The moving finger rants

Half of my friends page has erupted in an enraged frenzy about self-declared fattist and narcissistic, imperious, self-absorbed bitch Ruth Fowler's article in the Grauniad today. Good on you all.

This comes shortly after a post on British Dining about Jay Rayner's idiotic allergy sufferers are all attention-seeking whiners screed in that self-same organ. I think that the Graun's Comment Is Free section is becoming a refuge for all those wankers who have been booted off the BBC's odious Have Your Say section. It's best just to ignore them and hope they go away.

The current flap appears to have been kick-started by that eternal beacon of small-minded nastiness the Daily Hate, who have denounced the Miss England finalist as being fat. Much as I hate to link to the Hate, go and have a look. There are pictures. (There would have to be, knowing the intellectual capacity of the average Mail reader.)

That's Chloe Marshall, size 16, BMI 26.03. Yep, she's a wee bit chunky on the thighs there, but she's smiling, she's got a pretty face, she's comfortable with her body and so should you be. Furthermore, she probably knows how to string a sentence together without infuriating the entire western hemisphere. Ruth Fowler, the Graun's resident fattist, has none of these qualities—although, for an allegedly serious writer, she does have an awful lot of nudie pictures on her shitty frame-based website.

One of these women is a normal, happy person. The other is an attention-seeking, misogynist, hateful, tiny-breasted, mean-spirited cow. To be perfectly honest, I know which of the two I'd rather fuck, but that's only because, as a wise man once said, woman unable to talk bullshit with cock in mouth.

Never before has the phrase I'd hit it been so appropriate. Doubly so, in fact.^[0]

If I had to take one of them out for dinner, I'd take the one who looks like she knows how to enjoy food—or, indeed, enjoy anything at all. Chloe Marshall might not be the brightest button in the box either—she is, after all, seventeen years old and a Miss England contestant—but I've seen no evidence that she's quite so utterly stupid as the bitter hag with the Cambridge First^[1], and she is, at least, a human being.

~

To my knowledge, to date, no terrorists have been caught with the use of the new anti-terror provisions. The ones that have been caught have had a tendency to announce their intention to drive flaming jeeps into airports by, um, driving flaming jeeps into airports, which was illegal before the new laws were brought out anyway. If I recall correctly, blowing stuff up was also illegal before September 11th, which makes one wonder what all those new laws were for in the first place.

This is what the anti-terror laws are being used for instead. Anybody surprised?

I've never met a terrorist and I don't need protecting from them. But I do need protection from officious council scumbags. Can I get some laws? Thought not.

~

All should read cairmen's excellent post on the bloodspell blog, in which he points out just exactly how copyright laws are doing the opposite of protecting the artists. Speaking as an artist, I'm not being protected by a blanket refusal to allow the release of my work. Nor are Bioware being protected by preventing distribution of a work that uses some of their art in a manner which is, pretty much undeniably, non-infringing. This really is taking the use of the phrase derivative work to extremes.

I've never met a plagiarist and I don't need protecting from them. But I do need protection from officious lawyers. Can I get some laws? Maybe—cairmen's post outlines how to start.

--
[0] While we're on the subject: never has the phrase I'd hit it been quite so inappropriate.
[1] It's a First from New Hall, so it barely counts anyway. And once you get into Cambridge, it's relatively easy to get a First as long as you buckle down to studying and eschew all semblance of a social life. I suspect that wasn't much of a problem for the Sociopathic Narcissist, since with a personality like that I doubt she would have been in much demand at all those garden parties.

On the Acting in Bloodspell

Paul A J Hamilton is superb as the Master. His voice work suggests a background story that colours every line.

...excellent work by Thom Tuck as Jered and particularly Paul A J Hamilton as the Master.

Oh, yes.

In the interview (which is quite long) I'm fairly sure I sound weirdly unlike me, and—on a completely unrelated note—I sound like a complete and total nerd. Why did I decide to start talking about The Wrath of Khan for no apparent reason? Why?

