TV Links

Over the two weeks I spent alone at home (I meant to put this post up ages ago), I somehow got out of the habit of feeling that I constantly had to do anything useful with my life, put game, music and other projects on hold, and got addicted to watching things on TV Links. If you haven't already been there, this is a site that collects links from the recent explosion of web-based video sharing sites and organizes them neatly by series and episode. Not everything is anywhere near complete, but I was still very surprised at the amount of variety already there - it's constantly updated with programmes released by the day as well as having a decent archive of older shows and cartoon series.

Fantastic Four

The first thing I absolutely leapt on when I was it was the version of Fantastic Four that was made in about 1993. Why? Because when CBBC showed it all those years ago they decided to cut it off handily after two episodes of a three-part storyline and I never found out what happened. The cartoon itself wasn't among the absolute classics, but it was decent enough and had a fantastic 80s-style cheesy plot-summarization theme song that people just can't make these days.

What would make it even better is if they had the episodes of Iron Man that went along with them, as that was always my preferred Marvel series - however, they've just got one two-parter from then that cuts out about five minutes before everything is suddenly solved, and a few from the series a year later on when they gave Tony Stark an absolutely tragic mullet.

Sonic-X

After browsing around the Cartoons section I wanted to have a look at this, because I'd watched the other two animated takes on this series when I was about twelve. This Japanese effort wasn't actually terrible - no more embarrassing than, say, Ranma, and it actually made me laugh a few times. (This could be something to do with the other things that I tend to find funny, see below.) The theme music is one of those infuriating cheesy songs like the ones written by Ted Poley that's clearly appalling but remains stuck in your head and will not go away.

Unfortunately, even though the actors have changed over the last ten years and his voice is now mildly less irritating (it's no longer capable of sanding off a layer of the coffee table), my intense dislike of him has not yet subsided and I feel compelled to shout "You complete wanker" at the screen at least twice per episode. There's also the issue that I'm certain one of the baddies was called "Intellihentai". I'm sure that there must be a very good Japanese grammatical reason why that's a legitimate name, but with my limited vocabulary it just lets the imagination run wild.

Tom and Jerry

You must have seen this. Fred Quimby's series (not Chuck Jones, who ruined it) consists of the famous cat and mouse hitting each other with frying pans, fireworks, anvils and various other instruments of pain, and even though we're obviously far too sophisticated for that in Britain, it never stops being amusing. The best bit of the episodes on there at the moment isn't the physical violence, though - rather, the Robin Hood episode complete with voices that represent what the Americans think people from Britain sound like.

QI

In the moments on TV-links when I wasn't trying to relive my all too quickly vanished childhood, this was the main programme that I watched, and I got through a couple of episodes a night. It seemed like an original idea rather than a Have I Got News For You clone like most other panel games at the time, and it started just after I went down to university without access to television. It's often quite funny, but the previously warm and friendly Stephen Fry really does get quite irritating after a few programmes.

Reboot

Now that every single children's cartoon is either rendered in 3D, drawn in an angsty depressed angular fashion or is from Japan, it's difficult to remember why this was so special, but it was the first (I believe) regularly shown computer-rendered series. Clearly taking some inspiration from Tron and sounding like a strange precursor to The Matrix in places, it's a wonder it became so popular - it's undeniably the nerdiest cartoon in the entire world, with computery in-jokes comprising much of the vocabulary of the characters. And the token British villain was voiced by Tony Jay, the man with the voice so incredible that it qualified as a superpower.

Reboot, set in a city called Mainframe, drifted along in a fairly predictable storyline that didn't actually progress much for a while, then the end of the second series came and the writers went mad. After casually destroying the main character, they switched to doing the same kind of thing without him for a while, then decided they were fed up of that too, killed everyone else off and started again with a continuous hunt across entirely different worlds rather than staying in one location all the time. What happened after that is a mystery to me, because like most everything, Britain gave up showing it after a while and we never found out the conclusion.

MST3K

I was first shown MST3K - or, to give it its never-used massively long full title, Mystery Science Theater 3000 - when I was in first year of university. Being my usual open-minded self I predicted that it would just be over-Americanized rubbish like most of the rest of their TV output, but I was genuinely surprised to find that it was actually quite good. A programme about simply adding commentary to an existing film doesn't need a plot, but they put one in anyway, told in the theme song at the beginning of each episode (which is hilarious, by the way), and some of the observations by the characters are genuinely quite witty.

