Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in 21 Reasons' LiveJournal:

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Thursday, October 9th, 2008
10:17 pm	Have you ever wanted to be in a band? If so, reading The Spirit Speaks may make your humdrum, non rock 'n' roll life seem like a better idea after all. The Spirit of Love is the keyboard player for Alabama 3 and while his intermittent blog posts are always very entertaining to read, they are also very good at getting over the fact that being in a touring band is not a good place to be if you want to stay healthy in mind and body... Current Mood: tired (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
11:09 pm	The Watchmen - Trailer Here it is. From what I can tell from viewing a quicktime movie, it's a little more hyper-real in appearance than I'd have hoped for. Not surprising I suppose, as it proudly proclaims its from the director of 300, but I'd have thought the comic's low-fi visuals would translate best as something a bit more realist. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
11:07 pm	Chop chop busy busy work work bang bang! Friends may remember me mentioning an advert from my childhood, which involved a factory full of penguins saying the mantra "Chop chop, busy busy, work work, bang bang". They probably also remember looking at me askance when I mentioned this and questioning not only the accuracy of my memory, but also my sanity. Well, thanks to the power of teh Internets, I have found evidence it existed. I had even correctly remembered that it was an ad for British Telecom - a quick Google suggests I therefore remembered it more accurately than most folks who remembered the phrase. Current Mood: vindicated (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, February 1st, 2008
8:14 pm	I despair As is usual when I am at work, today I went to the local Greggs for lunch. As I was waiting for my tuna roll to be made up, a woman came in with a young boy (presumably her son). She indicated that he could have one of the sweet goods on display. The boy pointed to a strawberry jam doughnut with pink icing. In reply, the woman said, and I wish I was making this up... "You can't have that one. It's pink. You're a lad. You're not a poof." In case anyone present thought this was some odd joke, she proceeded to point to all of the available doughnuts, muffings and other assorted sweet baked goods, telling him that he could have any of these, but not the pink doughnut. He could have had a yellow one, if one had been available, but not a pink one, because he was a boy. I think I was a little stunned. It was the sort of dialogue I might have expected in an episode of Life on Mars, but not in real life. Beyond the sheer stupidity of it, I couldn't help but wonder how she could be certain that this 5 year old boy was straight? Or did she actually think that eating some pink icing could influence the boy's sexuality? Current Mood: aghast Current Music: Wilco, Company In My Back (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
8:47 pm	http://www.0pornos.com/? Are you kidding me? I'm a moderator for a mountain biking forum. One of my main duties is to filter genuine membership requests from those being made by spammers. Frankly, if I just deleted every new membership request, I'd be right 95% of the time or so. Around 10 spammer accounts get created each day. A vanishingly small amount of these spammer accounts could be confused with genuine membership requests. For a forum dedicated to mountain biking in Scotland we get a surprising number of membership requests from directors located in Canada who enjoy snowboarding. Still, even amongst all the blatantly spambot-generated membership requests, those who list their home page as http://www.0pornos.com/ (I am not going to hyperlink to that) take the biscuit. Really! Could they at least fucking try? Current Mood: irritated (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 26th, 2007
10:06 pm	The Clown Prince of Time? I have until now left the Doctor Who blogging to Dr Sordid and craigoxbrow, but The Sound of Drums finally got me to open my mouth. While I have fond memories of watching Doctor Who as a child, I was never the dedicated fan that others were. So compared to some I haven't been too upset by some of what Russel T Davies has done to turn the show into what he and the BBC reckons a 21st century audience expects it to be. I didn't agree with it all but generally mostly it's produced decent enough TV. Turning The Master into The Joker though is just not on. Unlike the Doctor, the Master's portrayal has previously been somewhat consistent across regenerations. Turning him into a capering trickster (albeit a sociopathic, megalomanical capering trickster) just