Humans Are Awesome

I discovered, by means of Ben Goldacre's extensive deconstruction of Gillian McKeith, the meaning of the term "cargo cult" - expanded by Wikipedia, naturally. And then that leads to this beautifully understated entry.

I'm highly sceptical of the cited source but I think I can just let it go and cherish the moment.

Sweatting it

One of the many Microsoft blogs I subscribe to is credited to M3 Sweatt. I had assumed this was another one of those hilarious programming jokes. If this is a subcategory of humour you're unfamiliar with, hold your sides closed and gaze upon this comedy gold courtesy of The Daily WTF:

my $send_button =
( !$rAuth->permits(SEND)
? ''
: $status != 1
? '' #'[Mailing must be unlocked to send now]'
: $approved
? $send_now
? '' #'[Mailing in Progress]'
: qq(

type="image"
name="send"
src="$::root/sendit.png"
alt="Send"
border="0"
class="form-align"
>

type="hidden"
name="state"
value="$sh"
>

)
: $send_now
? '' #'[Cancelling]'
: '' #'[Approval Required]' )
);

Soaked my keyboard in tears of laughter, that one. Anyway, this blog linked to an article today that interviewed the author, and it transpires that his name is actually M3 Sweatt. It's his real name. He doesn't appear to be some form of street-level DJ type, either:



What bemuses me more than anything else is that nowhere does history - well, the internet, which is supplanting history so rapidly we might as well just go with it - record why he would have such a name. It's obviously prime Google bait, so it's very easy to find every last thing he's posted using it, but nowhere does anybody seem to have tapped him on the shoulder and asked him why the hell his first name is a Scrabble piece. Is this some industry 'thing' that nobody talks about? Or is it such a transparent piece of Californian pretention that nobody dares bring it up in case he starts being cool and individual about it?

Want

Featuring:

> integrated neck pillow in the hood
> pull down light shield to cover eyes
> cuff thumb holes
> internal pocket for tickets and passports
> hidden stash pocket with ear plugs
> pit zips to keep you ventilated

Not quite sure about the last one, but it sounds an admirable replacement for my "any old hoody and a laptop bag full of technojunk" mainstay.

More Suitably

Five celebrities who would be really bad choices for narrating in-car GPS systems

• Joe Pasquale
  
• Tim Westwood
  
• Woody Allen
  
• MC Hammer
  
• Sinistar
  
  
  

Five celebrities who would be really great choices for narrating in-car GPS systems, assuming you want to get there very quickly

• Samuel L Jackson
  
• Laurence Fishburne
  
• Vin Diesel
  
• That Guy Who Does The Movie Trailer Narration
  
• Jack Bauer
  

Concept stolen, again, from 5ives.

Incidentally

Another thing about is that it's all about instant . Thus, I can enforce really terrible, mid 1990's newsletter designs on you at will. At will! Ahahaha. Given that most of said newsletters were brimming with bitchy remarks, overuse of exclamation marks and terrifying belief in the self-worth of the author, it's clear they were the forerunner of blogs anyway, so Comic Sans dragged into the third dimension is a development long overdue.

This line of thinking does overlook goth and emo, which as far as I know never flourished in newsletter form. Of course, I suppose the point would be that nobody read it; maybe childhood bedrooms across the globe contain crude WordPerfect creations marked "Distribution: 2. Me and the heartless, uncaring world."

EDIT: Turns out it doesn't do WordArt. Or image hosting to anything other than your own server. Rubbish.

Favourite Auntie

While I'm still blogging for the novelty of this Word interface... going through my RSS feeds after two weeks without broadband (which wasn't that challenging, I have to say. I was waiting for withdrawal symptoms that never came) I come across the news that the BBC plans to put its training resource online.

I do like the BBC (unlike Paul Dacre, it appears) and it's this sort of thing that means I don't begrudge it the licence fee. While I almost never watch television, I come across all sorts of BBC content all over the place, I listen to radio a lot and I'm a huge user of the BBC News website. I think the site justifies a big whack of money all by itself, and I'll cheerfully pay for having witless advertising removed. If they could hurry up and do a radio station completely bereft of DJs – just news and music – then I'll be just about ready to get the tattoo.

I know, this is a standard and uninteresting blog post. Give me time, I'm catching up here.

Oh no, it’s the future

Two more things:

• I'm publishing blog posts from within Word 2007, running on Windows Vista. It's worryingly satisfying.
  
• This is now a house of four bloggers. I worry about what may happen if there is strife over washing up.

Moving story

I knew that this month would be horrible, because we had to finish the magazine, and the website, and the endless array of other bits and pieces involved in a big launch like this. When it's finally all over I'm going to sit down and work out just how many posters, mini-magazines, Powerpoint presentations, web graphics and custom DVD cases we had to create and see how horrifying the resultant pile is. Remarkable we managed to do a magazine as well, really. Anyway, obviously this was the perfect time to move house.

