April 2006 Archives

It's no surprise to anyone that, given how well the touch-screen interface of the DS is expected to translate to the new Nintendo wand controller, that a new version of one of the best-selling and most acclaimed games on the DS has just been announced as a Revolution launch title:

...as if millions of Nintendo fanboys cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

It's a significant day in games console history. A seismic shift has occurred which has instantly forced the recontextualisation of the name of every games console ever produced.

I'll explain. Gamecube: previously a mediocre name for a console. Now it's a good one. Mega Drive: now perfectly acceptable. Virtual Boy: previously awful, now great. Wonder Swan, WONDER SWAN, for god's sake, now sounds like a better than average product name. Heaven help us all.

The reason for this dramatic compression of the scale? A new tenant occupies the entire bottom half of it. Nintendo have shown unrivalled ingenuity and dedication in creating a product name that may genuinely be optimal in its wrongness. We can only speculate on the gallons of sweat exuded in the dark bowels of the company, putting letters of the English alphabet through a literal torture chamber of wheels and spikes to produce a result that, from every angle, announces its vile purpose. My dear, unprepared readers, the new name for the Revolution: the Nintendo Wii.

Of course I can't let Matt's announcement pass without some sort of comment.

Matt and Alicyn are two of my oldest friends, but what's weird is that for years their paths never crossed at all. I've been friends with Matt since I started university. We've now known each other for 10 years with 6 of those being years we've shared flats/houses and 4 of those being years we've also shared offices, so it's fair to say we know each other pretty well. Alicyn on the other hand is a girl from California who I struck up a close and supportive online friendship with 9 years ago, which despite a bumpy ride in places is still as strong today as it ever was.

Matt describes in his blog entry the circumstances of how the two met and how romantic chemistry did its thing, so I won't repeat it. I just wanted to say how unexpected and great it is that my two best friends, from totally different starting points, have found enjoyment in one another's company, and how nice it is to think that I played a small role in it.

Congratulations and all the best to both of you.

Currently listening to Slovo — Whisper on repeat (link goes to a full-track mp3 on the band's website).

This track is amazing, yet the band doesn't even have a Wikipedia article. Wasn't the internet supposed to level the playing field for musical artists? If popularity was proportional to quality, this track would be on a million iPods by now.

Whatever controversial political or societal issues might threaten to divide the British public, it's comforting to know that there's one thing that we as a nation are all united in, as surely as if it were written in our DNA: our contempt for David Blaine.

Now, in the least impressive stunt of his career, he's planning to stay in a fish tank for 7 days with lines for air and food. I'm not sure if he's going to pee in the tank, but for the sake of visibility I hope they circulate the water.

I was never the biggest fan of Blaine's variety of off-the-shelf street magic, but at least he was actually doing tricks of some sort (even if they were sometimes camera tricks). I don't see the value of these endurance stunts at all, which could surely be replicated by any reasonably fit man with abundant free time to train. Breaking the world record for holding breath would be a genuine achievement, but I don't think there's even the slightest chance of him actually doing so. (If I'm proven wrong on this, and the new record is independently authenticated, I'll gladly write a fawning entry full of nothing but praise for the god Blaine.)

Blaine is a magician who no longer does magic. Perhaps the most impressive trick he could pull off would be to convince anyone that submerging himself in water for 7 days (with air and food) is interesting, remarkable, or praiseworthy. But I think that's probably well beyond his talents.

This blog had a near-death experience at the hands of my hosting provider last week, but fortunately I managed to reconstruct nearly everything on it. Notes for geeks:

• All past trackbacks are gone, gone, gone, whoa-oa-oah. No great loss, I think I only received about 5 of them up to now.
• Permalinks to entries and archives have changed. I know this makes Jakob Nielsen and the W3C cry, and I'm not totally happy about it myself, but it was the only thing that made sense in the circumstances.
• Large swathes of the site are still in the default styles. Patience!
• The site's now running on a faster and less contended server, and is now using a MySQL backend. These changes should make it a lot more responsive (unless one of the other sites on the machine is getting DDoSed, in which case it'll make it a lot less responsive).
• Think I feel a redesign coming on.

Although I think there's still plenty of potential mileage in continuing the charade, it's the way of things to admit April 1st hoaxes after the day's over, so: there was no elaborate site redesign ever, and yesterday's blog post was a total lie. Funny or lame, you decide.

Well, you'll see that the site's back to normal again. Yep, most of you realised pretty quickly, of course, that it's April 1st. And shame on the two of you who thought it was serious! (For those of you who missed it, the whole thing's archived here).

I've actually been working on this joke on and off for about 3 weeks to get it ready for today. I wanted to do something original that would top the glut of sites that do cheesy fake announcements/redesigns/legal takedowns. Dozens of graphics had to be created from scratch, photos taken and doctored to look genuine, and a ton of CGI scripting to get the site to behave like I wanted. This last week has been one of late nights to get everything ready in time. If just one detail hadn't been exactly right it could have ruined the whole thing. It wasn't until late last night that I was even sure I was going to make it in time, when I finally nailed the cause of a bug in IE that was stopping the fake webcam feed from streaming properly. And of course that's not really me in the video... (I only wish I could do that) I went through frame by frame and where the guy's face is in shot and clearly visible (actually only about 40 frames in the whole 90-odd seconds, though I halved the framerate so I only had to change 20), I replaced it with mine. That was the hardest thing to do, but I think the result looks pretty convincing.

I'm glad the response was so positive, it justifies spending the time preparing the prank, and on top of that I also learned a ton about AJAX scripting and video editing. I already know what I'm doing for next year's April Fool's Day and I think it might even top this year's. Can't wait!