Enjoying: Frank Hurley penguin picture

This is a great picture taken on a Mawson expedition to the South Pole between 1911 and 1913 by the legendary Australian photographer Frank Hurley.

The title - and they really went to town on titles back in the day - is:

This Camera Caricature Shows Some Moulting Adelies Which Have Become Cluttered Up With Snow during a Blizzard

LOLing: Newstopia clip - politicians and body language

There's - uh - quite a bit of swearing in this clip - but it's piss funny :)

Enjoying: old Planet of the Apes action figure ads

These are just slightly before my time but growing up with action figures (not dolls :) , I can relate. The Planet of the Apes series of films - particularly as you get further into the series and they just get weirder and darker - are well worth a look too. (Start out with the first film - Planet of the Apes - for context and make sure you see Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which has this whole apes as slaves in the 1990s thing going on. )

Making: a game about how to play games

Getting very meta with this one but as part of the previously mentioned game, I realised that there are a lot of people out there who have never played 3D games before and who could use a bit of detailed instruction.

This is the first part of the "how to play 3D games" game. (As ever, made in FPS Creator and recorded using Fraps)

Updating: the second lamest FPS ever

Been putting in a little work on a game that I mentioned earlier - to be honest though, a lot of the work has involved learning how tricky it is to use the no-doubt practical but confusing FPS Creator software. There are thousands of forum posts in the community with handy advice but searching is tricky as when you put in a query that gets more than 100 results, it says that there are too many results to display.

Anyways, this update adds more game elements to it - rules, challenges, goals and competition. Gotta press on now, still need to put something more substantial together for the how-to-play-the-game game.

Growing: A moustache for Movember

This is perhaps one of my slacker posts, it's largely about me not shaving a portion of my face and cutting and pasting some content from the Movember website because they tell it better than I do. Anyways, here goes.

During Movember (the month formerly known as November) I'll be growin a Mo. That's right I'm bringing the Mo back because I'm passionate about changing men's health and the fight against male depression and prostate cancer. Why...

* Depression affects 1 in 6 men...Most don't seek help. Untreated depression is a leading risk factor for suicide.
* Last year in Australia 18,700 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer and more than 2,900 died of prostate cancer - equivalent to the number of women who die from breast cancer annually.
* Men are far less healthy than women. The average life expectancy of males is 5 years less than females.

To sponsor my Mo please go to http://www.movember.com/au/donate, enter my registration number which is 139517 and your credit card details. Or you can sponsor me by cheque made payable to the "Movember Foundation" clearly marking the donation as being for my Registration Number: 139517. Please mail cheques to: PO Box 292, Prahran VIC 3181. All donations over $2 are tax deductible. I'm also more than happy to take cash off your hands directly and sort out the paperwork guff for you

The money raised by Movember is donated to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and beyondblue - the national depression initiative, which will use the funds to create awareness, fund research and increase support networks for those men who suffer from prostate cancer and male depression.

For those that have supported Movember in previous years you can be very proud of the impact it has had and can check out the detail at: Fundraising Outcomes.

So far the mo is coming along fairly nicely, only five days and it's pretty apparent already.

Looking forward to: Dollhouse (from Joss Whedon)

Joss Whedon has done a lot a great things for pop culture in the last 15 or so years - from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Toy Story to Angel to Firefly and a bunch of other geekosphere stuff.

Good news is that he has a new show coming up called Dollhouse, starring Eliza Dushku - Faith from Buffy (you know, the hotter, bad-girl slayer).

This is the gist of it.

In Dollhouse, Dushku plays a young woman named Echo; one of a group of men and women who can be neurally imprinted with "personality packages"; encompassing things such as memory, muscle memory, skills, and language. Sheltered in a secret futuristic dormitory/laboratory named the "Dollhouse"; these individuals are imprinted with customized personas for performing any of a wide variety of assignments—that can be romantic, adventurous, outlandish, illegal, etc.—and mind-wiped into a child-like state with no memories after completing an assignment. The series follows Echo as she begins to develop a persistent memory and self-awareness across imprints and wipes.

hurrah.