doesn't sit well with me. This feeling of wrongness only intensified when I watched the Doctor Who Confidential that accompanies The Sound of Drums. I'm not sure if I'd ever actually seen Roger Delgado's portrayal of the Master, but the clips of him on Confidential presented a Master I much preferred to the new one. For me, one of the reasons that the Master is scary is because he is in control. Lunatics are scary because around them, nothing is predictable, or under control. These two impressions do not sit well together. The reasons given for the Master's new behaviour were unconvincing too - apparently he's always been insane. So why has he only now started acting all manic and gurning? It is particularly galling to have this not-at-all-like-the-Master interpretation of the Mast served to us when in the previous series an impressively Master-like villain got crammed into an episode that really had too much stuff going on for its 45 minutes run-time. Tony Head made a great Master, unfortunately he was playing a Krillitane (actually you could argue that John Simm's Master would have been fine as some other villain, but I digress). I could even have forgiven him for not having a goatee. (Is that really how you spell goatee? Wikipedia thinks it is, anyway.) Derek Jacobi seemed to be doing OK without one too, come to think of it. But then he didn't have to do a song and dance routine. The thing is, despite my irritation about this, I'm aware that to an extent, Russel T Davies and the rest of the production crew had an impossible task. My impressions of the Master are based of a few fuzzy memories of those old Doctor Who stories that I saw that contained him, and a lot of projection. Every other old-timer Doctor Who fan will have remembered him in a slightly different way. For example, siliconowl's ideal Master would probably be camper than mine. There's no way that the Master could return and be right for everyone, especially when he would have to be right for all the people who have not seen Doctor Who before. However, I'm not sure the production team's done themselves any favours by changing the character so much. So basically, there's not actually much point to this post except to bitch about how The Master should not be The Joker and to generally sound like an old curmudgeon. Bah. Current Mood: grumpy (Comment on this)
Friday, June 15th, 2007
7:34 pm	I thought that in lieu of ever actually having something bloggish that I wanted to say, I could try posting some of the gaming ideas I've had. Random RPG-related ideas still strike me occasionally. Sadly I am rarely able to force them into something that would give me the will or the confidence to actually GM something, so they usually at most get stored away on a hard drive and forgotten about. Maybe by posting them some good will come of them. I'll start off with a couple of special items for Feng Shui. It once occurred to me that while the Shadowfist CCG and the Feng Shui backstory both contain magical artifacts and whatnot, none have really turned up in the game itself. At least not in the adventures I've played, nor the game books I've read. What I ended up creating aren't really magic items per se, but they are special and unique and they could add a little bit of flavour to a Feng Shui game. The Twin Dragons Backstory A pair of Colt M1911A1s, each detailed with dragons etched along their barrels and down their handles. The Dragons' eyes are picked out in jade. In recent years the guns have been stored in a sombre black briefcase, along with 2 clips of ammunition for each gun. These guns belonged to a near-legendary postwar hitman. He disappeared mysteriously in the late 1950s, though his infamy has lived on, along with stories of his pistols, the Twin Dragons. A person can use the Twin Dragons for one 'hit'. During a hit, the guns are deadly; a perfect pair of pistols. Countless bodyguards have fallen before them and they have signaled the end for mob bosses, gang leaders, Secret Warriors, monsters and even ghosts. After the hit is complete, their wielder must pass the guns on to another, or they will suffer terrible misfortune for as long as the continue to possess the guns. No-one except their original owner can ever use the guns for more than one hit. Rules If a character with a Guns AV of 13 or higher gets their hands on the Twin Dragons, they function as normal M1911A1 pistols until the character picks a specific target. The target need not be present and can be vaguely defined as long as the target is unambiguous. For example, the target could be "Freddy Cheng", or it could be "Whoever masterminded the attack on our Feng Shui site". In any fight directly related to taking out the target, the pistols gain some special abilities when used