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The Endearingly Weird World of Zsigupdated whenever I have nothing better to do January 01 So long, farewell...This blog has closed As noted earlier, I've moved this blog to its new home at http://philonoism.blogspot.com, after realising that I don't actually have to migrate the archives across - I just have to link here. So update your bookmarks, subscribe to the Atom feed if you'd like, and let us leave this poor little place, which will no longer be updating. See you over on Blogger. (Just in case you were wondering? It means "the love of knowledge".) December 23 Sadly Little-Known Yet Hilarious Biblical Personalities #2: The ShepherdsYes! It's another entry in the SL-KYHBP series! Believe me, you're as surprised as I am. Because it's almost Christmas, and because I need something to do while avoiding having to play "OK: The Board Game" with the rest of my family, I thought I'd bring you some thoughts on those poor members of the Nativity story, the shepherds. Up until now you've probably known them only as the kids with tea-towels on their heads, clutching woolly lambs while delivering wobbly lines in their primary school play. But no more! Let's look at the text... 8 And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11 Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. 12 This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger." 13 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, 15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about." 16 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. 17 When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. 19 But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. 20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told. --Luke 2:8-20 (NIV-UK) The next thing to notice is the angel's first words to the shepherds. "Do not be afraid," indeed. Sensible advice, I suppose, but you'd have thought he'd put in a bit more effort than that. He's just appeared surrounded by...well, very intense light is probably the nearest approximation we've got to "glory". The poor shepherds probably thought they were having an alien visitation or something. And the best he can come up with is "Ah, yeah, you know that absolute panic and mayhem thing you've got going on there? Yeah, cool it a bit, would you?" Incredible power? Yes. Sounds daft to us? Also yes. Probably the best part is the concept of "This will be a sign to you." Just in case you were asleep during that last paragraph - it's an angel. Soon to be joined by a complete choir, who have popped up, seemingly out of nowhere. Sounds like a pretty big sign to me! But no, it's nothing like that, it's "the baby is in a manger". True, that would be pretty unusual, although strange things happen in rural farming communities, but still, you'd expect something a little flashier than that. More to the point, imagine the shepherds' responses... "OK, it's in a manger. Let's go and see!" "Err...which manger?" "What d'you mean?" "We live in a small rural farming community. It's an agrarian-based economy. Everyone has at least one manger!" "Ah. But no-one else is going to have a baby in it as well!" Personally, I reckon verse 16 should read something more like "So they hurried off, and after a long night's searching, involving a couple of hilarious mishaps which led to their being chased down the street by an irate farmer waving a pitchfork, they eventually located the manger that the angels had been referring to." Even if that was what happened, though, the shepherds obviously didn't mind. They saw Jesus, they knew he was the Christ (something that meant rather a lot to Jews at the time), and they went back praising God. Mary and Joseph were probably more than a little surprised to have a bunch of hairy men smelling of sheep turning up to see their baby, but I think they knew more than anyone by this point that their kid was going to grow up to be something a bit more special than the average. God may well have a sense of humour in the way he works...but you can bet your life he knows what he's doing. December 22 The Christmas Movie - A Handy Step-By-Step GuideSo, you want to make a Christmas movie. This isn't a difficult process, and if it comes off, you too can rake in money by the bucketload - err, I mean, add to the magic of Christmas in the little hearts of millions around the globe. Bear in mind that it's also not a particularly new process...you've probably seen the classy offerings from five in the afternoons. This isn't a problem, though. Whereas in most genres of movie your aim is to add to the creativity and communal pool of ideas shared by filmmakers, Christmas entertainment absolutely thrives more than anything else on tradition. This means that far from having competition, you actually have a vast number of templates from which you can simply pull your favourite elements and produce a perfect Christmas movie first time. Let's look at the aspects of the creative process. Step 1: Genre There are many, many genres of movie out there right