The moving finger rants

What are you doing with your free time, pajh? you say. Well, since you asked so nicely, I'll skip the otherwise obligatory free time, what's that joke, and go straight to the incontrovertibly true answer: these days I spend my free time dressing up in skintight Lycra® and wrestling with men I barely know.

I may have mentioned in a previous post that Hollywood-grade motion capture systems create the potential for new narrative paradigms for the 21st century. Well, mostly I mentioned that they allow a specific actor, that actor being me, to hear the single most beautiful phrase ever expressed to an actor. We'll get to new narrative paradigms later. Meantime, there have been a number of very rapid learning experiences while working with thew new tech, not least of which is that I actually don't look totally terrible in skintight Lycra.

Unsurprisingly, most of the research in gyroscopic technologies these days is being done by the ballistics division of the US military and their contractors. Many of my readers may not have a particular interest in the increasingly accurate science of the transformation of alleged insurgents into chargrilled jerky from a distance of many kilometres, but fret not! for those of us so callously disinterested in how to blame friendly fire on technology, there are subsequent benefits for all of us (except for the families of the alleged insurgents, presumably): benefits like the upcoming Wolverine movie, and Skrillex' latest tour. I am, as ever, all about the trickle-down.

Yay us!

Another benefit of the fact that this is all repurposed military technology is that it's all incredibly robust. The suit comes in a case that is waterproof to 500 metres, and also conveniently scaled to comply with most airlines' regulations regarding carry-on luggage. In the event of a terrorist attack on a plane in which such a case was stored, it's more likely to survive than the black box. I dread to speculate on the newspaper headlines once the crash recovery team have spent a week attempting to recover data from it. Apparently the Captain spent twenty minutes trying to have an elaborate fistfight with the first officer, followed by an extended period of merengue dancing, with occasional periods of jazz hands. This presumably contributed to the crash, but exactly how is a question we hope maybe to have answered by next week.

Oh yes, the mocap. The suits are surprisingly accurate and expressive, to a level that I didn't think was possible. And you can play the mocap live in realtime into any 3D world you care to devise. In the following examples, we're going to be using Minecraft, because Minecraft. Also, because Minecraft is incredibly pretty, and it shows you just what you can do with a blocky Steve guy with no facial expressions.

Ye First Video: Meet the Creeper

In this short film I play the Creeper, which while it's not exactly a speaking role, does have the benefit of being in the title.

Took us about five minutes to shoot. About an hour of getting the suits configured first, but that's just teething. On a regular film shoot I spend much more time hanging around waiting, and there are usually fewer copies of Transmetropolitan lying about with which for me to occupy my time. These suits are awesome.

Ye Video the Second: in which pajh does acting

I know I'm a middle-class New Town bastard these days, but I do still pay attention to my acting when I get the chance. I have the most popular text-to-speech voice in the known world, and physical acting is no less an important discipline. I have done courses. I've done the Alexander Technique. I do stretches properly before I perform mocap (judiciously excluding the stretches that are likely to tear the €500 lycra suit, natch). I'm not by any means attempting to put myself up there in Patrick Stewart territory, but I think my research has paid off. In this second video I have more of a starring role.

I showed this to stormsearch and she got about twenty seconds in before she had to pause it and proclaim, oh god. It's you. Something about the way I hold my head slightly to one side, it would seem. And then there are little things, like the fact that apparently I pick my right foot up when I'm considering something. I didn't know that about me until I watched it expressed by a blocky Minecraft Steve.

The level of expressiveness and the subtlety you can get from the tech is quite incredible. I'm quite excited to see where this goes next.

In my Copious Free Time, obviously.

The other day I'm sitting in Illegal Jack's eating quesadillas with stormsearch, when my phone goes. Beep beep. It's Bixby Snyder.

The lascivious host of popular televisual entertainment It's Not My Problem expressed to me his readiness to purchase something for up to, but presumably not exceeding, the value of US$1.00. Exactly what it is that he would so purchase was not readily apparent. It took me a few minutes to work it out:

1. The previous evening I had saved a link to an article about the new Robocop film;
2. The following day the autoblogger had pushed that out to my linkdump;
3. Twitterfeed had pushed a snippet of text from the linkdump out to the Twitters;
4. Somebody on the Twitters has a bot that responds to any mention of the word Robocop with Bixby's immortal catchphrase;
5. Seesmic running in the background on my phone had picked up the twit addressed to me, and sent me a notification;
6. My phone vibrates on my belt while I'm trying to get creative with the application of hot sauces to pulled pork.

