Today I spent five solid hours programming (so far) and didn’t write a single line of code, nay, not even a single character. All I did was think with the whiteboard.

Eventually covering about 15 square meters of whiteboard in squiggly lines and weird characters and all sorts of stuff that I probably shouldn’t explain in too great a detail publicly. Let it suffice to say that I believe to have solved the problem of translating machine vocabulary to personalised user vocabulary.

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Children of Men is a bloody brilliant movie that the above trailer doesn’t quite do justice. It is quite simply the best dystopian/post-apocalyptic story my brain has ever had the pleasure of listening to.

The story revolves around the idea of what would happen if the whole world turned to shit, humanity was doomed and only England of all places, remained standing against the onslaught of shite. The best part is that the whole sequence of events and what exactly is going on is never quite explained. We’re told that the world started going fuckwards because of some sort of flu pandemic in 2008 – note the movie was made in 2006 and we had a bird flu scare in 2008 – and then in 2009 all women went sterile … this luckily hasn’t happend IRL yet.

Well the movie goes on 18 years after humans couldn’t make babies anymore. Inexplicably there is a civil war setting up about the rights of immigrants and the whole British government is being very Orwellian in operation. Interestingly, they’re becoming more and more Orwellian in real life as well.

Children of Men, next to the the awesome story, also features  very good cinematography and a neo-hippie – played by Michael Caine – who smokes a lot of weed and is a bloody awesome chap. But most of all, it is one of the scariest non-horror movies I’ve ever seen simply because it’s so fucking realistic you can almost touch it.

Everything, bloody everything, could become true in the next few decades.

Last night I watched Avatar nice and proper at the moving pictures – in 3D of course because fuck it, if they spent developing the funky new tech for seven years, I bloody well feel obliged to watch the movie as it was intended.

In short … it was fucking awesome! This is the first movie in 15 years that I am willing to pay for again and probably will. Sometime this week. Yep, I’ve always liked watching movies I like several times in rapid succession – this one however I can’t do justice with my rig at home. So the moving pictures it is!

Because I want each and everyone of you to go see this masterpiece I will not tell you anything about the story, but here are some tidbits that I believe make it more than just your usual blockbuster effects pornography.

1. There is a very good story that ties the whole movie together, albeit extremely cliche, it still throws a glove at the face of modern culture and blahblah. No story talk!
2. So. Much. Eye-porn! Love love love! It was like Angelina Jolie, Liz Hurley and Scarlet Johansson having sex with my eyes simultaneously for three hours.
3. Very fucking awesome scenography! You know those incredibly artistic comics you see in Flight and other proper art books? Well this was just like that, except in a movie! A fucking movie! I’ve never seen anything like it before. It was quite beyond words.
4. The details! Oh gawd the details. How often do you see a movie where scenes shot from within a glass canopy of any sort actually show the glass? That’s right, none. Until now.
5. The world made sense. This is very rare in fantasy these days, but the world made very much fucking sense. The animals looked right, even the topography and fauna looked proper and correct. It felt like properly exploring a foreign planet, not like somebody was pulling ideas out of their arse.
6. The blue people had a language. Now maybe I’m just a language geek, but it fills me with great delight to see that an artist went through the pain of creating a proper language instead of just stringing random words together … although it did sound a lot like a derivative of Quenya.

Now, there were a few annoying little tidbits that felt somewhat … off.

Like for example, if every animal on the world has three limbs, why do the humanoid peoples only have four? Doesn’t make sense.

Or … uhm … why did the animals feel so derivative of Earth animals? You have this wonderful opportunity to create something awesome, and you do, but why the fuck do you make my mind go “Well that’s a Rhino equivalent” … “and that’s a dog” … “oh look, a hyenna” and so forth? Don’t do that. Making animals that are awesomely designed, but then almost neglecting their behaviour … tsk tsk.

All in all, the movie is a definite thumbs up. All f0our thumbs!

Traditionally new year’s and Christmas have held a special place in the heart of students all over the world – it’s usually a time when everybody gets a winter break, that proper time when you’re not studying for exams, when you’re not doing anything special, when you’re just enjoying yourself.

Lovely.

Bullshit!

The real reason students love this time of year is that finally there are no classes, no tutorials, no whatevers – it’s just free time where you can actually get some work done without everyone getting in your damn way.