I'd completely forgotten that I was being interviewed today by Richard Grove about Bloodspell. He was in Army of Darkness, but I remember him better as the ornery warrior-caste Minbari from the second season of Babylon 5.

I had to grovel for a couple of hours off work at extremely short notice and hurtle off to Hugh's in a taxi. Surprisingly the entire interview consisted of rather more than me trying to get my breath back.

Ricky Grove really likes my acting. (He likes the rest of the film, too.) I have been legitimized by real, Hollywood actors.

That's worth the extra two-and-a-half hours I need to make up at work.

Today I have been mostly creating Web 2.0 application interfaces for a major Edinburgh-based film production company.

That's what it's going to say on my CV. Translated, it means working for Hugh for free.

The sum total of my Ruby knowledge this morning was the ability to write Hello World on the command line. Today I created an RSS feed for the Strange Company blog—with standards compliance and everything!—in the Perl It's Okay To Like.

(LJ syndication for RSS feed available, natch, at strangeco_feed.)

Ruby might well be God's own programming language, largely because it works in mysterious ways. I have no clue what I did today, but it seems to have worked. I realize that this is a tiny and largely insignificant piece of code, but it works, and I'm feeling pretty good about myself.

Coding muscles flexed. Brain atrophy process temporarily stemmed. Next: work out how that code was supposed to work, and work from there.

I also got to watch the full, feature-length cut of Bloodspell, and have come away in possession of the only copy of the DVD screener not physically present at Strange Company Towers. (My unpaid working for Hugh now extends to acting as, indeed physically embodying, the official off-site backup server.) I can say with some confidence that turlygod, verdandiweaves, salchichaastuta, stormsearch and digitalraven are all awesome.

And cairmen as well, but we all knew that, obviously.

At cairmen's flat last night for a script reading of Pirates of the Caribbean: the Curse of the Black Pearl, with stormsearch, xenophanean, and two young ladies WINOLJ. Apparently I was the only person brave enough to take on Captain Jack.

It turns out that I do a rather good Captain Jack—I had the two young ladies, neither of whom I've met before, squeeing. (Sorry, Hugh.) Nobody wanted to take Legolas, but in the event Claire made an excellent Will Turner. And I am now allowed to say that, for a few glorious hours at least, my girlfriend was Kiera Knightley. Mmm.

Occasional lines caused me to slip unconsciously into the Master's voice. It seems that Hugh has permanently ruined my ability to say the word boy.

After Pirates there was Singstar, in which I'm told I did not participate, which is good. It all gets a bit hazy at this point, which is not entirely surprising since the rum had gone. I do remember doing impromptu backing vocals to `Build Me Up, Buttercup', but fortunately no one was paying attention.

Excellent fun—and, given the amount of rum imbibed, surprisingly little hangover.

Drink up me `earties, yo ho.

Bloodspell, episode the last. Shocking revelations! Tear-jerking drama! Epic fight scenes! Me, actually acting!

Next, Hugh plays World of Warcraft for six weeks or so and then we make the feature-length version. I shall be called back at some stage to do a director's cut, special edition, extended version of the Creepy Opening Monologue.

And now, off to the wrap party.

I want to thank my agent, and my makeup artist, and my hairdresser....

Bitch Queen From Hell phoned me this morning. I was icily polite and brusque, and I used the Voice to its full advantage. I said Hello?, then I said What do you want?, then I said Right. Thank you and hung up.

If she still doesn't get the message then I shall go off on a vitriolic diatribe next time. This time it wasn't entirely appropriate to do so, because she was calling to tell me that my grandfather is dying.

The phrase We don't know how long he's got left was used.

What the hell. I'm pissed off with him too.

Until he decided to take sides in the ongoing feud between me and my mother, my grandfather was a wonderful man. Grandpa is a war hero (they are all heroes) and a terribly nice, generous chap with a host of interesting stories and a large stock of terrible, terrible jokes. But he holds some singular ideas about who I should choose to associate with and he lacks the capacity to appreciate my right to make my own decisions. I haven't spoken to him since early last December, and I haven't spoken to my grandmother since the end of February, for similar reasons. In neither case is it because I'm holding an aloof silence or deliberately cutting off contact, it's just so much easier for me not to have to deal with their shit.

