October 2008 Archives
This is just lovely. It's a video of a forthcoming first person game. First person games are rarely novel, but here the mechanic is wholly new (and I therefore immediately pledge it my heart, such is my long established relationship with novelty).
Whilst the atmosphere is undeniable, how it will play as a game is difficult to say. The video is little more than a tech demo. Based on what's shown so far I can easily see it being more irritating than fun, but I'll be keeping an eye out for it anyway.
Talent shows seem to be all the rage these days across much of the planet so it's nice to see contact juggling being represented. And represented well at that.
Germany's rendition of Britian's Got Talent featured the absurdly talented Kevin Kalvus recently. Apparently membership of contact juggling forums in Germany swelled considerably immediately afterwards.
I was fortunately enough to meet Kelvin at the EJC back in August where he was holding a workshop. Very nice guy indeed, and I'm glad of the reception he got.
On the downside, I can't help but watch his performance and think I've got a long, long way to go yet...
Fantastic video. Takes a while to get going, but stick with it.
It's not just the skill of execution which impresses me, though it's an immensely skillful performance, it's the fact that someone actually conceived of it to begin with. Just wonderful.
Is Stan Lee moonlighting in advertising?
Earlier tonight I passed a poster advertising a new razor blade. Rather than touting the number of blades as a selling point, the poster pointed out their composition instead. They're made of... Endurium.
Endurium?
Or more likely Enduriumtm.
I lay no claim to being able to recite the period table (always got lost around the lanthanides), but I'm willing to wager a not-inconsiderable sum that Endurium won't be found in it's vicinity. It sounds remarkably like something used to lace Wolverines bones. One wonders what the marketing department rejected on the way to discovering Edurium. Unyieldium? Immodium? Payingthemarketingdepartmenttoomuchmoneyium?
I actually made it to the middle of October. Naturally I'm quite pleased. I suppose it may have been simple inattention on my part, but I'd like to think that it actually happened later this year, that various institutions throughout the country all mutually agreed to postpone things just a bit this year.
If only they'd managed a couple of more weeks. Imagine! How wonderful would it be to not encounter a Christmas tree until Halloween had passed? Still the middle of October isn't too shabby at all. Christmas trees in September are simple depressing, but the middle of October I can live with.
An article from the Guardian stirs up some memories
It's striking how little I empathise with the authors predicament. It says much about how I relate to the world that I was most aware of my facial paralysis when dealing with it myself: looking in the mirror, stumbling over words and accidentally biting my lips because they no longer worked as they once did.
How other people saw me didn't concern me, though I think I may have made a conscious decision early on. Why bother with, or try to hide from something so out with my control?
It's a small frustration to me that things never went back to being quite the same as they were before. A good portion of the right side of my face remains numb, and I can see the difference around the right side of my lips, though I'm likely the only one. It was disturbing at first - it drove home the unconsidered intimacy we share with our faces - but fortunately, it is only a small frustration. As with many of life's troubles, it's magnitude lessened with time until became no more than an afterthought stirred by errant newspaper articles.
Autumn is in full throw now. The trees are shedding their leaves at pace, and every so often a neatly piled stack of leaves appears in the park, only to vanish mysteriously soon after.
The season seems to fit the unrelenting outpouring of dark and dank news concerning whatever is happening to the economy. Normally boisterous London is quietened by a pervasive gloom. Newspaper headlines compete vigorously with one another to promote the greatest misery. Look elsewhere in search of glad tidings.
A brief vignette played out in the park earlier. A young couple, sitting on a bench, produced a bottle of champagne with accompanying flutes and made a private toast amongst themselves, smiling despite the evening chill.
There's good news out there if you search for it.
Walking home tonight I received a smile and a wave from a woman passing by on a bicycle. Not being terribly good with faces, I faced a moment of panic as I wracked my memory trying to think who this person might be. I was slightly relieved, then, when a moment later she apologised, having mistaken me for someone else.
