Aquarionics

In memory of family and friends who have lost the battle with cancer; and in support of the ones who continue to conquer it! Donate to a cancer research charity, like this one.

Post on your livejournal or journal, and feel all virtuous about doing it as well, if you like, but don’t assume that posting this kind of thing is anything other than pointless.

some percentage of people will not bother to do this, and that’s fine, because they cannot afford it, or give somewhere else, or just don’t want to.

Have a sanctimonious day.

(This is a commentary on a meme you may not have seen)

Ah, the first daily update fail. I went to a LARP event. I meant to queue some posts up for the weekend, but then I had a week of doing stuff every evening. Anyway, I had a weekend of roleplaying, politicing, dancing, wandering about in the snow in a kilt, and not enough sleep. Therefore I got home, rebooted this server (May have to reimage or something, something is screwed somewhere) had a bath in the hope that my shoulders would stop hurting, and went to bed.

Because this was somewhere around 8pm, I then woke up somewhere around five. Clever Aquarion.

Day Zero: Aquarion loses his Halifax bank card (1) whilst in Cambridge. He reports it as lost.

Aquarion is sad.

Day Five: Aquarion gets a new bank card (2). He activates and signs it.

Day Seven: Someone phones Halifax with the old bank card (1). Halifax cancel the new bank card (2).

Day Eight: Aquarion attempts to get some cash out of an ATM. This fails, and his card is retained. Aquarion learns of the events of day Seven, and is not happy. Halifax deign to give him some of the money from his account in cash form, and issue a new bank card.

Aquarion is Miffed.

Day Ten: Aquarion gets a new bank card (3). He activates and signs it.

Day Eleven: Aquarion attempts to use the bank card at a supermarket. This fails, though he gets to keep his card this time. Aquarion learns that when they cancelled card (2), they also reset his PIN.

Aquarion is Upset.

Aquarion is of the opinion that if you’re going to do this, you should FUCKING MENTION IT AT SOME FUCKING POINT. And says this, paraphrased. Aquarion asks when he will receive his new PIN.

Halifax explain that with the postal strike, they really can’t forecast that.

Aquarion is Angry.

Most of what I’m doing right now is working, and due to the nature of my working, it’s dull. I’m mostly writing unit tests. And because it’s work, it’s occasionally awesome and fun, challanging and occasionally frustrating. We are, however, looking for PHP dev to work in our Kings Cross office, so if you know any PHP devs looking for a new job, fire an email at nicholas care of trutap dot net. I do hope to be able to shout about stuff we’re doing soon.

Because I’ve moved to the place with the most integrated transportation network in the country, it’s obvious that the next thing I need to do is learn to drive. Since my last experience I haven’t actually had any driving lessons at all (Well, not true. I got one while in Bedford, but taking a two hour lunch break meant I missed my bus home and didn’t get back to Letchworth until 22:00. I didn’t repeat the experience), But I’ve just signed up with Go Red for a lesson on the 1st August. Now to pass my theory test for the third, and ideally final, time.

One of the reasons for the above is my current habit of going LARPing, and the fact that lugging all my stuff on trains is annoying. Also, National Rail always seem to schedule line work over me coming back from Maelstrom, which is irritating. A car would make getting there – as well as Treasure Trap in Cambridge – easier. This weekend is another Maelstrom weekend, which should be fun.

This means that I’m going to not only miss LUGRadio Live, which annoyed me, but when it became the very last LR event ever, it just seemed like malice. I’ve listened to, and enjoyed, the show from the first episode, and while I’ve recently not been much part of the community, I’m proud of the bits I have been part of. LUGRadio is a staggering achievement, and I hope someone picks up the idea and does it half as well as the various generations of Gents have over the years. I don’t know what they’re planning to do with the site after it’s over, but if it fractures into a few dozen local LUGRadio divisions – such as was originally the plan for the series, I believe – it will be interesting.

Still not completed GTA4 yet.

Most of my “home” coding right now is being done on AqWiki, which is now running a community wiki for Maelstrom fans as well as one for an Ikariam alliance – pushing the under-developed macro system to the limit with treaty managers and databases. I’m also working on Lampstand, which is an IRC bot again for Maelstrom fans. It’s based on the Twisted framework, which is something of a run-up all of its own, and eventually I hope to integrate it into a django-powered community site.

London has elected Boris Johnson mayor of London.

This is Not Good. However, I am – from now – reserving judgement until he actually manages to screw up. Clock starts in three and a third hours.

