Confluence

Movies:

• Pathfinder — terrible; don’t bother. The premise is kind of cool, but the characters are cardboard and the plot is utterly predictable and spliced together from a hundred better movies. For some reason* I thought there would be an alien in this. There wasn’t.
• Sunshine — pretty awesome. I didn’t realise how much I love things-going-horribly-wrong-on-an-isolated-near-future-spaceship movies until an hour in. Marred by one moment of inexplicable character stupidity.

Comics:

• Bone — as good as it’s hyped up to be. Stupid, stupid rat creatures!
• Stickleback — I dunno, it disn’t grab me as much as Edginton and D’Israeli’s other stuff. Maybe it’ll grow on me.
• The Complete Nemesis the Warlock volumes 2 and 3 — cheesy eighties goodness. So, so cheesy.
• Historie manga — slightly gory historical manga set in ancient Greece. Once it got going, I couldn’t stop reading.
• Twin Spica manga — a young girl goes to a space academy. Slow, but entertaining.
• Planetes manga — more near-future SF. A bit difficult to get into, but that’s what I thought about Vinland Saga too, so I’ll give it more time.

* Because I was thinking of Outlander! D’oh!

So, if you live in South Africa and have The Internet, you probably already know that the IEC website is crap. It has been crap for years. It used to be bizarrely malformed in anything that isn’t IE, and lots of people complained.

Recently the IEC dramatically improved the situation by adding a browser check to their main page, and redirecting any browsers that don’t identify themselves as IE to an apologetic note which explains that the site doesn’t work in anything except IE. Please note that they had time to add Google Chrome to the list of other browsers — but not to actually fix the damn site; something which you might think is not rocket science, or very expensive to do, especially in this age of out-of-the-box CMSes and web development frameworks.

Of course the site still works in Firefox, exactly as badly as it used to — and the browser check is trivially circumventable. All you have to do to see it in its full malformed glory is navigate to any internal page. If you’re feeling energetic, you can make your browser lie in its user agent string. Be prepared to reload frequently — not only is the site atrociously designed and basically unmaintained (how long is that <\table> going to be there?); the server is a bit dodgy.

Now, people have been complaining about this crap for years, to little effect. Nobody seems to be particularly interested in fixing the problem.

Earlier today several people I know posted links to DigitalApartheid.com, a new site created by someone who is fed up with the state of the IEC website. As much as I agree with the purported goals of the site, I am not impressed with the way it has gone about achieving them, for several reasons.

One: the site instructs visitors to email or fax a form letter complaining about the site to various employees of the IEC. Form letters are crap. Form letters say “I’m not capable of articulating an intelligent opinion about this; I’m with that guy, so I copied what he said.” I wouldn’t be surprised if they were forwarded straight to /dev/dustbin at the IEC; I know that’s what I’d do.

Two: the form letter is full of bad punctuation and grammar. Badly written complaints make you look stupid.

Three: the form letter compares the site’s exclusion of non-IE users to apartheid, and states that the writer is contemplating not voting unless the site is fixed. Here’s where we go off the deep end.

Seriously? You really think that the inconvenience that you experience at this site because of your (admirable and sensible) choice to use a browser other than IE is comparable to decades of racist government oppression?

Dude. Maybe you should get some perspective.

Most people in South Africa don’t have access to computers. The IEC website is not the only — or indeed the primary — source of information about the elections. This information is not being denied to you — if you can’t access it in your browser (and you can, really), you have the ability to get it in some other way, just like all those computerless people.

I do want the IEC to fix their site — but bombarding them with ridiculous hyperbole isn’t going to make them do it. There are plenty of intelligent things to say about standards compliance and FOSS, and why they are important. If you’re going to send a complaint, please do it in a way which doesn’t make you — and by association everyone else who uses an alternative browser — look like a raving nutjob.

We went to see it on a whim, and it was surprisingly good. The voice acting is a bit dodgy in patches, but it’s not unbearable. In general, both the plot and the character interactions were better done and more interesting than in the steaming pile of crap that was the entire prequel trilogy. I actually sort of liked Anakin: he had a lot more personality than his live-action counterpart.

