Electric Quaker II

August Update: Lincoln Choir Tour

Everyone remember the last big update? No? What d’you mean “no”?

Lazy bastard. Alright, then (I’m only doing a summary this once, you realise…)

In the last dynamic episode, JTA legged it out of Aber, smuggling himself into the back of the Rev’s car, where he covered himself in a sheet, and sat pretending to be a picnic hamper, until safely over the Shropshire border, where he wandered around and said hello to Ruth’s grandparents.

Having driven six times past the Corn Exchange, JTA found himself on a sofa listening to Caroline, Jerry & the Rev discuss last week’s episode of The Forsyte Saga, but which turned out to be the accommodation arrangements for the marriage of the Rev’s fourth cousin’s second sister’s fiance’s brother Audrey, whose gibbon had mysteriously vanished, only to be replaced on the guest list by Ruth’s brother Owen, on the grounds that nobody would notice, and it’s impossible to work out who’s related to who in the Trim family anyway.

We pick up the story the next morning when…

Got to Wallingford and into the back of Caroline & Jerry’s car and made it up to Lincoln with a minimum of fuss and bother, except for a vague traffic jam on the motorway. Not being able to sing, I managed to spend most of the week wandering about the shops of Lincoln (there’s a sweet shop which sells Cinnamon balls [O God, you can get them off the Internet! Huzzah!] which was especially cool) and looking for a replacement coat, because, as usual, my regular one’s died through overuse.

The Cathedral itself was pretty cool, once the wallies filming the Da Vinci Code had cleared out, and we got a fantastic tour of the roofspace (bloody enourmous supporting beams up there, and mostly original 12th Century oak… great stuff) from Ken, who works for the Cathedral and whose son Will is part of the choir…

There was lots of wine, which was nice, and also good ale, and a nice ale shop as well, where we couldn’t buy very much because of having to get the train back. Then Bryn rang me, wanting to know if we could go out in Aber, and I explained that Ruth & I couldn’t, and he’d have to make do with Dan and Claire.

“As if,” he wistfully replied. “They’re in bloody Norfolk”
O-ho. Norfolk, eh?

So I rang Dan, and Lo! We managed to get a lift back, which took six hours (instead of the train’s eight) and didn’t cost us £30 apiece, meaning we had a spare 30 quid for more beer! Plus Ruth got to stay until the end of Sunday evensong, so that was all good.

Decent trip back (thanks to Claire for that!), even if we did get stuck on the M42 and definitely not drive off the motorway via an on-sliproad. And even if we had done, we didn’t get hit by the car that went down just after we would’ve gone up it, nor nabbed by the police car which would’ve passed us heading slip-road wards about two minutes afterwards.

Slightly alarming fog on the mountains by the Elvis rock on the way back, where you couldn’t see the edge of the road (which is alarming, because it’s generally also the edge of an enourmous drop, in that bit of the country) but we made it back safely, so it was all super.

And that was that, really, except I suddenly found myself surrounded by people bursting to give me a job. Still, it’s all good.

Whoops…

…I may’ve just scoffed more than I can chew…

I’m now down to work weekday evenings cleaning things for the Council, at £5.68/hour, 5pm-8pm. I’m also due to work Saturdays 8am-5pm, & Sundays 8am-3.30pm, at £4.80/hour at the 24-hour Spar.

On the plus side, I should wind up pulling down something like £160 a week (which is about 30 quid more than a much needed Driza-bone, for a start), and with my shoes literally falling apart at the seams (now up to a stunning four holes left-shoe, gaping hole at toe right-shoe level of collapse) I do really need the money.

On the downside, I’m now supposed to be working something like 30 hours a week, sorting out no end of other things, (OK, I think most of that’ll be calling people, but it’s still surprisingly tiring, and I have no idea when I’ll get to any meetings about anything), and, come September, doing the final year of my degree as well.

However, lack of free time for meetings aside, I’ve got something like four weeks of holidays left before I have to worry about the degree thing, and that’s time enough to pull down about £650. Almost a shiny new computer, in fact… Although I probably need to buy more shoes, a good solid coat and more than one pair of trousers, first. (The last pair of spare trousers I had broke at a time when I had no money for new ones, and I still haven’t)

Ah well. The Bank should end up happy, if nothing else. And, hey, I’ve got a whole two hours before I have to go to work! Where the Hell were jobs at the piggin’ start of the summer, that’s what I want to know…

Somebody get me some decent software, already!

Just thought “Hm, I want new wallpaper, maybe I’ll try to screenshot some Evangelion.” Playing things in Winamp, and I don’t want to get two tunes at once, so before I get Power DVD to play anything, I click “mute” on the seperate-to-the-main-window control panel.

Winamp muted.

Unmute Power DVD, Winamp comes back. Lower volume on Power DVD, Winamp gets quiet.

Er. Why the Hell d’you think I’ve got a volume control on the speakers and on Winamp, bitch? Why would anyone write software with a mute function that overrides everything else on the soundcard?