I've harboured a low-level desire to move out of the old place for over a year now, but never mustered the energy – not least because I've spent most of said year in the office. John, however, being a filthy freeloaderlancer, had more time to sit at home all day and really savour the broken lights, non-functional heating, and slowly peeling wallpaper, and as some other types were also looking for new digs a decision was made to move on. I thought about going solo – every move I've made since university has been a steadily decreasing number of cohabitees, so there was a mathematical precedent – but that was expensive and took more time than I had, so I just rolled with the group and we've finished up in a former student house a long way up one of Bath's more cardiac-endangering hills.

The move itself came at about the worst possible time: four days before the final print deadline, when I was already crazed from two weeks of overwork and sleep deprivation. I was working fourteen hour days so hadn't had time to pack anything and John hadn't done much either, and I didn't help matters by drinking heavily on the previous Friday evening in an attempt to unwind after the week. I managed to get up and over the van hire place a mere 45 minutes after the stated start time of 8am, and showed up chez Craig looking like the living dead. Handily, he's already moved about four times in the last twelve months so was able to introduce an air of consummate professionalism while I concentrated on not ending it all by creative use of an IKEA shelving unit.

The next movee was supposed to be Graham, but he wasn't ready either so I just went back and slept for two hours while John packed up. I then had to go to work, which meant there was quite a lot of stuff ready to go when we started moving again at about half-past four. A couple of friends who'd been unwise enough to be spare this weekend showed up mid-day and helped, and we managed to get John, some furniture and half the kitchen over before giving up around 10pm.

Next day the toil continued. My parents arrived expecting to give a hand with the final cleanup to discover the flat still half full of crap and friend busy at Wii Sports. The rest of the day was spent pushing filial relations to breaking point by carrying boxes, scrubbing three years' worth of crap off things and discovering new and exciting stains beneath long-static items of furniture. Graham, meanwhile, got to sit around in his living room, utterly without distraction because his entire life was packed in binbags, getting progressively less helpful text messages from me as it became clear that we were never going to get it all done.

Proceedings were enlivened by a trip to the dump, where we had to spend five minutes explaining that just because my father drives a van he is not in fact engaged in commercial waste disposal – at one point we were assured it would be okay if we emptied the rental van, filled it from Dad's van, then emptied it again – and thanks to truly heroic effort from the family team we managed to get all the big stuff – including Graham - moved in before exhaustion took over in late evening.

That wasn't the end, though. Oh no. The end didn't even come later in the week: my proposed time off got eaten up by doing photoshoots and we had to resort to first delaying the checkout by two hours as we vainly attempted to get carpets looking remotely disease-free, then giving up and hiding stuff in the garage. We overloaded the car so much I had my first crash in ten years of driving, and even once the letting agent had showed up, knocked fifty quid off the deposit for not cleaning the fucking oven lid and checked us out, there were still five boxes, two chairs, an electric radiator and two cars left on the property.

It's now the second weekend after the move: I type surrounded by boxes that I've not had the time to unpack and rubbish I've not had time to dump. I had to bring a washing machine we don't need and don't have the space for, the house is overflowing with unwanted furniture and the garage we were told came with the house turned out to have been sub-let to an enraged pensioner who did not take kindly to me jamming the lock trying to open it. There's still a car left in the old place that I can't even face thinking about, much less moving.

But we do have space, and the broadband is working, sort of, and I've avoided takeaway food all week. There's a Wii with Bomberman and Mario Kart 64 (and some Twilight Princess thing that I have no truck with.) And next week the magazine launches, and the website launches, and it'll all start to settle down. I'm wondering how I'll cope when it does.

A Year In Transit

For nobody's benefit other than my own, really, but for a while 2006 was the Year Of Indifferent Travel Food and DVT Paranoia. I went to the States so much in the first half of the year I was actually getting bored of it, which is a bit of an achievement given that until mid-2005 I'd only been on a couple of planes in my life. Vague ambition for 2007: head East more often.

Air

Trips abroad = 8
Of which
Press trips = 6

Cities Visited = Las Vegas (twice), Seattle (twice), Baltimore, New York, Los Angeles, Edinburgh, Paris, Kiev, London, Chernobyl, Pripyat
of which
Worst = Baltimore
Best = Pripyat

Baltimore was a bit of a dump and we all decided that it wasn't anywhere we'd want to go to again. Pripyat was, um, exactly the same, but it had the fine excuse that it was in a nuclear exclusion zone.