But what a strange world we live in, when a smile and a wave is something to apologise for.
The last several days of my job have been spent trying to produce something against an absurdly tight deadline. It's not been a fun project. At the end of today someone praised the work I'd done. I looked upon the mess of compromised code I'd written using an unfamiliar platform, desperately cobbled together in an effort to produce something, anything, that worked on time and blanched inside.
But Wednesday evenings I spend juggling in Camden, and at the end of the night someone told me that a move I've been practicing was "very beautiful".
One of those compliments I shall carry with me for many years to come.
I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to guess which.
ITV2 doesn't enjoy quite the same cachet as it's elder sibling, but even so I was slightly bemused by a trailer for it's upcoming autumn season featuring numerous people I presume are the stars of the new schedule. I say presume, because I didn't recognise any of them and from the presentation it was clear that I was supposed to.
Have I dropped into a new demographic without realising it? More likely it's just that I haven't been watching much terrestrial television recently. Doctor Who and Question Time are about the only programmes that persuade me to turn on the set these days.
It does make me wonder what I'm missing. There's a sense of connectedness that comes from watching a film in a cinema, or a programme on television: the knowledge that the experience is shared with others; that everyone shares common frame of reference. It's not a great basis for interacting with people, but it's handy to have a few pleasant trivialities to hand to pass the time over at the water cooler.
Of course, if my conclusion is that I should watch more television, the advert for ITV2 did nothing to persuade me that it would be showing any content I'd be interested in. I find that mildy amusing.
It's been a couple of years since I blogged about taking a new pair of shoes for spin, well slide really, on various granite paved surfaces in both Edinburgh and London. Without rehashing the details, suffice it say that I discovered a new pair of shoes had zero traction on wet granite surfaces and I took advantage of this by whizzing around town whenever the rains came.
Alas, it lasted no more than a couple of weeks, as the soles of the shoes wore down, so lessened their magical slipperyness until I was forced to walk in the rain like normal people. It was a sad occasion, and though I hearkened back to those halcyon times every now and again, I managed to go on with my life somehow.
You can only imagine my delight when today I discovered that a recently purchased pair of trainers share that same slipperly-slidey quality as my old shoes. I've owned them for several months already, so I'm hopeful I'll be able to slide about in them longer than I managed in my old shoes. On the down side, and the reason why it took me so long to discover this particularly property, is that they are made of canvas, and generally unsuitable for use in the pouring rain.
Still, zipping about Leicester Square in them, still startling tourists (an activity second only to scaring pigeons with a trenchcoat in Trafalgar Square. And don't be silly - of course it was me wearing the trenchcoat) is tremendous fun and easily worth the inconvenience of a damp toe or two.
I only managed a single circle of Leicester Square before I was quite horribly out of breath, but I'll be back.
Tourists beware!
I crunched my way to my practice space in the park this evening. So many leaves fallen in such a short space of time! Even a week ago, there was only a trickle of leaves. Now it's a flood.
Much as I love treading through fallen leaves (and however memorable the deranged mutant killer monster snow goons may be, I still believe the autumn season belongs to Calvin and Hobbes more than any other) , the falling temperatures and fading light aren't nearly as much fun. Chill winds and cold hands make for poor contact juggling.
Irritatingly, the spaced I'd identified for lunch time practicing during the winter months, a lounge at a nearby gym, is undergoing refurbishment for the next few weeks. Apparently it was under-utilised by the gym's members, which rather made it perfect for me: a large, mostly empty space replete with lovely big mirrors. I'm not quite sure what the plans for it are, but I've been told by the gym staff that they involve filling up the large, mostly empty space with fripperies such as an internet cafe.
I'm hopeful I'll be left with a small corner in which to continue to hone my skills, even if to the continuing bemusement of the gym staff. Once I managed to persuade them that I was actually a member of the gym they seemed content to leave me be, if still somewhat curious at to my motives.
They didn't seem to believe me when I claimed not have any...
Here be spoilers for season three of Heroes...
