Mike and Ike are at Beerfest
Mike and Ike are at Beerfest, originally uploaded by spinneyhead.
Because Ike hasn’t left the flat in months and I’d never hear the end of it if he didn’t make it to Beerfest.
Monthly archives: November 2010
Mike and Ike are at Beerfest, originally uploaded by spinneyhead.
Skeleton Boy in Space
Skeleton Boy in Space, originally uploaded by spinneyhead.
Random sketchy goodness to distract me from the mediocre comedians at Beerfest. Charlotte has the original. She’s hoarding my art card sketches, I’m worried she’s going to kill me and sell them because they shoot up in value.
The sorry tale the GMP blimp
Greater Manchester Police had a blimp they used for surveillance. Sadly it didn’t work so well in bad weather, so now all the equipment has been scrapped or repurposed. I wish I’d known about it whilst they were still using it.
The report is structured to make us angry at the waste of money, but I can’t help thinking they’re trying too hard. Certainly, GMP lost some money on it, but they managed to recoup some of the blimp’s £80,000 cost when they sold it, and bits of the equipment are still being used. Without the proper figures we don’t know how much money was wasted on the idea, but it may well be less than the £4,400 per flight the M.E.N. claims.
RIP Dino De Laurentiis
The film producer has died aged 91.
His IMDB page. He gave us Barbarella and Flash Gordon, amongst many others. That’s a pretty good legacy.
HUMINT
For research purposes, the Wikipedia entry on HUMan INTelligence in espionage.
HUMINT, a syllabic abbreviation of the words HUMan INTelligence, refers to intelligence gathering by means of interpersonal contact, as opposed to the more technical intelligence gathering disciplines such as SIGINT, IMINT and MASINT. NATO defines HUMINT as “a category of intelligence derived from information collected and provided by human sources.”[1] Typical HUMINT activities consist of interrogations and conversations with persons having access to pertinent information.
Now available on the Kindle
If you own a Kindle, or have one of the many devices which can run Kindle software, you can now subscribe to Spinneyhead and have it delivered directly to your reader. It’s £1.99 a month. If you want to try it out, the first fourteen days are free.
Get off my road!
There’s something about news items featuring cycles, particularly stories with a bearing on safety, which brings out the idiots. John Paul Allen was hit and killed by a car on Liverpool Road in Eccles. Which is a tragedy in itself, so why must the morons pile on in the reports comment thread just to compound it? There’s a load of the usual rubbish- Red light jumping, riding on the pavement, etc.- cited even though nothing in the report suggests Allen was doing any of these things. Yet when someone says that perhaps the driver was to blame (statistically more likely by 3 to 1 and almost certainly the truth as revealed in other comments) one of the reactionaries gets defensive and starts frothing and complaining about being victimised.
A complaint rattled out repeatedly by some of the haters is that cyclists don’t pay Road Tax, so they don’t deserve to be on the road. Nobody pays Road Tax, it doesn’t exist. Roads are funded out of Council Tax and general taxation. Even I, currently earning so little I don’t pay any income tax, fund road building through Council Tax and duty on essential items such as beer. Demonstrating their continued incomprehension, one of the commenters suggests that even though Road Tax isn’t real he’s allowed to cite it because he thinks it’s real. Sometimes I’d like to be able to reach through my monitor and slap people.
Another thing which annoys me about reporting of fatalities on the road is the coyness about what happened- the cyclist was “in collision with a Honda Civic”. Who hit whom? “In collision with” makes it sound like the bike rode into the car, when it’s almost certainly the other way around. I understand that there may be a wish to spare the grieving family further pain (in which case why allow the nasty, anti-cycling, “he was asking for it” tone in the comments?) and the paper may not be allowed to give out details which could prejudice a future conviction. But I’d like to see blame in these accidents correctly apportioned. Occasionally it will have been the fault of the cyclist, but many, many times more it will have been the driver who made a mistake which killed another person whilst they could walk away.
As the Government’s transport policy stands to make us all, but primarily cyclists and pedestrians, less safe on the roads, we need to more loudly point out that drivers are not the victims they claim to be and they should get a sense of proportion.
Press release: Manchester author creates a dark Green future for the city
Manchester based author Ian Pattinson imagines a Green future for Manchester after a cataclysmic war rips apart Europe and destroys the United States in Sounds of Soldiers. Returning to the city after five years on the continent reporting on the war, Robert Jones sets out to reconnect with friends and family and find out how life has changed away from the front line. Presented as a travelogue with flashbacks to the war, Robert finds recycling projects, a new sense of community and shadows and ghosts reaching across the Channel for him.
The novella was written as a reaction to the narrow focus of technothrillers and the overblown rhetoric coming from the United States since the 2008 election. “There are a lot of books which create ludicrous wars to make a, usually rightwing, political point. They always concentrate on the politicians and military personnel, the USA always wins and everything returns to normal afterwards. I used
to read a lot of them, but they often left me unsatisfied. I wanted to create a story which looked at the effect on civilians, where there was an aftermath and where the USA didn’t win. Some of the wilder commentary coming out of the States before and since the election of Barack Obama gave me a basis for the war- what if a US government believed some of this stuff and went overboard in reacting to it?”