Worst Travel Experience =
Las Vegas - LAX - Heathrow

Best Travel Experience =
London - Seattle, I guess, although that's mostly because of the silver BA Executive Club card I CANNOT KEEP THIS YEAR OH IT BURNS.

Best Airline = British Airways
Airline I Am Never Using Again Even If The Only Alternative Is A Shipping Container = America West

Road

Cars Owned = 6
Accidents = 0 (-100% decrease year-on-year)
Cars Lost = 1
Top Speed = 135-ish
Total Expenditure = £740
Best Buy = 94L Fiat Cinquecento SX.
Worst Buy = 91H BMW 325iSE.
Most Fun = 91H BMW 325iSE

Rail

Best Train Company = Métro de Paris
Worst Train Company = First Great Western

The trouble with Wikipedia

#1
"In the real world it is easy to not direct films. I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me. Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a film director again."

#2
"I have taken some pictures, should it be included in the article? I can add labels for the specific parts."

Dinner dinner dinner dinner dinner dinner dinner SEAWORLDATTENDANT

Scientists have taught dolphins to combine both rhythm and vocalisations to produce music, resulting in an extremely high-pitched, short version of the Batman theme song.

Satire: doomed. Dolphins: taking another squeaking flip towards opposable thumbs.

(Noted by Scary Man Ellis)

I am a bad person for laughing



Related
Later works
Actual detail
The Hindenburg Omen Wikipedia is pretty amazing, really.

So You Want To Be A Games Journalist

I'm playing this very straight as I work for some very straight publications, and my years in games journalism have not been the dazzling multiformat affairs that my co-writers have experienced. It's also based on magazines, because they're what I work on, and it's been done in a hurry because I'm trying to launch one at the moment and that's taking up most of my time. Made very short:

1.Be a good writer
That means knowing how to spell, knowing the rules of grammar, knowing which clichés to avoid and lots of other stuff that boils down to knowing that millions of words have already been written, thousands more will be written about exactly the same subject, and that your words have to stand out from them. If you aren’t a good writer – and this is something you should always be insecure about - then practice, and read other good writers, until you are.

2. Know something about games
I mention this mostly to point out that you don't have to know everything about games, played every Mario game to completion, have a Halo tattoo or whatever. Journalism has always demanded the ability to very quickly become an expert in something. You don't have to have played everything, but you do have to be prepared to do enough research to convincingly plug any gaps in your knowledge before writing.

3. Know about the medium you're writing for, and write for it
Writing for the web is different from writing for magazines; writing for one magazine is different to writing for another. Magazines for twelve-year-old boys will have a very different approach to magazines for thirty-year-old developers. If you only want to write concept reviews explaining how Solid Snake is actually speaking from the perspective of the battered wife, great, but don’t submit them to Good Housekeeping.

4. Have something interesting to say
This is overstating the case, but I believe it to be necessary. There are some, very few, games that are easy to write interestingly about. The majority of games are uninspired genre work. Your function is to write about them and make it interesting.

You might think that all of the above is stating the obvious. I used to, too, until about two years in; the umpteenth conversation or forum post or plaintive email about I Want To Be A Games Writer or Those Bastards Won’t Accept My Illiterate Blog Post About Girls In Gaming. Thus, I want to be very explicit: from my point of view as somebody who employs people to write about games (and all sorts of other stuff) what I want is somebody who's going to produce something literate, interesting, novel, and suitable for whatever I'm putting together. That is not an exclusive group: there's no sinister Illuminati or secret training school, no vital qualification you have to have. Just be good at writing, then politely and professionally inform people that you want to write for them. If they don’t take you up on it, then consider that the samples you provided, or the way in which you provided them, weren’t up to it – and try again.

I know many games writers who started out penning blog posts or forum arguments or articles on massively obscure websites. There’s no magic barometer of quality. There are just people who are good at writing, good at communicating, and those people are always in demand: every editor, everywhere, needs more and better writers, and usually they’re too busy to actively scour every written medium to find them. If you’ve decided that you really want to make a living in this remarkable, underpaid, bizarrely staffed field, then be the best damn writer you can be and draw as much attention to it as possible.

Some final notes:

* To a commissioning editor/employer, a degree in journalism is less useful than proven writing ability.
* Spelling and grammar is important. Sorry.
* A freelance commission specifies a writing style, a word limit, and a deadline. If you can’t meet any of those demands, don’t bother taking it on.
* Being a games journalist is not about “playing games all day.” Text does not occur naturally. Every word in every magazine or website has been written by someone, and if you a junior staff member/freelancer, then that someone is you.
* If a particular pitch is repeatedly rejected, it’s probably terrible.
* If you make regular requests for freelance and are repeatedly rejected, your writing is probably terrible. Get better.
* Don’t become a games journalist expecting to get rich.
* There are, as yet, no old games journalists. Except maybe Stuart.