Of course there are many who disagree with me and actually do take it easy over the holidays, but most of them don’t strain themselves very much anyway. For them, and those of us who like to work during holidays, here’s a few special comics describing just what the professors think winter break is for.

So what are you doing over the holidays?

There is something specially tragic about sexy people leaving this world. There was a big humbug when James Dean died, there was an outrage Jim Morrison died, there was an uproar when Hendrix passed and there was a whole lot of baawwing all over the interwebs when mr. Heath Ledger died last year and today we’ve lost another downright sexy person – Brittany Murphy.

She isn’t likely to reach such instant extents of fame and notoriety and legendary proportions of personality as the rest of them did … probably because she’s a woman or perhaps just because she wasn’t quite as famous … but she was nontheless incredibly sexy and gorgeous and by god I wish she did some porn.

I must admit I have no idea why we take such big notice when beautiful people die – perhaps it’s just our internal reaction to feeling the sexiness of the world slipping between our fingers. We want the world to be a sexy place and we so rarely contribute anything to the amount of sexy out there that it just strikes us very intimately, very personally, when the sexy is reduced.

They also all seem to go in such dubious circumstances, I’d go in more detail but I couldn’t do it much justice because I’m not a conspiracy theorist at heart … certainly someone else can do a better job. Why do you think they all go so very young and under such strange circumstances?

Upon first meeting people most of their attention is devoted to the card I have stuck in my hat.

Upon second time meeting a person their questions about the card suddenly become hey didn’t you have a different card last time? Well yeah, I do change it every day dude …

This quickly becomes, well why the fuck do you keep changing it? How the fuck do you pick? Blahblahblah.

So here’s the answer guys, this is how I choose my card every day and all the considerations that go into the selection.

First and foremost – simplicity uber alles! The simpler and less complex the card is, the more likely it is to end up on my hat. This also means that only hearts and spades get chosen. Diamonds are too pointy and weird, and that other thingy I don’t even know the name of in english, is just too complex and convoluted a symbol. Euch!

Secondly, the colour of the card alternates between days. If the prior day had a spade, next day it will be a heart and so on. I also try my best not to wear the same card twice in a week because that’s just silly.

Thirdly, if the hat hasn’t been worn all day and is being put on just for a party or some other social event – the joker is chosen. It used to be that I had a nudie card stuck between the normal card at all times and then would swap them for social events (it’s ‘bad luck‘ to change cards twice in a day). But I lost that one.

The rest is completely random. So you could say my subconscious mind picks a card according to the weights I’ve put in place. Now, some people say this is a terribly bad answer because it doesn’t tell a story. But it does, it tells a great story.

You’ll notice that most of the world’s religions, belief structures and pretty much everything humans ever do in life, is governed by randomness. We call them acts of god, faith, yada yada, but at their core, they are simply events so damn random human minds can’t wrap around them so they pull a reason out of thin air to feel a bit better about it. We don’t like thinking things are random, we want to feel there is at least some structure … somewhere … somehow.

But I reject that! I embrace randomness! I love randomness! Randomness is king!

And that’s why the card is random. The weights give selections a bit of a pattern, but mostly it’s very random.

Now stop asking me.

Last night I was discussing goth music with a mate and somehow the debate turned into my showing him around what goth music was in the first place. Blahblahblah.

This eventually led to my showing him Velvet Acid Christ, which I still don’t know whether they’re goth or industrial. And then I showed him a certain song. It triggered memories, many memories.

Particularly the whole story of how I discovered Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hunter Thompson in general – two of the biggest influences on my life and my art and pretty much everything I’ve ever done since reading the book, watching the movie and becoming a raging fan.

It all started out when I was a wee lad of 15-ish and listening to an internet radio – its name eludes my memory – that played a certain song a whole lot. It contained clips like Oh god, did you eat all this acid? That’s right, you see! and uhm … This is not a good town for psychadelic drugs, extremely menacing vibrations were all around us.

Back then I was quite a regular and chatted a lot with the DJ’s, yes it was a fucking awesome radio, and eventually this meant I asked what the song was and whether it was any particular mix they themselves created.

This is how I discovered Velvet Acid Christ.

So I listened to their music some more and god knows when, I finally decided to look up these sound clips and figure out where they were from.

This is how I discovered Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the movie.

