Almost Back Online

Posted on Sun, 27 May, 2007 by ATGW

Well, this is a short one to say I am almost back online now, although the process has been far from easy. It is entertaining that in today’s modern world, having a short spell offline can cause more problems than you can shake a 32gb memory stick at.

It it hard to work out where to start with my ranting over this recent debacle, so I may be disjointed (no change there though). Some recent examples of the “traumas” (which are, admitedly mostly trivial!), have included such things as working out when the rubbish bins will be emptied. My house now has two types of bin (recycling and landfill), with a note saying they will be collected on alternate weeks. Nothing else. No idea which day of the week, or which week is which. Wonderful.

What the note did say was that to find out the day of collection, and which week was landfill and which was recylcing, I was told to “log on to the councils website and enter my address details.” Brilliant, except I didn’t have an internet connection. Continue reading →

Too easy a target

Posted on Sun, 27 May, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Was enticed to visit WorldNetDaily via a post on Richard Dawkins which reproduced their article on teachers who felt they were being forced to promote atheism.

The article turned out to be as silly as you’d expect. Even more hatstand but with more intrinsic comedic value is Chuck Norris’s article on this very topic. (You can get there from the WND homepage by clicking on his big dumb face in the right column.)
Title:

How to outlaw Christianity (Steps 2 & 3)

So even good old z-list action movie stars can see the wisdom in banning religions? Well. that seems a bit extreme to me but I am not gifted with the action hero’s can-do spirit. So, I am prepared to be persuaded, although the Roman empire’s failure to manage this example suggests it may not be the way to go.

No wait, fool. This is a warning of the powerful atheist conspiracy to do just that. Bah. This blog wasn’t even invited. Word must have reached Atheist Conspiracy Central of our weak revisionist tendencies.

Some representative content:

Step 2: Target younger generations with atheism

Atheists are making a concerted effort to win the youth of America and the world. Hundreds of websites and blogs on the Internet seek to convince and convert adolescents, endeavoring to remove any residue of theism from their minds and hearts by packaging atheism as the choice of a new generation. While you think your kids are innocently surfing the Web, secular progressives are intentionally preying on their innocence and naÃ¯vetÃ©.

What’s preposterous is that atheists are now advertising and soliciting on websites particularly created for teens. The London Telegraph noted that, “Groups including Atheists for Human Rights and Atheist Alliance International â€“ ‘Call 1-866-HERETIC’ – are setting up summer camps and an Internet recruiting campaign.”

YouTube, the most popular video site on the Net for young people, is one of their primary avenues for passing off their secularist propaganda. Another antagonistic and self-proclaimed “blasphemous” site even beckons youth to record their anti-Christian beliefs on it.

Blimey. You think your kids are innocently surfing the web for goatporn or anorexia-promotion sites. You find that they are being suckered into rational philosophy sites. What parent wouldn’t be worried sick?

Thanks for the tip off, Chuck. Chuck Norris! I’m so pleased he has managed to crown his distinguished movie career with a new role as the moral watchdog of the religious right.

My god, the man has pretty well defined z-list acting since the 70s so I had to consult the biog on the IMDB to get the full flavour of his achievements.

Both his parents were half Irish and half Cherokee

Oh come on. Both? Surely the entire current Irish-Cherokee gene pool must consist of him and his bothers. (Wieland and Aaron, since you asked)

His real name is Carlos Ray. This is already a mystery. Why would anyone change the inoffensive Carlos to the ludicrous Chuck? Or Ray to Norris. Norris, ffs. It’s a mere step away from Norbert. Carlos Ray is Charles King in Spanish almost – if you ignore the spelling. He could have chosen that as a nom-de-action-movie if he thought his given name was too Hispanic. (Or Man-who-fights-bad-guys O’Shaughnessy, reflecting his background.) But he went straight for an English-sounding name that seems to have any residual human intelligence sucked out of its very syllables. The human equivalent of the Mazda vehicle called the Bongo Friendee. (Google it if you don’t belive me.)

