I woke up at 5am and forced myself back to sleep for two hours. This always results in a number of intense micro-dreams. I don’t know why that is, but the perceived length of time for each dream is far greater than the thirty minutes or so I’ve been asleep each time, so I’m really getting good value out of the morning.

All of these dreams were connected in some way with being miserably dissatisfied with life, in a slightly dated Brett Easton Ellis young professional kind of way. In the only one I can remember the plot of – and I’ll make this short because other people’s dreams are never very interesting – I had decided not to go to work because of a hangover, and was wandering around London. I met up with a friend from school who was inexplicably a security guard and had a little room actually in the building. I couldn’t get my phone to work to call the office; we talked for a bit and hung around his apartment. He had a number of manic pet squirrels that jumped all over me and everything else; some of his friends turned up, and everyone went back to someone else’s flat, which was a trendy white Apple-filled place full of people talking about making trendy experimental movies and trendy art. I didn’t participate, and it made me feel isolated and unhappy, even though they were friendly and didn’t exclude me. At around two o’clock everyone was going to go to the pub, and then I woke up, and it was all a dream. The end.

I don’t like the implications of this and the dream thing in general. I knew someone at university who said she had nightmares every time she went to sleep, and I thought that was horrific – one thing I’d grown to expect from sleep was that at least it would mostly be a rest, including mentally. These weren’t nightmares but they were very unsettling, at the time and in retrospect. I may be getting some pet squirrels though. No penguins were involved in the making of this dream.

IAM, Akhenaton, Freeman & K.reen / “Iam – Independenza”

I was reminded this afternoon of a rather unpleasant fact about myself – that I understand organisational politics much too well for my own good.

The issue was a particular technical initiative that is being implemented and I’m involved in tangentially. It’ll cause a deal of upheaval and people are always suspicious of that, though I think it’ll help overall, because it deliberately sets up a system where people aren’t able to put other people in shit because they are too lazy to do their jobs; it kills off a lot of the informal pecking order that grants power without responsibility.

Anyway, there could be problems with implementing it in time for the deadlines. My immediate reaction was “it’s better to delay it and only release it when it works properly, rather than release it with bugs on time, because the end users will be dissatisfied, they’ll bitch about it and say it’s not as good as the old system, and someone will pick up on that and escalate the complaints because they want to kill off the project and make it look like they have an alternative, to increase their profile”. » Continue reading “Corrupted by politics”

The Ramones / “I Wanna Be Sedated”

How long would you estimate it would take me to get a US driver’s licence?

I am planning on within the next month. I think I can get the learner’s permit within the week, book a test, spend a couple of weeks on lessons after work, take the test, and pass. My eyes, brain and hands do interact, and that seems to be the only real requirement for the test from what I see.

I am supposed to be moving in three months’ time, and for this a car will be extremely useful, so I’m using this as an excuse to get me off my arse. It’s too easy to just keep using the bus to get to work; if I want to move I will need to have a car to check out new locations, and I don’t want to be limited by the extremely limited public transport situation any more.

If I ever move to a place with good public transportation I will sell whatever car I get. (If I leave the US, I will have to sell it anyway.) I don’t see what other option I have out here though, and my indentured servant status means I can’t move to New York and obtain a glamourous lifestyle quite now.

That’s another thing I’ve been considering… whether to start going for Green Card lotteries etc or to leave it for the moment. I suppose having a Green Card is never a disadvantage (unless you’re stuck on a hijacked plane and terrorists are checking passports; I’d probably be shot after the Americans but before anyone else anyway, with a UK passport). Regardless of what I think about my current job, I will never feel entirely comfortable without complete freedom of movement and action in a place, or at least as much as my peers.

I find it rather ironic that the Constitution makes no reference to official citizenship requirements (as far as I’m aware) being designed for a nation of dirty immigrants, but right now I pay the same tax as an American citizen in the same situation but can’t vote. If you’d tried that back then you would have probably met with gunfire. I’ve got no huge ideological attachment to voting, I’m leaning more and more to the “it only encourages them” opinion and there are much better ways to be politically active, but it feels like a specific act of disenfranchisement.

One thing I learnt recently was that non-citizens may not be able to vote but they can certainly join the army:

Current Army regulations prohibit granting a Security Clearance to non-U.S. citizens. Additionally, some Army jobs may only be performed by U.S. citizens, regardless of Security Clearance requirements. Below are Army jobs that can be performed by Non-U.S. Citizens:

OOB–Diver

02–Band Member

02S–Special Band Member

11B–Infantryman

11C–Indirect Fire Infantryman

11H–Heavy Anti–armor Weapons Infantryman

11M–Fighting Vehicle Infantryman

and a huge number of other possible positions. Even if that would look good on my immigration record, I don’t think I’ll be taking it up.

The Smoking Gun produces a legal document worth reading…

MOTION TO DISMISS: THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF FUCK, “FUCKER” AND “FUCKING FAG”

This is a seven-page, 24-paragraph examination by Eric Vanatta, Colorado Deputy State Public Defender, of the legal status and precedents of the use of the word “fuck” in America.

The whole document is good, but the final paragraph is particularly useful in providing guidance as to where the word might be appropriate and inappropriate:

24. Fuck is certainly a controversial word that may be appropriate in certain venues and locales (Florida Election Commission, speed-eating contests, public defender offices) and may be inappropriate in others (weddings, Chuck-E-Cheese pizza parlors, district attorney offices). Some people may believe it is always inappropriate. But in all but a very few circumstances, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits our government from making that determination. This case falls outside of those very limited circumstance and as such, no conviction can result from Mr. *** alleged statements.

