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.

My Way Home

It's strange how much people who read this journal know about me, and yet they have no idea what I do on a day to day basis. This is because I have great difficulty explaining it myself without sounding phenomenally boring - the best way I've found to describe my job is that I work at a company that builds online database systems for other companies. After which people tend to sort of drift away and talk to someone else. And as I'm sitting on the train at the moment, I thought that another way to give you some snapshot of my life would be to describe my journey home from it. Well, it seemed a great idea one paragraph ago.

After avoiding the lifts by going down the artificially one-way stairs, the best bit of the journey home is that the entrance to the station is literally about ten steps away from the Vanguard building, where we have an office on the top floor. I'm certain that entering the door of Davis Square triggers the arrival of a red line train, because the tannoy always announces that my train is coming when I step inside. After that, it's a matter of performing an Olympic hundred-metre downhill escalator sprint (if it's working and not in bits at the side of the platform being polished), waving my wallet at the automatic gates and hoping they open. I've got quite good at this, and can now easily make it in time without resorting to jumping off the higher level.

For people in Britain, the train is just what you'd imagine the tube in London (or indeed any subway system) to be like - a set of slightly tatty carriages with plasters covering up the holes in the seats, with announcements read out periodically by someone who sounds like Marvin from the Hitch-Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy. Because I don't go home until about seven o'clock, it's common to get a carriage virtually to myself, at least until we pass Harvard University where a variety of odd students get on.

Seven stops along, Park Street is where I change over. This is one of the central Boston stations (unlike Central Station, which isn't central at all) that were built as part of America's first subway, and it contains connections for a number of lines, designated by colour. The green line is the one that takes me home, and it's unusual in that it splits into four sections halfway along its route - the B line for Boston College, C for Cleveland Circle, D for... er... riversiDe, and E for Heath Street. 'Eath Street. Well, I didn't come up with it.

After climbing the stairs from the red line, I manoeuvre myself in front of the second pillar on the right, next to the perpetual puddle on the floor under the leak in the roof because that's where the door of the carriage always stops, and if I get in first I'm more likely to get one of the seats to myself in the corners. At the time I come back in the evenings there's usually a man there who's either playing an ancient Chinese instrument or murdering a cat - I've never gone far enough down the platform to check which it is. The trains are arranged on two lines - B and E on one side, C and D on the other. After about eighteen D trains go past, eventually a C one arrives.

The Green Line has a fleet of trains powered by magic that turn into buses halfway along their route. After about six underground stations the carriage rises to ground level and follows Beacon Street, the main road that stretches from inner Boston all the way out to where we live and presumably continues halfway across the country. Even though it's a perfectly straight line the drivers somehow manage to make it an uncomfortable bumpy ride, and I often feel a little ill by the time it gets to Brandon Hall six more stops away. This is usually because of concentrating on playing something on my laptop (so far I've gone through almost the entirety of the first two Lemmings games, the original GTA, a couple of complete games of Civ, some Sierra adventures and various independent titles - suggestions for further train-entertainment are welcome).

My walk to the flat is slightly longer than the non-existent walk from work to the station, as it means wandering down a sort of lane-driveway on to the corner with the block of flats. Recently there's been a group of workmen there who obviously didn't think my journey home was dangerous enough, so they've turned off the lamp post opposite our street, making it necessary for me to cross the road in pitch darkness if I'm home at all late. Provided I survive that, it's then just a walk up the hill to the front door of the building. And after checking the post, finding a pile of junk mail and going down a floor in the second-scariest lift in the world, that's the end of the journey and also the end of the worst post ever.

The Fourth Floor

When I was small (and yes, I have been smaller), I used to be very scared of lifts. I wouldn't go on one if I could help it, instead opting to climb twelve flights of stairs whenever we visited anyone in an Aberdeen block of flats rather than be shut in a metal box for thirty seconds. I don't think that it was claustrophobia, but it was more a fear of not being able to get out again - everything in them happens according to some invisibile mechanical brain, and you can't see where it's taking you. Somehow I was all right with the one in the Bon Accord Centre (which I had to go back and correct after spelling it "Center"), as that was entirely made of glass and you could see where you were going as you moved between the three floors, or of course, shot through the roof.