The only watchable film that he was ever in, to my knowledge, was the one where he fought Bruce Lee in the Colliseum (watchable because of Bruce Lee rather than Mr Norris) This is called Meng long guo jiang, with what I consider excessive pedantry, by IMDB. And he was comically chest-and shoulder-hair-covered in that.

Everything else in the list of his movies brings the old phrase “straight-to-video gem” to mind.

Let’s see the upside here, fellow evil conspirators. If Chuck’s illustrious film career makes him the best-known celeb that the religious right can field to be the star face of a major blog, they really have had to scrape the barrel.

Let’s redouble our efforts to turn the youth to our godless ways.

More Technobabble

Posted on Sat, 26 May, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

The Register reports on Technorati’s problems resulting from its redesign. It knocked itself out of operation (surely not unprecedented for Technorati. I thought it let its imaginary Monster out to ravage it every weekend)

The Register argues that Technorati has more or less given up on indexing blogs and concentrated on images.

So what was always a lousy blog search tool is now little more than a lousy image search tool – this is not going to worry Yahoo! or Google

I hope not. For all my whining about it, Technorati is pretty useful.

Technorati links mystery

Posted on Sat, 26 May, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Technorati gives this blog a level of authority that could be considered pretty generous,given the unauthoritative nature of most of our posts. However, for the uninitiated, in Technoratispeak, “authority” refers to how popular you blog is, determined by how many other blogs link to it, not by how authoritative your content is (mercifully…).

But, links to us from the Atheist Blogroll that I can actually see on my screen – and that send visitors to us, according to FireStats – haven’t been listed for months.

I’ve tried researching the reasons for this, unsure whether the fault lies with our code (that would hardly be a first), our recent attempts to restyle the site (not an unmitigated success, yet), Technorati or the Atheist blogroll’s code.

I am none the wiser. This appears in Technorati’s explanation for why links may not get picked up.

If the link was in a blogroll, you may want to check to see if the hyperlink to your blog is located in the blog source of the blogroll. Blogroll links that are generated via a tool or script are not seen. The blogroll must reside in the blog home page as well. If the blogroll is in a subsection or directory of the site, it is not seen or picked up

On an experimental basis, I visited the most recent posters (at the top of the blogroll list on the left.)

onegoodmove.org doesn’t actually show the blogroll, nor have a link to Technorati that I could have used to check if it picks up the link from us.

Sans God has us on the Blogroll, on the index page and not below the so-called jump (other Technorati forum reasons for not seeing links) When I looked for blogs that link to Sans God, I see: “Why Dont You Blog? by Admin Istrator Â· 44 days ago ” Well no. It rather looks to me as if we linked to them today and yesterday and the day before and so on. When the 6 months from 44 days ago is up, we will disappear off their list of linked blogs.

God is pretend has a scrolling blogroll. Maybe that’s why our blog – which shot itself in the listing foot by starting with a letter as close as dammit to the end of the alphabet – doesn’t appear to be linked to from here. But, wait, God is pretend has only 3 inbound links and Whydontyou doesnt appear in the three. Maybe that’s because they are using a script.

We get lots of links from visitors to Gratuitous common sense and I can see us quite clearly on their blogroll, on the index page, not below the jump etc. Ahha. Technorati thinks this has links from whydontyou, but dates them as 35 and 50 days ago…..

I am getting bored with this. You get the picture. The only links that keep getting consistently
updated are from Parabiodox (ffs :-D) and content-scrapers. Any ideas?

It’s all in the game

Posted on Sat, 26 May, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

A job in any sci-fi movie or tv series is a job for life.

Actors get constantly recycled within the genre. Think of the self-effacing officer from the original Star Trek turning up as the sinister Bester in Babylon 5. Officer Sun and the captain from Starscape becoming SG1 crew members. Quark from Deep Space Nine in Buffy. The Doctor from Voyager in almost everything. Even the Quantum Leap man became the captain of Enterprise (did I mention it doesn’t have to be good sci-fi?) And so on.

The same applies to tv cop shows. (There is a certain amount of cop/sci-fi crossover but I guess that probably just constitutes an acting career rather than a pattern. E.g. The blonde woman out of last year’s series with the fishy aliens is in more cop & medical shows than she was in fish episodes.)