Jesus…

O, and Ruth & I are caught up on Evangelion, now. They seem to have given the Angels names. This is a little random, but not as worrying as a thought which stuck me during Episode, er, 12: “Angels” is all very well, messengers from God, we all know the drill. Broadly speaking, the term “angel” encompasses all the seraphim and cherubim, etc, there being different ranks of angels. In fact, Trinity aside, “Angel” encompasses the entire Host of Heaven, bar three. (It was bar four, but that was a long time ago…)

The Three not covered, therefore, are Gabriel, Raphael & Michael, they being what’re technically called Arch-Angels. I have no idea if that’s important or not, but it’s got a nasty potential to it, don’t you think?

Heh.

Well I do believe I may have a job. Cleaning (again, dear Lord…) for the Council. Should be fun.

There are, I’ve come to realise, few things more satisfying in my life than those occasions when I’m opbliged to make officialish phonecalls, and yet manage to hang up without feeling the need to swear.

This was one such call, which is nice & refreshing, especially since, if I had a fiver for every call I’ve had to start with “I’m sorry to bother you, but…” in the last couple of months, I’d probably not need a job at all…

August Update: S2005

OK, ladies & Gents, we’ve got no end up updating to do here, so I’m going to do it in smallish lumps, if that’s fine by you…

Left Aber something like Thursday, and slogged over the Sierra Drenewydd in the back of the Rev.’s carand got myself dropped off in Newport a couple of days before I slouched up the the Plant Factory about four hours before the starty of S2005, most of which was spent fiddling with the sound system (we do that every year, trying to get everything working properly, and every year, there’s a different system with an entirely different set of problems) and hoping that the rain would clear up.

For some reason, everyone seemed to have decided that I look like Terry Pratchett, which was a new one on me, and makes a pleasant change from a bunch of nergs whistling ‘The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly’ at me… and the rain did a reasonable job of clearing out of the way by 7pm, which gave ample opportunity for the usual round of saying hello to people and drinking OSH from a tin (ugh), and taking photos of people for the traditional Party Wallpaper. (I’ve high hopes of some of them, there’s a few quality “looking like a tit” snaps in there, although Scouser’s got an unusually high proportion of those, for some reason. [Presently, Statto, I shall e-mail the sodding things in your direction; Lincoln wouldn’t let me plug the camera in on any of their terminals, which was distressingly tech-savvy of them.

At about 3pm, the rain came back, which was fine, because everyone had tents.

That’d be “everyone except Kerrith & me,” then. *sigh* So Kerrith & I saty in the drizzle and kept the fire going, which wasn’t too hard; there was plenty of wood still left, and we managed a proper Beach-Bonfire quality of “white-hot embers beneath rapidly flaring lumber” blaze which meant that (freezing rain or not) you had to sit about two yards back from the nearest edge of the fire, or blister your legs whenever your shin touched smouldering trouser leg. And even then you were sweating.

It’s the heat from the fire that I blame for my falling asleep, in my coat, in the rain. Apparently, this amused people, although I don’t really know why; practically anyone who knows me well is aware I can sleep through almost anything (and yes, rather alarmingly, that includes fire alarms, and similar insistent loundnesses), and anyway, I wasn’t properly asleep, just dozing, because I’d wake up every 20 minutes or so and hurl more wood onto the fire.

Come the morning, the flash betented bastards re-emerged, generally whingeing about the grass being wet, and Mrs. Statto provided a cup of tea for which I’d been desperate since about 5am (if I’m going to avoid falling asleep on an all nighter, I need muchos caffine about 5 & 7 in the morning, or I haven’t a chance of making it past a quater to six without crashing out on the nearest seat availiable), which was pretty damn toptastic.

Mansbridge returned from wherever he’d slunk off to (his car, as I recall) and presently gave me a lift back to Newport, which was important because, S2005 duly over, I had to head off and wait for the return of the Rev, so I could join her & Ruth in a 120-mile slog down to Wallingford, in search of Caroline, Jerry, a choir, and somewhere to sleep. But that’s a different update…

As far as the obligatory snappy Party review goes, I think I’m best served by the following:

“I suppose, in retrospect, that I should’ve brought a tent, but for all that S2005 was the wettest Statto’s Party I’ve ever been to, it was also the most recent. And next year, I’ll bring a flask of tea.”

Hey, what do I look like? A guy with something better to do?

Hmm.

More Emotional You have: 47% SCIENTIFIC INTUITION and 62% EMOTIONAL INTUITION

The graph on the right represents your place in Intuition 2-Space. As you can see, you scored above average on emotional intuition and about average on scientific intuition.Keep in mind that very few people score high on both! In effect, you can compare your two intuition scores with each other to learn what kind of intuition you’re best at. Your emotional intuition is stronger than your scientific intuition. Your Emotional Intuition score is a measure of how well you understand people, especially their unspoken needs and sympathies. A high score score usually indicates social grace and persuasiveness. A low score usually means you’re good at Quake. Your Scientific Intuition score tells you how in tune you are with the world around you; how well you understand your physical and intellectual environment. People with high scores here are apt to succeed in business and, of course, the sciences.