Bagpuss

This wasn't on TV Links, but it fitted in here - someone put up a Youtube video of an episode of Bagpuss from 1974, and watching it nearly made me cry, I promise you. Most Americans think that his name sounds like an obscenity, and even if they get past that it's difficult to explain what was special about a programme that involved talking wooden bookends, singing mice and a toad playing the banjo without sounding like I'd taken a decent quantity of hallucinogenic drugs. This particular episode has a wonderful a capella ragtime performance from the mice at about 3:40 through.

Later on in the video, another talent of the Bagpuss writers emerges - unintentionally writing incredibly creepy songs. I remember two episodes of this programme giving me nightmares, one that had something about the four seasons and another about ears (set to Dvorák's famous Humoresque). This one has a song about a ragdoll. A ragdoll with stitched-up eyes that dances about in a possessed stop-motion voodoo manner that makes it look like it's from a rejected episode of The Twilight Zone. This is all set to the programme's signature haunting sitar/banjo/detuned piano music (I can't decide which it is).

Overall I wasted just about two entire weekends watching all of the above, and I felt rather good for it. With torrents and sites like these springing up, I can genuinely see television as we know it becoming obsolete before too long - why stick to broadcasting something at a set date and time when you can have downloadable content available for viewing at any time? Of course, if it was to be adopted they'd have to put some sort of amazingly intrusive DRM in it that would render it unable to be viewed by anyone, and that's a fairly major obstacle.

Gibberish

Oh, I've just remembered something - my parents are here for a week. And my youngest siblings are now 18, meaning that there are no children in our family. This journal started off as a record of events from my life, but it now seems that it's become so detached from reality and about whatever I'm thinking about at the time that I hardly even bother to tell people what's actually happening in life. It was for that reason that I changed its name from the four year old in-joke that about two people understood to the more appropriate one that you see at the top of the page now. Except that if you're reading this on your Friends page, which you are, this is all irrelevant.

I would just give up and read if I were you. Uniquely at this point, it's a lot more exciting.

My mother's birthday was yesterday as well, and we took her out to the vaguely obscenely named Fugakyu, a quite famous restaurant down the road from us. I hadn't realized that she had never tried sushi, but it went very well - I hadn't seen it presented on a model boat before. I nearly managed to pay, as well. And the price was very reasonable - it was about the same as what we pay for takeaway sushi that isn't anywhere near as good. So next time we feel like getting sushi, we're definitely going there.

This post's going nowhere. And it's too hot. I'm leaving.

Crystal Towers 2 - Luminous Tower

After doing a lot of general back-end-type things for ages, I started on a new level yesterday. No screenshots as yet because I haven't put in the graphical style that I'm going for (I've just sketched out a few ideas on my work notepad just now), but it's going to be a futuristic environment called Luminous Tower. The layout at the moment is also a bit of a mystery, but as the name implies I'm going to try and make this one focus more on progress vertically rather than continually going right like the rest of them.

I've put in a vertically moving platform which almost-sort of works - the trouble with those is that you have to detect whether your ground detector is over them when moving the player, and work out a way of limiting it so that it doesn't move away and dump the player off when it changes direction. (That could actually be quite a decent gameplay feature, but perhaps for another level.)

What I have done are a couple of enemies - I'm going for at least three different types on each level to keep things interesting, and trying my best not to just use simple monsters that mindlessly wander back and forward. At the moment I have a small upside-down helicopter thing that accelerates over time and pauses when changing direction, and a slightly Goomba-esque thing that crawls along the ceiling and jumps down to get you, like the Viles from the first game.

Confusion

I've never really been in tune with my moods, to be honest. Regularly my head can be fine and the rest of me can feel entirely different, or vice versa. At the moment it's an hour until I leave to meet up with my parents after they arrive at the airport, and I think I'm excited about this, but that feeling is manifesting itself as something identifiable as panic. I've been shaking all over all day while trying to sort out a stacktrace (three screens wide - a new record!), and to be honest, that Yorkie bar from down at the import shop was probably a bad idea. I've also been refreshing the progress of my parents' flight every fifteen minutes, and even though it had already gone halfway across the Atlantic, its altitude only rose above zero a few minutes ago, so someone must have wanted to go water-skiing very fast.

At the moment I've done all I really need to do for the day in that the report editor works, but the trouble is that it worked rather unexpectedly after my test cases got more and more desperate and there is now a report with the name "hairy dave" visible in the system. Therefore, getting around to writing a Delete button would seem the best thing to do at this point.