I somehow got used to them after that, but having to experience the lifts in the Vanguard building have put new fear into me over the six months that I've worked there. It's bad enough that you have to wait about ten minutes for one of the two to arrive, and that they take so long to go anywhere - it's like the London Underground stood on its end and reduced to four stops, and I spend just about as much time waiting for the lifts during the day as I do on the red line leg of my commute. Now, most of the building is made up of parts of a medical centre so there are a significant amount of people in it who genuinely can't climb stairs, so it's natural that the lifts should get a lot of use throughout the day. That's fair enough. But regularly you'll see a perfectly able-bodied staff member get on at the second floor (after waiting about five minutes for the lift, I might add) and ride up to the third floor, further delaying the whole process. This is a sure recipe for heart problems.

One of them had emergency repairs done to it last week (the lifts, not the staff members), but I can't see any difference as to its method of operation - it still takes half an hour to go anywhere, the light still flickers, the metal bar at the back is still close to detachment and the Close Front and Back Door buttons don't do anything no matter how hard you press them. The buttons are vital defence methods when you're stuck with an escaped mental patient who insists on rabbiting on about when he was in Vietnam, or believes that the burrito that you got for lunch is actually a bottle of spirits in a brown paper bag, and have to cut the journey as short as possible. In fact, the only difference I saw was that it smelled slightly worse than before as someone had tried spraying an overly sweet air freshener around it.

The lift does have a certificate in it saying that it passed an inspection, but when it was replaced last time it was about three months overdue and we're fairly certain that they just photocopy the certificate every few months and alter the date on it. I can now recognize the timings of each and every characteristic of this lift on its upward journey:

On leaving 1st floor: Knocking sound from under the floor.
If stopping on second floor: Slight swing from side to side.
Just after passing 3rd floor: Hideous grinding noise from upper left corner.
On arriving at fourth floor: Hold, vibrate...
Finally: And drop a couple of inches, then open - whereupon people get out as soon as possible, glad to have made it out alive.

So why do I even use them at all if I can't stand them? Well, there's a very good reason. Naturally, after a couple of mornings of the lift ride of death I had decided that it really wasn't worth the time and risk involved, and opted to take the stairs instead. However, that plan failed when I realized that the main staircase in the middle of the medical centre only went up to the third floor. The route to the fourth floor continues only through two rather narrow fire stairs at either end of the building that you can only enter on the first floor. Further, you can't get into the fourth floor from those stairs either - the door only opens in one direction, so you have to take the lift up if you're heading to the top floor offices.

I happened to ask another fourth floor worker about this arrangement soon after starting, and he explained to me that it was because there had been a large break-in not long before I started working in the building. To counteract that, he explained, the fourth floor doors were kept locked from one side so that people couldn't get in during the night - but so the workers could get to their offices at all hours, the lifts were just locked out of the second and third floors rather than being turned off entirely after everyone else had gone to bed.

"So what stops people from getting in and taking the lift up to the fourth floor instead?" I asked.

"Oh," he said, after a pause. "I never thought of that."

This is what they're paying me for - Great British intellect.

"Breaking Things" Day

My first Memorial Day weekend in America was spent alone, indoors hiding from the volcanic heat outside, with a giant fan next to my desk. I'd previously asked what the holiday was about and nobody seemed to be able to remember, though it seems to be roughly equivalent to Remembrance Day in Britain (ironically enough). The long weekend passed very quickly as I tried not to think about "working" on the various projects that I have going at the moment, instead going on TV Links (which I'm absolutely addicted to now - more on that at a later date) and occasionally getting up to cook something.

The worst bit of it is that now that Whitney's out of the house, everything electronic has decided to turn on me at once. It's like what happens at my parent's house when I'm not around to fix things. The problems started exactly at the beginning of the weekend, when I got up to leave work and my space bar fell off. And as it's on a laptop, trying to put it back on is a fiddly task normally never seen outside an Angry Man sketch from Chewin' the Fat. There are two little plastic hooks that have to lock in to each other, a task only made possible by pulling the outer one apart with your teeth and one hand to get the millimetre of room required to slot the other one in between it with your other hand. And then it all has to be hooked on to the base of the keyboard, hit down until it stays, and the key replaced on top of them, hoping that they'll all fit together again. And it's almost worked - the space bar now produces a space as long as I don't hit the very edge of it with my right thumb. Which, coincidentally, is exactly the place that I've ingrained my brain into hitting it on my old desktop keyboard because none of the rest of it worked.