And then the rather better-than-I’d-anticipated

Which was a bit of a surprise, frankly, because I generally know enough to ensure that when I break a PC it stays broke. That’s really not as useful as being able to fix things, but on balance I’d rather have that than be one of those arses who never takes the side off their box, and sets sytem files to “hidden”…

Ah well. Some of us have to be at Evensong in an hour or so, and there’s a bloody awful hill here. O, yeah, and one last thing – anyone seen this? How Uplink-tastic is that?!

Have fun!

Ugh. The Lincoln public library runs IE on the terminals…

…But, on the plus side, they’ve let me on for free! On the downside, of course, it’s a public library, so a) I can’t put Firefox on anything, and b) I’m putting up with the wafflings of gormless script-kiddies commoning at one another over MSN on the terminal next to me in the most chavish manner I’ve ever seen. But never mind.

The weather here is painfully toasty, which is a bit of a downer, (especially since I sat in a deckchair at Statto’s party at 3am last Saturday, and nodded off in the rain… Where was good weather then, eh?!) but otherwise it’s all good.

I’ll do a proper update when I get back to a real PC, at some point, because I’ve still got e-mails and things to check before my time on the terminal runs out, or I get thrown out and gaoled as the Lincoln Mouse-Cord Strangler… (Any more of this and I’ll grind a filling out…)

But I’ve managed a few more turns on Blue Dragon, and Annie came up to say Hello to Ruth yesterday, which was good…

Anyway, like I said: Proper Update When I Get Back To My PC.

Have fun!

07:41 pm: Generic Update Once Again…
…Just before I start jetting off to Statto’s party and the trip to Lincoln with the Wallingford Choir (inc. Caroline & Jerry, of ‘Ruth’s favourite aunt and uncle’ fame…)

With any luck, I shall manage to kill the stupid Blue Dragon at some point in the next two turns, or I’ll have to try to do it from my mother’s slow PC and slower narrowband connection (although, actually, I probably need to give it a going over anyway, just to keep Zone Alarm happy…)

And thus the march of Geekdom continues.

Over here, I have to say, the March of Geekdom is being somewhat slowed down by minor teething troubles such as the Subtle But Important Difference Between my Regular and DOS Keyboards – the location of the hash/tilde key.

The DOS keyboard (which I didn’t nick from the Old College at all) is now plugged in by means of an ATX/PS2 adapter, and has the hash key just after 0, – and = on the top row of the main key block. This means the backspace is about the same size as a threpny bit, or just smaller than one new pee. My usual keyboard, which I’m now pretty used to, is fairly weird in that it has the hash key on the numerical-keyboard side of the right-shift key, leaving the backspace with lots and lots of space, weighing in at about one third of the length of the space bar.

Somehow, probably because of the slightly sloppy way in which I send my fingers belting over the keyboard, the bit of the backspace button I’m most likely to hit in the tab-side end (ie, the left one), which is fine & dandy until you type the wrong drive letter on the DOS box, attempt to correct it, and suddenly try to send the damn thing to s#a:, rather than a:, as you’d originally intended.

O well. Such teething troubles aside, it’s running OK (except for the bizzarre memory error, which Paul thinks is somewhere in the first 640k, whatever that means) and I’m actually getting rather better with DOS than I was when we jumped PC to Win2k, which is fine by me. My only real trouble comes from games which apear to count as abandonware, ‘cos no bugger’s still selling them, but which still have severe old-school copy protection on ’em… In ten years time, that’ll be no problem at all, because all you’ll have to do to crack an old game is poke about on the ‘net, get a keygen and start playing (assuming you can be bothered to wait 10 years, rather than just doing it right now). That doesn’t, however, work when you have to cite things like “the word 5, line 3, page 34” or, (much worse) whatever word is formed by aligning the Espruar and piggin’ Dethek runes on the stupid Pool of Radiance code wheel…

Still, there’s still a few things I can get going, I expect, so it’ll all come good in the end.

Presently, I’ going to have to work out what books I’m going to take with me for the next week or so. But that technically counts as “packing,” and can safely be put off until 20 minutes before we’re due to leave. (except for my camera, the charger, the USB cable, the webcam and the webcam drivers, all of which I need to get ready for Statto’s party. Hmm.)

*starts digging things out of the Satanic Wire Tangle*

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: ‘Did I say That?,’ Meat Loaf

02:20 am: Stupid SQL.
Wordpress is still broken. At some point, if Dan’s still RSSing this old thing, I’m going to have to get help sorting my proper blog out.

Finished the packing chocolate job at about 0600 Saturday, and bloody glad to be rid of it. It has not been a good week for spending no time sleeping and far too much time bashing bars into packets and thinking dismal thoughts. Also, I’m now right off chocolate, although I expect that’ll fix itself presently.