Comments from a Madman

Feeling much better today, thank you. This is for two reasons:

Yesterday I was awarded a Featured position at SheezyArt, a site feature that I didn't know existed until someone pointed it out to me, and I was constantly refreshing my page at work to watch an avalanche of messages come in (and this just after I'd given up on getting listeners there). I'm trying to leave comments back as I think it's the polite thing to do, but they're coming in faster than I can think up different ways to say "Thanks for the favourite". The next time someone says I should form a real band, I may snap and actually do it.

And today, the first article on Worse Than Failure to make me laugh out loud at work was posted. Rather than direct people there and risk them being fatally injured from the discharge as the high-voltage overinflated egos scrape against each other, I thought I would reproduce it here. Now, amazingly enough, there may be people who read this who just can't find Java source code amusing, so I've improved it a bit by highlighting the comment lines (if the background of your page is blue you're out of luck). Think of it as like winding through Denis Norden on Alright on the Night to get to the funny bits.

Don't be scared by the code if you don't understand it (actually, if do understand it you're in danger of working with this man so you should probably be very scared indeed) - the best bit are the schizophrenic notes he leaves himself that signal a confident cruise into complete madness.

// I'll only ask one more question and then I think I am
// going to flip burgers for a living because I just
// can't figure this out!

// kludge, once in a blue this isn't set..

/**
* Tag to email the user. There is a seperate doc on the details on this tag somewhere...
*/

// new day is dawning or we re-booted, start count over

catch(Exception e) {

// hell what to say? Programmer not user error here!

}

return false;

//added by me

// oddity, can't figure out elegant solution

if (da.getServer().toLowerCase().equals("devdbsrv1"))
cmd.append("\\SQL2000");

catch(Exception e) {};

// sometimes its best to be quiet

// I don't get this why substracting 1 from the month is giving
// 1 YEAR ago. Would appear bad, so watch this

gc.add(Calendar.YEAR, -1);

private int rowCount = 0;

// due the nature of this "current row" isn't current row

// not sure why this needs to be a HashMap - and I wrote the damn thing

private HashMap applications = new HashMap();

//if we're not getting the database, just return some random numbers instead

System.out.println("db error: "+e);
Random r = new Random();
int randInt = Math.abs(r.nextInt()) % 11;
return Integer.toString(randInt);

//just tack on anything to make sure the result has no spaces or returns after it.

xmlOutput.append("&a=b");

// ooh baby is this check going to cause more issues then it's worth?

Core uc = (Core)findAncestorWithClass(this, Core.class);

// take a look at the content type

String type = "FIIN"; // f**k if I know

catch(Exception e) {

// what can we do? Printing an error as already failed!

}

// Don't let the command line get to big for it's britches

if (classNames.size() == 15 || j == nList.getLength() -1) {
String file = writeCommandFile(javaDir, classPath, tempDir, tomcatDir, classNames);
docBuff.append(runCommand(file));
classNames = new ArrayList();
}

int index = agent.indexOf("Windows");

// is it the 10,000LD Gorilla?

// don't ask.... okay you wanna know. Make unique URLs based on the image
// update count so when people change images it refelecs (else the page
// is cached

private static HashMap imagePageCount = new HashMap();

// just need get the &$*ing class name of a string array

String[] blah = new String[1];
Class[] cos = { blah.getClass() };

// this check in abstract should not be needed,
// but abstract is often too abstrat for me to postive about

if (df == null && rf == null)
continue;

// smart, stupid? Strugglign with the fact I dont know
// the prices without doing a DB query, and that will lots of DB queries

public static HashMap retailPrices = new HashMap();
public static HashMap dealerPrices = new HashMap();
public static ArrayList badParts = new ArrayList();

// massage the sucker so as to not confused my little po' head

int eot = pstrResponse.indexOf("^~000EOT");
if (eot > 0)
pstrResponse = pstrResponse.substring(0,eot);
eot = pstrResponse.indexOf("^~EOT");
if (eot > 0)
pstrResponse = pstrResponse.substring(0,eot);

// how many fields of repeatable data do we have, this handy dany calucalation tells us

int totalCols = tok.countTokens() - dataTok.countTokens() - singularFields + 1;

private String TRANSACTION_CODE="DLRORD ";

// complete guess, havnen't gotten anything from Jerry yet

// really a big &*&*& kludge, sick, hurry, tied, and worked 10 hours..