The next problem was the suicide of the oven. And I use that word very carefully. I got home on Friday night to find that it had been beeping insistently for any time up to most of the day, and it wouldn't stop no matter how many times I cancelled its meaningless "F7" error code. I found out later in the weekend that the "bake" and "broil" buttons were stuck, and the oven was continually trying to turn itself on at immense heat, giving the error as a safeguard. This is quite hurtful in a way - does it not seem to you that the oven was actively trying to kill itself rather than be used by me ever again?

My phone is another thing that's broken recently. That is, it still works - I can talk to people over it, and that's all I require of a phone. I noticed that the speakerphone had stopped working the other week, but I didn't see that as a massive problem. Now it's given up ringing - or, as I pointed out to Whitney, "It doesn't ring. It's not that I'm not listening to it, it's on the desk here in front of me, it doesn't make a sound when you call me. I don't need to change the volume, my volume is fine, it doesn't ring. It's right next to me, nothing happened to it, it doesn't ring, its ring isn't working, it does not ring." Just to make that clear. But it always seems to work when she previously warns me that she's about to call over IM, so it's clearly evil as well as insane.

And the Dave Gorman book I ordered from Amazon about a week and a half ago still hasn't arrived. This isn't a huge problem in itself because I still have a good fifty pages of Jeremy Clarkson shouting about foreigners to keep me going on the train, but I'm starting to wonder where it's gone.

Melting

Yesterday evening was a bit rubbish, all things considered. I stayed at work until about 8:30 doing some finishing touches to the bit of the system I'd been working on all week as it's a long weekend now (this isn't as tragic as it seems as I usually work until about 7 anyway).

When I got back to the flat it was just in time to hear the oven exploding. Well, it wasn't that bad (and that would have been quite a feat because it's electric) - it was just beeping frantically for who knows how long, flashing the helpful error message "F7", and kept coming back with it every thirty seconds after being turned off. I looked up the fault on the Internet, and it seems to be a pretty common problem with General Electric ovens that can mean anything from a button's stuck on the keypad to the circuitry is about to catch fire, so after some discussion with the superintendent's wife we turned it off at the circuit breaker and will probably be getting an entirely new one. Which is good news because it means I won't have to bother cleaning it, but I'm now going to have to try and cook without the oven.

And with the weather just now, that means I could probably just put dinner down on my desk and it would cook within about half an hour. The flat is close to experiencing maximum entropy and subsequent heat death - I'm here with a fan blowing next to me, putting my head under the shower every half hour to stay alive. And it isn't even summer yet.

But, good news - I've found an artist who's agreed to help out with Crystal Towers 2. It's Hayo Van Reek, who has worked on a few very impressive-looking games in the past, so there's hope yet for the game not looking appalling.

Further, I may not only have acquired a sprite artist but also a vocalist for my music as well - someone requested sheet music for one of my songs, and after ploughing Modplug's mad MIDI export through some notation software, I've sent it off. I'll have to see how that goes...

The Spirit of Megazeux

Before I finally settled on the Click community as my main focus as far as game making is concerned, I used to experiment with a few other game creation systems. One of the earliest of these was ZZT, which if you haven't been listening when I mentioned it before, was an ASCII-based action-adventure type thing written by what was eventually to become Epic Games. Shortly afterwards, I also discovered Megazeux, the spiritual successor to the program - and it allowed such advanced technologies as modifiable ANSI character sets and four-directional scrolling.

Megazeux was the system that I've been least productive in, having at least finished and released one game in all the others that I've tried. I think the major sticking point for me was that it was basically the same keyboard-based creation process as ZZT, but required a whole lot more effort to get something acceptable-looking out of it thanks to other people's talent at tricking the engine into doing a huge amount of things that weren't obvious at first. What resulted was that a large directory of MZX files was left languishing on one of our old computers' hard drives. (I honestly cannot remember most of the home computer inventory now, having pulled them all to pieces and reassembled them into various other computers during my summers away from university). But these have been rescued at last, thanks to sending me a 16MB RAR file of a pile of MZX games that we created together and never actually finished.