Sounds of Soldiers is available as a paperback and ebook and can be purchased online at Amazon. Details of all the formats it is available in can be found at http://www.spinneyhead.co.uk/books/
High resolution copies of the book cover image can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/spinneyhead/5123539218/
Zombiedefense.org
Everything you need to know about fighting zombies, including reviews of multiple potential weapons.
How to build an AK47
Not, as I’d hoped, from scratch. How to build an AK47 from a kit. It would seem there are factories in former Soviet countries dismantling AK47 assault rifles and then shipping the bits to the United States where hobby gunsmiths can rebuild them (without the full auto trigger group, that’s illegal).
Lettering with an Ames Guide
An Ames Guide is an odd little plastic device used by architects and comic book letterers to help create consistent guide lines for their lettering. I’ve got one, and used it on a comics project ages ago. I wasn’t satisfied with the results and have lettered on the computer ever since, though that’s less than perfect as well. I may go old school again next time I try my hand at comics, and I shall refer back to these guidelines by Dustin Harbin on how to do it properly.
via Drawn
Trailer Time
Sucker Punch.
Bangkok Knockout.
No Strings Attached.
Friends With Benefits.
Did someone send the same script out twice for those two?
links for 2010-11-06
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Porcupines prefer sex toys, and moose get off by rubbing their antlers on trees. While scientists debate the evolutionary reason for masturbation, there's no doubt that humans are not alone in their self-pleasure from time to time. Here are some other creatures that partake in solo sex.
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A US company called LaserMotive has broken the world record for keeping a helicopter aloft, by powering it with energy from a laser aimed from the ground.
links for 2010-11-05
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The traits that once made such Renaissance men appear old-fashioned—their scholarly followings, their steady price levels—have now become strong selling points. Although the recession hurt every art category last year, Old Master values at auction only fell 12% last year, compared to a 60% drop for contemporary art, according to Clare McAndrew, a Dublin-based art economist. Old Masters also have a history of rebounding quickly from downturns: As an investment asset, older art yielded a 6.2% compound annual return over the past decade, besting the negative 1.4% for the S&P 500 for the same period, according to the Mei Moses Annual Old Master Art Index, which tracks repeat sales of thousands of artworks at auction and compares the trajectory of art prices to other financial barometers.
Is Dan Brown scripting debate in the House of Lords? 5
Charles Stross highlights a very odd speech in the House of Lords on Monday night–
For the past 20 weeks I have been engaged in a very strange dialogue with the two noble Lords, in the course of which I have been trying to bring to their attention the willing availability of a strange organisation which wishes to make a great deal of money available to assist the recovery of the economy in this country. For want of a better name, I shall call it foundation X.
It all sounds very familiar, as I read the ramblings of at least one deluded conspiracy theorist. Variations of the old conspiracy theorist canard, “The experts say I’m wrong, but I know secrets the experts aren’t privy to.” are deployed at least twice, making it all quite hard to believe.
Stross says that it all sounds very Robert Ludlum
It makes you wonder what other strange stuff is uttered under Parliamentary privilege which we don’t get to hear about.
links for 2010-11-02
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Arkhalyk is very close to Prypyat (ghost-town near Chornobyl) according to the architectural typology and the period of construction, which raises to the maximum the general likeness between these two towns.
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Beyond Neptune lies the Kuiper Belt, a massive asteroid belt twenty times the size of the one between Mars and Jupiter. In this frigid, unforgiving environment, organic molecules might still survive, suggesting life's building blocks are everywhere in the universe.
Sounds of Soldiers
Five years ago the United States began to self destruct. As momentum toward a nuclear civil war grew at home, US covert kill teams- and then the military- rampaged through Europe attacking imaginary enemies. The USA found itself at war with former allies. Great Britain closed its borders and stayed mostly neutral.
Robert Jones didn’t get on the train out of Paris after it was bombed. He chose to stay on the continent and make a name for himself covering the conflict with reports on his blog. He saw the first blows, witnessed nuclear explosions lighting up the Mediterranean and was present for the final acts.
Now the borders have been reopened and Robert Jones is back from the war. He has returned to Manchester to reconnect with friends and family, to investigate the changes the city has gone through and to find out what life was like away from the warzone. He’s striving for a new, peaceful life, but there are still some ghosts and secrets from his time on the continent which are ready to come back and shake it up.
A novella about what happens when a technothriller goes horribly wrong, Sounds of Soldiers is part travelogue from the future, part war story satire, and takes a look at how the civilians usually ignored by the big war fantasies cope and survive.
Sounds of Soldiers is available from Amazon and Smashwords.
links for 2010-11-01
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Archaeologists are "excavating" a Roman city the size of Pompeii in the West Midlands without turning a spade or disturbing a single brick. With a range of experimental remote-sensing techniques, they are delving under the rolling countryside of Shropshire and piecing together a detailed matrix of the streets and buildings of Wroxeter.
Not only can researchers now tell what Viroconium Cornoviorum looked like when it finally subsided under the soil in the Dark Ages, but through the new process of "time slicing", an underground application of radar, they are able to chart the city's rise and fall during its 400 year history by sampling buried remains at a range of different depths.