Now, look. I’m on your side. You know that. I’m all for encouraging creativity and new talent. But, please, I’m begging you …
Stop making machinima movies with Carmina Burana as the soundtrack!
O Fortuna is a great piece of music. I’m not saying it’s not. Very evocative, very dramatic. I can see why, when you dragged that mp3 into your video editor, it seemed like a good idea. It’s bound to make your halfass movie feel like proper Dramatic Stuff.
Don’t make that mistake, please. O Fortuna is so over-used, it’s not even funny. It was already a cliche after The Omen. By this stage, it’s even a cliche as a machinima soundtrack. There are plenty of other great pieces of classical music. Why not look at Wagner, or Elgar, or one of the really great choral composers like Bach or Handel?
At the time, it seemed like a good idea. We were drunk, so was everybody else – why not take them back to our room and get them to recount their top 3 “machinima moments”? What could possibly go wrong?
Well. As you’ll hear if you’re brave enough to listen to the first of four interviews, when we’re as drunk as that and we think we’ve got a bleep machine, we use language and concepts that would make my prostitute blush. The thing I feel have to stress is this: we really, genuinely did believe that all our filthy expletives would be bleeped in post-production. We originally recorded this under the banner of Machinima For Dummies and Wiley Publishing. In the end, the filth-to-pre-watershed ratio was just so high that it was virtually un-bleepable. So we sent it to Overman. Not even his mad zound skillx were enough to bleep it properly, so we left it uncut and released it as an Overcast special. The only thing that’s bleeped now is any mention of Wiley or Machinima For Dummies.
The Overcast Episode 24 is – I really can’t stress this highly enough – NSFW. But, if you like the sound of a drunken Yorkshireman slurring obscenities into a microphone – and I know of at least one of you who does – then this is for you. There are another three to come, too, and they just get worse.
My poor mother would be so ashamed. Thank god she has no idea how to use the internet, and so never reads this blog.
Yes, you read the title correctly. Brace yourself.
Religeous-types try to convert me from my staunch atheism on a fairly regular basis, and the conversation always seems to follow the same basic lines. This example features A Christian Telling Me About Jesus, but it works the same for whatever mass-delusion the person concerned is trying to get me to buy into.
CHRISTIAN-TYPE: You should worship God and Jesus! It’s great!
ME: Well, I’m afraid I don’t believe in God, and I certainly don’t believe in Jesus in the way you’re meaning it.
CT: You should believe! It’s great! Why don’t you believe?
ME: Because there’s absolutely no evidence to incline me towards belief.
CT: Yes there is. What about the Bible?
ME: The Bible isn’t evidence, sorry. Just because I write “God exists” on a bit of paper, it doesn’t make it true.
CT: But the Bible comes to us directly from God, so it must be true.
ME: First of all, that’s circular logic of the most staggering design. Secondly, the existence of and content of the Bible is scientific fact. The accuracy or fallacy of the Bible is speculation. Therefore, the Bible is not evidence for the existence of God.
CT: Well, I believe in God. I know He’s there – I’ve felt his presence.
ME: That’s not evidence, either. It’s evidence for you (although I’d still be sceptical were I in your shoes), but it’s meaningless to me. You can’t admit that as evidence – it’s unscientific.
CT: Well, you’re obviously determined not to believe. Any evidence I give you, you just dismiss out of hand. There’s no point talking to you about this anymore.
ME: Oi! Come back here and argue properly!
I’m sick of this crap. The trump card that’s always pulled is “Well, you might not think of that as evidence, but I do.” As if evidence were somehow subjective, and open to interpretation. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. Something is either valid as scientific evidence or it isn’t. 2 + 2 is either 4, or it isn’t. You don’t get to decide whether or not you’re going to treat it as 5.
Now, piss off and stop trying to convert me until you can come up with something better than that.
P.S. Yes, it’s categorised as People I Hate. This is really starting to get on my nerves.
Much as love Linux – and god knows I do love ‘er, fickle and high-maintenance mistress that she is – there are a few things that irritate and annoy me. Some of them are big things and some of them are small things. The thing that annoys me most of all, though, more than anything else in the Free & Open Source software world, is the noise that K3B plays when it’s finished burning a disk. It’s a little fanfare of smugness. It’s a sound that all but demands a round of applause and a short speech to commemorate the fact that K3B has managed to accomplish the sole task for which it was designed, without – for example – setting my house on fire or pissing on my cat. It’s as bad as using Windows, where if I don’t want to sit through the ten-minute masturbation session that is the Windows XP New Features Tour, the operating system gets mildly indignant and goes off into the system tray for a sulk.
I know it’s open source, so I can just hack it myself and solve my own problem, but it shouldn’t be there in the first place. It’s stupid, and most un-FOSS-like.
Actually, if you and I ever do hook up, you’ll be able to tell when our relationship has moved on to a very special level – it’s the day I give you my root password. Which, by the way, I will never do. What if we split up?
My life at the moment is basically a series of XKCD strips, loosely strung together by sleep and beer.
The final, absolutely definately last cut of the BloodSpell feature has now been released onto teh interwebx. What’s that I hear you cry? A trailer to whet your appetite? Why, certainly, Sir, Madam or Thing.
The full meaty BloodSpell goodness can be downloaded for free from www.bloodspell.com, as if you didn’t already know.
Money that comes from an ATM on the day you get paid is always so much sweeter, isn’t it? If I get money out on pay day, it always seems to be crisp new notes, unfolded and smelling of success. The machine seems pleased for me. It’s almost as if it’s saying “Yeah, you’re the man. You’re the man! There’s plenty more where that came from, baby!”
Ask the machine for money towards the end of the month, though, when you’re scratting around to find enough change to buy a pint of milk, and it’s a different story. The machine whirs and beeps and grumbles, seeming to take an inordinate amount of time to check my card, and eventually spits it back out at me along with a grubby old tenner, ripped in two and held together with sellotape. The machine is disgusted with me. “You should be ashamed of yourself.” it mutters as I slink away.
I know, of course, that I should try to save some of the money from month to month. That way the machine will always be my friend. Unfortunately, I now live in Cambridge, so that pretty much buggers that idea.