Still very tired, so I’ll probably go to sleep soon (at night, too! Wow…) but cheers to all concerned for a really good Troma Night. Never seen a Western before, what with only being born 20 years ago, but it was all good.

O, and I’ve got a Trojan, which is irksome, not least because a) I dunno how it got in, and b) it’s been God knows how long since I had a virus, and I’ve pretty much forgotten what I’m supposed to do next. Which, frankly, is humiliating, although not as humiliating as having slipped from “toughest” to third toughest on Blue Dragon in the last week. Back up to No. 2 now, though, so as long as the RNG doesn’t turn evil on me, it’ll all be good…

Sleep now. Have fun!

04:37 pm: With the stupid wordpress database still royally screwed…

Fi-na-lly

Well, the PSU’s here, at something akin to long bloody last (long enough, for example, for me to forget how I’d lost no end of my files, including all the damn MP3s. Ah well…)

My current problem runs thusly: the PSU doesn’t fit into the case. Or, rather, it fits into the case fine, but it doesn’t screw into the case, because all the holes are in the wrong place, until you turn the PSU upside-down. I’m assuming it’s upside-down based on the way the “230V” sticker and switch are, and the fact that the fan is jammed up against the motherboard, if it goes in that way.

Anyone got a problem with that? (A technical one, I mean, not one of those “O, byt JTA, God Himself decreed that thou should have no working computer nor flower of the Earth” problems, because I’m fed up with them, just at the moment….) Because if not, I’ll stick it in presently.

O, and how do I login to the Abnib gallery? Only I’ve finally got access to all me Photos (thank God they never got lost, that’s all I can say), so I’ve got a load of things I can upload…

Aufughgh….

…In future, I think, I shall learn not to drink coffee that’s been standing in the maker for the last five hours. Still, it’s woken me up, and that was something I did need very much.

Currently feeling rather low and feeble, again, mostly because I don’t seem to have anything to do. There’s no end of things I could be doing, of course, and I’m pretty eager to get on with more than a couple of them, but they all seem to be things I can’t do yet. I’d like to start re-building my music collection, for example, but for that I need the PSU (which wasn’t delivered yesterday, because the courier went to the wrong address. Berk.), and I have to wait until that arrives. A lack of creative expression. That’s the problem, really…

And so on. Lazy though I am, I always preffer it if things move when they need to, and forced inactivity drives me nuts, although not quite as well as absinthe does… Frankly, I’m only blogging this for the sake of something to do, and I’ve polished my shoes about eight times today, which included rubbing in a bunch of nikwax which, predictably, temporarily buggered the shine, ’till I repolished them.

Quite why I need highly polished shoes full of holes (1 1/2 on the left one, 2 on the right) I’m not sure, but at least it gives me something to do before Troma.

It’s an especially silly paradox that I should get all keyed up about things I cannot yet do like this, and then lose any inclination to write essays, etc, as soon as I’m told about them. Bloody stupid, if you ask me, but I’ve yet to work out a solution to that. I think however, the difference is that the former is full of things I really want to do, whereas essays are things which I’ve been told to do, without, usually, anyone instilling any special attatchment to them beforehand.

Never mind. All it means in practice is that I’ll start belting along as soon as I can, and then end up with nothing left to do three weeks from now. Providing I don’t fall asleep first.

Only In Aber Moments: Number Seven

OK. Background. We’re walking back from the flat, and I’m damn drunk, and explaining to Ruth how the Miss Marple tapes I’ve got read by Joan Hickson are great (because Paul had played the Miss Marple theme) and from there we get onto the Red Dwarf tapes read by Chris Barrie, and thence to my Allo Allo tapes read by, er, yon bloke who played Rene.

And that’s when things went weird, because a bloke with long brown hair in a sweet full-length greatcoat followed the Aber Principle: “I may butt into this conversation, and nobody will mind,” and he did so thusly:

Bloke: Excuse me – you mentioned Allo Allo?
JTA: Yeah?
Bloke: Well it’s just that the bloke who played, er, Colonel Von Strohm went to my school, just as a random claim to fame, there…
JTA: Cool! Er, where’s that, then?
Bloke: Er, Monmouth.
JTA: Not, er, Habs Monmouth?
Bloke: Yeah, it was.
JTA: With green blazers?
Bloke: No, that was Habs [somewhere]. We had blue blazers, which was pretty cool. Like business suits. How come?
JTA: O, er, I’m from Adams’ Grammar in Shropshire. We’re Habs with maroon blazers, which are naff. And then Blue in the VIth form. And my mate Statto from school is now at Oxford with Chloe Beech from Habs Monmouth.
Bloke: O, right. I used to go out with Chloe.
JTA: ?
Bloke: Er, yeah, I’m Owen.
Ruth: Hah, that’s my brother’s name. I’m Ruth, and this is JTA.
Bloke Who Is Called Owen: [shaking hands] Well that’s a neat co-incidence, isn’t it? And all from random comedy.
JTA: Just a bit!
Owen: Just shows you, really, doesn’t it? Comedy is the key to life!
JTA: Well that’s certainly true!
Owen: Ah, well go carefully! I’ll say hi next time I see you!