After looking through them, enthusing over the old ideas, I decided I wanted at least some other people to see them, so this is a 7.2MB selection of things from that file. I've trimmed it down quite a lot because not everything in the RAR was actually ours, but it's often difficult to tell just what files you can delete from an MZX folder and which ones will cause catastrophic results if removed, so sorry for the size of it - still, you've all got broadband connections by now, haven't you? Think of it as a collection of abandoned games with a library of quite possibly illegaly distributed MOD files included.

The ZIP includes Megazeux 2.80h (for Windows) so you can actually run them - I'm not certain if this is the latest version, but I'm confident that I downloaded it fairly recently. The highlights I've included are:

Crusade

This one deserves to be remade. How or when, I don't know, but it has the makings of something fantastic - a story spanning multiple dimensions in the same space, told from the perspective of three different characters. This was a joint effort by me and my two brothers, with each of us taking a character and writing their storyline, converging at different points along the way. It spawned from a piece of ZZT daftness by Richard, which was then remade in Megazeux and had a plot tacked on to the end, but somehow it works. Well, I say "works" - some of it is atrociously put together and the dialogue is mostly terrible, but I can see myself redoing this. The idea of randomly switching dimensions is a way to effortlessly go between styles as disjointedly as is needed, which made it great fun to write. Actually, mine is the least developed of the three characters, as I kept taking over the others' storylines.

Ground

Uniquely amongst the collection, this is finished. It was written by , and contains what in hindsight is actually a really good RPG battle system. It's based on Scissors, Paper, Stone-style random chance, but it's more involved than anything that I ever wrote in it. And after the RPG section, it switches suddenly to one of the most frustrating platform sections I have ever experienced, including a generous non-working save point halfway through. I'll get you for that.

Space Assassin and Scorpion Swamp

When in school about six years ago (and do I feel old saying that), Jamie and I hit on an inspired way to motivate each other to actually complete something - rivalry. We would make sure to start on incredibly similar projects at the same time, which created the sense that we had to beat each other by producing a better game than the other. It did wonders for my final year Computing class, where someone would announce smugly that their calculator program handled cubic roots, and we'd all respond by annoyedly writing in support for arbitrary roots, formula memory and an instant messenger service. (I should add that under this plan we never actually completed anything, but it seemed like a good idea.) I've gone on about that for far too long. The point is, these are both adaptations of the Fighting Fantasy books with the same titles written by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and despite having similar source material they turned out very different.

Scorpion Swamp, 's effort, is a very RPG-styled game in which only the introduction is really done, but it has a battle system set up and accurate recreations of the story branches. It also has the fantastic feature that allows you to sell out at the beginning of the game!

Space Assassin is a little more loosely based, focusing more on exploration and getting the elements of the book to work in a more typical MZX action game. I rather like the feature that makes your character visibly deteriorate when low on health (an idea copied from Doomguy, whose name completely escapes me at the moment. Flynn Taggart! That's it). The game is more complete than Scorpion Swamp, but still just ends abruptly - there are a couple of early endings to the book there, though.

Traps

This is another clever idea by , or Jamie, or whatever name I'm meant to use here. In a demonstration of how Megazeux can be used for game types that weren't originally intended by the authors, this is a puzzle game along the lines of Lemmings. Except (because he is dangerously insane) the object isn't to help the bear-like creatures get to the exit - instead, the idea is to prevent as many of them as possible from excaping, by dropping large rocks on them, getting them to wander into lava, or other traps of varying nastiness. Only a couple of levels were ever done, but this was a decent concept and could probably be done quite a lot better under MMF.

WRISE

I'm sure that title stood for something, but I've no idea what it might have been. This is another of Jamie's efforts, being an action game based around several cramped rooms. The objective of the only mission so far is to get some data on to your pendrive, while getting around the building's incredibly dodgy disks.

Dark Side

This one's pretty interesting. It's another action game by me, with a title stolen from an old 3D PC game, in which only the tutorial and first level are complete. It was an attempt to make an almost Doom-like shooter from a top-down 2D perspective, with the added complications of experience, level-ups, and collecting orbs, gems and keys (prize items of increasing difficulty to collect) to unlock more levels. Games like this are simple to make in MZX, but it was the progression system that I was very proud of, and you may have recognized the layout of it - indeed, I liked the idea so much that I wanted to revive it for Crystal Towers 2. Dark Side also features the first hints of the style of music that I revived in the first CT game (with the water stage music being directly converted).

