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I've just made an appointment at the bank to talk about getting pre-approved for a home mortgage on Friday. I can't describe how quietly terrifying this is - it's only been a couple of weeks since I last watched a Disney film. And I still have a Livejournal account. And we've already had various replies from an online aggregator site of estate agents who are very keen to move us into our first property. I never thought I'd be doing that outside of playing Monopoly.

I think my age and life state are advancing at about double the rate of my mind.

I have pioneered new levels in accidentally stealing things. It seems that a lot of the time recently, I'll release a song and quickly be told that the tune is rather a lot like song X or shares the same title with song Y, which are both on the latest release I don't have from power metal band Z, but this is quite special.

It would be very difficult to deny that the Crystal Towers 2 level Walnut Creek, shown in the title banner here, was slightly inspired by the grassy, inexplicably-chequered first levels of the Sonic games (and the look of it just now actually came about after I'd spent quite a while trying to make it more graphically distinct) - that level of borrowing from another game is obvious. But I'd got the name for the level in a way that I thought was unique - when writing the first game, I had seen the name on a sign for a nearby town while being driven away from San Francisco airport for the first time, and instantly thought that it was the best Green Hill-like platform game level name ever.

A few days ago I was caught reading the bug list on http://www.sonicretro.org because of making a comment on dr_dos's journal describing how I got caught reading the bug list on http://www.sonicretro.org, and found that according to the level designers:

Visually speaking, through all three games, we always start with an island. At the time, we were developing in San Francisco, and south of there was a town(?) called Emerald Hill. We were doing a location test at a shopping center there when we saw it, and since it was a Green Hill-like name we thought well, let's use it in the game!

I never thought that I could be that non-original with quite so much geographical accuracy.

An ongoing issue of our era was once again brought to my attention at the supermarket - the ludicrous rate of inflation of Creme Eggs. I'd just remembered about their existence the other day, and suddenly they're back available again for the year. This time, these shells of chocolate filled with... that stuff that nobody knows what it is have reached $1 each and are naturally slightly more diminutive than the last time they were seen.

I used to get these for 30p from the school canteen ten years ago and they were positively fist-sized compared to the microscopic ovoid sitting in front of me just now. Cadbury's's own site used to go with the widely-spread claim that the eggs only seemed smaller to you because your own radius has slightly increased as a result of stuffing yourself with them last Easter, but after somebody or other appeared on a late night chat show with two different-sized eggs as proof, they quickly amended this to say that the American eggs had changed size after all and therefore the previous claim had been a bit of a lie.

I don't know what this world's coming to.

The MMF2 Flash runtime was officially released today! For people who want to make Flash-compatible games without going through that awkward "Flash" bit. Here's a little game that I put together during the testing of the runtime, to try out various maths, collision, control and online aspects - I've given it the unwieldy name "Gravqx", and you can make up a pronunciation for yourself.



http://www.clickteam.info/davidn/games/gravqx

It's a sort of skill/racing type game - the object is to guide your improbably fragile ship around courses as fast as possible, working with and against the force of gravity, without hitting the walls and blowing to pieces. Online best times are recorded, and Javascript needs to be on to post to them.

Hold the mouse button anywhere on the screen to thrust in the direction of the cursor - the amount you move is dependent on the distance from the cursor to the ship as well as the angle. I've tried to coach other testers into going slowly at first and building up to higher speeds later on, but as it turns out I'm apparently the only person on earth who's able to control it, here's some video evidence that it's possible to move around smoothly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3cv_Pch0EE

Unfortunately another thing I was testing with this game was the ability to add adverts on to the preloader, so I suppose it will also serve as a test for how badly people react to advertising in Flash games. Still, it pays for some hosting ($0.04 per billion players or thereabouts).

Good luck! At this rate I might start aiming to improve on my track record by releasing a game a month. (NB. This will not happen)

Play Gravqx

It must have been over fifteen years ago, now, that I first saw Klik and Play featured on Bad Influence. At that point, I never imagined that I would have a credit in one of its successors!

kjorteo showed me this. It's incredible.


I'd known that they'd done... well, I thought it was simply an acoustic album, so I thought I knew what to expect before clicking the link, but I didn't expect Dr Stein meets The Blues Brothers. The only explanation for this is that they wanted to re-invoke the Chameleon spirit and further wind up the fans who deny everything that they've ever been after Michael Kiske's merciful departure.