together: They count as Signature Weapons, each inflicting +3 damage. They take out unnamed characters on an outcome of 4 or more. They give their wielder 3 schticks in Both Guns Blazing. If their wielder already has schticks in Both Guns Blazing, this will not raise their number of such schticks above 3. They can damage *anyone*. Damage Immunity: Bullets has no effect. It is up to the GM to decide which fights these benefits are awarded, but they should be directly connected to taking out the target. For example, fighting a bunch of mooks who know where the target is doesn't count but fighting a bunch of mooks guarding the entrance to the target's base does if he is at home. After the target is killed or the character declares they no longer intend to kill the target, the character must quickly give the twin dragons to another character. If they do not, all characters they fight gain a +5 bonus to their AVs against the character and the character suffers any other misfortunes the GM can dream up. The definition of "quickly" is again up to the GM. They shouldn't have to hand them to the first passing person as soon as they drop the target, but hanging onto them when they have met plenty of people who could accept the pistols is unacceptable. Doc's Lucky Gun Backstory This gun is a .380 detective's special, well used, its wooden grip worn by a multitude of palms. As these things go it is an unremarkable looking weapon. The only way to distinguish it from countless other similar firearms are its obvious age, a filed hammer and the inscription "H. Lloyd" discretely etched into the weapon on one side of its barrel. The history of Doc's Lucky Gun is far less well known than that of most legendary weapons. It is thought likely that H. Lloyd was the titular Doc, the original owner of the gun, but no-one really knows for sure. As many of its subsequent owners seem to have led rather short and unfortunate lives after taking the gun into their possession, it is likely that its first owner started this trend rolling. Doc's Lucky Gun is a fearsome weapon and it has brought about many a person's doom. Those who have wielded it have described it as almost eager to be used, keen to jump out of its holster and into its wielder's hand at the slightest provocation. Unfortunately, while deadly, the gun is not too picky about who it shoots and it has gained as fearsome a reputation as a source of 'friendly fire' as it has for its deadliness to its wielder's enemies. Rules Doc's Lucky Gun counts as a Signature Weapon, inflicting +3 damage compared to a regular detective's special. Doc's Lucky Gun takes out unnamed characters on an outcome of 4 or more. As long as the wielder is using Doc's Lucky Gun it grants its wielder the equivalent of 2 levels of the gun schitck Fast Draw. If the wielder already has schitcks in Fast Draw this will not raise their number above 2. While it is in their possession, whoever wields Doc's Lucky Gun has their Fortune stat reduced by 2. This Fortune penalty applies until someone else chooses to wield Doc's Lucky Gun. Throwing it away or hiding it in a closet does not stop the bad luck, somebody else has to pick it up. If the wielder of Doc's Lucky Gun fails an attack roll while using it, call for a Fortune Check, difficulty 0. If this roll fails Doc's Lucky Gun will shoot a friend of the wielder (or a bystander) determined by the GM with an outcome equivalent to the negative of the outcome from the Fortune check. Credit Where Credit's Due Doc's Lucky Gun is largely a creation of bozobaggins, though another friend, Bruce, actually played the titular Doc. My contribution was to GM the chaos that Doc's Lucky Gun caused, and to realise that it could be happily transferred from Call of Cthulhu to Feng Shui. Current Mood: lethargic Current Music: Rats, Pearl Jam (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007
8:53 pm	His Life in Serious Organised Crime Mark Thomas: My Life in Serious Organised Crime was the funniest thing I've listened to in ages. Go download it and listen to it before Radio 4 take it offline - which may be on Thursday, so hurry! Current Mood: sore (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
12:16 pm	In the news today... A collosal squid's been landed by fisherman near New Zealand. This enormous cephalopod is roughly 10 metres long (though the little graphic at the bottom of the BBC story seems to suggest it's about twice that length) and a whopping 450kg in weight. Cthulhu is going to be mighty annoyed when his cousin doesn't ever return from his trip to the shops... Mind you, if Cthulhu spends the next handful of years plotting his revenge before attacking humanity, we'll be able to fight him off with lasers. Rock! Current Mood: Fed (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 13th, 2007