Reserving judgment on: The Librarians

The first episode of any tv comedy is always the hardest - you need to make an impression straight away but you also have to establish all of your characters, your underlying storylines and hopefully throw in a few killer gags as well. A good part of the humour in many shows comes from character traits (though preferably not catch-phrases, which are generally lazy comic short-cuts in my book) that need to be establised over a number of weeks.

For this reason, it's hard to make a call on last nights opening episode of The Librarians. (You can watch the whole thing online here)

The main word that comes to mind is low-key, which I guess works thematically with the whole library thing but I got the sense that it was only a step or two away from timid.

Which is interesting as one of the key themes that emerged was the head librarian's darkly cheery anti-Muslim racism. The fact that this was largely accepted by the other library staff I think was meant to suggest that they are all cowed by her and afraid to speak up but there really wasn't anything to suggest why they might find her scary (other than the fact that they're all, well, rather timid).

A few of the characters veered pretty close to 2D stereotype - now I think that an essential part of good comedy is exaggeration but this is something to be careful with too. The tarty good-time girl with the gangster boyfriend is one to watch here.

The main point of the episode was - as you would expect - establishing the characters and their relationships and setting up the introduction of a new character. Not much going on in terms of story though there was a hint that things might be building. To be honest, few of the characters really stood out - though not surprisingly, Bob Franklin did well with his moments on screen and Wayne Hope enjoyed a flashback cameo having an American Beauty shower moment. There were actually a lot of flashbacks now that I think about it - being the first ep this makes a certain amount of sense.

Stylistically, it has promise and will hopefully hit it's stride by the 2nd or 3rd.

Looking forward to: The Librarians

The new show tonight taking the slot from the highly overrated Summer Heights High on the ABC looks like a beauty.

It's called The Librarians and the website is well worth a look - rather schmick and full of nice book related gags. I'm leaning towards "Nothing can so easily transport you to a far away land as a book or a mental imbalance" - which appears to come from the character played by Bob Franklin, one of Oz's best comedy imports ever.



It kicks off tonight at 9.30 on the ABC

Struggling: to make progress on uni work

The finishing post is in sight, only four more assignments and I'm done for the year - unfortunately 3 of them are due in 5 days, on Monday.

Two of them should be a big old barrel of fun - building on the games I've been working on (mentioned previously) but before I get to those, I feel like I should get the duller, research and writing based one out of the way. Not entirely sure how this prioritisation works - something along the lines of no dessert until you eat your greens I guess - but it doesn't really seem to make sense.

Oh well, nothing to do but to do it really.

Watching: Architecture in Helsinki guest programming rage

Flicked on Rage on Saturday night as you do to find a weird and wonderful Hall and Oates clip followed up directly by one of the oddest, most cult-like videos I've every seen by The Jacksons. Turned out that quirky Melbourne band Architecture in Helsinki were programming the night and a fine job they did too. Check out their full list here and here are some of the choice selections they made. I really liked the Yo La Tengo go to rock school clip as well.

PWNing: The ANU Film Group movie trivia night

At the risk of sounding a little full of myself, the PC and I rocked the house on Saturday night at the ANU Film Group movie trivia night, with a 10 point victory over a bunch (at least 100) of some very nerdy film types.

Credit should of course go to most of the rest of our team as well (Team "How's the serenity?"), who, like us, hadn't organised a table but lobbed up assuming we'd be able to join one.

As far as quiz nights go, I think it was one of the best organised and most fun ones I've been to - well paced, entertaining and with an imaginative variety of questions and mini-activities.

Table games included an image containing picture clues to the titles of 20 movies (including a large, black bird soaring in the sky which a number of table members had to be convinced was The Crow rather than Black Hawk Down) and a series of story synopses which had been translated to another language and back again online (apparently most of the table - including several film students - haven't heard of that obscure indie flick Citizen Kane).

Question rounds included observation tests for clips, work out the theme of three selected soundtracks (eg all from franchises, all scored by John Williams, etc), a very tricky Catchphrase word puzzle round where you had picture clues which gave you actors or movies or whatever which then gave you the answer to a bigger listed puzzle (e.g Blade Runner & Black Hawk Down for Ridley Scott)

Nice to have some quiz night activities that were out of the ordinary. My taking-the-quiz-night-a-tad-too-seriously side only came out briefly a couple of times (well we were leading and our scribes were misspelling/not recognising every other name) when I had to fight the table for a couple of answers (leaf for Joaquin Phoenix's real name and Showgirls as a Golden Razzie record holder - over Gigli) - fortunately I was right after getting all insistent.