New design is New, and is light and airy and calm, which is nice. It’s also simple, which is even nicer. I’ve still got to fix the right hand column, which is a bit texty and stark. I’ve also got to fix my admin system, which is displaying all text boxes at 40 characters wide, which is annoying. New things include the replaced Gallery (Well, part of it. Actual viewing of sets and pictures is still handed over to Flickr, but that’ll change when I get another burst of arsedness)

As I mentioned, I have bought GTA4, and a 360 to play it on. I fail at resistance to shiny. However, I haven’t had much of a chance to play on it due to going places and doing things. I shall fix this now.

I went to GameCamp London, which was fun. There are photos on Flickr and in the gallery.

Something that interests me. I’ve been used as a psychological study in a marketing consultation report. Or, actually, in 2004, someone took my Names article (Itself three years old at that point, and now seven) and used it as a basis for part of Three Dreams: New Qualitative Analysis in the Dreamworld.

It says:

With that in mind, let us turn to our final sample of data. It is drawn from the website of a British man who calls himself Aquarion. The site appears to have been up and running for some four years and in that time Aquarion has added a good deal of content, principally diary entries, links and opinion pieces. The part of the website that will interest us is a passage of text from a page entitled “Article – Names”. It reads as follows:

(Contents of Names article follows)

EM and DA will help us get to grips with this text. The EM emphasis on personal accountability helps us see that Aquarion is not simply expressing a preference for one or another form of address. More than that, he orientates to his preference as problematic and his account of himself is organised so as to anticipate and deal with those problems. For instance, in line 40, Aquarion signs off “Yours in total sincerity”, clearly an acknowledgement of the problem of deliberate insincerity – deception – as a feature of life online. In lines 9-14 Aquarion justifies himself with reference to some previous bad experience that was the result of his failure to adequately conceal his ‘real’ identity from troublemakers (notice the emphasis on “ever” in line 12, which stresses the severity of the problem he encountered without going into details). His allusion to this experience additionally serves the very useful purpose of rhetorically categorising Aquarion in a socially recognisable group of ‘innocent victims’ and distancing him from a contrasting group of internet wrong-doers. Moreover, in lines 23-24, Aquarion offers the conspicuously rational criterion of public recognisability as the reason for his preferred title (and notice how that distinguishes him from, and opposes him to, the sort of person who would go online for the express purpose of achieving invisibility and hiding from public view). In lines 5-8 and his postscript of lines 42-43 he presents himself as someone who follows “the rules” of service providers by exposing his “real name”, even when doing so is to his own disadvantage and even though the rules are conventionally not enforced. Finally, we should not overlook his ironic self-description of line 38: “Aquarion is a fairly mucked up person” – amongst other things, a display of self-knowledge and transparency that trades on the common-sense idea that someone genuinely “mucked up” would be unlikely to advertise the fact.

At the same time, interleaved with Aquarion’s various acknowledgements of the problem of deception are signs that he orientates to precisely the opposite issue: the idea that the internet offers as its unique and characteristic benefit the possibility of a new self. Insights from DA help us to see how this is achieved. For instance, he makes effective use of techniques of normalisation and nominalisation, both of which are thoroughly researched and discussed in the DA literature (e.g., see Potter, 1996). On line 1 he uses inverted commas and upper-case letters to offer the self-reflective question of “Who is Aquarion” as the sort of question that persons in cyberspace might routinely encounter. He repeats the technique on line 29. It is not just that he personally prefers not to feel confused about who he ‘really’ is but in fact (he suggests) “Who Do I Want To Be Today …?” is a common “problem” of a known “variety” that the reading audience could be expected to recognise. Moreover, notice the wording and structure of “Who Do I Want To Be Today…?”. Aquarion could have offered an alternative, something like “Who Am I?”, for example, but in fact he is hearably drawing on the culturally available resource that is the Microsoft strapline “Where do you want to go today?”. In so doing, he normalises “Who Do I Want To Be Today…?” as a problem of the technology and therefore not unique to the “mucked up” individual. Finally, we cannot conclude even a superficial analysis of Aquarion’s “article” without reference to the absolutely fascinating phenomenon that is “$REALME” (line 28). This ingenious linguistic construction could only happen in textual form (there is no oral equivalent) and indeed only makes sense in the context of the net. It consists of three elements, all working together. There is the use of exclusively upper-case letters, the welding-together of ‘real’ and ‘me’ to form a single word, and the preface of “$”. Away from cyberspace, “$” reliably means ‘dollars’ but in the context of the internet, signs such as ‘$’, ‘?’, ‘#’ and even ‘*’ take on a new and flexible range of functions that are unique to the digital environment and therefore function as metonyms for it. The combined use of these three elements serves to ironise Aquarion’s ‘real self’ and display it as no less constructed and contingent than the online version which is known as ‘Aquarion’. That is, had Aquarion simply inserted his ‘real’ name in place of “$REALME”, readers might have had difficulty accepting that the two identities are different but equal and more or less interchangeable. There would have been the risk that readers would feel that Aquarion’s ‘real’ name was in fact the original and authentic ‘self’ that he ought to use, while the name ‘Aquarion’ looked, in contrast, like more of a costume or a disguise. However, his ingenious and imaginative construction “$REALME” resembles an off-line ‘real’ name even less than “Aquarion” and so the reading audience is helped and encouraged to understand “Aquarion” as an adequately genuine and authentic ID.