Watching the movie had an instant effect of making a raging drug lover out of me. Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to get my greedy little paws on most of the stuff I’ve wanted to try … have been hunting passively for acid for gawd knows how many years now … but I did try ether that I’ve made myself. The effects truly are just like the movie describes, it’s bloody fun too!

Anyhow, eventually I decided to read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the book.

Fucking brilliant stuff! My writing style has never been the same again and it only cemented my dire desire to get into psychadelic drugs as soon as I possibly can … I still haven’t. For shame.

The fucking suck part of wanting to do psychadelic drugs is that we’re not in the 60’s anymore and everybody just wants to get stoned and drunk and dance for a little longer than usual. Bleh. I want to have fun! But this is really another story, which says more about my lack of connections to the drug world than anything else.

Since as far back as my memory goes I’ve been using Apache for my main, primary, and absolutely only webserver. It was the workhorse of everything from dev environments to production machines serving tens of pages.

But throughout this love affair there was one constant – I had to change things.

This isn’t bad. Of course when you first start using mod_rewrite you’re going to have to change things and naturally adding a new website on a new domain means changing a few things. No problem here, all natural.

But still, there was a certain feeling that rose up in me like a mad urge, a feeling of endless power and proportion, a feeling like, hey, I’ve had sex with this woman a few times, and I quite like it, but there’s something missing something isn’t quite right, why can’t I watch a good movie instead of having this sex thing?

That’s right, it was the Sense of Impending Doom. Because you see dearies, whenever you have to make a small change in the apache configs a small part of your soul dies. You know it’s supposed to be a small change, you know it’s supposed to be effortless, but despite having done this countless times, you still waste an hour making everything work.

This Saturday I finally stomped my foot like a little school girl and said ENOUGH! Then I installed nginx.

It was a bit daunting at first and I may still not know how to pronounce the name, but I love it. The damn thing is sooper fast and when I had to add a config for a new site … hah! Took three lines of code, sure it was only for serving static files, but the same thing in apache takes a separate file, then a vhost, then blahlbah. Fuck you!

Here’s an example, come on, would you see anything so sleek and awesome under Apache? Ever?

server {
                listen localhost:80;
                server_name lestat;

                root /var/www;
                index index.html;
        }

Now obviously I don’t know how to do fancy rewrites and stuff yet, but from what I’ve seen so far, I think nginx and Swizec are a match made in heaven for the foreseeable future.

So there you go @robertbasic, @genom, @loudandwicked, @jaspertandy … a blog post about the change.

PS: about versatility and such that @genom mentioned, I haven’t a bloody clue (yet)

PS2: apologies to everyone I mentioned in the post and didn’t link to, Zemanta didn’t suggest the links and I’m too lazy to do them manugally.

Webcomics have been an internet constant for a while now and while I’ve become a fan almost in their infancy back when Elftor and PA were king (I never read PA) … oh must’ve been something like *gulp* eight years ago … fuck I’m old.

Anyhow, my second big love was CAD, which I’ve been reading to this day. Sometime during the whole affair I was quite popular on their forum, then a certain revolt happened, which I magically survived and then I got banned a few months later … oh well. But I loved that forum, learned a lot about painting there.

It would seem that there are even more comics that I used to read, but don’t read anymore, than there are comics I do read. There are such marvels as Pewfell, the Dreamwalker Chronicles and Lackadaisy – in all the bookmarks folder for webcomics holds 58 different links. Out of those I only read twelve today, with a few new ones still in the buffer for me to go through the archives. So in no particular order:

Ctrl-Alt-Del

AppleGeeks

Bardsworth

Bunny

Commissioned

Girl Genius

Not Invented Here

PHD Comics

Sheldon Comic

Wulffmorgenthaler

Johnny Wander

Lackadaisy

Two honourable mentions also go to Copper, which should really start updating again, and Ugly Hill, which ended, but @paulsouthworth awesomely went on to do Not Invented Here.

Sadly, most of the comics I stopped reading lost my attention due to my simply forgetting to click the bookmark for a while. Henceforth this is remedied because I have resolved to continue reading only through RSS. Life is too hectic even if the only really proper way to enjoy a webcomic is by going to the home page.

PS: of course there is also XKCD, but I refuse to even bookmark that one. There’s a special charm in entering the URL by hand every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.