Thinking in my sleep.

I just got woke up by one of those calls where I'm told that they want to get me a brand new up to date phone and a great deal. And just like usual I tell them how much I spend on my pay as you go phone and they apologise for bothering me and hand up quite quickly. Not so annoying, I was actually waiting for one of those to verify that how much I was spending was so little that I was of no value to these people. The annoying part is this: I was dreaming. From where I can remember my dream was about Google. It started with a conversation about Google, and about.. war. And my reiterating Alan Moore, saying that Google is so powerful because they have all the information and these days it's an information race to get power. Also linked in there was the economics / military might thing that Ret was telling me about, that things are more about economics than military power when it comes to global control these days. In my dream though I seemed to be concerned with a more personal type of control with the kind of personal information that was being stored and how that meant that power could be gained over people. I also remember thinking that Google were doing well in this because as well has having a lot of information they were also very good at harvesting information, little pieces in great volume, personal information. This lead onto the class room. I was now a student in a classroom being lectures on business or something similar. We we being quizzed on employment. There was a little joke from the teacher, I think we must have been discussing employment preferences because they took a stab at white middle/upper-class employers ignoring the language of English when they realise how cheap they can have the foreign labour that they were previously avoiding due to undercurrent of racism. The teacher did a little giggle across the room doing an accent.. half mocking the employer and half the employee. Slightly crouched and arms extended. "Computer yes, I use computer. Computer.. computer..". The message here was that they were using the persons computer literacy to get past the fact that they really should have someone with fluent English performing the job but were justifying it to themselves that this person was appropriate. Also there is some desperation from the potential employee there that's just mocking their misfortune. So that moved us on to migrant workers. Oddly though it wasn't so much eastern European people that the press have labeled THE migrant workers of recent time that occurred in my dream. On the blackboard or whiteboard there was an image of a face, down to the neck. How ever, this was an ever changing dynamic foreign face due to the fact that this is a dream but the way it took most stable form in my understanding is as a grid. Once face separated by a grid, and each section of the grid being a different nationality or race or whatever. It didn't look disjointed it looked like some slightly odd generic foreign face. Darker skin, curly hair, but like I said, the details changed. The teacher had asked us another question recently so was already slightly familiar with this quizzing format but I can't remember the question. This time the teacher drew on the face, with what must have been a pink marker, they drew a wavy/squiggly line through the top of the head and the hair of the head on the board. From left to right, leading from the right side of the person's forehead to their hair on their left side. It wasn't obvious pink because it was only a little into the guessing that I really noticed that. The question was asked "What do these people have in common?" by which was mean the selected few groups of people who have a line marking their section. I was eager to answer this question and as people were making wrong guesses I was trying to think of my answer and I noticed then that there was another rule to this quiz. As I heard the teacher answering "No. Sit down." I slowly realized that the teacher expected us all to stand with an idea and to sit down when our answer was shown to be wrong.
"They've all got a worm in their head." I thought, partly a funny, partly.. It might be the answer, I have no idea about these people really, or this teacher, or this lesson. So I slowly started to rise, still uncertain about the standing rules of this quiz. As I stood I was still concentrating, thinking too hard clouded my hearing and I though I heard someone give my answer and be told to sit down. I was unsure if that was the case or if I had just heard the answer in my own head. Sheepishly I lowered myself back into my seat to think of a better answer, one that was more serious.. one that was correct. As I thought and waited for all the people to be sitting down and the teacher to finally give in and tell us the answer my phone rang next to my bed and woke me up.

Meme-crap from Cel's LiveJournal

RULES:
1. Put Your iTunes, Windows Media Player, ETC on Shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS.
4. Put any comments in brackets after the song name.
5. Put this on your journal.

1.If someone says, "Is this okay?" You say?

The Stretch

(Picky?)


2.How would you describe yourself?

Come Friendly Bombs

(Disaster magnet? I don't feel like a disaster magnet.)


3.What do you like in a girl?

When Vegans Attack

(Ha..)


4.How do you feel today?

Supermassive Black Hole

(I think I'm feeling somewhat better than that.)


5.What is your life's purpose?

Scepters

(Born leader?)


6.What is your motto?

hidden track

(by Excrementory Grindfuckers from Bitte nicht vor den Gästen)


7.What do your friends think of you?

sonntags

(also by Excrementory Grindfuckers)



8.What do you think of your parents?

Korean - Unit 5

(Lesson 5 of learning Korean.)