12:51 pm	I expected more bureaucracy I phoned the speed camera people today. In the second of two short conversations, I was informed that a police officer had reviewed the photo taken by the speed camera and had concluded that it was not a picture of my car. Presumably it's entirely the wrong model, or they took me at my word that my car has a tow hook and is a different colour to the colour of the photographed car as it was described to me. Anyway, a letter has been posted to me, which apparently apologises for the inconvenience and confirms that no further action will be taken against me. This is all very much a relief for me. While I knew I had not been speeding down that road on that day, I expected a Brazil-esque journey through bureaucracy or the legal system in order to get the speed camera people/police to agree... Current Mood: fed (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 11th, 2007
12:54 pm	My Magical Car Apparently, while I was at work two Fridays ago, my car started itself and went for a drive! How do I know this? Because the following Friday I got a notice of intention to prosecute due to a speed camera getting my car on the A68 on the morning of the 2nd of Feburary. This I find odd as: I haven't driven on the A68 since June last year. I was at work at 10:21 on the 2nd of February. Hell, I even cycled to work that day! Anyway, the lovely letter I've been sent doesn't actually tell you what to do to contest one of these things. I get three options: Admit it was me, tell them who it was, or tell them who I've sold my car to. So what's the procedure for actually saying "you've got it wrong!"? The one bit I know is that I can make an appointment to see the relevant photo at their offices. I was vaguely under the impression I was supposed to be sent a copy, but apparently I'm wrong about that. So tomorrow I'll phone them up and try and work out what to do next. Hopefully the method for contesting this will be fairly straightforward. If I'm lucky the camera caught an obviously different car with a similar number plate that it mis-read. If I'm unlucky the cars could be very similar or worse still, someone for some reason could have 'cloned' my car. Anyway I will try and keep my blog updated as to how this progresses. Current Mood: Thirsty Current Music: Paint it Black, The Rolling Stones (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
10:48 pm	Bikes. Everywhere. So last week, I got my new bike. Because the bike's arrived ahead of the lock I've ordered for it, it's having to live in my flat, instead of secured to the ground anchor in my shed. But then again, it's not like I haven't had a bike in my flat before. This morning, my commuter bike's freehub froze while I was riding to work, about a mile from home. This meant that I could no longer pedal. Arse. An often suggested method for unfreezing a freehub is to, ah, relieve oneself on it. However I was on a busy street with an empty bladder, so instead I elected to push my bike home. By the time I'd changed and grabbed my car keys, the freehub had defrosted, but I was no longer in my cycling kit. Hmm. I guess my commuter will be sleeping in the flat too. Two bikes up here is a bit of a pinch, but not impossible. On Thursday, siliconowl will be coming round for roleplaying. He's likely to cycle here, which means there'll be three bikes trying to fit into my hallway. That could be tricky... Current Mood: thirsty Current Music: State of Love and Trust, Pearl Jam (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 19th, 2006
8:24 pm	Change is Possible! That's what the machine in the NCP car part said last night. Including the exclamation mark. I know that it actually meant that we would get change if we overpaid for parking, but as someone who generally finds change very hard work, I found it amusingly encouraging. Current Mood: okay (Comment on this)
Monday, September 25th, 2006
7:45 pm	Were you, like me, told as a child that if you dug a hole all the way through the earth you'd end up in Australia? Apparently Americans are told they'll end up in China, but you get the idea. Well sadly freakcrab has blown a hole through that childish misconception, by sending me a link to DigHoles.com. Thanks to this interesting use of Google's mapping technology I now know that were I, no matter where I was in the UK, to dig a hole through the centre of the Earth, I'd end up in the Pacific Ocean, somewhere south of New Zealand. Anyone digging such a hole from Australia would end up in the Atlantic Ocean. Some Spaniards are luckier and would make it to New Zealand but for most of us it'd be a watery experience. If we weren't fried to a crisp due to all the molten hot stuff that resides inside the Earth, that is. Any Falkland Islanders looking for an unconventional way to escape their sheep and penguin-filled homelands could tunnel their way to the China/Russia border. I think that a plane to Blighty would probably be a better idea, on balance. Current Mood: rushed Current Music: Some Sweet Day, Sparklehorse (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006