It's also worth mentioning that the reason this game was scrapped was because I decided I wanted to try to cram it into ZZT instead, because it was a game that was pretty standard in MZX but technically impressive in such a limited environment. After struggling to get it into ZZT's memory limits and running out of room in the end, it eventually worked and became my magnificent octopus, The Mercenary.

---

And now, the technical bit

Megazeux is a very different way of programming from Click - allowing each object to have its own individually running program allows things like artificial intelligence to be coded far more easily, and everything is kept globally over an entire game rather than expecting you to keep track of your variables over frames and deciding which need to be saved and restored. To remake most of these, I'd probably have to write my own interpreter in MMF2 - but I put together an experimental editor not so long ago, and a full interpreter might not be such a huge jump after that...

The World

All things considered, I think I've done pretty competently here so far. I got the first job I went for, have lived well enough, and can understand nearly all the rules to baseball. But sometimes, it hits me that I am now living in a place a great distance from where I've spent most of my life, without so much as a Tesco sandwich within 3000 miles. I had one of those moments yesterday evening.

Believe it or not, it's the weather that makes me realize it the most. When the sun's out, even the smell of the air is different - maybe from different plants, different... I don't know. Even the way that I have to put on sun lotion in May (as I am the second-whitest person in the world, after Michael Jackson) and not plan for sudden downpours makes it a completely alien environment. As long as I live here, I'm going to have to get used to my accent and home country being a huge talking point for a group of people who have never in their lives been further away than down the end of the road to get the papers. (Not that people even do that here anyway. See how difficult it is?)

And after living here for just under a year (has it been that long already?) I can see why. This is a huge country, segregated into fifty pretty diverse sections, all of them separated from most of the rest of the world by two vast oceans. Most of the population are dimly aware of some hockey players to the North and some people with big hats to the South. Owning a passport is special. Even being able to drive a manual car - or "stick", as it's called here, in a term that I despise utterly - is special. That's another thing - people say that at least the country speaks the same language as the one I came from, and I thought I knew most Americanisms and how to translate them into English English, but the words for everything are different. Virtually no one understands my voice or the words I use at first, and when they do, it's ensured that I'll be talking about said voice for the next ten minutes.

I used to think that Americans thought of their country as the world - but now I can see that this place is a whole world in itself. I've noticed that when people mention places on the message boards I visit, I recognize what they're talking about now. I habitually call America "here", or refer to the West coast and East coast, without thinking to mention where "here" actually is - because it seems that the whole Internet is based there and the rest of the world is the outside. "What state are you in?" posts no longer annoy me or tempt me to reply with "Knackered", because now I am here. The world.

Part of the feeling is because I went straight here from university. By making the jump from university to real life at the same time as moving to a completely new country, it feels like everything I learned before was a practice run for the real world with the difficult bits cut out, where things were familiar and I knew what I was doing (or how to correctly order something for lunch, or write a cheque, or drive, or any number of things that are commonplace to everyone else). Here, it's like relearning life again. And it's not that I want desperately to undo it and go back... but it scares me sometimes.

(Sorry about this.)

June releases

It's a very exciting time in the European metal world at the moment, because there are three bands releasing albums within a few weeks of each other over the next month.

The one I'm most excited about is "Megatropolis" by Iron Savior, the Gamma Ray side project-turned-real-band who got me started on all this in the first place. Despite sounding like the title of an early Genesis game, it sort of suits them, and I've been watching the recording studio reports and videos closely as they've been put up on the site. (They're a very "interactive" band in that way - not many bands visit and reply to their own forums quite so much.) While not as legendary or extensive as the introduction videos for Condition Red or the "director's commentary" series for Battering Ram, the videos do give some idea as to what to expect. Namely a more melodic version of Judas Priest, it seems.

