Author: Purple Wyrm

On Skrillex

I actually don’t mind a bit of dubstep 🙂

I do not feel required to believe that Skrillex is a human being. My top three theories to explain the existence of such a thing are as follows…

1: Skrillex is the name of a program designed by a post-grad computer engineering student to simulate industrial workplace noise. After a night of heavy drinking said student inadvertently messed up some of the audio filters and induced a series of overlapping sound loops, then realised that the resulting cacophony might go down well at next weekend’s beer and ecstasy mixer.

2: Skrillex is an ancient fax-modem, forgotten about in a storage cupboard but still connected to the net, which has achieved sentience and a recording contract.

3: Skrillex is a member of an unknown, sapient, deep-sea dwelling species that is attempting to communicate with us by modulating its vocalisations for propagation through air rather than water. It’s not very good at it.

I’ll take my Turner Prize now please…

Waddya mean you have to be British!?

Idea for a conceptual art project…

1: Invite members of the public to write letters about important personal issues to their friends and families, and send them to you along with the address details of the people they’re meant to be delivered to.

2: Put all the letters into stamped, addressed envelopes, ready for posting.

3: Place the envelopes into an elaborate machine in an art gallery which displays them one by one and has two buttons – “Deliver” and “Destroy”. If the “Deliver” button is pressed, the envelope is dropped into a hopper, collected at the end of the day and posted. If the “Destroy” button is pressed, the envelope is put through a shredder. Allow visitors to the gallery to press the buttons at will.

4: Give the whole arrangement an incredibly wanky name like “Thoughts and Memories of Olympus Mons”

5: ???

6: Profit!

Minecraft Update II

I guess everyone who gets sucked into the trap of Minecraft ends up imagining ways to improve the game. I am of course no exception and in the hours I’ve whiled away working on my Big Project™ (or getting pushed into lava streams by skeletons) I’ve come up with a number of them – all but one of which are actually slated for the next update (great minds obviously think alike…).

My one, original idea? Lodestones!

The recipe for a lodestone is…
C = Compass
R = Redstone Dust
? = Either a Diamond, an Iron Ingot, a Gold Ingot, a piece of Coal, a unit of Lapis Lazuli Dye, an Emerald (once launched) or another pile of Redstone Dust

?
R C R
R

So what the heck does a lodestone do? Simple. If you’re within 20 blocks (or maybe 15 blocks, or 10 blocks, or whatever) of ore for the particular mineral it was made with, it starts glowing and chiming.

It doesn’t tell you what direction the ore is in – you have to figure that out by moving back and forwards until it stops reacting – it just tells you the ore is nearby. It’s up to you to find it and dig it out.

So that’s my idea. You listening Notch? 😉

Pathetic Cave Adventure

Yeah, that’s the opening of Zork. Deal with it.

One of these days I’m going to program a text adventure game titled Pathetic Cave Adventure. It starts…

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

If you open the mailbox, you get arrested for mail fraud and the game ends. If you try and open the boarded front door, you get arrested for breaking and entering and the game ends. If you try to walk anywhere you get arrested for trespassing and the game ends. If you do nothing for more than a few rounds you get arrested for loitering and the game ends

Moit!

One of my guilty pleasures at the moment is the new season of Iron Man: Armored Adventures on ABC 3. Sure, it’s a kid’s show, but it’s fun – and hey, I already classified it as a guilty pleasure, which means I don’t have to justify it to anyone, let alone you.

😉

There was one annoying thing about the episodes they played last night though. The presence of an “Ossy” (which is how Americans strangely insist on pronouncing “Aussie”).

Now I have no strange objection to Australians appearing in American TV shows. It’s nice to see us represented. But what would also be nice would be getting actors who can actually do an Australian accent – as opposed to doing a Cockney accent with “moit” added to the end of every second sentence.

Sure, Americans can’t tell the difference, but believe me it makes us cringe. It’s like representing an American accent by getting a Puerto Riccan to randomly say “pard’ner”. Or a Canadian accent by having a South African end every sentence with “eh?”. It’s bizarre.

Of course, it’s not going to change. But it would be nice.

Or perhaps noice moit!

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