I am now going to make a mockery of my pure and true love of the Wire by sharing my personal TV trivia game.

(Don’t judge me too harshly, here. I’m just following HBO’s lead. They offer downloads of “Naimond’s” choice of classic hip-hop, or such.)

The original game consisted of trying to spot the entire cast of the Wire in old LawnOrder episodes. Anything from the LawnOrder stable counted (classic Law and Order, Special Victims or Criminal Intent. Or even the new spinoff, with lawyers, that’s set slightly outside the format, that I haven’t really got into. In fact even old episodes of Homicide might count, if I am feeling pushed for successes.

So far, I can only really claim Avon Barksdale, Omar and the female cop for definite, because I only recently realised the gameplay was up to a really extended scoring system. Bit I think I’ve seen Stringer Bell in one. And I’m sure I started squealing with joy because Marlow was spotted in an episode.

Then I thought, even with the most intense TV watching, it wouldn’t be possible to match the whole cast to Law and Order spinoffs or precursors.

So the new challenge is to match every speaking part actor in the Wire to EITHER a Law and Order character – 1 point each episode – OR the most comically different role in any visual medium – 5 points, but it’s got to be REALLY funny.

This lets me score points for McNulty in the 500 and Bodie in the Cosby Show. Omar scores 10 in anything, for being so extreme. Naimond’s mom would score 10 as well, but I’ve never seen her in anything else.

My ambition is to find the whole Barksdale crew. Contributions welcome. All the same, it only counts if I actually see it. Shortcuts like searching IMDB cost 10 conceptual penalty points for nerdiness above and beyond the call of duty.

My alternative ongoing games include:

“spot the musicians turned actors” by music genre –
e.g. Method Man and IceT – LawnOrder and the Wire –
Spandau Ballet – now TV/movie villains in a crasser version of the “Ray Winstone loveable
Cockney villian” archetypes
Phil Collins, ditto,
One of the bros out of Bros.. ditto..
I just refuse to count Will Smith and Kylie as I think they took the reverse direction. And in any case, people only count if they are either respected and/or unspeakably naff in either genre.

Life before the Internet?

Posted on Fri, 25 May, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

How do you get broadband if you don’t have an Internet connection?

Answer: You phone someone with a net connection to do it for you.

Explanation: TW is currently offline due to having to move to a place in which only the most intrepid ISPs will offer the most minimal services. Thanks to the world-class silliness of Virgin media tech support service, I have also very recently spent another two weeks offline. I will spare you from the uber-dull details, solved eventually again by the Cafe-Nero-style lad who seems to be Virgin’s only competent techy. It was hellish, in a very mild sense of the word “hellish”, true, but, nonetheless, you wouldn’t choose to do it.

In fact, how does anyone live now without being plugged into the matrix of the Net?

Even given the willful Luddism that stops me from doing Internet banking or shopping, I genuinely can’t imagine how we lived before the Internet, let alone before PCs. It’s not that I wasn’t alive, then, either.

But, to be honest, I can barely conceive of there not being an Internet. If ever anything felt like historical inevitability, it’s the world wide web.

How did we get information? Despite dumping industrial quantities of used books on charity shops every time I move, this house is still a book depository. But, it never has a book with the right information when I need it.

Which is always ten minutes ago, because of the “instant information gratification” expectation that has come along with the Internet. So the library won’t do either.

In fact the local library, which was limited enough (with romantic novels, improving multicultural children’s books and fishing hobbyist books filling about 70% of its shelves) has been more or less replaced by a caffeine-beverages-free Internet cafe. The incommoding books got sold off for pennies, even adding a few volumes to the aforementioned book depository.

I seem to remember it was possible to write letters, take photos, contact people, do calculations, play games, draw pictures, play music and so on. It seems unlikely that we did them much, though, given how bloody hard it is to do any of these things without a computer and a net connection.

Pencil and paper are OK. At least they are portable. But, have you tried using a manual typewriter? A calculator? Well, you just wouldn’t, would you? You might as well get out the slate and abacus.