Last November I was very excited that the MBTA was experimenting with an XML feed that gathered the locations of buses along five of their routes and made the data available to web developers, and I wrote a PHP page to keep track of them even though none of them were routes that were at all useful to me.

The trial still hasn't expanded, but someone has now provided something of a substitute for the interim period - Nickolai Zeldovich's MBTA map shows the last known location of all buses with GPS units, and tries its best to guess what route they're on based on where they've just been. (Also sometimes puts them in Bolivia or the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but that's a separate data problem.)

I tried this on Monday with the CT2, the route that I sometimes take home, leaving the office when I saw one of them approaching a couple of streets away. I drew into sight of the bus stop just in time to see it leave, so it seems that I need to work on my timing to compensate for the delay in updates until the actual time predictions are in place.

But after missing it, I opened up the computer, got on to the nearby bookshop's free wireless and was able to watch the buses approaching remotely, matching up the ID numbers painted on their sides to the ones that I was seeing coming past in front of me - it was amazing. Well, perhaps I'm just easily amused, but more importantly, it's striking how much the wait is improved when you can see something coming, and don't have to just stand around wondering if you're ever going to be picked up or not. This map made me enjoy waiting for the CT2, and as far as I'm concerned, that puts it well into Nobel Prize territory.

(07:03:43) Carmen: hi

(07:03:52) MSN: Hi.

(07:03:59) Carmen: hi how are you today?

(07:04:16) MSN: Not so bad. Yourself?

(07:04:26) Carmen: my name is paris I'm doing great today I'm 21 yrs old how old are you?

(07:05:12) MSN: Old enough to realize that you'd probably fail the Turing Test.

(07:05:32) Carmen: listen hun, I am just about to start my webcam show with jen, come chat me there in my chat room? We can cyber, I will get naked if u do..lol!

(07:05:41) MSN: Lol indeed.

(07:06:01) Carmen: I can show u how to watch free if u promise not to tell anyone else how to do it???PLEASE:-$

(07:06:20) MSN: Just me and the other million people you've added? Ace.

(07:06:50) Carmen: well since its free the law that u gotta be 18 (nudity involved), u have to sign up with a credit card for age verification! BUT .. Once you are inside, just clikc on "Webcams" let me know what name you use to sign in with so I know it is you babe! http://www.slags-r-us.com/anonymized fill out the bottom of the page then fill out the next page as well and u can see me live for free!

(07:07:03) MSN: As simple as that, eh?

(07:07:23) Carmen: Please dont mention anything about that in the chatroom once u get in ok?:-$

(07:08:00) MSN: Not to worry - if I were mug enough to be fooled by anything like this I'd probably want to keep it under my hat anyway.

(07:08:20) Carmen: OH SHIT.. k I am late to start my show, I gotta get off msn...I will see ya inside my chatroom babe.. remember not to mention that I am upgrading u for free... You can use your msn name to sign in so i know it is you..

(07:09:08) MSN: Stops you having to write any more scripted responses? I was wondering when they were going to run out.

(07:09:09) Carmen: AUTO-RESPONSE: hey just in the middle of my free webcam show if you want to watch click the link http://www.slags-r-us.com/anonymized

(07:09:23) MSN: Ah well, it was fun while it lasted.

(07:09:52) MSN: By the way, you could at least get a better profile picture. She looks like she's just fallen into a hedge.

Obviously not having felt like I'd taken enough punishment by completing the first, I ordered the sequel to Trauma Center: Under the Knife so that it would arrive in time for playing on the plane over to Los Angeles and back last year. It ended up being just about the perfect length, as I completed it at the end of the holiday after about 12 hours gameplay time (excluding the bonus missions - those took a lot longer and are an entire post to themselves). I won't give any specific storyline spoilers here, but I am going to describe some of the new operations in the second half, so you might not want to read that if you want to be as nastily surprised as I was.