(I'd given the Masonic handshake and asked for the super-secret special hot sauces from the back. Ended up rather disappointed. It was just the Cholula range, which I already own, and none of them were particularly hot.)

At no stage in this convoluted chain of events had a human being been involved since about 24 hours beforehand, when I'd saved the original link to Delicious. The rest was an automatic, inevitable process, mediated solely by Internet herself. The next day I get a text from a non-existent TV star.

I love this century.

~

Vaguely related: the day before I was walking past a hairdressers which was showing the Gangnam Style video on the TV in the back. I saw about two seconds of it from a great distance as I walked past. And I could swear that I was watching Bixby. There is a certain similarity, no?

Obviously I never, under any circumstances, want to give the Daily Mail the benefit of my pageviews. Every time I click on a link to dailymail.co.uk I get counted and increase the value of their website to advertisers, and I don't believe the Daily Mail deserves to be considered valuable by anyone. Sometimes, however, I want to read their articles to see what kind of a car crash they've come up with this time, and this is where istyosty.com steps in.

Istyosty.com reads the Daily Mail so you don't have to; saving a cached version of the page so that it only gets viewed once on the Mail's server, and can then be pointed/laughed at at our leisure elsewhere. The cached version, when viewed, might have comments that are out of date, but seriously, nobody reads Mail comments.

It occurred to me that it might be nice to have a browser plugin that automatically redirects all Mail traffic to the appropriate cached page. Thus, between bouts of providing the best customer service in Edinburgh, I have spent today hacking Javascript, by far the ugliest programnming language known to mankind. Halfway through the process I discovered that istyosty provide their own browser extension that already does it, but by now I am in blood stepp'd in so far, returning were as tedious as go o'er.

I will get this damn thing to work. Once it's done I'll probably install the official version instead, but this has become personal now. So far it installs properly, but doesn't actually work. I'm learning things about variable scoping that I really hoped I'd never need to know.

Still, it beats doing real work.

• Four bottles of homemade schnapps
• Five pairs of spectacles
• My copy of Dr B's In Search Of Perfection
• A black suit I didn't know I owned
• A receipt for frozen foods dated 04/10/99, the day after I moved to Edinburgh
• The Museum of Warfare
• Passport photos from 1999. Who is that handsome young clean-shaven kid?
• May Joy Foster's membership card for the Hull Co-operative Society, dated May 1927
• A note to myself, reading as follows:

  Elfman Batman theme
  +
  Doctor Who
  = awesome

• A Sun SPARC Ultra 1, an Amstrad CPC6128 with two monitors, and a Commodore 64
• Blank audio cassettes—remember those?

Still can't find the mop bucket, though.

I also have a massive range of FHM-type lads' mags from around 2000 and 2001. I have no idea what I'm going to do with those.

I was awesomesauce bottled tonight. Gods, but I've missed the stage.

And now, a gift for my loyal readers: your very own pajh-inna-box. Go to cereproc.com, and select William (Southern English) from the Live Demo list in the topbar (requires Flash). You can make me say anything you like. If you make me say anything nice about David Cameron, I will find you and kill you.

scattergather is already finding it useful for phrases like please drink my booze, I do not want it.

It seems there's no escape.

The old phone died with a pathetic whimper, but the nice people at the Orange Shop told me that I was due for a free upgrade. So now I have this thing with a 3.2 megapixel camera with Zeiss lenses, radio, mp3 player, video player, and an ARM processor core driving quad-band GSM, GPRS, and UMTS. I'm told it makes phone calls too, but I've not found that function yet.

All I actually want is something that will allow me to sometimes make phone calls when I'm not near a telephone. Instead I'm lugging around a billion times the processing power of the Apollo missions on my belt, probably. Meanwhile, even as they cram unsolicited silicon into my pocket, I can't help but think about all of those proteins going unfolded.

