Thursday, 29th March, 2007

Borked Links

Sorry about this, my scripts had a hiccup and resposted a load of links. I Was going to delete them, but decided not to...

View from the Window at Le Gras, Joseph Nicèphore Nièpce

"This photo is generally considered the first successful permanent photograph." — (I just wanted to check that 1856 was a realistic date)

'Elf' lingerie thief found guilty

During the three-day trial, the jury heard that Boyd wore a disguise of a blonde curly wig, reading glasses and a beany hat. — (via Becky )

ScriptExport

Export plugin for iPhoto that lets you process your images with shell scripts — (Via Daring Fireball ) Now this looks rather promising...

Katamari Tees

For Caity — Via Jon

siobhan wine on Flickr

Very specifically marketed booze — (from Joanna ) Of course, Bravo television is also marketed specifically to me too...

naughtyangel23

Hello. You look a bit familiar — I don't have a myspace account, so I'm not really sure what I can do about that. Far be it from me, though, to stop anyone else who does have one leaving little hint-type comments that I might know she's nicked my

Monday Teacher Buzz

SL/Web Integration & Kisa?s Gadgets:: (NMC Campus Observer)

Kaneva: Not Enough Fantasy?

"Until then, developers have to understand that the appeal of the virtual world is to create things that are impossible in the real world." — like gravity-defying dresses for a start...

Build your own LEGO Stormtrooper

OMG OMG OMG! — (via Jon )

G-ONE — sonic surfing by satellite

"The G-ONE (Global Orbit Navigation Engine) invites you to virtually hop on a satellite and scratch across the Earth's topography, just as the needle of a record player scratches across a record."

Stephanie's Pillowbook — Explanations

"People enter a world already created — and everything within that world conspires to make them conform" — something I've been saying for a while, but much more elegantly put

Hex Color Picker

"Lets you get and edit hexadecimal HTML color codes in the standard Mac OS X color panel."

Men Are Not Men

"A Stanford graduate student "proved" that men in online virtual worlds behave just like men in real life. But do they really?"

Gender, Sex and Self in Virtual Worlds

"Do you find it disconcerting to talk with someone online without knowing quite where to put them on the gender scale?" — (wired.com)

Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein

"It's not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something" — Apparently, Liechenstein has no army. Anyone fancy grabbing some paintball guns and staging a coup?[via Daring Fireball ]

How Photoshop Started

John Knoll on the origins of the world's most ubiquitous app — (via the Photoshop Blog)

PicLens: Cinematic Views for the Web

Full-screen slideshows for Safari from websites — OMG. It's a bit slick. And it works with Flickr. I thought it was going to be a bit kludgey, but it's actually rather stunning. This you have to try

Escher's "Ascending and Descending" in LEGO

Thanks Jo —

Escher in Lego by Andrew Lipson on Flickr

Probably blogged by everyone else on the planet already, but hey.

Oh feck.

I can't decide whether to leave all that there or not I might just tidy up the code or something...

...Hmm. /me changes <h1>s to <h2>s, and hope no-one notices...

Nasal Flashbacks

They say — do they not? — that the sense of smell is the most acutely developed for triggering memories. Just one whiff of a stink will send your mind rushing back to some previously un-repeated fragment of neuron-firing, and have you wallowing in reminiscences for eternity.

I read that that's bollocks. That there's nothing special about the sense of smell at all, and that it's just something we tell ourselves to make us feel good in an 'earthy' way.

But Seamus Heaney wrote a poem about it, so what do I know?

...

A couple of days ago (I forget exactly when — this week has been a bit of a blur to be honest), I recall telling the story of my one-and-only cartoon-star moment to an audience. You know how when Jerry smacks Tom (or whatever the 'kids' watch these days), and stars start to circle around his head?

Well, I'd always thought that the term "seeing stars" referred to the little flecks of light you sometimes see if you, oh, stand up too quickly or something. For years I'd laboured under the impression that these moving pinpricks of illumination were the eponymous "stars" of the expression.

That was before my head came into contact at (I'm guessing) twenty miles an hour with the groin of a member of the opposing rugby team.

...

Have I ever talked about rugby? I realise it's not a very 'ladylike' thing to discuss, and a total departure from my more 'girley' witterings, but I used to be a Full Back.

(I was a Wing Forward a couple of times. Hell, I almost even scored a try once)

I probably have talked about it. I doubt it's possible for me to sit down with an audience for more than five years without recanting the tale of How I Was Very Heroic Once And Did A Flying Tackle In Front Of A Girl I Fancied™, and other such macho exploits.

(If I haven't, then please tell me, and I'll fill yous in. It's very heroic of me. And macho)

But that's of little relevance, apart from there being a specific moment in my memory which involves flinging my head against the torso of an 18-year-old boy (seventeen years ago — I must point out), and suddenly having my entire vision dominated by very regular, very five-pointed stars.

Not little flecks of sparkle in my vision — a series of overlapping (I can still picture them, funnily enough, in absolute clarity) perfect stars.

Have you got Photoshop open? Flip to the text tool, change the typeface to Dingbats and hit Shift-H a few times at different point sizes.

That's what I saw.

It was, as I said, a momentary flash that was just as quickly replaced by the sight of the grass bearing up towards my face — but it was very real.

(Trust me, this is relevant)

...

When I was young — just a little bit younger than the rugby episodes — I used to be really into drawing Celtic knotwork. I have a book, somewhere in this house, by a Mr George Bain(es?) all about the mathematics involved in its construction, with carefully inscribed instructions for (um) contructing them.

It's an influence that spilled out into one of my films a while back, but the thing in my head at the moment is the Key Patterns.

Key Patterns are weird — bizarre geometric arrangements of lines and triangles that form the most intricate structures, usually around the borders of ancient texts. I must (at some point) write a little bit about them, because I've always been fascinated with the buggers — whether that's on an aesthetic level, or (to the other extreme) on a weird relation between them and swastikas.

(Which is a word I don't think I've ever used on this blog before )

But, getting back to some semblance of 'plot', I was sat in front of the fire a minute ago, stroking Biscuit's head (like she likes), and I opened the fire door for a second, to waft some heat into this (surprisingly) cold house, and a noseful of peat hit me.

Suddenly, my head wasn't in Lancaster. It was on a rugby pitch just outside of Belfast eighteen years ago, hurtling rapidly towards the ground.

Only this time it wasn't stars that flooded my momentary vision, it was shit like this...

I did (it has to be said) toy with the idea of pulling one of those hilariously funny blog-stunts on St. Patrick's Day a couple of weeks ago — not just changing CSS to make things green (which is very passé I feel), but replacing everything on this page with intricate celtic patterns.

OK, not everything — just the swirly image at the top

And I would have done it, had I not been far too clichédly Irish at the time, and been far too drunk to even hold a mouse, let alone cast my brain towards the delicate Illustrator gymnastics that that would have involved.

...

Whatever. I forgot to mention — it's Easter, and I'm on holiday. I'm going to wake up in the morning, and spend the whole day sitting (that's "sitting") in my pants laughing at all of you who are at work