I have memories, clouded by sorrow

Nearly festival time again - it's Bloodstock this weekend, and although I have always appreciated it as a small festival and one of its kind in England, it will definitely be hard to enjoy it as much just 2 weeks after getting back from Wacken, essentially the same thing on a much larger scale. I should probably contemplate packing my stuff for it tonight, which will include a bunch of bananas I'm taking along to eat there because I'm SO ROCK AND ROLL. Actually, I usually find the food at Bloodstock more edible - not to mention more pronounceable - than the food at overseas festivals so there's little danger of me starving. Hopefully I won't put back on the weight which I lost recently, though.

I have bought the new Ihsahn album. It had better be good, although seeing song titles like 'Elevator' doesn't fill me with hope. The only song I've heard so far sounds like an extra from Emperor's "Prometheus..." album, which isn't too surprising I suppose.

Yesterday, on the walk back home after work, I saw some kids throw a waterbomb at a cyclist and score a direct hit, before disappearing off giggling. Luckily he saw the funny side. I wasn't sure whether I was annoyed that kids did that sort of thing to complete strangers, or glad that they indulge their mischievous tendencies in a mostly harmless manner.

The latest in an occasional series of "sci-fi... or reality?" 'Rat-brain robot aids memory study'. "Created at the University of Reading, the project marries 300,000 rat neurons to a robot that navigates via sonar. The neurons are now being taught to steer the robot around obstacles and avoid the walls of the small pen in which it is kept." Hmm, mixing animals and machinery now, and not just any animal tissue, but supposedly that with the ability to learn. What next?

My computer gaming news: been doing badly on my second season on Football Manager 2005 (Wolverhampton Wanderers really are not good enough for the Premiership), am slowly crawling through Oblivion's "The Shivering Isles" expansion, installed Sins of a Solar Empire before discovering the tutorial was bugged (wtf!), and am rather impatiently waiting for Braid to become available on the PC. Of these, Braid is probably the one none of you have heard of, and definitely the most important game of the lot. It's available on Xbox Live Arcade now, Microsoft fanboys. (And girls.)

Oh, and I'm back reading fantasy fiction, after months of mainly non-fiction to expand the intellect and other such nonsense. Currently I'm on "Assassin's Apprentice" by Robin Hobb.

Hmm, so little to report since last time. But how did it come to be March already? I'm supposed to be getting stuff done this year, but yet again it's not really happening.

I 'accidentally' ordered another book yesterday, namely "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach", because it's supposedly quite a definitive textbook and I don't already own it. Buying it probably wasn't all that useful a move however, considering I have a backlog of about 30 books to get through. Anyway, It would be nice to get into proper AI at some point, after a couple of years of straightforward application programming.

And I still haven't finished Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. I should give that another go tonight, so I can get back to Oblivion, Thief 3, and maybe make a start on Planescape. On that note, everyone should play more RPGs, in honour of Gary Gygax who died today. It's fair to say that he has indirectly had a massive effect on my life in several ways. (Here are some possible examples.)

I finished "The Lords of the North" by Bernard Cornwell earlier. It's possibly the best in the series so far, in terms of emotional content, but I must admit to wanting to shake the author by the neck a few times. Did nobody ever teach you back in primary school that stringing 6 clauses together joined by "and" is awful? Too often I found myself jerked out of the immersion of the story, finding myself instead trying to reword his sentences with more appropriate conjunctions.

George R. R. Martin and Robert Jordan have no such problems with their prose. I'm still waiting on grrm's "A Dance of Dragons", the 5th book in the 7-part "A Song Of Ice And Fire", while Robert Jordan's final book in the Wheel of Time series is being held up by his unfortunate fight with amyloidosis. I started reading the Wheel of Time back in '95, when the 6th book in the series had just come out. Now we're waiting for book 12, and I refuse to read (and in a couple of cases, buy) books 8 to 11 until I know that the saga is actually finished, as the action dwindled away to nothing as the series went on. The premise is good, the writing is good, but it feels like he deliberately stretched it out.

The other day I found my notes on a book I've been planning to write. I was pleasantly surprised at how interesting it was, as I'm quite used to abandoning my projects due to their lack of quality, and there's a lot more emphasis on characterisation than I would have put in the stuff I wrote when I was younger. Still, it's just an outline for now, and there's a bit of a dull patch in the middle that would need spicing up. Also, there may be too many central characters, which will need some work somehow. Finally, I also need to flesh out the setting a bit more, as Generic Fantasy World just won't cut it. It would have been good to have had a go at this during NaNoWriMo, but arbitrary and artificial deadlines were never much use to me, and I really have had so many other things to do.

I got some writing software, too. I know most people might prefer to just plunge in with little or no planning and just do it linearly, but I work best when I do things methodically, and having some sort of timeline and outline helps. The things I wrote when I was younger tended to be all improvised - I wonder if I was more creative back then, or if it's just that I'm more used to planning everything now.

Today's pet gripe: undocumented code. "Here, have this program I've written; it'll make your life a lot easier. No, I'm not going to tell you how to use it. Oh, ok then, here's an example. No, I'm not going to tell you what the example does, or what any of those things I've written mean." I was going to program something interesting today, but since I can't work out how on earth to use this guy's code, it's not going to happen :( To make matters worse, his email address is invalid so I can't even ask him about it.

On _arnamentia_'s recommendation I am now reading a Bernard Cornwell novel. It's not bad, although I don't like the way he makes the reader omniscient. I like a little bit of mystery in what I read, and I find that being told what everybody's thinking is a bit odd. Still, I'm only about 30 pages in and there's already been plenty of violence so I'll stick it out.

Busy social week ahead - something semi-planned for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and maybe Saturday. Then maybe I will settle down to doing this dissertation, assuming that I get my exam results back by then. I'm not wasting my time on it if I failed everything!