(All 30 of you.)

In case anyone’s interested, here’s who’s reading this:

UNITED STATES (US) 20934 (taking over the world)
UNITED KINGDOM (UK) 8668 (I’d be disappointed if no-one from the UK was visiting)
SWITZERLAND (CH) 2843 (how do you make a Swiss roll? Sneak up on him with a bap…)
Indeterminable 1536 (I know the feeling)
AUSTRALIA (AU) 1205 (G’day, barbie, shrimp, tinnie)
TURKEY (TR) 1010 (This rather surprised me. I have never in my life thought ‘Ah-ha! This will appeal to my Turkish visitors!)
SINGAPORE (SG) 790 (‘Ello you lot! It’s nice to see the far east comes here too)
UNITED KINGDOM (GB) 731 (and this is different from ‘UK’ how? Did the software mean to say Ireland? I doubt the Irish would be very happy about being lumped in with us.)
NETHERLANDS (NL) 640 (I heard this week that ‘sucking a monkey’ is slang for drinking beer in Dutch. Is this true?)
CHINA (CN) 587 (You mean I’ve not been blocked by your goverment yet? I really must try harder…)
SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO (CS) 556 (‘Nice to have you on here. Again, not a country that I’ve really had in mind, but I’m happy to see you here)
GERMANY (DE) 502 (Guten tag… Oh dear, I really can’t remember much German, clearly you all know more English than I know Deutsche)
CANADA (CA) 380 (See you aboot. Gawd bless yer cotton socks. Canada: the sane bit of North America)
JAPAN (JP) 313 (Konichiwa! Okay, so everyone that I know has visited my site from Japan has been living on US military bases there, but it’s nice to be known in the country that inspired me with its comics back when I was a tiny little boy)
ISRAEL (IL) 277 (Sorry to be political, but I hope that all the unsettling has been worth it for everyone’s sake. It wouldn’t have been my solution, but it’s happened, so I really hope it works and there will finally be peace for everyone.)
RUSSIAN FEDERATION (RU) 256 (huuuuuuuge country, feeeeeeeew people. Hi Russia!)
ITALY (IT) 256 (Bounjourno! I did learn a little Italian for a recent trip there, but it’s rapidly vanishing again)
IRAN, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF (IR) 199 (More from the middle east. It’s great to have you here. If the world can’t get together to have a laugh then we’re really in trouble.)
BRAZIL (BR) 161 (Ah, the first country listed from South America. I’ve spent a long time looking at you on Google Earth. You have a very beautiful country. I hope we can all find a way to keep it so green!)
THAILAND (TH) 117 (I hear online gaming is big in Thailand, so I guess it shouldn’t be surprising to see visitors from them to my website, but again it’s not one that I anticipated)
BELGIUM (BE) 108 (How strange that you tie with India)
INDIA (IN) 108 (How strange that you tie with Belgium)
TAIWAN (TW) 98 (I’m running out of comments)
SAUDI ARABIA (SA) 96
COLOMBIA (CO) 83 (Woo hoo! More from South America!)
SPAIN (ES) 75
MEXICO (MX) 70
FRANCE (FR) 61 (61. 61?!?!?! Is that the best that my neighbouring country can do? I have three times more people visiting from Iran than France, and it’s probably a capital offence to visit my site over there!!)
GREECE (GR) 53
POLAND (PL) 43
EUROPEAN UNION (EU) 40 (Err, I didn’t realise this is a country these days…?)
AUSTRIA (AT) 37
NEW ZEALAND (NZ) 35
HONG KONG (HK) 33
BANGLADESH (BD) 32
SWEDEN (SE) 30 (Netherlands 640, Germany 502, Sweden 30. Apparently I do something that most Swedes don’t like.)

So, as I said at the beginning, hello Sweden, all 30 of you!

Clicking the banners at least once a day really does help me lots, especially if you’re in the UK. Basically, UK advertisers pay a lot more for their adverts than the US people. They want something in the region of 150,000 views of their banners each month for, in their words, ‘it to be worth the admin keeping our banners on your site’. Currently I don’t get that many hits from the UK each month, but I do get a good click-through rate on the banners, so this company is prepared to stick with me while this remains the case.

This is also in your interests too: if I wasn’t with this nice big company that pays decent amounts for their banners I would be with a smaller, cheaper one. The people that they advertise are also smaller and cheaper, which means far more annoying adverts… Perhaps even the Crazy Frog. Yes, it could sink that low.

So, help keep this site free of really rubbish and annoying banners by clicking the not-so-annoying ones today!

Well, the US Entertainment Software Rating Board has decided that the sexually explicit content that can be unlocked on GTA: San Andreas, despite not being part of the game without a hack being applied, is still part of the game and so have reclassified the game as being for ‘Adults Only’, AO.