9.What do you think about very often?

Smooth Tip

(of a penis? NO! Oh dear..)


10.What is 2 + 2?

10,000 Witnesses

(I hope they don't put them together..)


11.What do you think of your best friend?

Little Faces

(Makes your nose look big, must be the explanation.)


12.What do you think of the person you like?

Newjack

(Oddly I don;t have that much music that comes under the genre Club-House on my computer. *shrug*)


13.What is your life story?

Love

(Grand theme thanks to Prince's album 3121)


14.What do you want to be when you grow up?

glockenkantate

(Another Excrementory Grindfuckers this sort of works better if you get to listen to the tracks.)


15.What do you think of when you see the person you like?

---

(I accidentally missed this one and by the time I'd realised I'd become to attached to the results I'd already obtained to change things.)


16.What will you dance to at your wedding?

Jingle Bitz

(An electronic version of Jingle Bells from 8 Bit Weapon & ComputeHer)


17.What will they play at your funeral?

Man's Final Frontier

(Ladies and gentlemen, there are seven acknowledged wonders of the world
You are about to witness the eighth

Space ain't man's final frontier. Man's final frontier is the soul,
guided by someone more powerful than any human being
Someone felt but never seen. You will be surprised of what resides
in your insides...)


18.What is your hobby/interest?

It's Love
(It seems I have too many songs with Love in the title is this has happened.)

19.What is your biggest fear?

Chocolate Jesus

(Fear!? That sounds awesome...)


20.What is your biggest secret?

Not In Rivers, But In Drops

(... Oooh.. from the album In The Absence Of Truth)


21.What do you think of your friends?

The Three Little Pigs Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf

(Bunch o'fucking cowards. :D But which one would use bricks?)

Untidy room

Nan's coming over today to help me sort out my room. I don't think she realises what it's like.

Knytt Stories

Come across this game today. It's a nice little platformer.


Thanks to BGB

Sunmotori Sleepless Dreams

The academic year has now ended. I'm sitting in the living rooms just after doing all the washing up lying around in the kitchen. I am typing with prune fingers. I didn't got to bed last night. I made it sound ominous giving it its own sentence then, like that. I didn't sleep because I was up all night with mine and Gaz's friend and housemate from last year is visiting us and I was up playing games, watching YouTube videos, watching films.. activities that can easily sting together until sunlight is bothering you again. Actually, some names that came out of that night that I would like to get written down now so that I remember are.. Robert Crumb, and that there is a film about him available at fair price on DVD. The other person was.. Vivian Stanshall. Ooh and whil I'm on people and things Gojira is the latest musical interest. I recommend going to their website and listening to 'Flying Whale' from the album 'From Mars To Sirius'.
My plan was to talk about the fears I was having sitting here suffering from sleep deprivation but I've relaxed some now and have drifted onto happier things.
One of the happiest must be... Sumotori.

Now... this is a game. A FANTASTIC game.
Let me tell you why. It is a game made for a competition. The competition requirement of the game is that it should be no bigger than 96KB. So this game is small, very small. When I think about how small it is and how many hours of excellent quality amusement it has provided me I am even more impressed. Many of those minutes that make up those hours I must add were spent in tears of laughter. This game brought some serious joy.

I have only played it multiplayer. I imagine this is the best way to play it. I don't know if it would have been quite as good if I was playing it on my own. If I were to have found and played it alone I probably would have been seriously impressed and then urgently seeking other people to show it to in the hope that they would join in with me and have fun.. just like actually did happen.

So keep that in mind as you make your way through the link to download and play it yourself.

If you have someone else there, get them to sit up beside you and take and end of the keyboard so that you can square up against each other.. and I hope experience some collective joy.

Yeah, I haven't said much about what it is apart from how much it made me happy.

Please trust me. Please like it too.

--- LINK TO THE GAME ---


There are loads of other cool games and little programs littering my desktop, I need to sort through them. I went on a bit of a binge download. In time I should write about and link to them too. My main goal with those right now though it to get more people playing Sumotori Dreams. I plan to put some things on facebook to publicise it. Good ole facebook.

Another thing I want to put on facebook that gets back the the fear thing is an advert in the marketplace for.. myself. Requesting a spare room to rent. I'm extremely hesitant about it because its.. so.. scary? It shouldn't be scary. But it's like I'm exposing myself to.. well, the fact that I don;t have place sorted for next year. I'm starting to realise that its not really something to be afraid of as I'm writing, as writing does tend to help in that way. I am also however resisting that and leaning back towards my fear, instantly forgetting about how I just made myself feel silly for being fearful. It'll be done in time. Maybe today even.