11:37 pm	Crappy book meme bozobaggins has tagged me for a meme. Because it is a thought-free way to get my blog updated, I thought I'd do it. So, here's the meme: Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 123. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest. Tag five people. OK, so here's what we get: (Sea trading requires the Astronomy advance, and Ocean trading requires Magnetism or Navigation.) These connections are affected by enemy territory. One last thing deserves mention. You can trade strategic resources and luxuries with other civilizations, but only if their capital is included in a trade network with your capital. Oddly enough, the closest books to my PC appear to be manuals for complex games. The manuals for simple games being booklets. Consider yourself tagged if you're reading this and you haven't done this meme already. I'd be quite surprised to discover that there's more than five qualifying people out there... Current Mood: tired Current Music: Teamspeak chatter (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
9:27 pm	When people get in the way of politics The Register has an article about Masood Khan, and how he's going to save the Internet. It's uplifting to hear that sometimes politicians and diplomats can be coaxed around all the political issues that often seem to stop things getting done. Mind you it doesn't sound like much is going to be achieved anytime soon, but at least things are moving. In addition, wouldn't it be nice if it were something like world peace rather than Internet governance? Still, something's better than nothing. Current Mood: tired (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 17th, 2005
10:19 am	Shadowrun in a nutshell From this RPGnet review of Shadowrun's fourth edition: SR4 is a game in which, by default, Players will play Shadowrunners, who are Horrible People that Shoot People Right in the Face for Money. They will form Extravagant Plans, something will go Completely Wrong, but they will Improvise and get Paid Anyway. The Shadowrunners will then Fence the Loot to feed their Crippling Drug Addictions that they acquired so that they would have the build points to better Shoot People Right in the Face. I think that sums up Shadowrun pretty well. Well actually the few times I played it I don't remember any PCs having Crippling Drug Addictions but that may be because only the fourth edition has merits and flaws as part of the core rules... Current Mood: Monday morning (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 20th, 2005
10:06 pm	Top Fives This entry would have happened yesterday if it was not for an annoying feature of Opera's mouse gestures. I have learnt my lesson and I'm composing this update in TextPad before pasting it into Opera... I watched High Fidelity at the weekend. Later, as I pondered my lack of blog updates I decided to take leaf out of John Cusack's character's book. I'd do a top five post. Inspired by what I was doing when I had this idea, here is my top five tracks I listen to at very high volumes when driving: Long Snake Moan, PJ Harvey. From the opening "Mm hmm..." to the closing roars of guitars and vocals, this is just a great song. Driven along by an energetic bass riff, this song manages to include two fabby guitar breaks inbetween PJ Harvey's feral vocals. It's a great example of a song that's powerful and raw without being dark or bleak with it. The other tracks on To Bring You My Love are very good too but this for me is the stand out track. Is This Desire's Perfect Day Elise may have supplanted this in the top five if the rest of that album was up to the standard of To Bring You My Love. Long Snake Moan is also the song that I'm most likely to turn the volume up for when others are in my car. Up Above My Head, Alabama 3. From the Brixton collective's latest album Outlaw, though an acoustic version is also available. It opens like it's going to be a cover of Walk This Way but this song is archetypical Alabama 3. Cool riffs, samples and lyrics littered with pop culture references all come together to form an uplifting and immediately accessible track. It just sounds great at high volumes. Woke Up This Morning is the track's obvious competition but I've perhaps been a little too over exposed to that song and besides it seems more prone to distorting at high volumes over my car's speakers than Up Above My Head does. Someday