And off we went…

Pretty much the coolest thing that’s happened to me in years, that was, and all because Aber is sufficiently Bohemian that you can butt in on other people’s conversations to say “That bloke went to my school!”

Beautiful stuff. Feeling incredibly happy, atm, which is probably a deadly mix of amusingly extreme co-incidence and absinthe, but I’m hoping for a cup of tea, soon, and I think I may yet be sobering up…

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!

Er.

Paul has jsut told me that blogging when drunk is a bad plan, bvut I blame that on the, er, the absinthe, which I cannot spell, but which is burny and hot and then a soprt of cool happy thing.

And anyway, I havent;’ updated anything for aages,so there we go. I think my typing is buggered just atm, but I’m n ot sure I can be bothed to fix it. Hey ho…

Er. Tiring week, all things considered, but at least it’s looking up right at the moment, and I have drunk geek night, which means I didn’t win at Settlers of CAtan… Which is a pity, but I thought I ourght to update things, which is a pity, but I’ve not blogged for days now, and I’m still here and everythings going OK.

So now you know. Er. Inasmuch as you ever cared…

Ah well. I need to go now, becausde I’m getting tired of fixing up all of the typos what I keepn making for all of this things. aND Presently I need to go and sleep anyway.

Anf I;’m going to regret this anyway, because It’s going to look nasty wtih commas and things out of joint… aCTUALLY maybe aPaul was right. My fingers have wobbled.

Meh…

Whoomph…

There’s never anyone to punch when you need to, is there?

Uberwinnage!

OK… Noticed an Ability Plus 1.0 feature I’d never previously clocked yesterday (hey, I was two when we got Ability… It’s the “communicate” function which “is the Ability function that lets your PC communicate directly with other computers… [because] when you use COMMUNICATE Ability acts like (or emulates) a terminal”

Well, that looked interesting, I thought… Except it’s probably never going to cope with the AberNet Lan and firewall, and I’ve not got the foggiest idea how to even begin to set it up, and we’ve long ago got rid of the manuals.

So I e-mailed info@ability.com and asked if they knew where I could find a manual from 18 years ago. Not surprisingly, they had no idea. What I did get, however, was the manual for Ability Plus 3.0 (last patched 1997, ten years after the original Plus came out) and an e-mail explaining that they doubt it’ll work, but the actual communicate function barely changed between Ability Plus 1 and 3…

Feeling pretty damn impressed by that, all things considered, and I’ve worked out what I could do with my summer… Although it’s changed a bit since

The Original Plan…
Get a job, earn lots of money, buy lots of components and old games, play them next year and worry about the degree result next July.

because now I’ve got

The Revised Plan
Spend the summer pissing off HSBC by running miles and miles over my OD limit, whilst reading WikiPedia entries for old TSR games, playing with a thrown-together DOS box, courtesy of Bryn (the box, the CD drive) and Paul (the random memory-free soundcard, the games) and generally attempting to learn every DOS command anyone could ever have needed before Win98, thus cornering all the kudos of a tech whizz, without any of the troubles (ie, needing to sort out machines) because almost nobody has DOS anymore, and anyone who really needs to get a DOS machine fixed will probably be more than willing to fill me with ale once they’ve found out I’m the only person they’ve met for the last 10 years who’s ever heard of a .xtx, let alone has the software to read it.

Hooray.

Occasionally, when I’ve got bored of wishing I was around for cool decades like the ’20s, I wish I’d been born 10 years earlier, because I’d’ve been able to grow up with the technological surges we’ve seen since then (I’d’ve liked to have been there for Windows 2.0, really…)

Then I stop wishing that, because if I’d been born 10 years earlier I’dve been 30 since spring, and the older you get, the less dinky it is to be stupidly well-versed in an obsolete OS (because if you grew up with it, you’re supposed to be competent…)

Ah well… I have tea, all is good.

Winnage!

Have spent a profitable evening making backups of my old Seagate HDD to the new one Bryn gave me. Mostly, to be honest, it’s old document files from the incarnation of Windows that used to exist on there, and a small cache of Ability files (Ability Plus 1.0, mind you, not this Ability Office 4 stuff…), but there’s a couple of directories of interesting things on there as well…

Hillsfar, for example, which will become playable again once I’ve got the damn copy-protection codewheel, if it still exists, back from home (there’s some seriously tiresome copy-protection on these old games: Death Knights of Krynn asks you for words randomly picked from the Adventurer’s Journal every time you load a game, and from the Rule Book every tenth time you save, which doesn’t half get in the way of re-doing bits you ballsed up before…), and I still hope to get After Dark running again, as soon as I’ve got a copy of Windows 3.11 on there.

So I’ve had a satisfying evening, all things considered, and worked out how to stop idiots getting near computers, in an only slightly fascistic manner: forbid people to run anything other than Linux, Unix or DOS 6.22… If you can manage your regular home computing needs from those for, say, a year, without making a proper mess of it, then you can have something more beefy and more user-friendly.