String spd = (String)dbFields.get("start_pay_month");
String epd = (String)dbFields.get("end_pay_month");

catch(Exception e) {

// not that big deal..

}

// one can question if this is the "best" way.
// I first take the information and throw into objects, then I create hashtables
// and then I make a view out that....
// okay maybe I should go strait to hash tables I see that now!

// abstractly this should be 0, but.. just accept 1.

if (count == 1)
return "Y";

// okay a little corny, but create new object to keep the
// the values field of this object untouched....

ItNutsAndNotes t = new ItNutsAndNotes();

/**
* Gets a list of invoices for orders with the given criteria
* @.attribute status: The status of s**t
*/

catch(Exception ex) {
System.out.println("CAN'T DO S**T");
};

// never happes, can't figure the f**k out why

if (action != null && action.toUpperCase().equals("CANCEL")) {
return EVAL_PAGE;
}

F**K <- Who wrote that???

if (r != EVAL_BODY_AGAIN) {
System.out.println("AAA....");
pageContext.getOut().print("F**KME");
}

//This is a miserable hack I am about to perform.
//Since the POCheck happens in the super class, and uses the user to do so,
//I need to temporarily set the order of the user to the deleted order, then switch
//it back to what it was after the POCheck is complete. The hand is quicker than the eye!

I haven't encountered anything quite as glorious as that lot in my work, but there was one that came pretty close. You'll have seen a couple of "catch {}" blocks in the code above, which are meant to be used for deciding what to do if an error occurs and hopefully recovering from it. Instead, the entire contents of one of the catch blocks in our system reads "// Oh well".

Why Everyone is Stupid

I think it's fair to say that anyone who spends a significant amount of time on the Internet will eventually become mildly irritated at the overused words and phrases that people use, as well as the increasing tendency towards blatant gibberish becoming an acceptable way to communicate. "It's just the Internet" is no excuse - if you're writing something that you expect people to read or answer, then I would have thought that writing style was of paramount importance in an environment where you're entirely composed of written language. As you can probably tell I'm in a bad mood just now, because we've just been hit with another doctor's fee on top of our already ludicrous hospital bill for Whitney's teeth, and preaching about these is one of the things that I do best. Don't take any of this personally. Let's open with the obvious.

"Alot" - Right, stop doing this. Also, stop saying that language evolves, the excuse of illiterates down the centuries, when people tell you to stop doing this. Evolution doesn't happen because you're too stupid to know better. Strangely, when it's written wrongly like this it's common to see it emphasized by putting it in capitals, drawing even more attention to the inability of the user. I would have thought that you would know that these are two separate words, how to use apostrophes correctly and the difference between "you're" and "your" by the time you're out of, say, primary seven (and that's a phenomenally generous estimate if you ask me). This is the first and last purely grammatical issue that I'm going to include, so you're probably safe from now on.

"Law of averages" - Not exclusive to the Internet by any means, but it gets to me every time someone mentions it. It's not a law. It doesn't work. Stop it. I never liked it, but my aversion to it was heightened when some people were talking about statistics on Worse Than Failure (the half that are predominantly stupid rather than predominantly loud) and using it to disprove that there's an equal chance of getting heads or tails when a coin is tossed. Idiots, the lot of them.

"k" - An abbreviation of an abbreviation. "OK". There's no reason to use this unless you happen to be Jam from Weebl and Bob. Is one extra keystroke too much to ask? And no, not "kk" either - it's only half an inch to stretch over to the O. You don't even need to hold the shift key down if you don't want to.

"O_O" - I hate this emoticon and all its variants. I don't like any of them much, not because of what they are but because I feel that by using them I'm admitting that I'm not good enough at expressing myself in writing not to have to rely on them. But this is the worst of the lot. Variations include O_o and o_O, and I've seen them almost exclusively used as entire posts by clueless people on the Java forums, making it shorthand in my head for "I'm an idiot and don't know how to ask coherent questions or say what I don't understand". Even more deplorable is when you fill an entire page of a chatroom with variations of it and those appalling < and > shifty-eyes things in a flickbook-animated style. Get off my Internet.

"Get off my Internet" - If you say this you're clearly an intolerant bastard with an overinflated sense of self-importance. (In other words, a perfect personality match for the Worse Than Failure forums.) You probably spend your time putting together lists of Internet words and phrases you hate, you tedious individual.