Amidala gets to have an adventure all by herself, and pwn bad guys with her mad senatorial skillz. There’s a new female hero and a new(ish) female villain (and they only fight each other for a couple of seconds). There are amusing (and short-lived) droid grunts. If they made a plush Baby Hutt, I’d totally get one.

If you’ve been depressed about the current state of the franchise, this should cheer you up at least a little bit.

So Trevor Manuel has simultaneously resigned and not resigned. We’ll finally know his state when someone peeks into his office and collapses the wave function. I made this joke purely for the sake of generating an interesting title for my post, and I apologise.

Hellboy 2 was awesome; it’s really nice to be able to say that about a cinema movie for a change. Abe’s makeup was better than in the first movie. I liked the story. I’ve heard of some people saying it’s not very “Hellboy” — but the tragic decline of the pre-human magical races (and their continual attempts to get Hellboy on their side) is a major theme in the comics (”lovecraftian horrors from space try to eat the world” is the other one).

Abe has his own comic spin-off! I have ordered the first trade, but publication appears to have been delayed. I’m also getting the Lobster Johnson trade — I may as well collect the lot.

I am reading the InuYasha manga. Scanlations are funny. It’s very rare for fan translators to have a flawless grasp of English grammar — and they have a tendency to be obsessively faithful to the original text, so if they encounter something difficult to translate they prefer to provide a half-page explanatory footnote than to pick an equivalent but not identical English phrase. Also, since this is generally a youth-friendly manga, I’m pretty sure that InuYasha doesn’t keep saying “fuck” and “bitch” in the official English translation.

I have installed Privoxy at home, and cleaned up some of my previous hacky ad- and cookie-blocking measures (huge blacklist in my browser, mostly pointless since I was not accepting cookies by default and thus only using the whitelist; huge wodge of domains in my hosts file, etc.). The first advantage that Privoxy has over all this crap is that it understands wildcards. Thanks to this, I will not have to allow cookies from every single LJ/Blogger domain individually. And for my next trick, I hope to be able to tell Privoxy to extend the life of LiveJournal’s cookies beyond the session — I’m not a prolific poster, but unless I am logged in (with openid), I keep running into the infuriating new adult content filters[1].

[1] This is what self-policing enforced by vague threats and imprecise rules looks like. Anyone who thinks they might occasionally mention sex in a post (i.e. is a normal person) sticks these on their entire journal, just in case. And of course the anonymous reader is assumed by LiveJournal to be a minor, and subjected to the most extreme filtering by default. I’m an adult. Why do I have to wrestle with childproof caps on my interwebs?

My photographs, let me show you them:

• Monkey Town
• Hermanus

Lemurs! Monkeys! Tortoises! Surprise cat! Poultry! Indistinct floaty things with flippers!

After some misadventures with dynamic DNS, we’re moving our stuff to the lovely CLAWs server in the UK. Yay, countries with less crappy internet.

Notable recent events in no particular order:

Dragonfire happened, and it was cool. Then Hodgestar and I went to Jo’burg (or rather its outskirts) to visit the HartRAO observatory, where work keeps its test radiotelescope, and where we climbed into the 26m dish. Jo’burg and flying made me a bit ill, but the telescopes were awesome.

More recently, we belatedly celebrated Hodgestar’s birthday with a trip to Monkey Town with a bunch of people (longer review and photos forthcoming; you must go there and see the mongoose lemurs, which are like kitties with opposable thumbs).

We went to the awesome second-hand bookshop in Gordon’s Bay, which is huge and impossible to explore thoroughly in less than a week. I got some random scifi, and an old book on lacemaking for R3.

Afterwards we went for a walk on the beach, and I found some exciting flotsam: a not-quite-dead hermit crab with no shell (I think) which I threw back into the sea, mostly unbroken wrap-around sunglasses, filed to a matt finish by the sand, and a barbie leg (not an authentic barbie leg; a cheap imitation plastic doll leg) which I left there for some unfortunate small child with a one-legged barbie to find. I intend to make the sunglasses into a steampunky set of Goggles of Uselessness. They are useless, because the matt surface makes them impossible to see through. They could theoretically be helpful for sleeping in the car. I might write a whole LARP around this prop (which doesn’t exist yet).