Oddly enough, a lot of people seem to be talking about how much BuyMusic.com (the supposed Windows challenger to the iTunes Music Store) sucks. You know, I find this really surprising. How odd that an official music download service would suck! How strange! You could knock me dahn wiv a feaver!

And it seems to suck for the same reasons, too. Windows-IE-only. Can only play on Windows Media Player, has to verify your licence online before playing each song, only burn with a specialised WiMP plugin that apparently doesn’t work that well, only licenced to one machine for burning… christ, just read what some other people have said about the experience: Jennifer at scriptygoddess, this huge list of problems, the originator of this banner.

Oh, one final thing: from their “privacy” agreement…

we may disclose, sell, trade, or rent your Personally Identifiable Information to others without your consent

Riiiiiight.

Now MusicMatch are starting a similar service. And I’ll put money on that sucking too.

The reason they suck and always will suck is that the problems are just the result of ideological points that users and providers just don’t agree on. Publishers and purchasers basically see music purchases as two entirely different things. They are providing a service not a product. (Products are so twentieth century, dahling.) » Continue reading “If this is my alternative to piracy, bring on the parrot”

I decided that the random generation of sushi each time you went to a new page on this site was getting a bit annoying and distracting. I’ve put static sushi in the headers now, but I can easily change the images round.

The images were being grabbed randomly by a little perl script, but it was taking too long to return the images. The flickering effect is irritating when you’re moving between pages.

If you’re interested, here’s the full list of the sushi icons (dynamically generated) and the code for the script.

» Continue reading “Static sushi”

50 Cent / “Many Men (Wish Death)”

And now, I’ve missed the bus because I was typing all that crap about drugs. See? Caffeine is bad for you.

I blame society.

I’m not really sure that you could say that chopping half an hour off my work day is really a bad result as such. Best get going now, though, because if I miss the next bus there isn’t another one for an hour.

My head is still thick this morning. I slept for a reasonable length of time, but quality of sleep is important too.

So many adults, I’m sure many of the readers of this blog, are used to the idea of two-stage awakeness. “I’m not really human until I’ve had two cups of coffee in the mornings.” It’s taken as being standard. There are whole cartoon strips based on the idea. Really, how pathological is this? If you need an alarm clock to wake up in the morning, you are chronically sleep deprived. If you need heavy doses of stimulants to get you through the day, every day, you are if not a drug abuser certainly a compulsive drug user.

Caffeine is a real drug. Take a break from it and reduce your tolerance and see what it does to you afterwards. It’s pretty physically safe, but then, so is dope, and there are long-term psychological effects of continued stimulant use. Like anti-depressants they can become an enabler that lets you continue a self-abusive lifestyle far longer than is healthy.

I’m neutral about drugs in themselves, but people who treat it as comedy but would condemn jokes about, say, alcohol annoy me. Giving it in large doses to children seems a bit odd too (the average US child consumes considerably more caffeine than I do now). You wouldn’t give amphetamines to children, would you?

Oh. Yeah.

A lot of this is interesting in historical context. Watch old sitcoms like Bewitched; they’re full of jokes about booze and pills, because those were socially acceptable lifestyle drugs then.

An unusual Unreal mod from kinematic.org.

9-11 Survivor is a game project that examines the role of media in our culture, and the influence that continuous, hyper exposure has on our overall perception of the distinctions between reality and media mediation. This project raises questions regarding how and why popular media forms, such as games and movies, deal with tragedy, conflict and violence.

The level of customisation allowed by Doom, then Quake, Half Life, Unreal etc, makes for an interesting artistic medium. We’ve had all sorts of ideologically-driven mods and FPSes already – see the America’s Army game (now available for Macs it seems) and that race-hate Quake mod where you get to kill Jews and blacks. It doesn’t appear that this is a propaganda piece, but it is going to be designed to deliver a message of some sort, whatever the designers want to say about 9-11. Assuming it’s not just publicity trash.

The rule is: give people a medium and they will use it for (a) porn and (b) art, no matter what it was supposed to be for. FPSes are designed to be immersive.

I wonder if the popularity of multi-player first-personers where the priority is interaction with others and there is little environmental interaction, as opposed to complex single-player ones where you experience like Perfect Dark or most non-MMPO RPGs, will change the way the medium works. If you are used to having the main play value coming from what other people do, will it then be harder for an artist to impose a vision? Is it really important for an artist to impose a vision in an interactive piece anyway, doesn’t that go against the point?

A massively-multiplayer 9-11 simulation would be extremely interesting. I would love to see how people behaved and reacted in that environment. How much would they retain videogame attitudes? Would there be any real empathy? What is the gap between simulation and reality, what would it say about the media portrayal of the real event? These days I’m more interested in social art projects than those based on one creator’s idea – emergent art fascinates me, I feel it says much more about humanity than normal pieces are likely to without unusual inspiration. It’s like instant genius. The skill comes in setting up a situation that will produce a good result.

Technically it’s unlikely at the moment – to get hundreds or thousands of people in the same virtual place takes an awful lot of server work. In a few years, though, who knows? In ten years time we could probably all be running the whole of Everquest from our home computers.

I dropped the creator a mail, it’ll be interesting to see what he says.

Just been alerted to BlogChangeBot by letoii.

This is yet another blog update method – an AIM bot. Send a message to blogchangebot saying

subscribe www.fridgemagnet.org.uk

and you will receive IMs when I update. Works for any blog that pings weblogs.com.

There’s a link in the front page sidebar to do this automatically in case you find that confusing.