now, but within the highly specialised field of Christmas movies there are only two: the Kids' Christmas Movie and the Heartwarming Family Christmas Movie. You probably should decide on one of these now, but don't worry too much - it's not that difficult to change it later. Step 2: Title The title of your movie is, surprisingly, one of the trickiest parts of the process. This is because of one almost crippling restriction on which most studios will insist: it should be different to the title of any previous movie. The whole concept that your movie should be in some way distinguishable from the rest of the genre shows a rather egregious misunderstanding on the part of the studios, but no matter. You'll be fine so long as you follow these simple naming rules: a. Definitely include at least one of the following terms: Christmas Santa Claus (especially if you went with the Kids' Christmas Movie option) b. Include as many of the following terms as is humanly possible: Wish Love Dream Star Kiss Family Snow Bunny New York Bing Crosby c. Avoid any use of the following terms: Fire Volcano David Lynch Hell Death KISS Financial Sex Step 3: Casting Yes, casting does come before script. The reason for this is that the cast more or less writes the script anyway. You'll definitely need people to play the following roles. Santa Claus (for the Kids' Christmas Movie). If you really want to be edgy, you can cast someone who isn't fat and white-bearded, but be careful. You don't want this backfiring. For extra merchantability, include related characters such as Mrs Claus and Santa's son. Overworked Dad. One of the few roles who appears in both subgenres of Christmas movie, Overworked Dad can be your main character, but only if you give him the type of job that looks good on screen. High-Powered Lawyer is good, Plastic Tubing Sales Representative isn't. Wistful But Heroic Mum. Must be fulfilling a traditional gender role by staying at home and doing enough cooking to feed an entire army. She's wistful because Overworked Dad is away from home so much, but never argues with him. Brave Illness Sufferer. This role can be combined with Wistful But Heroic Mum if you're short on budget. Cancer's always a good illness to give this character - tuberculosis if your film is set more than fifty years ago. Don't show any blood or visible wounds, though. If you're really short of cash, kill off the character before the film starts to preload your characters with angst. Chirpy Kid. Absolutely essential character, frequently the main one. Don't worry if your child actor can't act to save his/her life; if they're reasonably cute (or at least interestingly ugly) then you're fine. Their role is to write letters to Santa asking for no material presents, but rather for an abstract emotional problem to be solved. Not their own emotional problem, you understand - they're not called Chirpy Kid for nothing - but as soon as Overworked Dad does less work/Brave Illness Sufferer is cured, they will work together as a happy family once again. It's extremely rare to cast more than one Chirpy Kid, although you can if you want. Combine one of them with Brave Illness Sufferer for some real tear-jerking. Stony-Hearted Authoritarian. Usually an elderly woman living alone, although you can combine this role with Overworked Dad. You'll need to establish their stony-heartedness and authoritarian personality as quickly as possible - getting them to be cold and unloving towards Chirpy Kid is probably the quickest route. By the end of the movie, their heart will be warmed and they will end up as part of the happy family. (Kids' Christmas Movie only) Two-Dimensional Baddie. Budget goes on a) costume and b) beard for this role. Don't bother spending it on their dialogue or character development - they want to get rid of Santa because they're EVIL, OK? Include a few ineffective henchmen, one of which will get bitten in the crotch or buttocks by a dog at some point in the slapstick comedy fight scene. Step 4. Location For the Heartwarming Family Christmas Movie, pick one of small-town USA, New York, or possibly another major US city. Don't bother going abroad, unless it's a period movie that you want to shoot in Edwardian England. In which case, shoot in Canada. The Kids' Christmas Movie means you have to add another location. Scour the world, looking for that perfect place which can mix magic and laughter with snow in just the right amounts. And which looks passably similar to the North Pole. Step 5. Plot For the Kids' Christmas Movie, this is extremely easy - Two-Dimensional Baddie wants to get rid of Santa/Mrs Claus/Santa's son, Chirpy Kid somehow gets to the North Pole and stops him (via the slapstick comedy fight scene), reuniting his family before helping Santa distribute presents to the children of the world. For the Heartwarming Family Christmas Movie, it's even easier - Chirpy Kid's chirpiness warms the heart of Stony-Hearted Authoritarian and gets Overworked Dad to work less. Step 6. Set Dressing And Special Effects Lots of fake snow, lots of glitter, one or