As far as mechanics go, much of what I said in the post about the first game still applies. It's difficult to really say without knowing what newcomers think of it, but I think that this sequel strikes a decent balance between leading on from the first game and starting off easy enough for new players to cope with - three difficulty levels have been provided this time rather than leaving you on one, so if you find things too overwhelming then you can switch to Easy, or alternatively bump it up to Hard if you're a total masochist. Slightly disappointingly, the difference between these difficulty levels seems to be purely mathematical - on Easy damaging events are toned down and you can heal really quickly, and on Hard your patient will rapidly die from a mild bruise and you'll get repetitive strain injury from going back and forth with the wimpy stabilizer trying to prevent it. If they'd instead changed the behaviours of some of the stuff you're up against slightly depending on the difficulty level (see my more detailed suggested technique!) then they could effectively have tripled the number of operations in the game - still, there are already a few more than there were in the original, so there's no real reason to complain.

It's nothing a splash of antibiotic gel won't fix

The presentation has had a complete overhaul, to get closer to the games that were released on the Wii - the characters now look completely different due to a new graphics artist, and things look generally more crisp. The music has been changed from something reminiscent of Bill Bailey's version of the BBC News theme to a variety of different styles, mostly somewhere around Metal Gear Solid meets the title music from Casualty. I quite like the soundtrack in general - usually the music is something I pay a lot of attention to in games, but I hadn't really noticed how good this series' was until after finishing the first one. Perhaps mostly because you really don't have a lot of time to listen to it during actual gameplay. In other changes, they've happily realized the insanity of having separate modes for the storyline and replaying old operations, so have combined them into one big storyline list, where you can re-watch entire chapters or just do the operations from them. The largely irrelevant miss limit (you had about twenty chances and were likely to lose a maximum of two of them per operation) has also sensibly been replaced with a maximum chain scoring system.

The dialogue isn't completely text-based like the first game, but because they have to work within the limits of a 64MB cartridge, they've only gone for sort of semi-voicing the game, giving each character a few phrases that are spoken out loud on vaguely appropriate paragraphs of the written text - if you're reading through it at a reasonable pace, it gives the impression that the Caduceus members communicate with each other by sort of Twittering verbally in a stream of "Hey." "Excuse me." "Well..." "Yes." "What the..." "Doctor?" "Understood." And it's enormously irritating (apart from the villain's maniacal laugh sound clip, which makes it all worthwhile) but you shouldn't allow yourself to turn it off because the same little sound cues are so helpful during the operations - it's just about possible now to go through it without looking at the top screen at all because you're prompted to do everything verbally.

Something that surprised me was that the game runs noticeably slower. When you do your first operation, you feel a definite reduction in pace compared to the first - I suffered the indignity of having my first suture counted as a "BAD" before realizing I had to relearn how it was expecting me to do them. Another example is that the syringe seems to have been changed from a smoothly sliding gradient into a series of sprites, giving filling it a much jerkier appearance. It's not unplayably slow - after a while you get used to it and don't notice it at all by itself (indeed, now that I'm at the end of the game and having to touch the screen five times per second it's difficult to imagine how I could ever call the game "slow"), but if you go back to the first game after getting used to this one it's surprising how much faster it seems. I think the screen just doesn't update quite as quickly as before, most noticeably on tools where you have to draw lines like the sutures and scalpel - maybe it was an attempt to combat the slowdown that the first game experienced when there were a lot of objects on the screen at once.

I said before that even though I'm not someone who just skips through cutscenes all the time I didn't really consider the plot of the first game all that important, more a vehicle to trundle the game between operations of increasing unlikeliness and difficulty, but the storyline here has really been brought to the forefront. Rather than just one group fighting a medical terrorist plot, it's been turned into a story about the rivalries between two medical companies and the soap opera of the more personal stories of all of the characters that you meet and work with (while they work tirelessly at pushing your two clueless protagonists into finally going to bed together). I didn't find myself caring all that much about the couple of tragic plot points the first time round, but this one has an absolute heartbreaker that I honestly felt guilty about for most of the day afterwards (made all the worse because in the context of the game I had done everything right - the plot nevertheless just dictated that I wasn't good enough). It seems that even the great Derek Stiles can't compete with storyline injuries.