Then we went to Hermanus with Akika and drnlm, and saw lots of whales really close up (photos forthcoming). We went to a nursery with Hodgestar’s mom, because they had bonsai there. Hodgestar selected what is allegedly a chinese hackberry, which looks tree-like and has cute little leaves. We have been reading about bonsai on teh interwebs. Apparently the hackberry is easy to care for, and since we have neither aircon nor central heating, and a place outdoors to keep it if it’s miserable inside, we are unlikely to kill it.

I ordered a lot of graphic novels from Outer Limits and they rather surprisingly arrived all at the same time, including the Hellboy stuff from Dark Horse, which has traditionally been held up for months by mysterious forces of import and export. (Adeeb says that Diamond has improved its internet presence, which has made it easier to complain when they’ve stuffed something up.) I’m all caught up on B.P.R.D., I’m still waiting for Hellboy 8 (7 arrived), I got a lot of random lovecraftian stuff from Boom! studios, and I have all the A Distant Soil that’s been written so far.

And now for some actual photos:

• The samurai LARP that ate a month of our lives. It worked out rather well.
• Dragonfire during the day
• The Fountain of Youth, Beth’s LARP, which we helped DM.

The band Atrina lives again! Here is their new website, where you can still download a bunch of their mp3s.

Marina Bychkova, who makes the most beautiful porcelain dolls in the world, has re-done her website. And her fans have started a forum for discussing her dolls and posting their own photos of dolls that they’ve bought. There’s also a Flickr group.

The fantasy webcomic Juathuur has a sequel, Gatecrash.

Cool stuff I have recently read or seen:

Books:
Glasshouse by Charles Stross — sf novel set in a world where human identities can easily be backed up and restored, psychosurgery can alter memories and identities, and the world is recovering from a war over identity-editing — the precise circumstances of which are unknown, because they have been edited out of the consciousness of the survivors.
A Shadow in Summer by Daniel Abraham (through Tor’s free e-book offer) — fantasy novel; pseudo-oriental setting; very cool worldbuilding, characterisation and magic system. The cities of a coastal empire are kept in power by their andat — ideas made flesh which are created and enslaved by Poets. Each andat has a power tied to the concept that it represents, and since andat disappear when their Poets die and it is very difficult to re-bind them, all the obvious ideas have been used up, and the existing andat have rather specific abilities. The book opens with a young man receiving a somewhat cliched harsh monastic education which is supposed to lead to Poethood after the appropriate trials by fire. In a pleasant break from the way this story usually goes, he rapidly rejects this as a cruel and misguided way of life, and runs away to find his fortune elsewhere. And then interesting things happen. There is an ensemble cast of interconnected protagonists, one of whom is an old lady. The best Tor e-book so far, I think.

Manga:
Naoki Urasawa! He is awesome! I have now read all of his manga that I have been able to get my hands on:

Monster — psychological horror mystery set in 90s Germany. A young surgeon saves the life of a little boy who has been shot in the head under mysterious circumstances. Many years later, he discovers that the boy is a psychopathic serial killer — and is framed for some of his murders. He sets out to track him down.
20th Century Boys (last chapter here) — sci-fi mystery set in Japan and other Asian countries during the 60s, the modern day and the future. In the modern day, a mysterious cult is gaining political power, and seems to be behind a number of sinister events. A young man realises that Friend, the mysterious leader of the cult, must have been in his close-knit group of friends in the 60s. But who is it?
Pluto — sci-fi murder mystery with robots, based on an Astroboy story. Very reminiscent of Asimov. Ongoing.

Later I found some other manga which are almost as good:

Vinland Saga by Makoto Yukimura — it’s about Vikings! A young Danish boy has joined the mercenary band of the ruthless, cunning man who killed his father — and performs dangerous missions for his nemesis in exchange for opportunities to duel him to the death. This all happens against the backdrop of various historical Viking invasions of Britain. Ongoing.
Ressentiment by Kengo Hanazawa — it’s about an unattractive loser who gives up on real women and immerses himself in a virtual dating sim. Then weird things start to happen. This doesn’t sound very good, but it actually is — it’s played completely straight, and for every scene which could be construed as cute girl fanservice, there’s a hairy, flabby man showing way too much skin as a counterbalance. There’s a crunchy cyberpunk-y plot, which has so far not made me want to stab myself with a fork, and I normally dislike cyberpunk. Ongoing.

