A weblog. The inside and outside influences of Kevan Davis.
Books I've read in the past year, according to All Consuming:- The Ministry of Fear (Graham Greene) How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World (Francis Wheen) The Sound of Paint Drying (John Hegley) Idle Thoughts Of An Idle Fellow (Jerome K. Jerome) Artist descending a staircase, and, Where are they now?: Two plays for radio (Tom Stoppard) England, England (Julian Barnes) The Unexpurgated Code: A…
My pre-order of Stafford and Webb's Mind Hacks made it here before Christmas, and looks to be full of the things I've read a bit but not enough about, or have - obviously - been merely skimming via Matt's mini-links over the past year. This may well be the brain book that I'd been hoping all previous brain books would have been, but weren't; why things happen, and how to prove it to yourself. More…
An excellently absurd piece of audio-interface design on Argos's automated reservations line - when one pre-recorded robot voice switches to a different one to read out a chunk of the catalogue blurb, it softens the disjunct by saying "Here's Chris with the product description".
The third Hours of Inform have begun, then - good to see some interest. "The adventure must be set in a theatre. It must involve a petticoat, an advertisement, something which is repainted, and a trapdoor."
Levez points out that there hasn't been an Hours of Inform this year, and that maybe it's time for one. Is anyone interested? For the uninformed, Inform is a text-adventure programming language which allows the creation of games in the Infocom style - it automatically includes all the default handling and stock responses, and leaves you to expand and alter things as much as you feel like. The…
Because I couldn't find any on the web and it seemed quicker to write my own than keep looking: A Single Random Scrabble Tile . Use it wisely.
There was a good fragment of a Margaret Atwood short story, somewhere, about bad news being a black, straggly-winged monster that rises up and hunts you down; that you can attempt to delay it until after your breakfast or your morning coffee, but should ultimately surrender to it in your own careful time, as it's never going to go away. So four more years, or until the end of the world, then,…