Perhaps because of the plot taking its time more, the pace of the game seems to sort of dither a bit, and there's more of a concentration on normal-ish operations and upgraded versions of some of the ones that you know and despise from the first game than introducing any completely new ideas. Three of the GUILT strains return - the classic lung-sharks Kyriaki are back, and they seem to move a bit faster and annoyingly have to be ultrasounded quite precisely before their shadow appears for long enough to start extracting them. As if it wasn't enough trouble before, the large one that always appeared at the end that I called the 'mother' has been replaced with the Queen, which can lay (similarly invisible!) eggs that spawn even more of the things if left alone for too long. Pempti has had a hardware upgrade as it's now dual core, but is actually one of the easiest operations because its attacks have been scaled back to make it remotely fair (it's possible to go through a whole operation without it getting to launch anything now). And I was extremely pleased with the colour-coded Tetarti at first because they'd replaced the colours of "a bit dark", "a bit light" and "blue" with very clear red, blue and yellow - until halfway through the first operation on them, where they had the decency to introduce a purple one. Then a black one as well. With five possible colours, you now have to remember which ones are even present rather than do it by process of elimination, which can make your life difficult very quickly. In addition to this, you're often given some quite creative handicaps, like having to perform an operation with an additional pen-light tool that you need to drag around to see what you're doing at all, or having to perform three operations on one timer, or with limited supplies of certain tools.

The new GUILT types are almost all confined to the last chapter of the game, which makes it sound like they're underused, but pretty much all of them fall well into the 'boss' category. The beginning of them is wonderfully handled, with Derek in the course of the story being led to believe that he's doing a very normal operation, until a massive green spiny thing bursts out of the patient's small intestine. That serves as your introduction to the new and improved strains.

This is my favourite of the new ones, and it's called Bythos or By-thos or http://www.byethost.com or something. I actually really love this one, as much as you wouldn't expect for something so designed to make your life difficult - it announces itself by popping out of the back of the screen, causing cuts everywhere, and then beginning to bounce around. It's sort of this game's Savato without the spiders - while it goes about making various patterns of cuts, you have to zap it with the laser until it falls to bits, and then you have to pick out the core past the blades and glowing spores hovering around in a very sort of Crystal Maze arrangement. After the familiarity of a lot of the game up until then, it's a very original challenge that isn't like anything else either in this game or the first.

Nous is actually the first one you encounter, though you don't know what it is until much later. Until the reintroduction of Tetarti later in the game I thought that this one had been thought up as a harder replacement for it - you have to watch a sequence of tumours generate and then treat them in the same order that they appeared by draining, cutting and excising them, having to remember the positions of up to five in a row, before doing the same procedure to the main body. It's the easiest one provided you can perform the small feat of memory required, but also the most repetitive.

Sige is the third, and it's like Kyriaki on acid - it zooms about making an awful racket and causing all sort of problems until you ultrasound it into visibility, then you have to cut it out and freeze it before attacking it again. The problems that it causes are more varied than Kyriaki, needing draining and scalpelling and injecting as well as suturing, and it's also the only strain to make use of the microphone - you have to physically blow away the clouds of gas that it releases periodically, to clear your view of the operating area. It clones itself a bit later on to make things a bit harder for you, but it's nothing the Healing Touch can't cope with.

Ah, balls.

Until Aletheia, which could best be described as completely bloody impossible. At the start of this operation, you dive down on to the heart to be confronted with a giant eye on its surface blinking up at you, and getting rid of it is a long process - you have to remember how to deal with the variants of the six other strains that it can summon, while stabbing its eyeball with a syringe during any spare moment you find. After you've stuffed it with serum, there's an intermediate stage which is a tense and cruel test of nerves as you have to sever eight strands around it without ever touching the rapidly-changing red one. You have to do this three times and then perform the expected trick to finish it off (which I took a risk on the first time I played it and it ended in catastrophic failure).

But after finally getting past all that, you're triumphantly given a notice that you've now got access to the Confidential Operations, also known as the X-missions. So my descriptions of those are going to have to come much later provided I can complete them at some point within the next hundred years. Thanks a lot, Atlus.

I've just noticed that my DS now has a perfect groove worn into the screen at the point where the stabilizer appears.

There you go, pookatimes (as mentioned here) - I've now posted each day for a second month in a row, and recorded the feat on one of those nonsensically-abbreviated monthly achievement sites, NaBloPoMo, which on reflection has proved to be one of the more pointless things that I've done in my life.

Certainly I kept up my writing for the month, and half-heartedly joined a couple of groups at the start, but didn't really get into the community or pay any attention to anyone else on the site. The other stated purpose of trying to post something each day was to clear out the file where I keep all the notes for my entries, but if anything it's somehow become slightly longer than it was at the start of the month. I'm not sure how that happened.

