Walsingham

The mere sight of me in spandex would eradicte much world hunger at a stroke.

Could you elaborate on the "understated performances" the movie has been getting lots of praise, specially regarding Gary Oldman's acting. It just seems to me that what carries a film like that it's performances and considering the all star cast that's what I was expecting from it. And now you have to worry me. Oh, don't worry. I meant that in the good way of understated performances. Gary Oldman can be a very good actor, but he's also had a lot of roles that are.. bigger then the screen? Characters that can loom and be very loud (performance wise, not verbally). Within this film, all the characters they play have no real scenery chewing, there are no "loud" moments. They're all very quiet, restrained, very.. English. The whole film has a certain sense of claustrophobic feeling to it when it's all taken together, and that suits the story. "Whats a Drexel?"

Good point, Raithe. I say the same thing about my spleen.

Nothing cuter than a political child. Actually, that's kinda the point. Those are political placards, not theological ones.

Kryten: And we're going to... live!

Um... seeing patterns is what the human brain is good at. Case in point: seeing the face of Jesus in toast, etc. Looking at history and saying it is implausible without God is an argument I find ...less than compelling. Continuing another thread, I don't see what's so mental about making crap up. I mean falling in love is 99% of the time an exercise in raw fantasy over facts. But being in love can stil make you do and achieve all sort sof things.

Woke with awful hangover. Got straight down to work and actually got a lot done. Gallons of coffee, big spanish omelette for fuel. Am now contemplating taking a break and getting in some more fodder. Got offerred a new job today. I really can't make up my mind, so I'm playing for time. It is pretty crap work, but extremely close by, and pretty secure.

But margin for error defined how? To the best of my knoeldge stistical tests are pretty much arbitrarily pegged at what we have found to be useful. But if utility works then the god-monkeys already win. Because I've seen god-boys doing crap I would have said was absolutely impossible as an unaugmented human.

If you stick with this animation/TV mashup it gets funnier and funnier. http://neave.com/television/

Something about moving from an internal space to an external one lags my PC to hell, and I have to shut down the game instance and do something else for an hour. This actually work out well, and has resulted in my getting quite a lot of admin done around the house.

Weirdly, I DO like this.

from memory, because of the time delay in pushing a control and anything happening, you haveto get an instinctive feel for what you are doing. I put on classical music for flying choppers. Bach, or Strauss.

:lol:

There are some very good bits of 40k, if you stay away from the space marines. Although in fairness to Games Workshop, the space marine schtick sells well, and I encourage them to keep churning the stuff out. The really good bits of all Warhammer material is when it looks at chaos in the old skool sense. The four gods, slaves to darkness, the lost and the damned. Chaos has become Marvel-ised in recent years. Took out all the psychological horror and just left lots of spikes and chains.

And yet, ironically I'd wager there's more artistic merit in this bank robbery than in 60% of official star wars merchandise.

I don't think that's funny. But it is a useful illustration of why I treat all guns, even if checked, as if they are loaded.

I hesitate to bring this up again, but I don't feel I can usefully controbute unelss we settle it: you can't PROVE anything. You can form a hypothesis, organise facts which would disprove it, and test accordingly. But you simply cannot prove. Ever. It is therefore no more or less insane to wish for proof of the existence of God, than of my downstairs bathroom.

Indeed. May Gods damn every species of statute writer, and save the few who convey the public good in their hearts and hands, not in books.

With respect I'd say it's nonsense to assert that an extra-dimensional construct needs to intersect with our dimension in a replicatable laboratory measurable way. In human psychology you have the devil of a time scientifically measuring abstract emotions, yet very few would argue they don't exist. By which I mean that it could be some form of particle or field we just don't have the kit or mathematics to sense or even model. Indeed, since I'm in a mischievous icecream fuelled mood I'd suggest that it is precisely the confused nature of religious scripture which indicates that even the softest modelling of 'god' fails at the first hurdle. EDIT: For example, how on earth could you model a religion which asserts in the same book that killing is OK, and at the same time not ok? I admit I'm no maths wizard, but that's got to be tricky.

I think it's pretty clear you need to level up the party a bit. You aren't cheesing and you are having perma-death. Sort it out!

I'm now firmly of the opinion that having a sequence of cheap keyboards is far superior to one expensive one. The expensive ones are high on spec but woefully weak on design. There's no cleverness to them at all. Just slightly better components.

Doing a bit of singing practice, to Electric Worry. What's interesting is that with 100% reliability every time I sing "My happy home" I pull something in my spine. I should probably quit testing this.

I watched most of Beowulf (with Angelina in it) the other night. Apart from the baffling choice of male voice lead - fat men sound fat - I really liked it. The graphics are quite badly dated, but it still largely works. A tale of heroism and shame, with awesome levels of guts chucked about, and of course fantasy Jolie covered in a thin layer of gold paint and nothing else.

Slept through alarms and phonecalls. More tired than I realised. Since today is obviously a washout I am going to sit about eating ice-cream and reading documents. Quite sunny, actually. Can't go into non-twitter detail as my exhaustion relates mainly to the troubles of a friend of mine.

I had leftovers in the fridge which needed using so I've made a big tub of home-made icecream with - single cream - double cream - creme fraiche - leftover chocolates - cinnamon - rice-milk - caster sugar - molasses (a dab) Used the food processor to mix it and re-mix it as it froze. It is quite amazing.