<insert crazy ramblings here>

Freecycle offer: Child

175x86cm, good condition, mattress not included.

( screenshot )

Last night I went to sandpit #10 for some unusual games.

Aside: Hmm, I'll need some new nicknames here.

Aside2: Just realised I never wrote up Sandpit 8. hawkida, stefzilla, Ladybird, and Chef went then.

• We signed up for Mexican Thumb Westling, which took all night, so we didn't get to do any of the other big / outdoor games.
  
  Instead we played some of the pick up and play games. First of we played Exquisite Corpse story. Write a line and word or two, fold over and pass on. One of these was brilliant. Two were funny, and one made no sense at all.
  
  Then we got into a fairly large round of werewolf (about 20 people), in which Chef accused me of having hairy hands, and that I must be a wolf. I wasn't but Ladybird was, and IIRC won!
  
  stefzilla made it to the final of Mexican Thumb Westling.

Floo, StarShirt and Ladybird were there for sandpit 10. This time they had ticketed it, and set each game to last an hour, so you could get three in. However they had sold out.

So back to the pick up and play games.

Dadaist Trivial Pursuit was surprisingly good. One person reads out a random question from a Trivial pursuit card, and the others then read out the most surreal answer on their cards.
"What colour are all snakes eyes?"
"German"
"A Cow"
"Michael Flatly"

Next I rounded a few random people who were waiting 20 minutes for their game to start and tried to host a quick game of Werewolf (which I ought to explain here, but don't have time. Read more if you want). No one there had ever played before, and I'd never hosted. It went okay, but not great. StarShirt was lynched straight off as the Villagers thought he was smiling too much, so must have just killed. He was innocent.

Then we tried to play a simplified version of Mao, a hidden rules card game, but that didn't go so well.

At this point we were thinking about leaving when the game of "Super Secret Robot Werewolf" descended on our table, so we snuck onto that. It was a Werewolf variation set on Battlesta a space ship, with crew, cylo super secret robots, a security officer, and a science officer with a cylo robot detector. StarShirt was lynched early on as the Crew thought he was smiling too much, so must have just killed. He was innocent.

I was not. For the first time ever I was a werewolf cylo robot. I think the highlight of the game was when someone announced that they were the science officer, and they knew who a robot was. The certainly convinced us, so the secret robots all backed up each others arguments, and convinced the crew to lynch him. At the end of the game it turned out he'd been lying anyway!

Oh and we won. 3 cylo super secret robots took out the crew of 13.

( Microsoft spam offering the opportunity for more spam. )

Fristly, is this even a real site? It only seems to have seven pages.

So lets assume that this doesn't smell phishy straight away and is genuine. Having managed to tick the box to say I do not want to be left without the chance to not get marketing emails, Why on Earth would I want to agree to receive spam?

Anyone care to join me at a pervasive games night next Wednesday?

Last time I went to Sandpit, I ended up in a Mexican thumb war, so missed out on the pervasive outside round London stuff.

Wednesday 22 April 6:30 at the ICA. It'll cost £4 this time to be guaranteed a slot on one of the 3 biggest games of the night. I'll buy my ticket tonight.

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Oh, and current to-be written posts:

Eastercon - Utterly utterly fabulous weekend. Don't think I made it to a single thing that was directly about SF. Oops. ToDo: Programming I did make it to and highlights. The in-depth report will go into a fanzine I appear to have announced I'll do by Plokta.con. bohemiancoast, Bill Burns, johncoxon, ceemage, agreed (in principle) to write something for it :D

Reading List. Two Novels. Two Fanzines. About 10 Comics.

Currently to-be written posts that are looking like they won't get done:

Webcomix Thing con-report.

Picocon con report.

Quoth el reg:

Next week's sees the British National Science Fiction gathering in Bradford, where the great and the bearded will be discussing the RepRap project for self-building machines amongst other things

In Ansible's "As Others See Us" style.

So since I don't have a beard, I must be one of the great!

Old news I know, made me giggle.

Anyone looking for a room share for plokta.con? {ETA: sorted out now}


Also, bit last minute posting this here, but I'm going to the Thing tomorrow.

AKA The UK Web & Mini Comix Thing
AAKA The Webcomix Thing
AAAKA The Mile End Thing.

It's a great place to find small press comics, and meet their creators. There's a few webcomics people there too. This year they've actually got a few pannels, which they havent' had for the last couple of years.

As well as browsing work I don't know about:

I'm going to squee at: Sarah McIntyre, Caroline Parkinson, Reckless Youth, John Allison, Diesel Sweeties, and Beaver and Steve.

