seven days.

This morning I sent out the following message to both lists:

Abnib Announce/Joke of the Week Update:

Bad news, everyone. My network has been in touch to say that running these regular bulk SMS lists is a violation of their Fair Use agreement, so I can’t run them from my “free texts” package any more. The good news is they’ve offered an alternative. These lists will now become subscription-based SMS services. This will cost you no more than 15p per message received, and a maximum of £1 per week (so £2 per week if you’re on both lists). I’m supposed to ask for your permission before subscribing your number, but I know you’ll all agree anyway. If for some reason you DON’T want to continue receiving Joke of the Week or Abnib Announce at 15p per message, please text me back BEFORE the first message, this afternoon. Ta!

I’ve had a handful of great responses, so far, including:

Nice try.x

Them: The rotters, what a bargain, keep the jokes coming please sir
Me: Seriously? When I made up those prices this April Fools’ Day I should have put them higher!
Them: Hahaha, got me, first one too. Love to the crew

Halfway through a serious response to this i remembered what day it is…

April fool?

Totally not falling for that, sorry! Happy April Fools

Them: Hey dan. Sorry i cant do that on my phone as my mum Pays my contract
Me: Happy April Fools’!
Them: Hee.very good

Them: I dont want to pay thanks. I have enough problems with arguing with orange over my phone bill at the minute, thanks. Hope you are good.
Me: April Fools’!
Them: Is it april already?! Damn i fell for it again! Nice one :-)

Them: Take me off the lists please! Ill get info from [other subscriber] and jokes from sickipedia
Me: Tell you what: because it’s you I’ll negotiate with your network: you’re on Orange, right? I’ve kidnapped the dog of the CEO of Orange; I’m pretty sure I can get him to waive the charges in your case.
Them: Is vodaphone, and their ceo only has a parrot and 5 fish.
Me: =op

Them: Im confused, if its 15p per message why is it £2 a week?
Me: NO MORE THAN £2 a week (well, £1 per week per list). So 4 Joke Of The Week messages would be 60p, 8 would be £1, 20 would be £1. Remember that it’s usually a multipart message spanning 4/5 messages each week. Full terms and conditions apply.
Them: Lol, sounds confusing, being a poor student i’ll have to pass i think, though i’ll miss moaning at your messages ;-)
Me: Really? You’re actually going? And, even more unbelievably, you’re actually falling for this obvious April Fools’ gag?
Me: Gotcha ;-)
Them: Yup and yup lol :-P

Happy April Fools day!

Them: oh arse, i can’t as i don’t pay the phone bill. is it possible for you to put them online?
Me: April Fools’, dummy!

Lol, good one. Did you manage to snare anyone?

Them: Textin back.no joke
Me: Gotcha! April Fools’.

Man, I love this day of the year.

Board Games And Waterfalls

It’s been a fun, full weekend. Highlights include:

A good Troma Night

In case you weren’t following, Troma Night is on Fridays nowadays. We watched the fantastic 1945 film Brief Encounter, which I’d highly recommend, and Lava, which I wouldn’t (although if you do see it, watch ’til the end: it improves, I promise).

Same about the early finish, though. People are such sleepyheads these days.

A lie-in!

Ah, it shouldn’t be such a rarity that it’s noteworthy, but unfortunately it is. I thought I had so little to do on Saturday, so Claire and I lay in and then went for a leisurely brunch… and then is when I remembered all of the things I was supposed to be doing – helping out with the Samaritans stand at the Aber Farmer’s Market, meeting up with a friend for a drink, and meeting my dad and his partner Jenny who were visiting.

Did manage to find time to hack around with some Wiimotes, though. I’ve been doing some fun reverse-engineering of their peripherals. More on that later, little doubt.

An awesome Geek Night

My dad had a little difficulty with Munchkin, but apart from that it was a fast-paced and fun Geek Night. I kicked arse at Gnostica, but only by being a bastard (Claire almost had it at one point, and even got so far as to declare an imminent victory), and also played a hell of a game of Puerto Rico, winning by only a couple of points. It was nice that Jenny was able to win Apples to Apples on the first time she’s played it, despite not being able to “play to the judge” as the rest of us so often do.

And afterwards, most of us lounged around and chatted, in that way that’s sometimes become the end to a Geek Night, and it was fabulous. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard as I did while Jimmy was trying to explain to Elizabeth how variable the consistency of semen can be. You probably had to be there, I’m afraid.

Pushing my dad off

My dad’s visit marked the beginning of his now-annual Aberystwyth to Preston cycle ride (yes, the mad fool rides the 130+ mile journey in a day).

I pushed him the first 5 yards, though, along the prom, so I’ve done my bit. He set off at about 08:30 and got home at about 19:15, so made a run of 10 hours of 45 minutes. And I’m pretty sure he couldn’t have done it without that first 5 yards, so it’s my victory, really.

Hafod estate

Ruth and I decided to make the most of the day, having gotten up early to see my dad off, and so – armed with a Forestry Commission brochure from the hotel where he and Jenny had been staying – we went to go for a walk around the quite-beautiful Hafod Estate, near Devil’s Bridge. It’s a quite beautiful part of the Ystwyth valley, filled with forests and waterfalls.

And yet another Whedon Night

And then a Whedon Night (our weekly Buffy & Angel night) to finish off the weekend. We’ve decided to try to squeeze a couple more of these in over the coming weeks in order to try to finish the final series of Buffy (and the penultimate series of Angel) before Ruth leaves for Oxford at the end of the month.

JTA Makes A “Bin Bag Coat”

JTA had forgotten to bring his coat with him to Troma Night, so he quickly fashioned himself a makeshift coat out of bin bags. Unfortunately, it had stopped raining in the meantime, and so he ended up looking like a bit of a wally.

Also available on YouTube.