Have you tried even using your PC without the Internet, recently? It’s OK for playing music and doing 3d rendering. After that it’s like playing frisbee with a dog with its back legs cutoff.

No such thing as free newspaper

Posted on Thu, 24 May, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

This part of the blog is a sucker for free newspapers. (Mainly because of a bizarre reading obsession that can be fed by repeatedly reading the words “Hot” and “Cold” on the bath taps, if absolutely necessary.)

But the previously unspotted City News that dropped through the door last evening was a free newspaper too far. It looked slick. In fact it looked like a tabloid version of the community news magazines that the local council persists in seeing as not being a waste of taxpapayer’s money.

The front page shows a full page colour shot of a man – looking like an Armani perfume model gazing moodily into the middle distance, brow slightly furrowed in Deep Thought. And there ias a mini-inset picture of Madonna. The heading splashed across this picture in about 60 point sans-serif is “Can envy harm you?”

(Hmm, I’m starting to get a mite suspicious now. )

On page 3, the continuation of the lead story revealed that the chap in question (now pensively holding his chin in his hand, while gazing into the middle distance) and his sister had suffered leprosy and worse since a childhood visit to Cape Verde – the result of witchcraft practised by a jealous relative. (That’s the “envy” and “harm” bit, by the way) Luckily, after he had spent thousands on doctors and witchdoctors and got no relief, prayer from the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God Help Centre put paid to that.

(I kid you not.)

No surpises that this free newspaper turns out to be a publication from an organisation called UCKG – a registered charity, no less.

The rest of the paper is basically full of tales of people whose illnesses – especially depression and suicidal thoughts – and problems were all cured by UCKG. Having an exploding mind; getting engaged 3 times to men who cheated on her; having a father who beat him senseless; baby who stopped breathing every ten minutes ; etc. Whatever the human tragedy… they were all sorted by UCKG.

Blimey, put that in your pipe and smoke it, atheist blogroll.

This UCKG certainly know their target – really unhappy people – and are going straight for it without passing Go but clearly collecting their Â£200 (at least) on the way.

I had to Google these miracle workers. (That’s not a real link I put in .extrawords. to stop it being a link, with the happy accident of making it say http://www.extrawords.uckg.org/.) It is a church headed by a self-anointed Bishop Renato Cardoso, founded in Rio thirty years ago, according to its website. It even offers a song-book but, disappointingly to those of us with a really sick sense of humour, this only shows the words, not the music.

Now, the over-used ROFL word is not going to appear here, except in passing. (Because obviously it is a funny publication. The relenetless accumulation of sob stories reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s remarks on Little Nell’s death in the Old Curiosity Shop.

“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing”

)

However, a dip into this world actually ends up quite disturbing. The idea that unsceptical people’s deep misery is being exploited to get adherents is blatantly sick. At the same time, you wonder how the rest of us can ignore the fact that there are thousands of people without any hope except the pseudo hope provided by this sort of thing.

Tell me it’s not true?

Posted on Thu, 24 May, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Quintessential Rambling posted yesterday to say that he/she? thinks war with Iran is about to happen on the basis of an order for massive upping of missile cones, as seen before the last two rounds of global “Risk”.

This post has the horrible ring of truth. So I am just saying to the full pantheon of all deities, spaghetti-monsters, tooth fairies and all “Please, let this be too paranoid a conclusion”

The Armageddon-meisters on any of the constantly shifting sides in WWIII tend to be quietly confident that:
(a) they won’t actually have to do any killing or dying themselves. Lots of young men and women in the armed forces and millions of civilians who happen to been unfortunate in where they chose to be born will do that for them.
(b) they will be rewarded after death anyway when the big magic man rewards them for doing his righteous smiting.

I don’t suppose they care, but some of us are quite pleased to be alive on this planet. We’re not remotely convinced that we’ll be anything except wormfood when we’re not here anymore.
Basically, only having one shot at this life, some of us may value life a bit more than those people who think they’re going to a better one.

Wifi Dangers

Posted on Wed, 23 May, 2007 by ATGW

I dont have much time online, so I have pick and choose my ranting carefully now… The Will of Toutatis seems to have decreed that while I am mostly offline, the news is full of things which almost make my blood boil over. Bah. Humbug.