I Will Treat You Good, Sparklehorse. This is probably the most accessible song on Sparklehorse's first album Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot and thus a primary reason I got into the band. It's a fairly straightforward indie rock song, albeit with some occasionally odd lyrics but it has a great pace and energy. It is also the winner of a special prize for the song that I am most likely to sing along to at loud volumes. Save You, Pearl Jam. Well they're not short of loud rock songs but this one from Riot Act wins. Get Right from the same album was also in contention as well as tracks from pretty much every other album they've done. Save You probably wins out because Riot Act was one of the first CDs into my car's CD changer and seems to work well in the car. Of course the fact that it's a loud and fast paced rock song with some good example of Eddie Vedder roaring lyrics helps. It is also the sort of tune I wish I could have stuck in my head when I'm tearing down the hillside on my mountain bike. Usually all I have in there when I'm doing that is my own internal commentary ("change gear, haul on the pedals, lean against the corner fool!, arse I'm not going to go into this jump as smoothly as I'd like...") and the noise of the bike going over the trail but who wouldn't like a rock soundtrack to their life? Lakini's Juice, Live. This one's from Secret Samadhi, the album they made after they stopped trying to sound so much like Pearl Jam. Big chunky guitars are backed up by strings that don't sound too much like an overproduced rock cliche. In conjunction with the lipstick Voodoo lyrics you get a cool heavy rock song with a nice edge of sanity feel. The closest competitors I can think of from Live are Simple Creed from V and Like I Do off Birds of Pray but they don't really come close. If only the ol tag could do countdowns, then that'd be even better, but there you go. I suppose if you want to make this a whole dirty meme thing you could start giving people top fives to fill in. Hopefully they wouldn't all require so many annoying links... Current Mood: melancholy Current Music: Pure, Mary Beats Jane (which nearly made the top five too) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005
1:26 pm	What I did on my holidays In lieu of a proper update with a point and stuff, here's a list of some of the things I did during my recent time off from work: I went to Cambridge: There I attended Consternation, a gaming convention, along with freakcrab, silicon_owl, Martin and Oliver. I played one roleplaying game, "Abnormal for Norfolk", but it was pretty good. I picked up some bargains in the con's auction but also some cheap tat too. Just as we do everytime we go to Cambridge, we spent ages wandering around town looking for somewhere to eat I went to see The Island. Don't bother. It's pretty upsetting that a film this poor spelt the end of Spare's chances of getting filmed. On the way back I actually enjoyed some of the driving. The southern half of the A68 is really nice. I spent a lot of time clearing out some of the junk from my flat, in particular I emptied the spare room so it was once again spare. I helped a friend move into my spare room, rapidly making it not spare again. I threw out a pile of model airplanes. It's amazing that it took me so long to get rid of them, they'd been lurking around since I was at school. It's amazing how much influence sentimentality can exert. I donated 4 PCs, including monitors, to a PC re-use scheme. And I still have more PCs than I need. I went mountain biking. Woo-hoo! Three rides and each time I felt my shoulder was stronger and I was more confident. I'm still pretty timid on the bike though, particularly when the terrain turns steeply downhill. I got a new hydration pack. My old Camelbak was cut off me when I broke my collarbone. The new one (a The North Face Megamouth 18) is dead good. I went to the pub to join in Andy W's birthday celebrations. I don't actually go to pubs much any more, so it is kind-of worth mentioning. Like I said, this is a list of things I've done rather than a post with a point. But someone was complaining about my lack of updates. For a clue, look at what I've named my journal - I called it that for a reason... Current Mood: working Current Music: Pearl Jam - Dirty Frank (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 7th, 2005
3:54 pm	A little bit of politics While walking near the city centre yesterday I saw a piece of graffiti on a dumpster. It pointed to the dumpster's lid and said "vote here". I quite liked it. Well, it was nicer than the various tags that covered the other dumpsters nearby. Current Mood: thirsty Current Music: Up Above My Head, Alabama 3 featuring Siobhan Parr (2 Comments |Comment on this)