Happy Halloween

Sleep? Hell no:

Thanks to Coilhouse

Tags: halloween, mild horror, uncanny valley, video

Makers

For those that don’t know, I love the fiction that Cory Doctorow writes and he has a brand new book out today! Woo!

I wasn’t able to make the signing, but I did the next best thing; downloaded a copy of the book.

Before you gasp in shock, be assured that I have done this legally with the author’s consent. You see Mr. Doctorow is an awesome guy and a copyfighter, he releases books under a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license so I can read this book, remix it and do awesome things like tell you to go read it here now!

Now this might not make a lot of sense, but hear me out. I’m about a third of the way though this book, but I’ve only downloaded a txt file of it. Instead of buying a physical copy for myself, I’ve donated a copy to the Institute of Technology Carlow. Now you see, Mr. Doctorow’s book will be read by at least two people. If you read it now like you should then that’s three. If the hard copy gets passed around the Institute of Technology, that’s a shed load more. If just a few of those people buy a book for themselves or a friend then the system has worked. That’s marketing and sales all in one.

I’ll leave you with my favourite passage from the book so far:

“They need the tools to make any other tools,” is what Perry said when he returned from the hospital, the side of his head still swaddled in bandages that draped over his injured eye. They’d shaved his head at his insistence, saying that he wasn’t going to try to keep his hair clean with all the bandages. It made him look younger, and his fine skull-bones stood out through his thin scalp when he finally came home. Before he’d looked like a outdoorsman engineer: now he looked like a radical, a pirate.

“They need the tools that will let them build anything else, for free, and use it or sell it.” He gestured at the rapid prototyping machines they had, the three-dee printer and scanner setups. “I mean something like that, but I want it to be capable of printing out the parts necessary to assemble another one. Machines that can reproduce themselves.”

Francis shifted in his seat. “What are they supposed to do with those?”

“Everything,” Perry said, his eye glinting. “Make your kitchen fixtures. Make your shoes and hat. Make your kids’ toys — if it’s in the stores, it should be a downloadable too. Make toolchests and tools. Make it and build it and sell it. Make other printers and sell them. Make machines that make the goop we feed into the printers. Teach a man to fish, Francis, teach a man to fucking *fish*. No top-down ‘solutions’ driven by ‘market research’” — his finger-quotes oozed sarcasm — “the thing that we need to do is make these people the authors of their own destiny.”

Photo by eschipul

Tags: books, copyright, Cory Doctorow

[Waffle-o-Tron] Kicking Dogs

PROPAGANDA WARNING!
I forewarn you now this post will be preachy and talk about feelings an’ stuff, but it’s cheaper than therapy. This post reprisents my views, which will differ from yours, but that’s OK. I present this more as a discussion piece rather than a way of saying ‘you’re wrong,’ and I hope you will take it in the spirit in which it’s intended.

Today in the office folks have been discussing the news article Puppy is kicked to death in park on ye olde BBC News. The act of kicking a puppy to death was roundly condemned by the folks I work with, the phrase ‘sick bastards’ was bandied around a few times. Most people’s concern at this act stemmed from the fact that someone had mindlessly taken the life of a cute puppy discompassionately and for no gain, almost killing for sport. Some others saw the problem more like theft, the abhorrent part being the hurt caused to the family.

The thing that struck me was the people who were upset by this were the people who were dismissing vegetarianism the day before. I try not to talk about my vegetarianism, it tends to make people uncomfortable (I’ve heard a similar thing from religious folks) and their initial reaction is to question me, to find holes in an argument I haven’t stated yet. Usually it’s ‘do you eat fish?’ followed by ‘do you wear leather?’ then ‘do you eat eggs?’ These are the questions you tend to laugh off, but yesterday someone asked me ‘why?’ and it threw me.

I couldn’t just bat the question away, so I told him. I don’t eat meat because I think it’s wrong to kill an animal.

Here’s a video of a slaughter house (or abattoir if you prefer). There’s none of the horrific music or the abuse of livestock that litter most videos of this type on youtube, this is how a slaughterhouse works:

Even this makes me feel uneasy, but that’s probably where you differ from me, and I understand because I used to be a meat eater and laugh at silly vegetarians and their morals.