More info:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/21/gta_reclassified/

So this means that in the eyes of US ratings a developer is responsible for every piece of code in games that they release.

How exactly are they going to enforce this? The adult scenes were removed from the flow of the final game, so they don’t feature unless you use the mod, so how were the ratings office to know that it exists? And how are they going to ensure that this doesn’t happen in the future? Maybe ‘Play With The Teletubbies’ has a hackable set of scenes with the fur off but no-one’s found it yet…

This is very much a new-media problem. If you buy a book you’re not likely to discover hidden pages after you’ve read it a few times, and this only confirms the status of electronic media as being unlike previous industry models. People are constantly comparing games to the film industry, but the level of interaction and the ability for players to change the events means that developers are going to be increasingly out of control of the content.

I don’t know whether the unlocked scenes are in any way interactive (‘press alternate keys to pump’…?), it’s more likely that they are cut-scenes, premade but then left on the cutting-room floor. And there again we have the film industry metaphors leaking through.

It’s entirely possible that there is code lurking in many games to make the deaths of enemies more bloody (except perhaps in the case of the brilliantly enjoyable God Of War UK link US link where it’s unlikely that they could make the deaths of the mythological creatures any more violent!) but instead a toned-down version was eventually used. If these could be used instead, by applying a mod, does that mean that the game should have been rated differently?

I use the example of violence here on purpose. Partly because I’m British and our rating system views sex as natural, although still adult, so doesn’t go insane if a nipple accidentally slips out on national television (we all giggle and feel embarassed for the performer), but sees violence as something to be kept away from children where possible. I also use it as an example because it’s easier to draw a line between mild and extreme violence.

Beside the point of levels of acceptable sexual content (is flirting sexual? When does something become ‘adult’?) we also have the decision about the responsibility of developers to examine the ways that their code can be used. Clearly in this case explicit scenes were simply unlocked, but this was still not available to your average user of the game but the really big question raised by this case is how much modification does a mod have to make before its results are no longer the responsibility of the developer? I think that this is going to be an increasing problem as the gaming industry grows and the games become ever-closer to being photorealistic.

who realised it was just another hallucination.
(click for bigger)

So there’s this boy, right. He’s always felt out of place. He wears big, think rimmed glasses, and he lives in a pretty miserable situation… But then he finds out he’s got magical powers! And he gets an owl! And he goes to magic school and learns that he’s destined to be a great magician!

I am, of course, writing about Neil Gaiman’s 1990 story ‘The Books Of Magic’, and the rest of the books in the series. Hell, it’s such a nice set-up it’s amazing that no-one’s blatantly ripped it off yet!

…What?

I’ve been accused of acting superior to Americans for posting about my pride in Britain’s handling of the recent bombings in London. My post had nothing to do with my thoughts about America, but apparently I’m not the only one who is annoyed that some Americans have been acting like this was ‘the British September 11th’. It wasn’t. The deaths are tragic, but there is no paradigm shift here, we’re not surprised, we’re not changing, and we’re not even really scared. I was on the phone last night arranging to visit a friend in a couple of weeks, travelling through central London, and the ‘danger’ didn’t even cross my mind.

Gia’s two posts sum up the British feelings to all this nicely:

Her first post on initial reactions to the bombings…

… and her second post in response to the way some Americans have been acting. It’s entitled ‘Terror Alert Level: More Beer!’ and the title alone speaks volumes about our feelings: it was a waste of life, but we are not going to change because of it. Our strength is in being British. Ask us for help and we’ll give it. Kill us and we’ll tell you to piss off.

Before I get more complaints: I am fortunate enough to know many lovely Americans and to know that the occasional weird response to these events isn’t happening to everyone over there.

Thanks to Sean from http://corfield.org for passing these links on to me.

Terrorism is supposed to be the method of the oppressed to get their message to the world, but it seems that even that has got lost in some darkened twist on post-modernism. The removal of the meaning from the act seems to have created a global aesthetic where violence is a self-fulfilling action, justifying itself by the damage it causes and not by the fulfillment of ideological goals.

We’ve lived through decades of attacks from the IRA. I found the footage on television today eerily familiar to those times. Admittedly there’s not been an attack on mainland Britain for a while now, but those memories are still clear. When I was growing up it seemed like every day there was a new bomb somewhere. I think as a nation we have become accustomed to terrorism in a way that the US perhaps has not.

I thought Blair gave a good speech, but I’m actually most impressed with an interview given by a barrister who was on one of the tube trains when it exploded. He was clearly in shock, but gave a good description of events. When asked the blatant ‘let’s get a sound bite’ question of how he felt about the people who did the attacks his word was ‘pity’. I thought it was really admirable that a man who has just walked past the bodies of his countrymen could muster the strength to give such a wise answer. I think his word is going to be my lasting memory of this event.