On searching for the title on Google I came across some 30-second samples on a dodgy Russian site, and I was surprised to discover that (from my interpretation of the words) it appears that they've written a song about World of Warcraft. I'm not sure whether this is appalling or absolutely brilliant. Piet Sielck has the remarkable talent of being able to write supremely dodgy lyrics (rhyming "sword" with "restored", for one) and then making them sound not embarrassing at all. This might be because he's so massive and German that you don't really dare laugh at anything he sings.

Kamelot are also back with "Ghost Opera", which looks like a continuation of the general sound that they were exploring in The Black Halo. There's a video from the title song on the front page now, featuring a trademark 5/4-3/4-possibly 7/4 changing time signature, bullet-time hair-flinging and Roy Khan with an all-new record-breakingly stupid beard.

Their musical history is strange and difficult to explain - they started off several years ago with two absolutely appalling albums fronted by Mark Vanderbilt, who sang like a dog chewing a toffee. After kicking him out along with their drummer, they started heading in a better direction, but it took a couple of albums before everything suddenly and inexplicably worked. At that point they became a sort of everything-band, able to write lighter and more aggressive music with equal ability. Then they started getting a bit too clever for their own good and ventured away from power into progressive metal, becoming a sort of "Dream Theater Lite" with pretentious symphonic musical self-references and connections to various points in a continuing storyline. It's a bit like what would happen if Russell T Davies started a band.

And Sonata Arctica are about to release "Unia". This time, samples are available officially rather than having to rely on Mafia-funded MP3 sites. From going through the samples, it seems that the band have calmed down considerably since the days that they were a more manic version of Stratovarius that succeeded in dramatically upstaging their main influence - I couldn't find a single fast song on there, and they seem to be relying on their slower, more string-led style now. As I expected, just like the previous album, the song with the silliest title is once again my favourite ("My Dream's but a Drop of Fuel for a Nightmare", or MDBADOFFAN, which sounds a bit like a kind of cake). It's also mildly disturbing to see that they're beginning to look a bit like Nickelback.

Dinner, bachelor style

I really shouldn't be posting this. If I kept it quiet, no one would ever know and the whole thing would just go away. But in the interest of finally writing a decent entry , letting the Internet share the story and not worrying about my reputation, this is an account of dinner this evening.

The plan was simple. Home-made pizza. It's not the most amazingly complex of meals, but still respectable enough to be impressive for someone who doesn't normally cook for himself. The last time Whitney and I tried it, it all got stuck to the baking pan and could only be removed by chiselling at it with a fork for hours, and I was determined to do it right this time.

Again, in a none too complicated fashion, I went for chicken and pepperoni as my toppings. I've always found chicken a terribly frightening thing to cook because it'll obviously kill you instantly if you so much as touch it when it's raw, so I always end up frying it for about four hours and it's as dry as a sheet of paper by the time it comes out. Not this time, though - in fact, I'd like to think I got a rather perfectly done chicken thigh.

Rolling the dough isn't a difficult task either, even though the stuff I was using seemed pretty resistant to my efforts to actually spread it out. Nevertheless, I guessed that that was just because it had been in the freezer for a while. After battering it a bit with the rolling pin, I got it into something resembling a circle, oiled a biscuit sheet, slapped it on and threw it in the oven.

About ten minutes later I came back to see that it had formed a huge mountain in the middle. (I was later told by Whitney that you're meant to puncture dough before you put it in the oven to stop it from doing that. Who knew?) Still, this was easily solved by battering it down a bit with a spatula. After that, it doesn't take Gordon Ramsay to know that you slather it in tomato-based sauce and put cheese on top along with your choice of topping - cubed chicken and sliced pepperoni. What could be simpler?

So after about another ten minutes, I went back to check it. It seemed ready enough, so I got it out, tipped it on to a plate and, after a painstaking half hour or so avoiding any kitchen-related disasters, sat down for dinner.

That was when I realized I'd used piecrust instead of pizza dough.

The result was a perfectly formed, crispy, flaky pie crust - one that happened to have a load of cheese, chicken and pepperoni on top of it. Or, to put it another way, the ugliest, saltiest pizza in the world.

After trying a couple of bites, then staring at it with mixed feelings of despair and hysteria, I scraped the toppings off on to a slice of naan. Then I rolled it up and ate that instead in a kind of salad wrap arrangement, cusring the Gods of Home Economics for making a mockery of me once again.

I think I'll stick to salad from now on.