Back to the original point, the disgust you may have felt at the news report that a puppy was kicked to death for no reason is exactly the same reaction that I now have for the idea of any animal being slaughtered to feed me. That’s why I don’t eat meat. I don’t think it’s wrong that you’re a meat eater, and believe me when I say I think PETA and the ALF are wankers too.

See, us veggies aren’t all assholes. Most of us don’t mind that you eat meat, and we’re happy to sit and watch you while we eat our (inevitably crappy) veggie burger, some of us are so skilled at being a veggie you might not even realise. In fact I’m going to say something you might not expect a vegetarian to ever say: if you’re happy with it eating meat is OK.

You made it all the way to the end? I’m impressed! Here, watch the awesome Penn & Teller have a go at militant animal rights groups and have a pork pie, I won’t judge you for it:

Tags: Penn & Teller, rant, vegetarianism, video, waffle-o-tron

Unhappy Shopper…

This might sound like a silly question and I guess it is, but whilst sat here wondering about stuff I don’t think anyone even cares about it occurred to me that most shops are open all day, closing between 17:00 and 17:30 each night. My question is why??

After some brief musing it does seem quite illogical really. Surely the target audience for shops is those with an money and preferably an income, the white whale of these being young professionals with no dependents bring with them that awesome treasure trove the retail lords know as “disposable income”.

As the name implies, this most bountiful of quarries have jobs, usually reasonably well paying jobs that require nine to five attendance at some form of office or singular location. This very fact means that they are almost certainly not available to peruse for their next purchase during the hours the retail outlets deem they should be open. Where is the logic in this??

Surely it follows that the majority of people any shop would play host to during week days are those of either the unemployed or too old to be employed. The later have earned the right to spend money on whatever they want but generally have little motivation to spend and the former shouldn’t really be encouraged to spend their money on consumer goods, by having the sotres open whilst they have little to do.

I can see why shops would open during such hours on weekends, as that time slot would likely be the most preferable for those wanting to fulfil their economic responsibility as a consumer. However, even this is curtailed by Sunday trading regulations. I happen to agree with Sunday trading being restricted, but it would be remiss of me not to mention it, as it does seem to exacerbate the situation we find ourselves in.

In any case, would it not be better to simply open at 14:00 and close about 22:00 throughout the week??

Thank you. This has been my plan for saving the failing economy. I am Adrian Cooper and I am your next Prime Minister of these United Kingdoms of Great Britain…

Tags: consumer, disposable income, economic plan, logic, opening hours, retail, shopping

Celebrity Cos-play

Big thanks to my sister for making me aware of this.  It turns Capcom have something chilling planned for lunatic dictator and world famous psycho crusher advocate M Bison in Super Streetfighter IV.   It would appear that in a move to make him even more disturbing to players designers are playing with the idea of making him look like B-celebrity pop-mime-ist Cheryl Cole!

I wouldn’t have believed it either had I not seen this shocking production photograph.

Yup, I’m scared too.

The Slowest Hour

I have no doubt that time is elastic. A second is hardly ever a second, a minute is a mutable thing and hours can exist anywhere between blink-of-the-eye quickness and a slow gelatinous creep. There is for me, however, an hour which more than others becomes a moribund struggle, a slow inexorable march. That hour starts at 4pm on a Friday.

It seems a series of events coalesce to produce this time warping effect. I’ve had at least one pint at lunchtime, most of the people that call me at work have already left, and I don’t want to start any jobs as I won’t have time to finish them. Couple these to Big Brother watching my internet usage and you’re left with me sat at my desk trying to figure out how it’s only ten past four.

I’ve tried to find a way to pass the time. My desk presents no opportunities to speed the hour up, technical manuals, promotional DVDs, broken IT equipment. Not even a small plastic Godzilla can help this situation.

I take two hard disk magnets and stick them together. It’s a good start but I need something else. Rooting around in my drawer I find some broken ball mice and discover the interior of them to be a large ball bearing. These become stuck to the magnets too. I check my change, and find that some two pence coins are magnetic. These are stuck to the magnets along with any drawing pins and paperclips.

Intoxicated by my success, I begin searching for more items to add to my magnetic medley. A screwdriver, a pen, a wrench, a tray, a filing cabinet, a stove, a car, a plane, a ship, a skyscraper, a mountain, a planet, a sun, a galaxy, a universe.

As I float in nothingness, gazing at my creation, I idly wonder what time it is.

4:15pm

Tags: brainfart, vanityproject, We Love Katamari, writing