October 2005 Archive

Went to the Purple Turtle in Reading to listen to Tom DJ-ing on Friday. It was the first time I’d gotten to see DJ Stackmiester. I was pleasantly suprised, I’m no great techno expert, but Tom’s set seemed to have a dark and dirty hard edge, with some decent analogue bleeps and breaks. I’d liken it to a more dance-floor friendly sound to the Belgian industrial/electronic-body masters Front 242 or Nitzer Ebb (~ thats a good thing from my point of view).

Unfortunately it was over a little early in the night (on the other hand, it did mean I could catch the last train, and hear the whole of his set!), but the techno-faithful and random wierdos did some crazy dancing, whilst I just got on with a bit of head-nodding.

Nice!

Zarch is hard.

Most games work on the theory, give em a couple of easy levels, get them used to it, then ramp up the difficulty to keep interest. Most games you can get to level 3 on on first play. Zarch (David Braben, Firebird, 1987) takes that rule and drops it from a great height.

There’s an (interesting?) debate in some gaming fraternities about simulation vs. gameplay. Zarch simulates a very convincing physics model, the relationships between thrust, air-position, tilt and gravity make flying really enjoyable, and there’s a nice sense of ‘oh my god I’m going to crash’, just before the exponential build up of thrust fires you away from the ground, if your lucky. It’s really fun, like virtual bungee jumping.

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The entirety of the local Russian speaking population seemed to have turned up for this saturdays local showing of. Nochnoy Dozor (I’m going to insist on using it’s Russian title) (Timur Bekmambetov, 2004) is one of those films, like much sci-fi/fantasy anime (Dragonball Z/ Monkey written by Wu Cheng’en spring to mind,) it tries to cram in an entire mythology derived from thousands of pages of book and/or cultural knowledge into a single movie, which doesn’t really work.

What does work is the grime and the dirt of violence. The film has been likened to a crossbreed of the Lord of the Rings (there are medieval warriors) and the Matrix (there is bullet-time). What this pairing fails to point out is that this isn’t the clean virtual reality of the Matrix, here characters vomit blood over the sides of subway entrances, stamp on peoples heads, stab with hairdressing scissors, the bullet-time scene involves kicking someones teeth out. It’s more like an Alan Clarke movie, The Firm (1988) / Scum (1977), or Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1991) in that respect, except it has the Undead and shapechangers in it.
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New “Happy Halloween” cover for the website. Yes, it’s another girl in a witchy halloween costume. This time, the style is slightly more naturalistic, and the typography is less cheeky, and more sedate.

Having been looking at Zarch/Virus et al recently and I think the influence of planar-modelling actually shows through. Having said that, reducing things to basic planes was what we were taught in life drawing classes, so I suppose there’s part of that too.
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Logical filenames, like proper subject lines in emails and well organised directory structures can make all the difference to the working day.

But why is it that often, quite arbitary, meaningless file-naming conventions get used. For example I’ve been working on some video/download stuff but the files when they were supplied were:

“Video 1 - Final_56k.mov”

Overall: what’s with the spaces, underscores and hyphens? How much punctuation does a filename really need? Not that much.
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