I shall continue to get on with my own life, three hundred miles away. None of this is of any concern to me unless my bloody mother tries to call again.

~

I have been subjected to a sooper-sekrit sneak preview of an incomplete version of Bloodspell episode 13. cairmen is desperate for critical feedback before release, for some reason that hasn't been explained. Some of the sound isn't ready yet and at one point there is a SCENE MISSING placeholder card that simply reads, The Master kicks the living crap out of everyone.

I feel quite strongly that they should just leave the placeholder in there. And I sound awesome.

~

Observe this fantastic image of Saturn eclipsing the Sun, as seen from Cassini (larger version here).

Earth is that little dot just inside the G ring at about 10 o'clock. Everything we've ever known is on that pale speck.

If it were up to me, we'd consume all of Earth's resources so that we could get out into space before I'm too old to appreciate it. Perhaps it's a good thing that it's not up to me. But pictures like this remind me that I can still hear the thin gnat-voices crying.

~

On which note: I'm told it was Rupert Brooke—though I've never found the context, said the Air Marshal in Wyndham's version of the far-future year 1998. A five-second google for brooke thin-gnat-voices provides context in an instant.

Remember when we could go to space but we didn't have computers yet? Whatever happened to the good old days?

Oh, and how could I forget? Bloodspell Episode 11. In which much happens, and I only turn up when it is absolutely most necessary.

(Not convinced about the bit in the flashback, though. That doesn't even sound like me.)

Just go and watch it. We're getting close to the big climax.

Hugh: I need words with you.

Bloodspell episode 8! And episode 9! ...thus indicating how long it's been since I eljayed last.

Haven't seen 9 yet, but I get to go muwahahahahah, figuratively, in ep 8.

Would appreciate comments on that bit, actually. I thought I sucked, but feedback has apparently been positive.

(Actually, I thought I rocked as usual, just that I didn't sound much like the Master.)

I always used to hate NTSC. This sentiment probably began when I arranged for my first towpath copies of the first few episodes of Voyager to be delivered to me on VHS, just after the series had started to air in the States. It was simultaneously an early exercise in video piracy and a demonstration of how video piracy can go horribly wrong.

Those first six episodes looked like they had been recorded using a Super 8 camera pointed vaguely towards a television screen at the bottom of a swimming pool. At the time I thought that this was just the price you pay for getting Voyager a year earlier than it was supposed to be seen here. It was a copy of a copy of a VHS recording made in America, and maybe the geomagnetic flux lines the tape had to pass through on the way to me had something to do with it.

Later, as I became wiser and less naive (and saw more of Barbara Wintergreen of CBN News), I realised that: no, that's just what NTSC looks like. Americans have to put up with this shit every day. It's no wonder they make a hobby of invading tiny countries who can't defend themselves. Explosions are about the only thing that looks good on an NTSC newscast.

So my loathing of NTSC turned to the far more reasonable, logical and cynical grounds that it was a technically inferior protocol, with the slightly jingoistic overtones that the fucking Yanks were perpetrating this bollocks upon the world when a superior alternative was right there and readily available. (I said that I became wiser and less naive. I never said that this was a journey that I had completed.)

(Hell, I didn't even use a diaresis over the i.)

Now, as of today, I really, really fucking hate NTSC. My forehead is not that big, dammit.

That's right, I'm in a Making Of documentary, Part 2 (Part 1 is right here, for them as wants it). Fortunately, perhaps, my involvement is brief.

(The bit of recording I'm talking about, if anyone is interested, is this bit.)

I also notice a distinct lack of any of the slightly embarrassing footage I shot of Hugh, during our foray into recording via the Miracle of Internet Technologies, directing theatrically at a laptop. I suspect I may need to borrow the camera (especially if I can work out how to make the damn thing record PAL) and make a Guerilla Making Of Bloodspell Documentary.

After all, Sharing and Remixing are Encouraged, right?