One thing that it did bring to my attention was that, after writing up a triumphant description of how I got through the almost humanly impossible X-operations in Under the Knife 2, it turned out that I never actually posted my original write-up of it. So that'll have to be added to the queue for next month as well.

First of all, Prince of Persia 2008 (as I am going to call it, because there's already a game called Prince of Persia as you should well know) has single-handedly made me realize why certain people hate the current generation's Trophies system so much. When I first discovered the idea it sounded great, offering records of special achievements or milestones in games so that you can then show them off, but this goes so over the top with them that it's comparable to Armor Games' parody of the concept. You have taken a step into the canyon at the start of the game - have a trophy! You have been bashed in the face with a sword - trophy! You have successfully blocked and avoided being bashed in the face with a sword - another trophy! You have completed the tutorial - trophy! You have pressed the Compass button - trophy! Oh, you've pressed the Talk button too, well, have another trophy! You've pressed Talk another 49 times - trophy! You are not George Bush - Nobel Prize! You're not Piers Morgan either - have another! After half an hour of this it just begins to feel utterly condescending, akin to being rewarded at every turn by being given a pat on the head and a biscuit. That aside, though, I think I enjoyed it... though I'm yet to decide if it was really any good or not. It's confusing that way.

The game opens with a mysterious stranger wearing all sort of dangly nonsense and a scarf to rival Tom Baker wandering through the desert (his identity is never revealed in the game but its title gives you a slight clue), and you're guided through a course of running and jumping tutorials. The controls seem to have been simplified from the previous three games in the series, and I wasn't comfortable with them at first - instead of a shoulder button to run along a wall and X to jump off it, for example, the entire action is performed by simply pressing, holding, then letting go of X (and that goes for most of the actions in the game, with the occasional incorporation of O). The combat has also been completely changed, and it took me a while to realize that it made it a lot closer to that of the first game, taking the 3D action out of it and reducing it to one-on-one fights done through sequences of button presses. It almost feels as if the entire game is one very big quicktime event with occasional changes of direction - not quite up to Heavy Rain's level but noticeable all the same - and while that would normally be a fairly deadly thing to say about a game, somehow it avoids being brought down by it...

After getting used to the controls you're quickly roped into a quest to prevent a dark god from being revived by restoring life to the lands like Ammy the God of Turnips. You do this in a very curious arrangement for games these days - the entire landscape of the game is open to you from the start, and your only real task is to hop around the various precarious structures and gather as many light seeds as possible. What's also interesting is that after some obligatory levels, the order in which you guide Prince Jack of Sparrow around the game is completely up to you. I've only played through it once, but I'm assuming that the later obstacles, which include Silent Hill-like tentacles that pull you into the walls, are added to the parts of the landscape that you choose to do last, therefore increasing the difficulty curve no matter which order you do them in.

I thought that it felt very short (the ludicrously enthusiastic Achievements list reported that I completed it in under 12 hours), but I suppose that it was just about as long as the previous three games. I think that that feeling came because the game's so open, and that it feels like you only ever have one actual objective - the whole thing takes place in one continuous environment that never has to stop for loading unless you teleport to the other end of the game via the map screen (which looks like a revival of what Warrior Within tried to do but with a sudden realization that they could actually make it useful). When you get to higher points, the view can be incredible (you have stood around for a bit - trophy!) - even more so when you consider that pretty much all of that landscape is playable, and it's all still rendered from that distance.


It's interesting that the idea of controlling two characters at a time doesn't feel awkward at any point, though I thought the new conversation system was disappointing, having to stop and actively decide to talk rather than just enjoy the continuous conversation between the two characters that Sands of Time had. And I liked the rescue system at first, thinking "Oh, this is a nice way to lead me through the tutorial and ensure I can't die", but it took me a while to realize that it wasn't ever going to be turned off! At first I thought that this seemed a bit... silly, as I felt the finite-rewinding mechanic of the previous games was a decent balance between forgiveness and challenge, but after a while I sort of understood why it was done that way, or I just got used to it, or something. Nevertheless, it's a sort of awkward feeling that a balance in difficulty of the game has been abandoned in favour of just being able to restart you five seconds before you died all the time... like I said, I've no idea whether this is good or not. It's very confusing.