two poor stunt actors, VAST quantities of fairy lights. Oh, and a forest's worth of Christmas trees. OK? OK. Step 7. Distribution And Screening Straight-to-video if you're lucky. If you're normal, straight-to-TV. Look, what did you expect? December 16 To do: A) Sort out career, B) Learn to use metaphors correctlyFirst things first - I'm no longer "underground" (see last post). It was enormously helpful in a number of ways, although I didn't get as much work done as I'd hoped. Might try that again at some point. Second, plans are now afoot to not only move to Blogger, but also to take the opportunity to entirely change my online presence - this will take a little while, but should result in people being able to find most traces of me online in one place. Well, except for the bits that I don't publicise, but if anyone really wants to find those a couple of canny Google searches will sort that out. Anyway, this is going to take place within a couple of weeks - I'm aiming to get round to doing it by the New Year, at least. I've had one excellent reason to switch shown to me just now, in fact - I'm having to use Firefox to post this (the version of Firefox I have on my flash drive), because IE wouldn't. Yes, that's right, even Internet Explorer doesn't work with this blog now. Most impressive there, Microsoft. And so to what I actually wanted to talk about. I'm at home, having come back on Wednesday. And it is utterly bizarre how quickly I've slipped straight back into my home routine. Remember, this has been an incredibly long term by my standards (and by Oxford standards) - a full three months. The last time I was away from my whole family for that long, I was also about 4,500 miles away, which is a reasonable excuse. Now, though, I live about 2.5 hours away by road (and about 7 by bus, train and taxi...sometimes I hate living in the middle of nowhere), so it does seem odd that I can go that long with only a weekly phone call and the odd MSN conversation to keep me in contact. I've been trying to extend the amount of time I stay away, getting ready for the time that will inevitably come when I no longer think of "home" as home. But, within a day, I was back in my old groove, drinking ludicrous quantities of tea, spending all day slumming around the house in my socks (and a few other clothes as well, before anyone makes a hilarious comment), and doing none of the work I ought to get on with. (Admittedly, there is a reason for this, possibly to do with the fact that I forgot to bring my laptop's power supply home with me, so it is now acting as a piece of industrial furniture rather than the efficient information-processing machine it was designed to be. No great hardship, as the desktop PC here is approximately a zillion times more powerful. Unfortunately, it's full of entirely Microsoft products, which is requiring me to swallow my pride somewhat.) Anyway, being in my routine has reminded me that whatever I do in my life, two things will always be true. 1) I will always have a place at home if I need it. 2) It would be intensely dangerous for me to avail myself of that opportunity for more than a few weeks at a time. I'm serious. Once I'm at home, I flip straight into my "no need for doing much" routine. It's fun, but so seriously unproductive that if I come back to live at home after graduating, there is no way I will ever get round to doing something with my life. Even now, I've done nothing with the leads I have careers-wise. I need to write a CV within the next couple of days, for example, and should be emailing various firms to ask what qualifications I need to work for them. (No, I won't tell you who I'm applying to. Not until I actually know myself, anyway.) There's plenty of project work that I should be doing, and probably could be. Instead, my days are slipping into the temporal equivalent of a large Yorkshire pudding: warm, comforting, stodgy, full of carbohydrates, and a good accompaniment to roast beef. I need to apply the gravy of ambition, and dig through until I find the hidden carrot of career success. Nestling next to the broccoli floret of HOPE. Darn it. Now I'm all hungry. Time to raid the kitchen for some food that isn't Tesco Value and tastes really nice. OK, maybe there are some advantages to living at home... December 03 Going undergroundIt's been a very long term.
I came up to Oxford about 4 weeks before term began, and since then I've been almost constantly doing stuff. There's been new people to meet, new subjects to learn, an entire research project to run, and a career to think about. And now term is over, and I'm absolutely shattered.
That's not to say that I've run out of things to do. I have a decent quantity of work that needs doing, for a start. What's more, I've found out just what the difference is between an emotional and and an intellectual decision (hint: one of them makes sense), and I need to catch up on all the reading that I've neglected in all areas. Of course, I could do with some sleep too, having somehow got into a pattern of going to sleep some time around 2am.