"You win the Internet" - Perhaps the opposite to the phrase above. It was hilarious the first time, and mildly funny as I kept hearing it for about a year afterwards, but I've now seen this about five times a day since 2002 and it's beginning to grate a little.

"[Anything] FTW!" - [People who use this] STFU!

"Urbs" - This is how the Americans say "herbs". I can't understand why. This isn't a writing issue, but I just thought I'd throw it in while I was at it.

"Full stops. For. Emphasis." - Stop. Doing. That.

"Nomnomnom" - Shut up.

"Sheeple" - No.

"confused" - Now, here we have to pause a moment. I have no idea why I don't like this word. There's no underlying grammatical reason to dislike it, but I find myself avoiding using it wherever possible. It's an example of something that I don't like purely for the sound of it in my head rather than how it's used. I'm not mental, I promise.

"Beta read" - I saw this for the first time yesterday and after a moment of looking at it, just about worked out what it meant. If you don't understand it, it was meant to mean "proofread", in presumably the same way that software goes through a beta stage where it's almost complete and needs checking over by a wider testing audience. I can see how this sort of makes sense, but it doesn't quite sit right in my mind - the context it was used in was wildly inappropriate if the suspicions I have as to where the term actually comes from are correct.

"LOL" - The universal killer. A staple of AOL-speak, it was introduced to indicate "laughing out loud", even though I would be prepared to bet that 99.9% of the time it's used that the user isn't. Worse is when it's used as a sentence delimiter in stream-of-consciousness gibberish that lacks any other form of punctuation. Even when used in a paragraph that's at least vaguely coherent it's often simply added to the end of sentences, making me feel to mentally pronounce it as I read it lol. See how annoying it is? It is the hallmark of the terminally stupid and I despite it utterly.

And some people have the nerve to ask why I care about people's grammar and written language so much. It's because in my daily interaction with the Internet I'm forced to read such garbage - I consider it polite if people talk in a way that I'm at least vaguely able to parse. I'm off to smash things with hammers.

Oh, by the way, I just got a Featured Art on Sheezyart, so that's brightened things up a bit.

Crystal Towers 2 - Online

After Wired got up to its tricks again and disabled sessions for half a week, I'm planning to move the bug tracker over to my free account at Byethost - there will be adverts, but I can set it up to be exclusively for CT issues rather than having problems with the bug tracker lumped in as well.

Recently I've still been working on the menu, and the game now has fully customizable controls! All that's left is to put Enter and Esc in as the default confirm and cancel buttons, so that navigation doesn't rely on you remembering what you set them to for each player.

As Jam has gone on an extension-writing spree recently, I've been thinking of how to include online high scores for the game using the new Live Receiver object. They probably won't be nearly as extensive as the Special Agent ones, instead giving each player a "data sheet" to show their progress through the levels and finding of secrets, and so on, with the high score table being the list of people who have completed the game. That means I'd need to extend the accounts system, possibly by adding an "Update online account" option to the existing player accounts and prompting for a password when needed. It would also mean that I would need to come up with a way to encrypt the save data so that it couldn't be modified by hand.

But that's jumping ahead a bit, as I've still only got three levels - I'll try to pick it up again soon, but what I really need to do is plan the layout of the hub a bit more. A possible progress tree would also help a lot.

Russia

My "RUSSIA" T-shirt caused problems again today, after last year when I wore it in the Megabowl in Dundee and couldn't cross the room without being asked to fix a lane. This time, on the way back from a walk to the reservoir at Cleveland Circle, we stopped at the Russian shop on the corner to get some kefir. This is one food item available in America that I've really developed a liking for even though Whitney thinks I'm impossibly gay for drinking it, and everything went fine until I approached the woman at the counter.

"шахматный кефир водка Каспаров?" she asked cheerily. Taken aback, I paused for a second, and on the spur of the moment only just stopped myself from answering in German. I think my mind must have gone through the process of "It's foreign, so she'll understand it". But I stumbled a reply out in English instead so that the conversation wasn't carried out in a language that neither of us really knew, and I didn't even notice that she thought I would be able to understand Russian because of the T-shirt until I'd convinced her I wasn't.

After a slump caused by nowhere to submit them, my music writing has picked up again recently and I finished the first song from a new planned album yesterday. In fact I've even drawn up a likely complete track list and posted it on the two sites I submit them to. Not that anyone ever pays attention to journals there, mind you (after the first explosion, things reverted to having exactly two people look at anything I've submitted in the future). Maybe a subtle "Comment on my submissions, you otaku cretins" would convince them otherwise.