I'll keep an eye out for anything new by: Factor Fiction, Modern Monstrosity, Ninja Bunny, Fetishman, REET!, and Tozo.
{ETA2: I should point out that the only reason MM isn't in the squee list is because Oliver Lambden is too cool and relaxed to squee at. I shall just nod my head and say 'sup.}

I'll have a good look at these guys, who I never seem to have take the time to decide if I like, but have seen around a few times: Liz Greenfield, Octopus Pie, Kate Beaton Comics, Anders Loves Maria

Aside: The creators from the DFC have a new shared blog. Excellent.

It's the monthly late night at the science museum tonight, and it's one of the rare ones that doesn't clash with the BSFA's monthly author readings. I'm planning to be in the queue at 6:30, if you want join me.

raven_mocara, floo and <<nickname not found error>> should be there. hawkida said she may head along later.

I read the Drop Dead Monstrous anthology last Autumn after picking it up at the MCM expo, from by Sweatdrop Studio's stall (A UK small press Manga publisher). Richard Bruton's reviewed it if you're interested.

I his review he writes that it, like many anthologies is:

patchy, all the strips are punchy, truncated things and it has the feel of the artists just throwing their odd little rejected stories onto the anthology pile. Okay, maybe a little harsh, but you know what I mean.

I like comics anthologies. I'd guess I've probably picked up about 3 or 4 small press anthologies a year for the past few years. More often than not I do enjoy the stuff in them. They all have something that's not my favourite, but that's sort of why I like them. It's a chance to see stuff I'd normally reject on quick glance when deciding what to buy. Even if I don't like a story, or art style, I've not spent that long on it anyway.

Which segues into this weeks reading list:

*) The DFC
Thinking about the DFC as an anthology, it would be a clear favourite. But that's probably not fair because most stories run over multiple weeks so do have a chance to say more.

I mean I've even grow to like most of the stuff I didn't get at first after reading Richard's interview with Molly, his young daughter.

Richard: I just didn’t see any story in it, just friends standing around chatting.
Molly: I like the way it’s about a group of friends hanging around and talking about stuff. Maybe it’s just meant to be for kids Dad?

This was the issue where they announce the closure :(

The Weird Wild West wrapped up it's first run. The Bad Guy got away, setting up for a second season that won't happen :(
With inking, I normally prefer a fat line that changes width, but I really love the sketchy quality of the lines in this epsiode in particular.

13) Born On A Blue Day by Daniel Tammet.
This is the autobiography of a high-functioning autistic savant.

It's a pretty moving story following his life from his birth, through to the release of a documentary about his ability to absorb languages (he gave a live televised interview in Iceland, less than a week after starting to learn the language). His synaesthesia and love of numbers run strongly through the book.

While much of the book is about the difficulty of his life, the chapters where he breaks out the comfortable rhythms and moves overseas for a year, or first meets his partner Neil, are really uplifting.

At one point he writes that he finds it very difficult to understand phrases such as "Jack isn't tall, he's a giant!" Since he can't mentally go back and change it to "Not only is Jack tall, he's a giant!" As such the book has a curious precision to it's prose, that is interesting in itself.

Big thanks to major_clanger for inviting me to a talk on invisibility at the IET. It was actually about the new materials with interesting optical properties, that don't exist in nature. His write up is worth a read.

I've tried to find some copies of the ray diagrams from the slide show to illustrate the fantastic properties of this stuff (if you made a milk bottle from it, you would see the milk outside the edge of bottle), but couldn't find any online. If I get time, I'll write them up from memory.

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chiller has found what causes the squigly things you see when you look up at clear blue sky.

It reminded me of an odd visual distortion I've noticed a few times.

If you press you palms to your closed eyes, applying a light pressure simulates the retina. When I do this I see sort of yellowy-greenish-purple blobs. It wasn't until I tried to photoshop the image you'll see below that I realised this is the colour of magic and being made up from opposite sides of a colour wheel shouldn't exist e.g. (red+green = white, blue + orange = white, yellow+purple=white, etc).

To get the point, I've noticed that I occasionally, when having a shower in the morning, and I'm scrunching my eyes up to stop soap getting in them, I see an Phosphene that looks a bit like this:


It gets brighter the longer and tighter I screw my eyes up. If I leave them closed long enough I even get afterimages. Never happens at any other time.

Anyone else have any intersting visual distortions?

Being a Friday Afternoon I doubt there's many LJ readers out there, but thought I'd ask just in case