We are not a nation for raging anger in response to threats, there will be those that do, but as a majority we hold controlled, civilised life as the most important approach to the world. We solidify, we protect the things that we believe in more earnestly, and one of the things that the British really believe in is not making a spectacle of things. We get on with it and try not to make a fuss. We might be angry inside, but we have lived and died in such times before, and will most likely continue to do so for the rest of our lives. No ‘war on terror’ will change that. It’s a sad fact of life that today some friends and families won’t see the people they care about ever again, and all over some dispute that they most likely don’t care about and almost certainly have never had any meaningful involvement with. We will, as always, try to create equality in the world to attempt to protect ourselves from the extremists’ accusations, but there will always be people who do not like who we are, and who we have been, as a nation.

We accept that we have enemies, our nation always has done and almost certainly will do for the rest of our lifetimes, but we also defend the things that make us who we are as a group, and one of those things is composure, clear-headedness, and the organised and responsible reaction to acts performed against us. Terrorism like this will not make us less British; it only demonstrates how singular as a nation we are in times of crisis. We are singular and we are diverse. This attack strikes at black, white, young, old, those who live here, and those who are visiting, Christian, Muslim, Jew, and all others alike. We are the British, and we do not change to the whim of aggressors.

Ultraviolence – I Am Destructor video

I told you that there would be more from that thing I was playing with yesterday!

The blobby effect is made by hand-drawing a graphic animation loop of around 18 frames with the blobs moving around on the spot. This is easier if you turn on the onion-skin option (the button that looks like two little squares on top of each-other just below the timeline). You then put the loop into a new graphic-clip and put another keyframe on the timeline 18 frames later with the blob-loop motion tweened to a new position. Put an empty keyframe after the end of the loop (frame 19) otherwise it will start again. Copy those frames and into a new layer and move them along one, so the first frame of the motion-tween is now frame 2. Repeat this, staggering the first frame by one until you’ve got an effect you like. I chose to do eighteen layers for eighteen frame clips, but that’s just a personal choice.

If you have a look at the clip now it will look pretty silly. Because the clips all start and end in identical positions, the individual frames lay directly on top of each-other so there is no effect of movement. To fix this, go through and individually move around the beginning and end positions of the graphic clips. It’s best to keep the beginning points close to each-other if you want a clear ‘point of origin’ for the blobs, but you can spread out the end points over a big distance. Really there’s no hard set rule here, so just do whatever looks good to you.

Now you’ve got a graphic clip of the blobs moving in a very pleasing multilayered way across the screen. For interest you might want to go down into the original blob loop and draw a few strings of dots, the main blob dividing, or to fill in some of them with colours. Experimentation is the key here. I think I’ve got a lot to learn about this technique, but it’s certainly fun to play with!

too how window anybody follow
hat out allowed filled description edge
surely cousin favour evening repeated

I’m not sure I want to know what happened in the first evening DS was favoured by its cousin, let alone the repeat…

Inspired by my tutorial earlier in the week, here’s a new game:

Chase The Cheese!

I’ll post more about the making of this in a few days time. Have fun!

Click for bigger!

I have a friend who teaches at a school. One day my girlfriend and I were visiting her in Weymouth and I decided it was time to buy some new army boots because my old ones, that had travelled with me for many many years, had finally become too worn out. There is an army surplus shop in town so we went and bought some new boots, a nice pair of British para boots. Lovely stuff. Obviously, I now no longer needed the boots that I was wearing.

My friend is an Art teacher, so, to give her students a break from the normal still-life objects, I gave her my boots under strict instructions to remove the laces (which would be just too annoying to draw). She took them to school with her and put them out. She was asked ‘Miss, where on earth did you get those boots from?’ to which she naturally replied that her friend Mata had bought a new pair and given the old ones to her. I am told that one of the girls in the class was very excited about these being my boots so runs across the room and kisses them.

Jamie; you are clearly barking mad, but I think that’s lovely. So here’s a ‘hello’ to you for being a complete loon!

Here’s an massively evil game for you to play: Su Doku

If you’ve not played it yet then prepare to lose a lot of time…

It’s got very simple rules:

Each row must have the numbers from 1 to 9 in it

Each column must have the numbers from 1 to 9 in it

Each of the nine 3×3 boxes must have the numbers from 1 to 9 in them

… And that’s it.

Just click on the sample problems to have a go. If you’re new then I strongly suggest the ‘easy’ ones!

(You’ll need Java enabled for the games to run, but if you’re techy enough to know about that then you’ll probably be ready for that anyway.)