Crystal Towers 2 - Time for another monthly update

I've been fixing a lot of little bugs for the last hundred years, so progress is slightly boring as far as the gameplay is concerned. There's a menu on the game now, though, and the joystick controls are fully customizable - something pretty vital for people with controllers other than the PS2 one I'm using, but that's nevertheless overlooked by a lot of games. That took ages and it still needs a couple of things ironed out of it.





Player accounts have also been done. Having separate saves, options and control settings for each player is a difficult thing to keep track of and I did wonder in the end how many people would actually use more than one player on the same computer. But my previous game had them so I was determined to get them into here. Saying that console-style name entry screens was annoying was obviously going to come back and bite me, and I've put one in to here. This gives two advantages - first, you don't need to check for invalid filenames put in as a result of awkward users, and second, it makes control the same through joystick and keyboard. And besides, if the keyboard triggers are letters, how do you know when the user's typing and when they're saying they're finished? (It also has an Easter egg on it, so I can cram in a few more in-jokes - if you put in enough someone's bound to get one.)





The background you see on there is a small taste of the graphics that Hayo is introducing to the game. He's been a bit busy recently, but I've seen a screenshot of some new tiles, and things are looking very exciting indeed...

Jam jam jam

At the moment I am writing a function to get some individual properties, conditions and search terms written in XML out of one part of the webapp, convert them into a set of PropertySearchCriterionBeans that another part of it can use, then loop to load these CriterionBeans into a publishing set.

The temptation to call it imFillingThePubSetWithBeans() is almost too much for me to cope with.

Massachusetts General Hospital

The last 36 hours or so have been some of the most stressful of my life, and that includes the weekend when I had to stay in London. Thursday was the day that Whitney got her teeth fixed, something that we'd been waiting for ever since Boxing Day when they decided to start growing into each other.

The first two insults came when the hospital phoned Whitney during Wednesday lunchtime to say that they wanted us to be there at 8:45 in the morning, and that we would be paying upwards of $3,000 for the surgery. This is apparently normal for students living in America under the least effective healthcare I've ever experienced. So even before we arrived, that doubled the number of painful extractions that were going to be performed that day. Turning around from the entrance to the Farmer's Market, I didn't even pause to finish my lunchtime burrito before taking the train home.

I couldn't sleep that night at all. I don't tend to have nightmares when I'm stressed, but instead my thought patterns get confused with what I've been doing earlier that day - and more often than not, I've been writing code. This means that two nights ago I had constant thoughts about having to instantiate the hopsital and plan how to implement its various departments and offices. After going to bed early, I woke up at ten, eleven, and two in the morning, trying to convince myself that all we had to do was get in a taxi and get to the hospital when we woke up.

And that task is difficult enough - to make absolutely certain that I would be all right for the journey, I rose out of bed at five o'clock. This isn't a wimpish aversion to early morning starts - I genuinely have to have a couple of hours in the morning before moving from the safety of where I live, or the result is usually like something out of the Exorcist. (Remember when everyone thought I was pregnant in first year of university? It's much the same as that.) At eight o'clock I decided that I didn't want to deal with the subway, and phoned for a taxi for both of us. A $20 fare on top of the riches the hospital was expecting us to pay wouldn't make a huge difference.

So after an uneasy taxi ride, we arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital, which is an Escheresque set of very disparate buildings jammed together at random angles. But I'll say this for it - the lifts are impressive. Virtually as soon as you step in to them - "What floor would you li-" ZOOM "There you are". At the medical centre I work above, the lifts are so slow that anyone entering them while ill would probably be dead by the time that they arrived on an adjacent floor. In these, I'm surprised that we didn't momentarily become weightless.

When you go to hospital in America the first thing they do is hand you a heap of forms to fill in, to establish whether you're at risk from allergies or anything in your family history. Whitney got quite a full form out of this, as her extended family are some of the most resilient people in the world and they've together managed to amass just about the whole collection of disorders while staying alive regardless. The most interesting bit that I found on the form was a pain-o-meter of sorts, where the patient had to rate their level of agony on a scale from one to ten - from "Listening to a 9am Functional Analysis lecture" to "Dinner with Timmy Mallett". I can't imagine what possible use they could have for that for people that they're going to operate on anyway.