Other things!

Rent. Need to pay the last rent payment. Also need to sort out how to get my deposit back, if even I will be getting it back. The whipped cream stained the wall pretty bad and my trying to clean it off made smudgy matters worse.

Bills. There are water and sewage bills to pay and no doubt more utility bills before everything to do with this abode is terminated.

Packing. A major operation.

Booking a flight. Bit scary, shouldn't be, should be like any other ticket. Did it for Tool, I can do it for a plane. I;m going to Belfast if you didn't know. Next week. Whoa... very soon. Less than a week even, six days.

I'm going to stop writing this post now because I'm getting a sense that is is becoming rather long.

Oooh, one more thing though before ending. A picture of James, the friend that stayed, while he was on his visit here.

Metal Colour

Another group I've been enjoying that's new to me is Living Colour.

But that wasn't to be the main purpose of this post, I wanted to expand more on the enjoyment of Metal Slug Anthology. First off the extra features... The interview was disappointing, for some reason I was expecting a video interview not a text interview that you have to scroll through.. the kind of cheap inclusion you often get on lousy DVDs. However, that doesn't matter it is the games that I bought it for. The great thing about these games is that they're instantaneously exciting arcade games. 'Pick up and play' is a spot on description of the experience of a late starting second player. I love to play games with other people and Metal Slug Anthology has delighted me with the ease it allows a second player to participate with me. In the arcade style of putting in some coins and pressing start, they're right there beside you playing the game co-operatively. Only they don't have to put in any money so the steps are halved. Same as books and films I feel that I get the most value out of them when when they are enjoyed by more people, this game is doing that and doing it well, so I'm quite happy.

Delicious Phunkee Slug UFO

Delicious Library is the kind of application I would love to play with if I was running a Mac still. I'll just try to remember it for in the next few years when I'm loaded and can afford to have a nice Mac again.

My friend Hendrix has himself an appearance on a website from a bit of modelling that he did. If that link is still fresh you should see him bottom centre there.

I got a new Wii game, Metal Slug Anthology. It is of course great fun, knew it would be because I'd already played Metal Slug and it's just.. Metal Slug. :D

Recent musical discovery: Phunk Junkeez
Some nice words I fountd on the internet to describe them are 'Funk Metal', 'Rap-Metal' and my favourite 'alterna-funk'.

The Simpsons Trio

Click to view full size.

Simpsons Avatar

Drunken Post

yauman says:
hmmmm i have no reason to be up this late
SCÜD says:
Drinking? Alone?
yauman says:
heh don't feel like i want to start drinking at 3.25
SCÜD says:
Pfff. woosie.
SCÜD says:
You're no alcoholic!
yauman says:
i just had some soy milk
yauman says:
i'm content
SCÜD says:
Urgh soy milk.
SCÜD says:
Why don;t you drink REAL milk.
SCÜD says:
Man's milk.
SCÜD says:
Not... semen... that'..
SCÜD says:
I mean creamy cow milk.
yauman says:
red top
yauman says:
SCÜD says:
Urgh soy milk.
SCÜD says:
Why don;t you drink REAL milk.
SCÜD says:
Man's milk.
SCÜD says:
Not... semen... that'..
SCÜD says:
I mean creamy cow milk.
yauman says:
needs to be quoted
SCÜD says:
Mke it so.

WiiFlash

WiiFlash - Potential final year project?



Also Sepak Takraw, very interesting.

Jigsaw Grading

Did my grading for 2nd Kup (Red Belt) today. Waseem kindly gave me and Karen a lift to the Beaufort Community Centre where the grading was being held. He had already driven down to Bournemouth especially for the grading. It took him much less time than he anticipated. Expecting to arrive and arranging to pick us up at some time after eight in the morning he actually found himself taking a nap in his car outside the house at half past seven.
The grading went O.K. the toughest part, as usually is, was the waiting before hand. The grading seems difficult but no where near as arduous in comparison. Fluffed up yuk jang the first time around, but we all did and I blame that on us being too close to each other in the hall when we were doing it because when we had more room the second attempt was fine. Also it was the first time that I've ever broken a board successfully on the first attempt. It appears so much more impressive when you do it that way.

Some of the time was passed happily piecing together some cute puppies in a basket.