Movies:
Children of Men — dystopia done very well.
Survive Style 5+ — this movie is bizarre and awesome, and has a really good soundtrack.

Series:
The Lost Room — a miniseries which has frequently been described to me as “very Unknown Armies”. It’s quite good, although major things are left unresolved at the end, probably in anticipation of a TV series extension. I thought the second episode had a few really creepy moments (subtle Lovecraftian horror; the kind with unnatural geometry, not the kind with tentacles).
ETA: Rome (season 1) — Backstabbing! Togas! Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo! Colourful expletives! Equal-opportunity nudity! Ciarán Hinds is hawt; it’s a pity that Caesar’s demise at the end of the season is historically inevitable. Best semi-historical series evar!

The third running of Appoinment at Atropos, our sci-fi LARP, happened on the 19th. Here are some photos.

I am always pleasantly surprised by the alien costumes. The physical descriptions of the aliens are deliberately left vague, because getting four people to dress up as matching aliens is difficult enough without more specific requirements. So we just throw some facepaint and make-up at the relevant players at the beginning of the briefing, and let them make something up. This year the Kar-Shan had bright blue skin and hair which faded to white with age. In the playtest they had gills, and in the second running they had two pairs of eyes.

A full PDF copy of this LARP will be going up on its page in the CLAWs library, but I have to fix up the special ability cards first.

Because we suddenly have a huge pool of female roleplayers again, it looked like we weren’t going to find enough men for this running — so we made four of the male characters gender-swappable. This is where writing the LARP in pmwiki really came in handy: I set up some variables in the config and replaced all the pronouns and other gendered words referring to those characters with placeholders, and we can now swap the gender of the characters by setting some variables on a wiki page. I think I will make this into a more generic recipe and submit it to the pmwiki cookbook.

This does make it more difficult to provide a PDF, since there are 256 possible gender combinations. I guess we’ll put up a maximally male and maximally female version, and take custom orders.

Having all the gender-swappable and gender-neutral characters makes the LARP much less of a casting nightmare than completely fixed-gender LARPs. Especially when looking for emergency last-minute replacements.

I am slowly working on a sequel/prequel, set in a seedy bar in a mining colony and populated by dubious semi-criminal characters. It would be the antithesis of Atropos’s epic politics. I like the universe, and I want to do more stuff with it — and it will be easier to write a second LARP in it because I won’t have to do all the background information from scratch.

Now I just need to think of another SF book title to parody.

Now that I have a computer which still has all of its teeth and is good for something other than yelling “You damn kids! Get off my lawn!”*, I have set up Basilisk II, the 68k Mac emulator (when I upgrade to Hardy I will also try SheepShaver, the PowerPC emulator). It’s running MacOS 8.0, the highest version of the operating system that Basilisk will support, and is using a Quadra ROM.

MacOS 8 is prehistoric, and the emulator keeps hanging — I’m hoping that with a bit more research I’ll be able to optimise the settings and make it stop doing that . Why did I bother doing this at all? Mostly so that I could once again play the finest Breakout clone in the history of human civilisation: Akira Nagamatsu and Shizue Mouri’s MozPong.

Instead of a paddle, you have a small boy with a big head. Instead of a ball, you have “Butasan”, which seems to be a tiny flying pig (I only solved this mystery ten minutes ago, with the awesome power of Google. I always thought it was some kind of clay bottle!). Instead of bricks, you have eggs — when you break them, chickens fall out and you have to catch them for points. Some eggs contain extra Butasan, and there are also bombs (which explode). Every now and then, a dinosaur called Josephine walks onto the screen and tries to hug you, thereby preventing you from getting to your Butasan (or chickens). You get rid of her by hitting her with the Butasan and running over her while she’s down. Catching lots of chickens gives you random bonuses — most of them just give you more points, but some have interesting special effects.

This game is made of win. It makes the whole emulator setup worth it. There is apparently also a Windows port, which you may find more convenient if you’re already running the OS of Evil.

Other favourites I am looking forward to playing are Maniac (a cross between Pacman and hangman), Blobbo Lite (a puzzle game) and Bill the Demon (a gruesome little platform game) — which I will review properly at a later stage.

* Its RAM is an order of magnitude larger than that of my old computer. This means that I can now actually run things that normal people run — even all at the same time.