Thus only those who can cope with writing “copy d:\old folder\oldthin~1.wps c:\backups\seagate” at the command propmt get access to the “highlight – ctrl+c – ctrl+v” method of copying. Likewise, anyone too dense to manage a “deltree c:\dos /Y” command stands a far greater chance of keeping their work than they do if they’re given an OS which lets them go online without a decent firewall and with pants anti-spywave and anti-virus protection.

*sigh*

Frankly, you could achieve much the same thing by giving people DOS and then forbidding the ownership of computers to anyone too dim to either work it out or type “help,” but it wouldn’t be as entertaining as making tech support guys take calls from people wanting to know how to balance cups of coffee on the floppy drive…

O – and on the vague subject of knackered old computers, anyone, nee Dan, know where my bloody PSU is yet?

Dear God…

…Returning from the Flat, past WH Smiths, what did we see but a collection of loons stood in the street (presumably after several hours) waiting to go in and collect a book they’d already reserved…

So, predictably, we ended up re-running the old “what needs to happen with Harry Potter, and why is JK Rowling too dim to do it” conversation, which threw up a few new points. Well, I say new, but I imagine anyone who’s previously considered the intrinsic naff-ness of Potter will’ve found them before…

Still:

Ideally, at the end of this book, Dumbledore needs to be dead. He can’t die at the end of the next one, because that’s when Harry has to die.

That oughtn’t come as a shock to anyone; it’s how the genre works. Heroic fiction requires the hero and the villain to take one another down in a gigantic stand-off, hence Potter must die at the end of book 7 (because that’s the last book).

Dumbledore needs to die before then because there has to come a point at which everything seems hopeless, and there seems to be no way for the Good Guys to win. (That’s the point, you’ll generally find, when you can’t bear to put the book down or stop reading, because you have to find out what happens next.) This is most noticable in films, and the most famous and obvious example would be the end of ‘The Empire Strikes Back.’

I doubt, however, Rowling will do that, because I’m not entirely convinced she realises she’s writing heroic fiction (although it should be pretty obvious to anyone who thinks about it – clearly defined Bad Guys, a few Nasty People and a Young Hero determined to Overthrow Evil and Save The Day) and, therefore, she won’t see the need for the hero to die in a Last Desperate Attempt to Save The World.

Don’t believe me? Try:
Gandalf Vs. Balrog: Both die.
Elendil Vs. Sauron: Both die.
Vader Vs. Palpatine: Both die.
Asriel/Coulter Vs. the Metatron: Both die.
Neo Vs. Agent Smith (in Revolutions): Both die.
Holmes Vs. Moriarty: Both die.
Rimmer Vs. The Rage (Last Human Both die, and it’s incredibly powerful because Rimmer isn’t heroic, but he’s fulfilling the ideal.)

(Note that, although some of the Good Guys do survive, they are dead at the end of the story, even if they come back later…)

It’s the way the genre works, simple as that.

Trouble is, Rowling isn’t very good at that, or, indeed, at killing people in general. Sirius, for example, was a stupid person to kill because the only character that affected was Harry. Hagrid would have been a really clever person to kill, because he’s rather more interesting, and there’s lots of characters capable of feeling sorry, guilty or pleased… But no, Sirius fell through the metaphcurtain, and nobody gave a toss. Bad plan.

Bad plan, yes, but also typical of Rowling’s problem: she doesn’t care about any of the characters other than Harry. It’s as if Tolkien had tried to do LoTR and only paid attention to Frodo, mentioning the other characters, but not really exploring them. Doesn’t work. It’s like Blackadder, without the feedback from Baldrick and the others – can you imagine the end of Goes Forth if you’d never got to feel anything from the other characters? Christ, of course you can’t; without George admitting that he’s scared, after all his patriotic fervour, to actually go over the top, it wouldn’t be worth beans…

The best Potter book is Askaban, because it’s a self-contained thing, and that’s what the books ought to be: an ongoing theme, but also self-containing stand-alone tales, not Neon Genesis, not Future Boy Conan but Futurama – there’s an ongoing plot woven through it, and you can gain more from knowing what’s gone before (The scientist in Space Pilot 3000 [“Welcome to the world of tomorrow!”] appears at Fry’s funeral in “The Sting,” and it’s a really nice touch; it’s not essential to have seen the first episode, but if you have, then it’s a really nice touch, especially since Leela was the one who used to work with him…)

But Rowling tries to be both stand-alone and ongoing-or-bust, and it’s not just clunky, but tiresome. (Futurama, after the first episode, doesn’t really bother to explain how Fry got to the year 3000, and when it does, it demonstrates an incredible understanding of what’s going on – right in there in Space Pilot 3000 you can see the shadows under the desk…) So rather than take it as a given that the magical world has Quidditch (a game in which only two players are important: the opposition Seeker and, surprise surprise, Harry) we’re forced through a chapter about it in every book. Likewise we get a section in which we’re shocked to discover that Harry doesn’t like his aunt and uncle, and that Snape doesn’t like Harry very much, and that Draco Malfoy is exactly the same character he was before and he hasn’t developed because he isn’t Harry Potter…

And that’s the problem in a nutshell: nothing is examined except in direct relation to Harry, and that’s rarely the mark of a good story. Certainly, it’s not something which will allow Potter to get killed, and without that then it’s not a tale of Good Against Evil, it’s a tale of Something Without Closure Against Evil…

I cried when I read Holmes’ death. I cried at the end of Last Human too, because there was a meaning behind it all, a sense that there was hope from a tragic sacrifice, and Potter readers won’t ever get that because, even if Harry were to die, nobody would be left behind for the readers to give a damn for.