My Dæmon

High Score

A little Geometry Wars update my current high score is 255,960 it slowly climbs. I usually do a little better each time I play. I decided my preferred method of control is keyboard and mouse over purely the keyboard. It's still no where near as much fun with two thumbsticks though, as I originally played the demo on Cel's 360.

New Game

A post. :o Goodness me. Just a little one. Telling you about one of my late night despondent purchases. You know how it is... It's 3am.. you're not doing what you haven't done for the past several hours. eBay becomes your new best friend.

Well, this one wasn't from eBay. It was through Steam. I took advantage of their $2.50 limited time offer on Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. Actually $2.94 once they tell you about the tax right at the end of the process. So that's only about a quid fifty in real money.

Loading

Working on a an interactive thing in Crandon today. Made a little loading thing for it, even though it won't be distributed on the web. I just wanted to learn how to.

It works like this:
In a move clip on the main timeline on the first frame I have...

if (_root._framesloaded == _root._totalframes){
_root.gotoAndPlay("Loaded Stuffs");
}


then..

FADE IN LOADING ANIMATION


then..

frame label: "beginloop"

if (_root._framesloaded == _root._totalframes){
gotoAndPlay("loadingfinished");
}



LOOP ANIMATION


then..

first frame of fadeout
if (_root._framesloaded == _root._totalframes){
gotoAndPlay("loadingfinished");
} else {
gotoAndPlay("beginloop");
}


then..

second frame of fadeout labelled "loadingfinished"


then..

last frame of fadeout..

_root.gotoAndPlay("Loaded Stuffs");





I'm sure that'll be really easy to read back and make complete sense when I look at it again.
Of course it will, when I look back at it I'll be able to recognise it instantly and laugh at it's simplicity as I would have since made much better things.

Activity Time

Currently on my work placement at Crandon. Thinking about ways to change their current website. Made me realise that I've got to start really getting into webby stuff. Learning special web skills and creating a better web presence for myself, that means coming back to regular blogging. Maybe starting a new one or continuing this one.
Whatever it should be strong. I should be looked to as someone powerful in this respect if I want to go about selling my skill in this area to people.
I need a website and it needs to show off my skills.
What should be my fast growing list of skills.

Some things to consider learning:

CSS in much greater depth.

Flash and ActionScript to an extreme depth. - I want to be able to make games. I should be making an interactive doodingle at least once a day.

Being a pro at MySpace etc. - part of CSS. I want to be able to know the answer every time someone asks "How do you do this?". Someone asked that about customising their MySpace page, I didn't know how. I should make mine fancy, really fancy.

General web things. How servers work. Hosting. - I should be able to say to a person. "I'll do you a website." and see it from that stage all the way to launch without them having to bother about anything, I should be able to do it all.

Other clever things that will make for better web stuffs. JavaScript, .NET, PHP, MySQL and variants of these type of things.

I can make a start on these by creating a fancy portfolio of my time at Crandon. I need to produce material for assessment anyway, I may as well make the entire report something I can use to show myself off too.

Summer Reprise

I did stuff this summer. Not er.. get a job though, that was something I didn't do.

Coming up: Degree Year Two, Take Two.

Tad Drunk

On the way to Christine's to watch Pirates of the Caribbean I bought a 660ml bottle of Cobra Beer and drank it ALL. So that's me a little drunk. I then went with Gaz in his car to ASDA where I spent £10.56 I now how 12 jars of pasta sauce and a large block of cheap cheese, should be enough to keep my going for a while with that 3kg bag of pasta I still haven't opened. I also bought other things like biscuits yoghurt and ASDA's own lucazade substitute.

I made cake.

I say I made cake. What I actually did was take the things that I thought go into making a cake, mixed them together in a jug and then fried them in butter. The resulting squishy slab tasted like something inbetween an omelette and a pancake, only very salty. I didn't add any salt, I suspect the saltiness came from the butter.
I might have another go at it again, adjusting the ingredients and process. Hopefully I'll end up being able to make something good. Maybe I can turn it into a meal, throw in some peas or something.

Conservative Night Out

Gaz was had a gig tonight. I agreed to go despite the lack of information and organisation. It was only when I was in the taxi on the way there that I found out that he was playing in a conservative club. I presumed that the club had been rented for some sort of event.
My assumption was incorrect. We soon realised upon entering that this was a normal conservative club.. club night thing. Where we were certainly the youngest people there..much younger.






Guess who that is making fool of them self in front of a load of royalists.