Archive for August, 2006

Sad news about the troubles at Humbrol, Airfix and Heller.

Read the BBC story for more details: Sticky future for kitmaker Airfix

Last night’s local news had a piece about some vandals doing something stupid and dangerous. The whole piece was hijacked for an attack on YouTube because the stupid criminals filmed themselves and put it on the web. YouTube was lumped into a "dangerous part of the web" where you shouldn’t go like you wouldn’t go to "the dangerous part of town after dark". I’m not a big YouTube user but the journalist’s trying to peg the blame for an act of stupidity on a web site is just a bit lazy. They too showed the footage the vandals had filmed doesn’t that move them into the bad part of town where you can see nasty things? I wonder if more people watched the footage on the news or on the web.

Vandalism and stupid and dangerous actions happened long before the Internet. Now though stupid criminals film themselves and post it in a public place for everyone to see including the police. This kind of criminal used to be hard to catch. There was little evidence unless they were caught in the act. Now they film the prosecution’s evidence for them. As the old adage goes don’t shoot the messenger.

The Lover Archetype

This Follows on from: Characters on the Couch (Part 7). The first part can be found at: Characters on the Couch (Part 1).

"I only have eyes for you."

Lovers are evangelical in their promotion and focus on relationships, sensuality and pleasure. They hold truthfulness and commitment dear. Harmonious relationships and emotional involvement are important to them. They seek intimacy, deep love and passion. Sensuous beauty appeals to their aesthetic side. Ultimately they want to find love and give love.

Their dark side is obsession, envy, jealousy and Puritanism. They are the preying mantises, the femme fatale preying on others.

Aphrodite (Greek Goddess) and Freya (Norse goddess) are both Lover archetypes. Delilah (Biblical temptress), the Sirens (Greek Legend) and Cleopatra (Egyptian Queen) are all shadow characters of the archetype. Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell both play lovers in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Not all Lovers are women – Michael Caine’s Alfie is a Lover. They often come in pairs like Romeo and Juliet. Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart’s characters in Casablanca cannot easily be separated in our consciousness no matter how tragic their parting. Some portrayals of Guinevere cast her as a Lover and soma as a Ruler.

Tags:
writing

I’ve been meaning to have a play with the terrain functions in Vue’s Python. Finally found the time and wrote two scripts that use most of the related features.

Two scripts that allow you to work with a terrain by exporting it as a CSV file that
can be edited in a spreadsheet and then importing it back into Vue.

Select a terrain and then run terraintocsv.py. A file called terraindata.csv will be saved in the directory you put the script in.

Edit the CSV file in your prefered spreadsheet or text editor. Save a CSV file over the original
terraindata.csv

Go back to Vue. With the original terrain selected run the csvtoterrain.py and the altered
CSV file will be loaded and used to set the terrains altitudes.

Download: terraintocsv.zip

Tags: impworks
vue
python
cg
3d

Glad I’m inside it’s throwing it down outside. Even a bit of thunder and lightning although it sounded like it was a reasonable distance away. Need to crack on with the current section of the Noir Fairy Tale so I can dump the hero back into the real world and have the same storm soak him for a third time.

Back from visiting friends for a BBQ yesterday. Weather held off except for one shower. Great to catch up with friends scattered across the country. Did some writing on the train. Not a huge amount but enough to feel like current WIPs are still moving. Wiped out so I’m going to get an early night.

This made me laugh – Lookwell an early 1990s US sitcom pilot is on YouTube. Vaguely Police Squadish.

Found on Kung Fu Monkey Blog

As I said when blogging about Plutons a short while ago the whole Pluto thing really has all the elements of a good West Wing plot. The hijaking of the process to demote Pluto out of the planetary big league after the intelligent compromise that was the Plutons plan was killed off is by itself a plot worthy of the West Wing. Where before I thought Toby wouldn’t care about the situation or would see it as a pointless distraction from serious things I can see him being really upset – he’d now failed a test he passed at the age of 7 because he knew there were 9 planets but now there were 8. It would give him something to be grumpy about. Sam’s hopes would be dashed after he’d enjoyed the new word “Pluton” “Pl-ooo-ton”. CJ would need briefing and would still put her foot in it somehow. Leo would be dealing with a real situation. Josh would be trying to find a way to sort it out. The President would be ridiculing the new definition of a planet because at least 3 other planets in the solar system appear to fail it including Earth.

Ragnarok Issue 50 landed through my door today with articles on wargaming Ragnarok, combat engineering for Dirtside 2, a scenario for Space Vixens From Mars, the Ottoman air fleet in Aeronef and the usual regular review columns. Steve F’s last issue as editor (thanks for the hard work over the last 10 issues Steve) before John and Sue W take on the mantle of editor.

Roll on the next fifty Ragnaroks. I’m off to read my copy and then come up with an article idea or two…

United Utilities finally restored my water supply to full service at 10:30AM on Wednesday. Thats over 7 days 2 hours after they cut it off while working in the road to replace pipes. Apparently getting one tap working at low pressure by Saturday afternoon meets their contractual obligations.

I’d compare their attitude to the attitude against that of the Transco staff a few years ago when replacing gas pipes. They too had a problem. Did they down tools at 5 when they knew they hadn’t done the job? No. They sent someone round telling us that they had a problem and then carried on working. At 1:30AM their engineer rang my doorbell to reconnect my supply and check it was working. Yes it was 1:30 in the morning and I was surprisd but I didn’t mind because they wanted to make sure everyone had a service as soon as possible.