There is a long list of things which are stupid beyond belief in the media this week. I picked the post headline based on the furore from the BBC’s Panorama program which claims Wifi is three times more “dangerous” than mobile phone masts.Â I didn’t watch the program myself, so my comments about it are based on the (mostly radio) news which picked it up.

For years there have been minor scare stories about mobile phone masts (cellphones for you colonials) causing all maner of problems to the people who live in their footprints. There has even been a considerable amount of rigourous scientific investigation into this. Sadly, for both the frightened and the media causing the scares, there is little to support the claims. Now, call me old fashioned but if you have 99 studies which show no ill effects and 1 which does, it probably means there are no ill effects.

Why in Odin’s Name do people focus on the outlier and demand that be considered as the “real evidence?” It is insane. It really is madness, and the BBC radio news about it was a cringeworthy example of it. There were “concerned citizens” calling on the Government to carry out an “inquiry” (as is the case today, if a dog craps on the pavement there needs to be a government inquiry into how and why it happened) and, predictably, there were “scientists” who wanted 15 mins of fame, demanding the same. All based on the same lack of evidence.

When I see things like this, I like to remember a pop-science programme I saw on television a few years ago (it was something like Brainiac but it wasnt brainiac), in which a group of “electrosensitives” were put in a house for two weeks. Outside was a broadcast tower. The subjects were told the tower would be on for the first week and off for the second week.

All subjects reported the “electrosensitivity” problems during the first week, which miraculously cleared up in the second. As they predicted. The kicker of it all was, the experiment was reversed. The tower was off when they thought it was on, and on when they thought it was off.

Now, I am not for one second saying that is the sort of thing which should be published in the Journal of EM Woo or whatever, but it goes a long way to showing how people convince themselves about something – and once they do it manifests itself in other effects.

This recent nonsense about WiFi is prime example, but pure comedy value can be gained from the “three times as dangerous” phrase. Radio towers are not dangerous, so what is three times zero.

I think I can agree with that.

Petitions work then?

Posted on Tue, 22 May, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

That magical tiny number of people who can change government policy (see the post about the government bowing to “pressure” to allow the creation of human-animal hybrids) obviously didn’t sign the road-pricing petition. Millions of people took the time and effort to sign it but they weren’t the right people, obviously.

The government just ignored the whole thing, except for adding insult to injury by sending everyone emails with Blair’s name on it to say in effect “Thanks for participating but f*** off. Now I will tell you why you were wrong…” (Well, that’s what the anti-ID petition got)

On a personal note, I would never have signed the no road-pricing petition. I don’t have a vehicle. I am against cars. Well, against cars as much as anyone can reasonably be who sometimes gladly takes advantage of riding in other people’s and who takes the occasional taxi. I do object to breathing in secondhand vehicle emissions all day. I don’t like fearing death from some metallic monster every time I go out of the house. I don’t like living in a world so dependent on oil that any amount of evil seems OK, if it will secure it. And so on.

BUT, I am not so divorced from reality as to think that car journeys are the luxury jaunts of the privileged. Even ignoring the fact that people who live outside a few city centres have basically no alternative but to use a car to earn a living, get food or get their kids to school, I don’t think road pricing will cut urban car journeys by more than a miniscule amount. Bloody hell, people spend hours every day on the M25. Would anyone choose to do that if they had an alternative?

The UK has a rubbish public transport system. I live in a city. It normally takes me about eight times as long to get to work (2 buses) as it does when I have been lucky enough to get a lift. (It takes me an hour and a half to walk, on the days when I can still face the walk after a day’s work. The bus journey takes an hour a best – two at worst.) I could replace part of one bus journey with a train but this wouldn’t cut the time by more than a minute or two and would cost more.

My recent experiences of travelling by train have involved unbelievable expense with appalling service standards. It is cheaper to buy a used car and throw it away than to pay the train fare for 3 or 4 people to get to London from the North of England. (And you could breathe in less germs, have the certainty of getting a seat, smoke if you choose, stop when you choose and not have to listen to incomprehensible welcoming speeches every few minutes nor use toilets that would be considered below par in a hurricane refugees’ camp.)

