Tag Archives: waffle

The spry fen.

I awoke this morning and turned to Mrs Melmoth, as one does in these situations if a Mrs Melmoth happens to be laying beside them, and said “Well, I’d better get up before Stephen Fry breaks your piano further”.

“What?”

“Oh nothing; I was just having a dream where Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and I were making up comedy sketches. Stephen had attempted to move your old piano so that he could get better access to it, as it was rather cramped in the Queen’s living room where we were trying to recreate an Irish folk song of some kind, and the top of it had just fallen off like it always used to do”.

“Huh.”

“Well, I know, but it is me we’re talking about, and it was a dream, not something I have much control over. Stupid subconscious.”

“No. The ‘huh’ was because I had a dream about Stephen Fry last night too.”

“Really? How strange!”

“Most strange.”

And the thing is that neither of us had watched or seen anything to do with Stephen Fry the previous evening. Admittedly I have a Stephen Fry as Jeeves alarm clock, but I don’t have a Stephen Fry bedspread or wallpaper or posable action figure (although that’s only because they don’t make one), and the alarm clock is switched off over the weekend anyway.

I post this because I’m concerned that Stephen Fry isn’t the loveable and affable English comedian, writer and font of all knowledge that we think him to be. I fear that this is actually a ruse, a Marvelian (not Marvellian) super villain’s disguise, while he works on his secret project: a doomsday device which will allow him to enter the minds of all who have seen his likeness, and to control them as an army of mindless slaves, reigning terror and Quite Interesting facts upon all those who stand in their way.

It’s quite a frightning thought! And it really puts me into two minds as to whether I should continue listening to his podgrams, lest they contain some form of subliminal message. On the other hand, they are exceedingly good. Such a dilemma: mindless zombie slave or give up an excellent podcast?

I’ll have to think about that while I have a nice cup of tea and DESTROY ALL HUMANKIND, YES MR FRY…

Doctor, Doctor, I’ve been CAPTCHA’d

I understand why blogs and forums might need to employ a CAPTCHA; there’s one on this very site for comments, added after spam-bots decided our massive readership would be really interested in wombat accessories or whatever other rubbish they’re peddling (blame/praise Melmoth for the word choice, though).

The Age of Conan forums employ a captcha whenever you want to search, which seems slightly over the top to start with (possibly to stop DoS attempts, I dunno). It suffers from one oh-so-minor flaw, though: it doesn’t show you a slightly deformed word to recognise, it vomits forth a Jackson Pollock tribute which allegedly contains six numbers and/or letters, though you can’t tell ‘cos they’re strangely distorted and rotated to start with, then a five year old has been let loose on them with a whole box of crayons (and not one of those little boxes with about six colours, oh no, we’re talking jumbo deluxe party selection). There were obviously plenty of people posting, maybe it was just me having trouble with the thing; I went to search on “captcha” to check, only I had to… oh yeah, pass the captcha…

Figuring it might only be required for non-registered users, I went to sign up, completed the form and… oh look, it’s a captcha (understandable, on registrations). After a mere thirty or so reloads, I finally found one where the resident child had missed most of the letters with the crayons and got through, and sure enough that avoids the need on every search. Except by that point I’d got bored and forgot what I was looking for in the first place, and went off to YouTube to find the source of this post title (6 minutes in), but at least I’ll be ready next time I need to search. So long as I can remember the login…

Blog roll.

I have mentioned in the past that I am somewhat of an alt-a-holic when it comes to my game characters. Be they MMO based, single player RPG or otherwise, as long as there’s a way to customise a character then I’ll need to re-roll at some point, usually it’s because I find the dot product relationship between the eyebrow vectors to be sub-optimal, or some other desperately important trifling niggle. I can’t explain it, like crop circles, it just is.

However, it occurred to me this morning that I recently re-rolled my blog.

It would seem that the disease is spreading. I begin now to wonder whether I am the singularity for a world-wide epidemic, the focus point from which a wave of alternative zombies will spread out and ravage the Earth with indecision.

Or maybe alternative mummies, yeah I like mummies better.

No, wait! Make them werewolves. Yeah. An army of werewolves would be awesome.

Hmm, maybe I should just stick with my original zombie main. I know, I’ll create one of each and see how they get on. Whichever one destroys England the quickest is the one that I’ll stick with and use to destroy the rest of the world. That’s it! That’s the plan.

Although vampires would be pretty cool…

DEATH by BLOG!

Via Slashdot, I just found out I’m in mortal peril. When they talk about the “nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet”, I know just what they mean, it’s not easy coming up with random waffle here every couple of days (apart from weekends, public holidays and when I can’t be bothered).

Actually, it is *quite* easy. And if I get stuck I can just post links to the New York Times. Mind you, the advertising revenue isn’t so hot, the Welcome Break, Low Wycombe still haven’t sent us the promised 74p, makes me glad I cleared them out of little bottles of shampoo at the time, the bastards.