All up an entirely fun night and very well put together. (and prizes are always nice - books and privileges cards - it was an added bonus to see a former housemate - the taskmaster - come second, particularly after she rather rudely pushed in front of me in a line earlier on)

And now the PC is a little geed up about quiz shows (which I think she could do pretty well on)

Playing: Songs for Sunset

Staring Through My Rear View 2Pac 5:14 The Prophet
Dawsons Creek Sarah Sarah 3:05 The Kids Who Kill For Sugar: Popboomerang Records 5th Birthday Sampler
When The War Is Over Something For Kate 5:19 Standing On The Outside (The Songs Of Cold Chisel)
Khe Sanh Paul Kelly 4:17 Standing On The Outside (The Songs Of Cold Chisel)
You Say You Lie The Raveonettes 2:55 Pretty In Black
Ladykillers Lush 3:14 Lovelife
Let's Get Lost Chet Baker 3:44 A Selection From 25 Best Albums
Fire Fire Fire Dappled Cities 3:48 Granddance
War Still A Run Zenzile 4:20 Modus Vivendi
Us Amazonians Kirsty MacColl 4:09 Tropical Brainstorm
Caravan Trash The Fuelers 3:23 Hot Dang
Show Me Dexy's Midnight Runners 3:25 Uncut The Playlist - March 2007
The Illustrated Man Konrad Lenz w/The Henchmen 4:01 One of the missing
Velvet Girl Howling Bells 3:22 VARIOUS Now Hear This! - February 2007
The Lion & Albert Jarvis Cocker 3:10 VARIOUS Now Hear This! - February 2007
Panther Dash The Go! Team 2:45 Thunder, Lightning, Strike
Know You Too Well Minimum Chips 2:52 Kitchen Tea Thankyou
The Old Man Can Talk Bit By Bats 3:30 Bit By Bats
Sharkfin Blues The Drones 4:32 Single
This is Not a Love Song Nouvelle Vague 4:33 Versions
Twin Lakes Sodastream 2:12 Reservations

LOLing: surviving zombies (in plain english)

Those clever folks at Commoncraft.org have put together a nice guide to surviving zombie attacks in plain english. Learn and live :)

Updating: Playing with Spokentext.net

I posted the other day about a nifty text-to-speech tool I've been using over at Spokentext.net and mentioned/whinged/whatever about having to use two separate sites to actually embed the audio file it produced in the blog. (Created the file on Spokentext and then hosted it over at Odeo)

The creator of the software commented and pointed out that you can actually embed directly and here's the proof







Hmm, um, actually, that doesn't seem to work.

Here's a hacked version though - just using html/flash embedding rather than javascript (all thanks to our local web/script guru Len, I'm a little noobish at this myself to be honest)





As you can see, this is definitely a tool with potential.

Loving: Hawkey's sledge of Howard

With K-Rudd playing the sensible (but boring and perhaps wussy) political game and doing the whole small target, wedge dodging, hubris avoiding thing, he's been a little slack in coming out and giving our Prime Miniature a good serve.

Fortunately we have ex-PMs to come out and do that for us and Bob Hawke has delivered a beauty in an interview on Sky News.

Here are the first few paragraphs from the story in the Age, read the whole thing here, it's great.

John Howard "buggered up" Australia's economy when he was treasurer and Labor had to fix it, former prime minister Bob Hawke said today.

Mr Hawke branded the current prime minister the worst economic manager in Australian history, pointing to Mr Howard's time as treasurer in the Fraser government.

During that period, he said, unemployment reached 11 per cent, inflation 11 per cent and the budget deficit $9.6 billion - or $40 billion in today's terms.

"The fact is, if you look at the question of economic management, the worst economic manager that this country's had since federation was John Howard," Mr Hawke told Sky News.

"The day after I got elected on March 5 (1983) I had John Stone, the secretary of the Treasury in, and he gave me a written report in which he said the budget deficit which I was inheriting ... was the worst performance of any developed economy in the post-war period.

"That absolutely buggered the Australian economy. And we had to fix it, and we did."