This was born of an overstuffed MSN conversation with Tim, Kieron, Suki and others, and represents part of a general commitment to bringing Truth To The People. You may read the other epistles here:
Tim | John | Suki | Kieron | Bill | Tom | Log | The Triforce | Richard | Matthew | Stuart

Just because I remembered him

No further comment

And finally

House M.D.’s Life and Death 2. Sadly found too late to distract John from his suffering, although I'm sure I'll find another use for the House Head(TM) soon enough.

The lady with the lump

I should be working right now, but the topic I'm supposed to be addressing isn't very interesting and I thought I'd try and work up my linguistic mojo by offering a director's commentary counterpart to John's Appendicitis adventure. It's mostly to point out, because John's too polite to, that my bedside manner leaves quite a lot to be desired, earning a reaction less akin to sighting the Lady with the Lamp and more like seeing a skinny chap holding a farming implement. Being acutely aware that I have zero medical skills, I tend towards a three-stage response to personal illness:

1. Paracetamol
2. Hospital
3. Death

Historians will note that swapping "paracetamol" for "leeches" reveals this to be a proud medical tradition, and doubtless one that will result in my eventual death from gangrene. Handily John escalated to stage two with some speed, enabling me to actually do something useful and take him to hospital. I missed all but the first, slightly creepy doctor so I can't speak for the attractiveness of subsequent staff, but they were gratifyingly quick at deciding it was something significant. Eventually he was taken away and I was parked under a sign reading DO NOT LEAVE PEOPLE SAT HERE IT'S INTRUSIVE FFS and left to marvel at how much TV oversells the excitement of A&E. It turned out I was sat on the entrance route for the ambulance admissions, but these amounted to two pensioners, one unconsious and the other seemingly alert but utterly unpeterbed by a horrific head wound. John contributed to the lamentable lack of drama by suffering only appendicitis rather than the alien infestation I'd proposed previously, and not even requesting a differential diagnosis.

Once I'd exhausted my magazine and the rack of little cards they give you when being discharged, apparently just to rub in the fact that public healthcare really doesn't do followup treatment very well (Sample content: When recovering from a serious head injury, do not use trampolines. If you suffer extreme pain regardless, stick it out for a couple of days before bothering us) I decided that he could jolly well move on to stage 3 without my help and purposefully strolled out. In the process I discovered once again that a purposeful stride means you can get into absolutely any part of any hospital unchallenged, but it's really hard to do because every corridor is identical and you immediately get lost.

Handily, it turned out this was the right thing to do because I didn't see him for another two days, even on my return visit to drop off essential supplies (DS Lite, Mp3 player and shiv). In conclusion: my system works! Take that, penicillin.

Speaking of which

While we're on the subject of dinosaurs, I can't really do any better as a link title than Tyrannnosaurus Sex. Bonus points for including the phrase "Cloacal Kissers," which I immediately noted as a new band name although further research might well reveal that it's better used as a collective noun for a certain breed of commenters on Digg.

..he said the ancient animals were hampered by what palaeontologists called the 'golden rule': rear-mounting males always had to keep one foot on the ground to avoid crushing their mates. "Their mating had to be done with great delicacy and great precision. It must have been utterly charming to watch, quite unlike our own species... [if dinosaurs] humped like birds, they'd have to have got past that thick, powerful tail; and for that they would need a corkscrew-shaped penis about three metres long.

Oh, for that sort of ice-breaker at parties. One of those bits of research that it doesn't come as much of a surprise that somebody is doing, somewhere, but it never would have occurred to me to consider it. I guess my teen years must really be behind me now.

The way we was

I have a terrible fear that when I'm old and senile my lack of reading in earlier life will catch up with me, and my time spent dwelling on better days will be overwhelmed with crap like this.

Judgement

Judge Floro was dismissed (or "separated") from the bench in Malabon City, a suburb north of Manila, after questions arose about his practices of starting court days with a reading from the Book of Revelations, conducting faith-healing sessions in chambers, and consulting three "mystic dwarves" named Luis, Armand and Angel for advice and predictions of future events.

The intro has a point. If you want justice handed down, who better to do it than someone with lightning teeth, eyes that emit spiritual fires, and hands that heal poor people with hot coconuts?

In other news: I am sad Steve Irwin is dead. I am not surprised Steve Irwin is dead, and I don't think he added much to modern culture, an opinion shared by many others. However, while I didn't want to watch somebody annoying dangerous animals for entertainment, I did like the idea that there was somebody out there actually doing it - there's a charm, however silly, that the David Attenborough voiceover can't match. I raise an enraged reptile to his memory.