And that would be fine, if the publicity engine hadn’t over-hyped the books to the point where people will queue in the cold just to get a copy they’ve already made sure they’ll get with a deposit. If this book were coming out into the environment of the early years, when Potter was published, and few people knew or cared, that’d be fine. But Rowling has let the publicity run away with her work, and now people pretend she’s a genius, a really original writer, someone who Got Children Reading Again, before selling out to Hollywood so the children can Go Watch the Film.

I have no idea if she’s realised it, but if I were in her shoes tonight, I’d feel terrible. Rich, yes, but incredibly sad with it, because everyone would belive I was something I’m not; believe I was better than I am, and they’re not buying the books because of me, they’re doing it because they’ve been told they’re brilliant books…

And they’re not. Really, they’re not. A world in which magic costs nothing, takes no effort, two words can kill someone forever simply doesn’t work: the wizards wouldn’t have retreated from the muggle world, they’d have overrun it, and the death of Voldemort would never have stopped the Death Eaters, because with that level of power, who needs a leader? Christ; if you can use magic to cook and travel and kill, how come you have to teach people? There’s got to be a spell that gives other people knowledge, because if there isn’t, how can we be expected to believe everything else – no cost, remember, no effort at all, and so there’s no need for schools at all…

Harry Potter is a tale of Good Versus Evil in which the side of Good is ignored in favour of a specky orphaned adolescent, and the side of Evil is bogiemanned into teachers and bullies… And that works fine for a children’s story, just about, but it’s not good enough for a world-wide phenomenon that sees Canadian retailers taking out injunctions on people they’ve sold the book to, and hundreds of people waiting up for something which, despite what they’ve been told, won’t be any better than the last five.

Alright…

…Still, as you see, none of the old posts, but that’s because of no end of hassle at this end (no psu, laptop HDD dead and clicking, running ubuntu live cd, connection to the ‘net is via a USB ethernet card. So can’t upload off the big. rescue CD without either killing the OS [bad plan] or using the external CD/RW, which is a USB connection meaning killing the ‘net [bad plan] or using the PS2/USB adapter plug, killing the mouse [irksome]. O well. Life goes on.

One of the ways it goes on is in the 20Gb HDD Bryn’s just given me for the Pentium 2 I’m reconstructing, which will do fine for running old DOS games and the like, once I’ve got a copy of DOS on it. Dan’s advised me that the best version of DOS is DOS 7, as packaged with Win98.

Er. Anybody got a copy of Win98 I can have a lend of? Ideally on floppies, if it ever came on floppies, to save me having to swap drives about (I’m going to put an old 1x CDRom into it, presently, but that’s at home and I shan’t get to it for aaaages…) and then I can get Win98 onto it, strip Win98 off it, giving me a nice version of DOS v. 7 on it, and if I can be arsed I’ll get Win 3.1 on there too, partly for old time’s sake, and partly so I don’t forget how to use it…

What? I like Win 3.1! It did me perfectly well from 1993 to 2001.

Well I like it, anyway…

Finally…

…Kudos to Ruth for fixing the stupid SQL issue that had locked me out of the site, under the impression that Admin access was only availiable to Chris Dalby. God alone knows how that one came about…

Bear with me while I try and get this bastard back into something like order, if you will. Yes, that will take a long time. No, I’m not really very hot on this Internet lark.

06:23 pm: Ah…
…With my new PSU still nowhere to be seen (bloody Courier; two weeks and no show? Something big’s gone wrong, there…) and the laptop HDD properly screwed (thank Christ for the Ubuntu live CD…)

I’ve found (technically for the second time) a helpful edition of User Friendly, which saves me the trouble of a proper update by giving a neat summary of my present situation.

Frankly, I identify too much with AJ as it is, but never mind…

O, not *again*…
…Results are out. For the year, therefore, I’ve got

Med+Renaiss Writing 63
Detective+Crime Fict 62

Read Theory/Text 1 58
Restor+18 C.Lit 63
Hieronimo To Hamlet 59

So, again, the two modules I thought I’d do really badly at, mostly because I did hardly any reading, turn out to give me my two top scores…
I wonder sometimes whether I ought to give up on the reading, altogether. Probably not, however, because my mother will sulk if I get a 2:1, on the not-sure-where-that-figure-came-from grounds that “everyone gets 2:1s, these days,” although I’m fairly certain they don’t…

Hey ho.