What is the upshot for marketing? Clearly, the number and range of ways that it’s possible to exploit the dream of Transformation far exceeds traditional ideas of purchasing products so as to become a muscular hero or raving beauty, although those functions of the dream are still going strong. The lesson offered to us by Aquarion is that there are certain aspects of contemporary social life in which consumers themselves will put Transformation and Alter Identity on the agenda. The point, then, is to achieve some insight into why and how that happens, and to understand both the triggers and barriers so that we can offer products and services that help consumers do what they are attempting to do of their own accord. For example, the Aquarion text suggests that people are going to respond well to any product or service that helps them take advantage of the internet’s opportunities for self re-invention while simultaneously facilitating their display of themselves as one of the ‘good guys’. People are evidently looking for ways to mark themselves as honest and transparent, not despite but because they also want the facility to be anything but. Moreover, it may be that “Who Do I Want To Be Today?” articulates a consumer need that’s even more relevant and genuine than “Where do I want to go?” and this is certainly something that would merit some more research. Evidently, thinking of the internet as a ‘space’ around which consumers travel – ‘surfing’ to places of interest and eventually returning ‘home’ – is only one possible metaphor for what people are actually doing online. It might be even more relevant and useful to provide people with metaphors that facilitate identity play, freedom and work on the self as well as those that facilitate travel and exploration.

This amuses me. Partly because of the seemingly genuine attempt to work out how “online people” think, partly the outsiders viewpoint that puts a remarkable emphasis on my throw-away phrase that includes a pop-culture (or, at least, pop-geek-culture) reference.

But mostly that the article, which was part of a sequence of me slowly over-analysing myself and my identity until it (the identity) completely collapsed under the weight of my own theories, has itself been over-analysed, and was apparently presented at a conference!

I do hope someone took the presentation and dissected it into little pieces with logological scalpels, that would make my day.

Of course, I’m also interested in the very fact that Ms. Lowes took it upon herself not to contact me at all when she found this goldmine of pseudo-intellectual claptrap and used it to base her paper on. However, since I’ve just reprinted a large swathe of it, I should probably avoid throwing stones.

I only found it because I did a search for my old usenet sig, ‘Yours in Total Sincerity’.

Traditions are fun. Every two years for the past ten I’ve run though Robert Hayden’s Geek Code test (which hasn’t changed in that time). The rules are simple: I run it without looking at previous years tests. That’s it. I haven’t put it in this entry, because it’s slightly clearer as a text file

See my brief flirtation with Babylon 5 and X files! Watch as my dream of owning a mac comes true! Watch the ebb and flow of my housing situation! it’s like ten years of history in condensed form.

It’s a little scary.

From complications arising from complications arising from things that could have, should have… whatever. Jasper the dog died this morning, of old age in dog years. This was a dog who was once scared of a toy sheep that was walking towards him, who learnt that lakes weren’t as solid as they looked by attempting to go look at a duck, who repeatedly forgot that it is difficult to see sudden hills when running too fast, who fell into the swimming pool an hour before we picked him up as a puppy, who…

A shaggy dog story:

About five years ago, maybe six, I was living at home with my parents. It would have been between Uni and moving to Cambridge. It was summer, the time of the Annual Fictional Town Of Paddock Wood Carnival, which traditionally is held every year and involves scouts on lorries dressed as cavemen. Or the french. Or other such things. Anyway, the carnival lead up to the field on the road where we lived, where there was a traditional travelling fair, with big wheels and ghost trains and throwing darts to win diseased goldfish and constant rumours that the travellers running the fair were going to kill us in our sleep. One particularly pernicious rumour was of “Big Carl” who was arrested five years ago for slitting the throat of a local, but had gotten out of jail and was back for his revenge. I heard this rumour every year from ages eight through to eighteen, “Big Carl”’s name changing every time.

On the Sunday of the carnival, as the fair were packing up to go home, I was asked to walk the dog, which I did. Because it was a weekend, and I couldn’t walk him around the local field because of the fair, I decided to take him on a long walk. Across the local field, over the main road, around the footpaths around the corn fields, and so I put him on his lead and we wander around for a bit. Like this:

View Larger Map

(Yay technology)

Note, for reference, that Church Road on that map is fairly busy, and the bit of it near us tend towards blind corners.