As Whitney is still somehow under the impression that I have ambitions to become a citizen of this country, I've been looking at the form that you have to fill in in order to apply. From what I can tell from the instructions, having gone through all of the fiancee visa and residence processes and paid a fee for them to look at each one, I'm now required to come in through the naturalization process, which costs $675. (Generously, there is also an "Application for Posthumous citizenship" that costs nothing to file if you only want to start becoming a citizen after you've died.)

Dealing with the immigration services or any of their forms is like a constant reminder of the futility of everything you do in life, but I've worked out that I fall under category 2 of the groups of people who can apply for citizenship, having been a permanent resident retroactively for three years AND married to the same US citizen for three years AND that citizen has also been a citizen for three years. Firefox is so disgusted by the pair of them that it just crashes when you try to view them in it (but it's Adobe Reader - this isn't exactly unusual for it), so after downloading the instructions (7 pages including Paperwork Reduction Act note) and form (14 sections, 10 pages), let's have a look at the questions that I have to answer this time...

Chapter 1, verses 1-4

This part is called "Your Name", and is fairly straightforward, but section D is a surprise because it asks you if you want to change your name on becoming a citizen, like some sort of bonus rename token you've bought on Livejournal. The next few parts aren't particularly remarkable or exciting apart from revealing that the usual "Hair/Eye Color" questions that I've had to answer as part of my biometrics (neither of which have an "Unknown" option) are required by the FBI for criminal records searches. The next few, however, are far more impossible:

Chapter 7

A. How many total days did you spend outside of the United States during the past five years?

I don't know! I wasn't aware that I was supposed to be keeping count. Everything before summer 2006 and occasional visits to the outside world starting as soon as they allowed me to do so... I'm sure I can work out a rough estimate.

C. List below all the trips of 24 hours or more that you have taken outside of the United States since becoming a lawful permanent resident. Begin with your most recent trip. If you need more space, use a separate sheet of paper.

What follows is a form asking for exact dates and a count of days spent on them, so it looks like a rough estimate is insufficient for their purposes and the number above had better match the total of everything in this section if I want to be considered. I think that the US is going for the best deterrent to immigration being to make people fall asleep before they've reached the end of the citizenship form.

It starts to get really good after this point.

Part 10. Additional Questions
A. General Questions.

Answer Questions 1 through 14. If you answer Yes to any of these questions, include a written explanation with this form. Your written explanation should (1) explain why your answer was Yes and (2) provide any additional information that helps to explain your answer.

In other words - you really don't want to answer Yes to any of these.

6. Do you have any title of nobility in any foreign country?
7. Have you ever been declared legally incompetent or been confined to a mental institution within the last five years?

Interesting that these are placed so close together. Yes, I am, in fact, King George the Mad. Of Meikle Wartle.

B. Affiliations.

8a. Have you ever been a member of or associated with any organization, association, fund, foundation, party, club, society, or similar group in the United States or in any other place?
b. If you answered "Yes", list the name of each group below. If you need more space, attach the names of the other separate sheet of paper.

The chess club at the academy? Omaha Steaks? A school ceilidh band? TigerDirect's mailing list? bostonfurs? I'm not sure of the exact angle at which you're trying to incriminate me, here.

9. Have you ever been a member of or in any way associated (either directly or indirectly) with:
a. The Communist Party?
b. Any other totalitarian party?
c. A terrorist organization?

Not that I can remember...

10. Have you ever advocated (either directly or indirectly) the overthrow of any government by force or violence?
11. Have you ever persecuted (either directly or indirectly) any person because of race, religion, national origin, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion?

Hmmmmm... no?

12. Between March 23, 1933, and May 8, 1945, did you work for or associate in any way (either directly or indirectly) with:
a. The Nazi government of Germany?
b. Any government in any area (1) occupied by, (2) allied with, or (3) established with the help of the Nazi government of Germany?
c. Any German, Nazi, or S.S. military unit, paramilitary unit, self-defense unit, vigilante unit, citizen unit, police unit, government agency or office, extermination camp, concentration camp, prisoner of war camp, prison, labor camp, or transit camp?

Very familiar questions to anyone who's ever come into the US on the Visa waiver - the idea here is that if you say "No" when you were actually Hitler's secretary, you've then lied about it, and the act of lying about it is somehow more incriminating than organizing the packed lunches for the invasion of Poland.