Why am I broadcasting this stuff to the world? Well, it's because I've hit on one possible way of sorting it all out. It may not work - I may come out of the other end in a rather worse condition - but I suspect it's worth a try. Essentially, I'm going underground for a bit, making myself uncontactable. I'm doing that by closing pretty much all channels of communication between me and everyone else. My mobile's off right now (it will be on for brief periods, but texts will not be replied to unless they're urgent). Emails will be checked, but only selectively read, and again, unless they're urgent you will not receive a reply. I'm not going to log in to Facebook either (no poke for YOU!) and I'm not even going to lurk on MSN. What's more, I'll mainly be staying in the house, emerging pretty much only to buy food and go to important meetings.
This is definitely going to last until Wednesday (I need some kind of target to aim for) and if it's going well, it will continue to the end of the week. See you on the other side. November 23 A useless thing to say, but it needs to be saidTo the owner of the brown Ford that just made a very fair attempt at killing me on Cowley Road:
In case you weren't aware of this fact, an arm outstretched to the right generally means "I'm about to make a right turn. This will involve my cutting across the flow of traffic. Do not attempt to overtake." It does not mean "I need to air out my hand so I'm going to put it into the wind for a bit." Nor does it mean "well, yes, I'm going to turn right, but not just yet - it's more important that you shave five seconds off your journey time and roar past me."
Your reaction to this event shows me what kind of a driver you are. None of the horn-blowing, uninventive swearing or threats of actual bodily harm in the world will change the rules of the road. Moreover, the fact that you were prepared to stop at a busy T-junction just to attempt to compensate for your lack of driving skill with your torrent of abuse shows just how much you care about the people who were behind you.
It is my fond hope that the next person you try to dangerously overtake will be a policeman, and that he explains to you in no uncertain terms just what the words "fixed penalty notice" mean.
If you're going to try to drive in Oxford, for the love of mercy learn to drive. November 12 Just because it has no discernible practical use doesn't mean it was a waste of time, OK?One of the things I find a little disturbing just at the moment is how much of a geek I seem to be, just under the surface. I mean, glancing at my personal information, you wouldn't have thought that this was all that likely - I do psychology, a medical science with a reputation for being extremely non-technical. (Well, admittedly this reputation only exists in the minds of those who know nothing about it, but still.) I regard the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings films as "an entertaining way to spend an afternoon or so", as opposed to "a cultural touchstone that affects everything I do, and did I mention that I can perform Hamlet's Soliloquy in Elvish?" And I spend a considerable portion of my day outdoors, or at least feeling guilty that I'm not outdoors, which is the next best thing.
But it's only when you get past this surface that you realise what's going on. The amount of excitement that I got from analysing some of my research project data and getting a smooth curve out of it was just ridiculous, as was the fact that I got that far by organising the data on Excel for about four hours without a break. The fact that I'm considering going into some kind of career in the scientific industry entirely so that I can put "Scientist" on my business cards is a pretty big clue as well. However, none of these worries me quite as much as what I was doing well into the small hours last night.
And what was it? Why, getting Windows 3.11 to run on my laptop, of course!
I've been playing around with operating systems quite a bit this term, which shows you just how much I'm capable of putting off work when I want to. I think I mentioned before that I've got Puppy Linux working quite happily on my laptop (it even drives my wireless card, which was no mean feat), and because that's such a small distribution I've got the whole thing on my USB flash drive. You know, just in case I need to boot up someone else's computer into Linux or something. So when, late last night, I finally gave up on ever getting round to doing some proper work, my mind for some reason started on that dangerous journey down to Silicon Memory Lane, that nostalgic utopia where nothing ever crashes, where operating systems were small and non-bloated, and where you didn't have to worry about driver conflicts because you didn't have anything to drive with them in the first place.