Also notice how the line ends and doesn’t return. Along that hedge I let Jasper off his lead to run around a bit, which he proceeded to do. When we got to that point of the line, however, another dog came out with its owner, it wasn’t on a lead either.

It was a greyhound.

Jasper and the Greyhound had a staring contest for a bit, but the greyhound gave in first, and bolted for the hedge, so, of course, Jasper followed, chasing after the greyhound like a militarised bunny-rabbit.

At this point the world was awfully quiet. Birds twittered quietly in the trees, until they ran out of batteries in their mobiles. All was calm. All was piece. A beautiful day in the Garden of England.

The owner of the greyhound, at this point, got as far as me.

“What has your fucking mutt done with my Greyhound?” it asked. The greyhound was sleek, tall, slim, apparently intelligent and could run a long way. Also, it was proof positive that dogs do not take after their owners. The owner – whose name I never caught, it may have been buried in the stream of invective poured at me over the next ten minutes – demonstrated his annoyance that my “fucking mutt” had kidnapped his pure-bred greyhound, and demanded to know where it (the mutt) had taken it (the greyhound).

I stood around and shouted Jasper’s name for a while, ignored the owner (Who ensured me he would sue for damages. He hadn’t asked for my name, or the dogs, or any identifying information) and worried about the – to me – more pressing issue of (a) Where my pet mobile mop had run off too and (b) Exactly how was I going to explain this to my parents? Eventually the owner stalked off in the direction the dogs had gone, and I made the decision that I was going to have to face the music.

On the way back I considered the benefits of running away myself, what we could possibly do next (Zoom out on that map above, they could run though fields for hours and we’d never find them) and wishing we’d got some kind of homing pigeon instead. I crossed the (now fairly busy) main road, and went home. By this time the fair had packed up and left, and I went diagonally across the local field.

In the middle of the field, standing by my oldest little brother, looking for all the world like he’d wondered exactly where I’d gone for the past hour… was, obviously the dog. Who had finished chasing the greyhound, crossed the main road and gone back home.

Jasper. b 1995 – d 2008. Just.

Another family christmas comes and wanders off into the sunset. I’m heading back to London tomorrow.

My parents’ current policy of not buying a “big” present unless we chose one doesn’t fit with my desire to be suprised, and I have a horrible feeling that, once again, it’s going to end up being combined with my birthday present at the end of the month, and be something for my new flat. Last time this was a tumble dryer, and it was all so domestic I wanted to hide under the duvet until I was five again and got a puppet theatre for christmas.

I can see the puppet theatre from here, actually. I’m in my middle brother’s bedroom – since he’s moved to Thailand to teach English as a Foreign Language for a while, which is suitable since he pretty much speaks English as a foreign language… – which used to be my room until I moved out (for the final time, to go to live in Cambridge with WingedKami & Ccooke. I’m wondering if I can put the theatre in my new flat somewhere. Depends on the flat, I suppose.

My attempts to short-circuit my flat-hunting by arranging viewings this week for next week have themselves been curtailed by estate agents having the work ethic of a retired dead battery, and not working at all this week. Not a single one of the agents with flats I’m interested in has been open all week.

For christmas I got: Chocolate (gone), Jelly Beans (gone), other sweets (gone), Kendal Mint Cake (freaky. Don’t ask why), A USB Coffee Lukewarmity Maintainace Pad and associated Coffee Mug, Sonic & Mario’s at the Olympics for Wii, A Bathrobe and a Radio Duck Which You Turn On By Exorcisting Its Head Which Is Faintly Freaky.

Oh, and bath stuff.

And, of course, socks.

My dad has introduced me to the fantasy books of Steven Erikson, which are Fantasy books of the deep/complicated/multiplotlined type. I’ve attempted to introduce my mum to Animal Crossing (My mum has a DS, Nintendo’s Blue Ocean thing in action) and I managed to distract my (9/10 & 12 Year old) cousins with Wii Sports for almost ten minutes at a time…

Oh, and I redesigned Epistula’s view system, started the new statistics package, cleaned up the comment posting and did a metric fuckton of work on Piracy Inc., not least working out what motivates monkeys.

• Recharge brain.

• Laundry

  Methods to do this:

• Mindless flash games.
• Mystery Case File (Which is basically “find these objects in this picture” done on computers, but done with skill and artistry. Plus: three quid.)
• Bioshock (Put on hold because I broke my mouse playing it)
• Catching up on unread news items brought on by spending last weekend Maelstroming and this week busy.
• Writing letters from my Maelstrom character to other people’s
• Doing laundry.

• Extreme Peggle.