O, come on, everyone else will be doing one…

In response to Andy (PWL Andy, that is), who asked in a private post if anyone had the same reaction as him, yes, I did. I got a call from Ruth asking me to get a telly on and find out what was happening, and my first responses went something like

“Bloody hell, an actual terrorist attack.”
“Hope Bush keeps his nose out of this, bastard”
“Shit, that was insensitive of me.”
“O, Jesus, Howard’s on the telly. That’ll bugger the asylum applications, then”
“No, still insensitive. Better get onto the ‘Net and try again, then…”

Unfortunately, I’m still not doing very well. Yes, I had a vague resurgence of “bastards, how dare they?!” but that was pretty much neutralised right off on the grounds that nobody seems to know whodunnit… For once, however, I suspect it’s not an Irish thing, because even the Real IRA have been fairly quiet lately. (Partly, of course, that’s because it’s no-longer fashionable for the US to give money to the IRA, for some reason or other)

But Andy is, as usual, right. For September 11th, my first response was “How terrible!” followed presently by “No, hang on, that wasn’t an attack on American democracy, that was an attack on trade. Shit, this is going to get out of hand…”

Now, largely thanks to the stalwart efforts of George W. (and, indeed, everyone else who jumped on the bandwagon) my first response wasn’t “Shit, that’s awful, the poor bastards involved” – that got relegated to third place, mingled with guilt that my first response was surprise that an attack had actually happened, regardless of media hype, and that my second response was that Bush didn’t use it as an excuse for attacking, for example, Iran.

I wait to be proven wrong on the attacking Iran…

I do feel terrible, insofar as I have a right to feel anything at all (as far as I know, I’ve never met anyone involved, so issuing full-blown mourning seems fairly callous), for all those affected, and, naturally, I hope Andy (K) has some decent news asap, but I do think it’s telling that in the time since September 11th 2001 my initial response to terrorist attacks has changed from “fucking Hell, that’s awful” to “O, shit, I really hope the politicians don’t use this for another bollocks war”

Presently, I suspect, I’m going to get savaged for this post, and to all the flamers waiting in the wings, I say this: Fuck You, chummy.

In 2001 it took about a week for the focus to shift from the suffering of the victims to a state of abducting the issue for political gain. Today it doesn’t seem to have taken an hour. That’s bad, my friends, that’s bloody bad. The proper reaction to events such as this is, I cannot help but feel, one of sorrow and quiet reflection. It should not be one of Bush popping up and suggesting a hunt for countries may make tenuous links.

So, no, thank-you, this post is not here to say “hah, I don’t give a shit about people suffering,” it’s here to say that I’m frankly fucking scared, but not because there’s an ever-present threat of a terrorist attack, as there was during the Irish troubles, but because things like this, in the world of today, give politicians too much scope to play silly buggers, only paying token tribute to the victims and their families whilst they pay much more attention to where the Yanks will invade next…

That’s what scares me, really. Terrorists I can cope with, all things considered, because God willing I’ll never be affected by a terrorist attack. Politicians, however, are rather more insidious, and if some dickhead uses this as an excuse to bring in bloody ID cards I shall do my sodding nut.

’nuff said. Even I’m getting far too political for my own good, now…

Ladies and Gentlemen: A damn-near emergency announcement. (LJ only, as will rapidly become clear)

Something I heard last night has put the wind up me strongly; I’ve a foul feeling that my blog is rapidly approaching the “fucked beyond revival” mark, and it’s not entirely certain I’ve got anything left there at all (although if that’s the bloody case I’ll be making enough noise to split Satan’s eardrums before the summer’s out…) I do not, however, believe that the stuff is really gone. You may, therefore, ask questions like “JTA, my friend, why bail out on a decent setup you’ve got going – and not only going, but going with a friend?” That’s what this post is for… I am not a man willing to induce lurches amongst friends, and especially not if they happen to be running something for money. On the other hand, it’s usually idiots saying “I don’t want to make waves amongst friends” that allows life to run itself to tatters before anyone has the guts to stand up and do that, and right now I’m following the advice I’ve just had from Dan. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the official notice that I’m bailing out of the deal. Electric Quaker should be back, in one form or another, fairly soon, and in the meantime I’d ask you to bear with me, because I’ve got a few problems – mostly of the “can’t buy anything online because my cards keep getting rejected” variety – involved in getting a new I announce this here, rather than by directly informing those interested for two reasons: 1. If I’m going to have to reconstruct a heap of blog entires from the sodding Ether, then I’m going to want an at-the-time account of what I managed to do about it, once everything went up the swanee. 2. It’s just about conceivable that someone else may be wondering where the fuck my blog’s gone and look here on the offchance. If anyone involved can come through with a credit card payment in exchange for cash, I’d be very grateful, and ASAP is best because of the deal explained in the e-mail. So, there we go. Sorry, Gareth, I’m with Dan on this one.