Just in case you didn't realise, that place never existed. Windows version one came on between two and four floppies, depending on how much of it you wanted, and that was an appalling OS. BBC Micros used to crash, for goodness' sake. But no matter. Once the idea of putting Win3.11 on my computer was rooted in my mind, it wasn't coming out, so off I went to Google to do a little detective work.
The install disks for earlier versions of Windows aren't difficult to find, if you know what you're looking for. (Incidentally, technically you're not supposed to download them. However, given that I have a completely paid-up copy of XP on here, that I'm unlikely to actually use 3.11 for any real purpose except interest, and that the only way to buy 3.11 nowadays would be to first build a time machine and travel back to the early nineties, I'm not too cut up about it.) The problems start to arise when you realise that all the 1-3.x versions of Windows were glorified front-ends on DOS, and DOS does not exist on a PC running XP. You have a command prompt that looks just like it, but the underlying architecture is entirely different.
So, how do you do it? Well, basically, you have to make Windows believe that it IS running on DOS. And the way to do that is with an emulator. I used DOSbox, basically because it's free. All you have to do is to give it a folder which can pretend to be a C: drive, and another to be an A: drive, and you're in business. Then you put the files from the install disks into your A: folder, and the Windows setup program will install them happily into its virtual C: drive.
It took a while, but eventually Windows 3.11 was running away in its window. Not wanting to stop there, I also...err...acquired a copy of Office version 4 (all 16 floppies' worth - how did anyone have the patience to sit through the chugging noise of it installing for that long?) and installed that too. That works just as well as the OS, and it was very tempting to go through the "Welcome to Office" tutorials to see what new and exciting features they were offering me.
It's very instructive, and more than a little bit scary, to look back at this software (which, I may remind you, is all of ten years old - a blink of an eye in historical terms) and realise just how ancient it seems to me today. Office 4, for instance, was the first version of Office to include a spellchecker in all of its components, something which we take entirely for granted today. Powerpoint is included in this bundle as well - the animations you can do on it are limited to text only, and the program includes templates for printing out your slides to actual 35mm slides. Having never been to a meeting or a lecture before the advent of data projectors, this seems utterly bizarre to me, but obviously it was completely de rigeur back then.
The thing that really struck me, though, was the almost complete absence of electronic communication. The little window that popped up encouraging me to register my copy of Office (I'd love to know whether you can still actually do that) had a jolly little graphic of fountain pens and pieces of card on it. The word "email" is nowhere to be found. Even the networking capabilities of Win3.11, which were pretty much its unique selling point at the time, are shoved away on the last two installation disks where you can install them if you absolutely need to. Contrast this with the world today, where I can, if I so wish, download an entire operating system and office suite in an evening on a whim, having transferred that data down a fibreoptic cable and through the air to my room. If you had told someone back in 1992 that this kind of thing was going to be possible within about a decade, he'd have flat-out called you a liar.
In the end, though, all I could do was just sit there, looking at the Windows desktop in all its 640x480 8-bit glory, surrounded by an XP desktop which could carry out so many more tasks than could possibly have been imagined back then. In a way, it was really sad. This "revolutionary" piece of software was sitting in its window, blissfully unaware that it was contained inside something 14 years younger and hundreds of times more powerful. (Not "faster" or "more reliable", mind you.) DOSbox is designed for playing games, not running an OS, so it couldn't handle things like networking or internet access, meaning that Win3.11 was cut off from its host computer. I could save documents in the old programs and open them in their modern equivalents, but that was about it.
This piece of software, which had been worked on by so many people for years, was rendered obsolete, probably in about the same length of time as its development cycle. Now, it's no more than a museum piece, a record of what was thought to be the future but turned out to be a minor chapter in a long, ongoing story. In time, no doubt XP will go the same way, and in years to come doubtless someone will do just what I've done, and look at the stupid mistakes, the dead-end marketing decisions, and the way we communicate, and will go "What did they think they were doing?"
And in the meantime, I'll probably go on greeting each new bit of technology with the same wide-eyed excitement that I had when I first saw a 286 Toshiba laptop with Windows 2.0 running QBasic Gorillas. Because that's the fun part about being a complete and utter geek. |
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