D. Good Moral Character.

22. Have you ever:
a. Been a habitual drunkard?
b. Been a prostitute, or procured anyone for prostitution?
c. Failed to support your dependents or to pay alimony?
d. Sold or smuggled controlled substances, illegal drugs, or narcotics?
e. Been married to more than one person at the same time?
f. Helped anyone enter or try to enter the United States illegally?
g. Gambled illegally or received income from illegal gambling?

None of these, but I think 22a would present some problems for several people I knew in university.

23. Have you ever given false or misleading information to any U.S. Government official while applying for any immigration benefit or to prevent deportation, exclusion, or removal?
24. Have you ever lied to any U.S. Government official to gain entry or admission into the United States?

I made up the address where I was going to stay, the first time I was here, because I couldn't remember what it was and had no means of checking on the plane. But I admitted this at the time, so I'm in the clear for that.

H. Oath Requirements

34. Do you support the Constitution and form of government of the United States?

Not really. It seems a bit shafted.

35. Do you understand the full Oath of Allegiance to the United States?

As far as it goes.

36. Are you willing to take the full Oath of Allegiance to the United States?

No (see later)

37. If the law requires it, are you willing to bear arms on behalf of the United States?

Absolutely not

38. If the law requires it, are you willing to perform noncombatant services in the U.S. Armed Forces?

No, not particularly

39. If the law requires it, are you willing to perform work of national importance under civilian direction?

I've honestly no idea what this involves, but maybe, if it involves being suddenly dragged along into the plot of Die Hard 3 - it depends on how I'm feeling that day.

If your application is approved, you will be scheduled for a public oath ceremony at which time you will be required to take the following Oath of Allegiance immediately prior to becoming a naturalized citizen. By signing, you acknowledge your willingness and ability to take this oath:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen...

What?! No, forget it. It's bad enough making me something that I've been rather proud of not being up until this point, but taking what I already am away from me and indoctrinating me fully into "American" status is miles too far.

That's a whole lot of money saved, then.

(Plus a ton of audio workstation magic - I'm really not this good!)

During our last conversation my mum said that she really wanted to hear some of what I'd been doing since starting to learn the guitar - something I'm sort of hesitant about showing around, partly because it's so far removed from what she or indeed most of the human race would consider identifiable as music.

Nevertheless, as a first step towards that in the form of putting it on a site whose URL I can actually share around unselectively, I opened a Tracktion works-in-progress "album" on my Bandcamp page and have started it off with an unfinished recording of my first song that was written entirely in GP5 and not Modplug.



The guitar parts are (more or less) performed by me, everything else is electronic. It still needs some parts added, and probably a replacement ending. And some tuning.

I finally got around to watching the Red Dwarf: Back to Earth specials last night, after they'd been on nearly a year ago. They were completely awful. Initially that was going to be my entire review, but in the later parts, I decided that to be fair to them, they were either an absurdist bit of series metafiction that fell a bit short of the mark, or they were actually completely awful.

And I'm leaning towards the latter side at the moment, because the whole thing felt so cringeworthy to watch - to cut a long story short, the crew fall through a portal into another dimension where they discover that they're actually just characters on a TV programme and have to find their creator to prevent their series from being cancelled, after which the whole thing is revealed to be a recycled plot from an earlier episode done significantly less well. The whole thing felt like one hundred percent fanfiction, with the jokes coming from each character being a total exaggeration of their former selves, and episodes and people being smugly name-dropped throughout. Even though it wants you to find it funny, it also seems to suffer from the same problem as Series 7, where it started wanting to be taken seriously and it just wasn't mature enough to make it - this one feels rather like the modern Doctor Who series, with the increased special effects budget and film look.

The best part - or rather one of the identifiably all right parts - was something that nearly caused me to bang my head off the desk when I first saw it, but then turned around as it got more and more unlikely - when placed among less comedic scenes the jokes are almost done in too straight-faced a way to even be deadpan comedy. It's the CSI-style photo scene (though it's in the context of a much wider reference to Blade Runner).

I used to love Red Dwarf when I was twelve, though a lot of it seems childish to me now - perhaps that's an effect of the age I used to watch it. Or maybe it just is. Nevertheless, I think I'll have to spend some time watching earlier episodes in the hope of reminding myself that it used to be quite good. Some things should be left in the past!