With regards to the quality of service, last year, I made at least two train journeys that were a net loss to the train company. I.e. the service was so bad that they had to pay for me to use it. Both arrived hours after any possible connections were running and, on each occasion, I had to be taken by taxi for close to 50 miles. And was given a refund 🙂

Basically, there are currently no feasible alternatives to using a car for most journeys.

So this road pricing idea is just going to be another tax. Unlike direct taxation, the ability to pay will be irrelevant. What will affect how much you pay will be how close you live to workplaces, public services, schools and shops. So, also unlike direct taxation, there will be an impact on a wide range of apparently unrelated things like house prices.

So, the rich will be able to carry on driving at will, just getting irritated by the attendant bureaucracy of it. Other people will just get more and more stressed trying to stretch their wages far enough to cover the cost of the journey to earning them.

We all know the alternatives, if there really were any serious concern to cut the number of cars on the road:

An efficient and cheap public transport system
Encourage working from home
Planning decisions to stop cities and services from sprawling out endlessly
Stop closing down locally based services like post offices and schools

Too much trouble, hey? Don’t bother then, just get another source of revenue from drivers.

Last refuge of the scoundrel

Posted on Mon, 21 May, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Margaret Hodge, the government’s Industry Minister, not random nutter, has been trying to snatch votes from the BNP – i.e. voters who are blatantly three courses short of a 2 course meal – by coming out with anti-immigrant nonsense.

Shoe made some cursory efforts to distinguish her call for housing to be kept for British people from the far-right ranting of the BNP by phrasing it in supposedly inclusive terms:

She said white, black and Asian British families on low incomes, who had lived in an area for several generations, could not get their own homes and all felt there was an “essential unfairness” in the system

Getting votes by adopting the policies of parties that exist only through pandering to racism by stealing their policies does nothing to challenge these parties. Her whole argument is particularly insidious because she has taken on the whole principle of “Seek power by blaming some weak and visibly different group for all social ills” and just shifted it towards blaming Eastern Europeans and “asylum seekers” – the 1930s German Jews de nos jours.

This is unlikely to fool the black and Asian families who’ve lived here for generations and have therefore probably developed a healthy fear of the whole principle. Or is the BNP also trying to attract these people now?

I suspect that would certainly alienate their core constituency, but, hey, rabid racism is nothing if not inclusive – they can happily add Eastern Europeans to their mental rolls of hate figures. It’s not very good at shrinking though, so I dont hold out much hope of the BNP welcoming their previous core enemies into the fold so they can happily gang up on the Eastern Europeans.

Social housing, especially in the South East, is so close to non-existent now that the idea that it is getting handed out freely to immigrants and asylum seekers is laughable. Is there a shred of evidence of this?

There is no easier and more shameful way to get political power than by picking out a group of people to scapegoat. The fact that Margaret Hodge – former the 70’s anti-Thatcher London council leftwinger 🙂 – is driven to using this strategy tells us a lot about how deep principle runs in the average politician (granted, no surprise there.) It also draws attention to the horrifying fact that the BNP are becoming a viable political force.

Yes, these people are basically morons and rogues. They are still dangerous. That must be more of an issue than whether a Barking MP (you can obviously read that with or without the capital) is so afraid that her constituents are being seduced by racism that her major response is to try and keep her seat in Parliament by adopting their policies.

Sci-fi cliches

Posted on Mon, 21 May, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

This is further to the post about Dr Who’s references to other sci-fi and some very knowledgeable comments, one of which pointed out that sci-fi movies owe a fair bit to Dr Who.

Spotting the refences and cliches makes up a good part of the enjoyment of sci-fi. There’s an inclusive list on cthreepio among other sites. Here are a few of my own favourites:

All alien races speak English. This is very convenient, of course. (Although, unusually, Klingons do have their own language.)

The most advanced computer can be completely confused into breaking, by being asked to process a contradictory statement.

Any high spec computer will become sentient. And homicidal. It can then only be defeated by making use of the surprising design fault listed above.