Having said that, the radio is quite nice. I'm rapidly learning about the current standard of voiceover talent, and thus that breaking into the industry really shouldn't be very difficult. On the other hand, given the quality of the scripting, I'm not sure I want to any more.

Website backed up, domain registry transferred over, new hosting arranged and paid for. Website backup turns out to be inaccessible, so will try to restore later. Lost my email for a bit, but now I seem to have got it back. Sort of.

I seem to have signed myself up for Google Apps, which seems to be like Gmail but more awesome, or at the very least more awesomely complex. Possibly it's also more Orwellian, which at least starts with the same syllable as awesome. And I have no idea what to do with it.

It would seem that I now have my pajh.org email going into this Google Apps thing, and all of the other emails from my intricate networks of forwards and filters is still going to Gmail. Now I need to decide which one of the two I actually want to use.

Any advice?

With thanks to lady_rani here:

Doctor Who executive producer Russell T Davies has accused BBC1 of cocking up the scheduling of the show, claiming it will lose 1.5m viewers in its new timeslot.

He then goes on to whine and stamp his feet a lot. More so than I think JNT ever did when they buggered about with the scheduling on his watch, but possibly less than Toby Hadoke did. In any case it's somewhat unbecoming—isn't it?—for the BBC's darling to throw a tantrum in a trade journal instead of maybe doing something about it or getting on with his job.

And frankly, Auntie's new attempt to recapture the glory of Britain's Got Talentless Media Whores needs all the help it can get. Didn't everyone get sick of back-to-back talent shows about three years ago?

Bitching about a scheduling conflict is, like, so 2007, dude. The viewers don't care any more. In times gone past, the announcement of a new season would launch a flurry of panicked complaints about: shit! I'm at work then orbut I have to go to a paaaarty that night. This year, the entire Internet has proffered a collective shrug and said: I'll catch it on iPlayer.

The most common thing I hear about BBC iPlayer, in every case is almost exactly the same words: It has totally revolutionized the way I watch television. I don't make a habit of asking people their opinion of iPlayer, but it often comes up in conversation regardless, because it is a Remarkably Cool Thing.

I still don't own a television set or have TV reception in my flat. (We do pay the licence fee, though.) Over the last two months I have watched infinity per cent more television than ever before. Much of it has been good television, which has forced me to reassess my attitude towards the medium. And my BitTorrent usage has dropped right off.

This is LiveJournal, so everyone reading this is acutely aware that the Internet has made it a million times easier to whinge and prate. Sometimes, when done right, the Internet also removes the reasons for such grousery in the first place.

(Although, now I come to think about it, it would make much more sense than it really should for Auntie to continue to determine ratings figures the old way even when everyone in the country is using the newer, more convenient, niftier 21st-century system. As a result, the entire next commissioning round would be decided on the basis of the five people left in the country who think that Satan invented the Internet.)

Oh, one more thing:

I'll rewrite [scripts] 100% if I have to, [Rusty] said. With Steven Moffat's scripts, I don't touch a word, but anyone else's I do.

...is by far the smartest thing I've ever heard him say. And it shows, Russell, oh how it shows.

Today I am a walking technological disaster. penelope won't boot and it looks like a motherboard problem. The motherboard is an obsolete type that is going to be interesting to replace.

I just realized that I use penelope for pretty much everything in my flat that's not food-related. She looks after my Internet and my music and my DVD player and my Doctor Who and my porn. She has the only reliable clock in the flat and I use cron and atd to wake me up. I tried reading a book last night, but I couldn't find the power switch.

Also today I walked into one of Jehane's stupid sticking-out doors and shattered my mobile phone case. The phone is currently in my hip pocket, resembling some sort of hideous growth. Dogs snarl at me in the street and children abandon their hopscotch and hide in fear.

And Voga has the Key To Time boxset and the New Beginnings boxset in stock, neither of which are any use to me until I get a functioning DVD player.

Dear Windows®:

I KNOW WHICH PART OF THE TEXT I AM TRYING TO SELECT.

DO NOT DEIGN TO ASSUME THAT YOU KNOW BETTER THAN I.

Die horribly,

pajh