Whitney's been watching a load of Murder, She Wrote this weekend, and there was an episode where the captain of an ocean liner was played by Leslie Nielsen. After Airplane and Naked Gun it's totally impossible to watch him do anything seriously now, because you keep expecting something to happen like him saluting with a kettle in his hand and smacking himself in the face, or to knock over a load of background objects in a Tom and Jerry chain reaction. It helps that he acted just as straight-faced in his comedy films as he did in the straight ones.

Dead Ringers (not the film) also did this to me with Charlotte Green, who I could no longer listen to reading the news because I was always waiting for the joke. And it unexpectedly did it with Crimewatch as well, which is unfortunate given that it's actually serious, often disturbing and doesn't regularly include coverage of the multiple song-homicide of the Sing Something Simple Singers.

I remember that the era of full-3D games was beginning when Total Reality was on CITV, and that I was amazed at the look of a Saturn/arcade game that they showed called Daytona USA. I also couldn't help... noticing... its music - for some reason, as part of a triumphant start to the era they'd decided to set the game to the most over-the-top "Wow, I'm a 3D racing game" soundtrack that then rang throughout arcades for a number of years (you must have heard it - it's possibly even more iconic than "Ridgeidge Raceraceracer").

I thought it was hideous even at the time and couldn't understand why it the programme was saying how great it was, but of course, what I didn't realize at that age, having no sense of paradox, was that directly because this was the worst game theme in the world, that retroactively makes it also the best one in the world. Even if you've forgotten it by now, you'll never be able to get it out of your head once you've dared to click on this link.

DAY-TO-NAAAAA - Let's [indeterminate noise]!

Of particular note are the lyrics, starting with the hideously jolly "Do-do-do-de-do-do" part and then performing the spectacular feat of managing to turn downhill from there. It's mostly in that mangled attempt at something resembling English that only the Japanese and Ben Sotto have truly perfected, but as far as I can tell, the first verse is something along the lines of:

This is your Crew Chief,
The courses are really tough,
But it's a beautiful day,
So... [long pause] feckitDAYTONAAAAAAA...

As the art of good lyric writing seems oddly to be equivalent to that of not saying what you actually mean, you've got to admire their bluntness. I suppose by American motorsports standards the courses are indeed really tough, sometimes featuring corners that turn to the right as well as to the left.

As part of my education in 80s live-action Disney films that I missed growing up, we watched Cool Runnings, the film about the Jamaican bobsleigh team, yesterday. I had to have the subtitles turned on. Perhaps I was just overly tired.

I thought I'd never seen any of it before, but there was one scene that I suddenly realized that I'd seen a fragment of on TV when I was very young - the part where they're doing their first practice run with the high-pitched screaming (so much so that I had remembered it as a woman's voice) followed by the crash in the tunnel. Does anyone else get this, isolated memories of things like that that suddenly make sense when you recognize them years later? It happened to me when I first saw Goldfinger all the way through as well, with the vault door and the flippy-counter bomb - I had been in the living room when my dad and uncle were watching that when I was about four.

I was pointed to this by someone else a couple of days ago. It's from a TV channel here that despite calling itself "Fox News" is really a 24-hour right wing propaganda machine, and I'm sorry to tarnish your browser history with the address but it's worth watching to see the level of politics around here.

College Skews Political Spectrum

Nothing wrong with that headline, is there? Yes there is, as e_to_the_ipi explains in the comments. But there's never been a country more afraid of words, or a party that is better at using them, and just by planting ideas into such a negative context they can hack at the minds of their gullible audience. You can put a bad spin on anything if you disagree with it, but this attempts to take the pure school bullying approach of making things like just being educated or having an awareness of the wider world into negative things.

A question - why aren't we out there screaming like the Party of Teabags or whatever they want to call themselves now, protesting that yes, we want America to take great steps forward among Western society and have healthcare available to all, or that people should be able to get married to each other as they choose and not as we choose based on what an unknown person wrote two thousand years ago? Because we're too quiet, and too reasonable, and it's only the loudest and most hateful voices that are heard. Don't send your children to college where it'll somehow erode their civic knowledge - let them turn into these people instead.

This is the reason why I'm honestly indifferent about Britain becoming conservative in the next general election (apart from the lack of any promise from Labour anyway) - no matter how much I may disagree with any of their ideas they are positively saints compared to the willful idiocy that so many people of this country take an immense amount of pride in exhibiting.

Besides, ours dig themselves holes so deep it becomes funny again.