Non-humans usually look exactly like humans or exactly like humans with insect heads or with some wierd ear, nose, eye or forehead attribute.

About 70% of all non-earth civilisations are identical to those of medieval Europe. A further 20% are basically the same as Ancient Egypt.

The crew of any spaceship will happily mate with non-humans but there is less than 1% chance of crew members of different earth “races” ever getting involved with each other. Which is odd, given that space travel is only achieved when the earth becomes one big happy international family.

The holodeck is always broken in such a way that game characters will come to life and threaten the life of the crew, while the crew will never be able to end the game. Nevertheless, the holosuite is never dismantled. The crew will still go blithely into it. They will always choose Nazi Germany or an interplanetary war or some other blatantly dangerous setting.

Any Stargate crew member that you’ve never seen before who speaks a few lines at the beginning of an episode is doomed to die in the next few minutes. Being assigned to SG6 is a death sentence

Offline

Posted on Sun, 20 May, 2007 by ATGW

This is a short post to let people know that Admin and myself will be off line now for a couple of weeks. Hopefully it wont be long before a functioning ISP / Net connection is re-established (will it be Sky? Will it be Pipex? Who knows but it bloody wont be Virgin Media!).

In the interim Heather will try to keep ranting about idiocy, bad science, bad philosophy and the like.

Bye bye for now…

New Style

Posted on Sun, 20 May, 2007 by Site Admin

As you may see from the site, we have taken the plunge and gone for a whole new style here. This has been designed for us by Compuskills and as far as I am aware it will be made available for free download from the compuskills blog site in the very near future.

This theme has also been tweaked a little to try and address some of the issues this blog has been having lately. Hopefully you should now find the site faster and more responsive. If you have any questions or issues with this theme please let us know. We are genuinely interested if you have any problems with the navigation or find the style is broken in anyway.

Thank you for your patience.

[tags]Site Admin, Style, Themes, Compuskills, Blog, Blog Software, WordPress, Downloads[/tags]

Dr Who – Alien meets 24

Posted on Sat, 19 May, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Another pretty good Dr Who episode tonight.

Visually, Dr Who is getting better and better. There was better rendering (a good space ship and a bubbling sun) and more interesting lighting (red and blue on the face close-ups) than we’d expect from normally cash-short British tv.

Altogether, it had the look and feel of “proper” sci-fi. Racing headlong into the sun is par for the course. (Solaris, and the film where Bruce Willis has to destroy an asteroid.) So is being trapped on a space ship with an unknown evil entity. (Alien, 2001.) As well as being stalked by a mechanical humanoid figure. (Predator, Terminator, Judge Dredd.) The computer female voice that keeps giving out unemotional messages of the pressure of time (can’t think of a reference sorry, but it seems standard…)

The main visual influence seemed to be the Alien movies (with a nod to Das Boot, but maybe that’s just me.) Both male and female technicians looked like the crew of Alien (vests, combat suits, artfully arranged sweat) . The ship also had the same sort of look and there was an intense claustrophobic feel to the plot, as well as to the sets.

This episode was called “42”, with a nod to Douglas Adams (the “answer to the universe”) and to “24” (the episode was supposed to be in real-time and there was a 42 minute timer countdown providing constant pressure).

So, a bit of an art-house-for-nerds episode. This series is shaping up to be the best one ever. Although this is from someone who loves sci-fi clichÃ©s. And who thinks that the very first Dr Who series – with that weird Quatermassy feel and the old man with long white hair – and the mainly-played for laughs Tom Baker Dr Who were the only really good bits, out of what was often dire.

[tags]42, dr-who, episode, rave, sci-fi, sci-fi-cliches, television, tv, BBC, Douglas Adams[/tags]

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Why Dont You Blog?

Challenging the Zeitgeist

Category Archives: General

Almost Back Online

Too easy a target

More Technobabble

It’s all in the game

Life before the Internet?

No such thing as free newspaper

Tell me it’s not true?

Wifi Dangers

Petitions work then?

Last refuge of the scoundrel

Sci-fi cliches

Offline

New Style

Dr Who – Alien meets 24

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