What's that leetspeek term? Oh yeah

PWNED!!!

Interested in: Fido the movie

This one looks like it could either work well or just miss the mark - it's another zombie comedy (zom-com if you prefer) which features domesticated zombies which at some point go wild.

This picks up nicely from the idea touched on at the end of Shaun of the Dead and interestingly comes back to the origins of zombie mythology, which is zombies as slaves. (In Haiti, it wasn't zombies per se that the locals were afraid of - as the whole flesh eating thing isn't part of zombie lore there - but of actually becoming a zombie and having to keep working beyond death)



Best of all though, it stars the guy who played the paedophile dad in Happiness

Playing: with SpokenText.net

I've been having a look (or a listen rather) to a nifty website that allows you to convert text from a range of sources (documents, text files, pdfs, web sites) into speech.

It has that slightly clunky, overly literal quality to reading that you know and love from text-to-speech converters (might try to keep this in mind if I ever make a movie about evil robots - or good ones for that matter)

Check it out at http://www.spokentext.net

Here's a recording from my bday blog post yesterday. (I like how it thinks that col is short for colonel)


powered by ODEO

Now I won't be offended if no-one listens to this one (as it's something like 40 mins long) but this is a listing of all the tags I've used on posts in the last year or so. It has a slightly hypnotic quality, might be an interesting background sound.


powered by ODEO

It would be great if you didn't have to go through two separate sites to embed this in a site but I'm sure that one day it'll all come together.

Watching: Skynet's slow birth

I've banged on about the slow rise of killer robots before - in that slightly mad conspiracist/apocalypsist way I do - but every once in a while a news story pops up that suggests that a Terminator-like future dominated by the buggers is coming one step closer.



This story from Wired is just the latest - nine South African soldiers were killed and fourteen wounded when a robot cannon "malfunctioned" during a test last week. (Or was it just feeling a little emo?)

The anti-aircraft weapon, an Oerlikon GDF-005, is designed to use passive and active radar, as well as laser range finders, to lock on to "high-speed, low-flying aircraft, helicopters, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and cruise missiles." In "automatic mode," the weapon feeds targeting data from the fire control unit straight to the pair of 35mm guns, and reloads on its own when its emptied its magazine.

Think I might just brush up on this book again :)

Enjoying : Birthday week

Those who know me might be aware of my theory that a single day is clearly not long enough to really celebrate another year of existence and it's a much better proposition to milk it by stretching it out to a week. This doesn't have to be entirely over the top (but it doesn't hurt :) but I think it's something that everyone should be entitled to do.

The balancing side (in theory at least) is that during the rest of the year this frees you to focus a little more on the needs of others. Obviously this is by no means a foolproof system but I think the principle is worthwhile, given that our consumerist culture seems to increasingly give us the message that it's everyone for themselves.

Personally I blame John Howard and his love for the Thatcherist philosophy that there is no society, just competing individuals. (Of course, I tend to blame J-Ho for a lot of things because, well, he sucks :)

Anyway, so far, bday week has been a good one. (Bday week, by the way, starts whenever the bday person chooses - but obviously the actual bday needs to fall inside it at some point).

The leadup has been great - very funny 90 minutes of Howard-bashing humour from Rod Quantock on Friday night (though he didn't mind sticking a couple of jabs to card-table lefties and even Margaret Whitlam). Finally got around to seeing The Simpsons movie on Saturday (after a solid and productive day of study work) and then the official beginning of the week last night with a very nice dinner in the schmicko revolving restaurant on Black Mountain tower. (With extensive views over the city lights of - uh - Canberra).

Woke this morning to hear that J-Ho got rather pwned in the election debate last night - the audio clips on the radio certainly showed this to be the case (although he's lost the last few debates so I guess that doesn't say too much) and then got a couple of super prezzies from the PC including a voucher for a tandem hang-gliding lesson. (Hang gliding has been one of my life aspirations for a long time)

Add to this the radio play version of OK Computer that I discovered yesterday (check the other post today for more info) and another solid days study work yesterday as well as some glorious sunny weather and I'm pretty durned happy.

All in all, life is pretty bloody good.

(cake image not actually mine, borrowed from uwhisper on Flickr)