Much sooner than the original 10am appointment time, we were called through to what looked like a storage cupboard and sat down in very fake leather armchairs. Whitney was connected to an IV device, which she did very well with even though she's scared of needles, and we watched an ECG machine beep to itself at random as we waited for something else to happen. The nurse came through and asked about her name, age and what she was here for, which was mildly frightening as it's the kind of thing that you would think they should know already.

After what seemed an extraordinarily long time, during which half the staff came through and took gowns out of the shelving unit behind us, I watched Whitney being taken through into the operating room. I then walked back to the front area to wait, and for that hour, I was terrified. I had meant to ask how long the procedure was meant to take so that I had some idea of the time I would have to distract myself for, but I just had to keep going on Earthbound on my laptop, not knowing whether I could expect to wait another thirty minutes or that having to wait an hour signalled that something was wrong already. At the same moment my battery ran out, my name was called again and was shown through to Whitney, fast asleep on one of the leather chairs with a set of cooling bags around her jaws.

The nurse handed me a set of instructions and guidelines about what we would experience in the next few hours and what medication Whitney needed for her newly shaped jaw, then I was asked about contact details for a telephone follow-up on Monday. At this moment, Whitney sat upright, said very clearly that I had said our two phone numbers the wrong way around, then instantly fell asleep again. There's no escaping it. Over the next while she gradually came round, and after waiting for the doctor, who said how nice Whitney's jaw had been, we wandered out to the main entrance again, caught a taxi from the stop on the pavement outside and finally went home.

After getting back to the flat, we laid Whitney out on the sofa and I ventured forth to get her prescriptions from the local CVS pharmacy. (No, I can't look at that name without thinking that either.) Except they didn't have the all-important painkillers, so I had to phone the increasingly agonized Whitney and explain that I was trekking throughout the pharmacies to find them. Eventually the Walgreens along the road had them, and at the very reasonable price of $65, too - I was expecting to pay hundreds for them, the same as the painkillers that she had to take a few months ago. Now she should be asleep on the sofa, her mouth gradually forming into the right shape again. Hello if you're reading.

I've somehow managed to come up with a decent entry out of this, but this doesn't reflect at all how I felt at the time. The whole experience was almost as torturous and life-draining as the Visa process from start to finish. A word of advice - never get ill in America.

(By the way, for the benefit of as she's started some sort of linguistic counterterrorism initiative: Elevator; MGH; EKG; T; rank; sidewalk.)

48, 42, 2

I was mildly surprised to find forty-eight emails in my inbox this morning. Even accounting for the regular spam I get about cheap Ad0be s0ftware and c1aGgLi$, that's far beyond the number of LJ comments, worried emails from Mum and confused questions from confused people trying to follow the confused tutorials I've written for Clickteam. The source of the emails was comments from Livejournal, but not from my own - my previous pizza disaster tale was accepted to Mock The Stupid yesterday. I'm rather proud of that, as it's quite difficult to get on there - I've only had one other post accepted before and that was one that I didn't actually write. And it's being rather well received, so it looks like I've somehow learned how to write entertainingly. Whitney said to me that I should go into humour writing last week, but it's reasonable to assume that she might be slightly biased. And Don said on the same day that my posts remind him of Jeremy Clarkson, and that might be the most distressing compliment I've ever received.

We're a bit behind with Doctor Who, and we only got around to seeing the one from a fortnight ago last night. Some of them have been mildly disturbing this series, but "42" is definitely the first this series that I can say was genuinely frightening. I think only "Love and Monsters" comes close to it, and everyone else thought that one was just stupid. I've no idea what they could have done to make those Cyclops-from-the-X-Men sun masks look more frightening. And the stress of it was only heightened by the way that it was set in real-time, not allowing for any narrative breaks or reprieve of pace at all. It did make me wonder if the title "42" was meant to refer to the timer, a play on the title of "24", or a nod to Douglas Adams, but knowing the current Doctor Who writers, I would say that it was probably meant to be all three.

Whitney had a good find yesterday when we went into Gamestop on the way back from shopping - Kingdom Hearts 2 for $17.99, so after completing the first one last month, we had to get started on that. We played through what must be the longest pre-titles sequence ever last night, going for about five hours before being rewarded by it mentioning that we'd reached the start. It's almost an MGS2-like deception in that it starts you off thinking you're well into the game, then rips you out of it and puts you into a completely different one. The villain is bald and voiced by Christopher Lee - I don't know his name yet, but in typical Square fashion he wears two belts wrapped around his head.