Nachimir

Yeah, I discussed it with a friend this lunchtime and found out it took him ten years and his own mother pestering him before caving though She (my friend, not Conan Doyle's mother) summed it up as "potentially a huge flaw, however one with such balls that I have to admire it" Good theories Ben, I think you all definitely have it with the .

That was an ace episode. I've never read the original stories or seen any adaptations of them. At the very end, I thought I then went and read about The Final Problem on Wikipedia. I really like that . Heh

If you're in the UK and like nature documentaries, Earthflight is well worth a watch: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b018xsc5/hd/Earthflight_North_America/ It has aerial shots done with drones, microlights, gliders, and cameras strapped to trained birds. Here's a bit of it posted by the BBC; other people are uploading HD stuff: 5bneK4kpIPY Apparently the last episode will be all about the methods they used to film it.

Props to Kroms. This is possibly the best, most concise life advice I've ever seen

Hark! A Vagrant was recently turned into a book, and it's wonderful. Particularly relevant to recent threads are this one and this one.

Oh god, what have I started? Edit: You should probably PM rather than ask in this thread. I should specify that I won't send it to anyone who isn't an established forumer, (i.e. no one has been turned down so far ) Incidentally: PiratePoo, every time I read your posts now, my brain hears them in Jake the dog's voice. It is good

The best thing about that one was that he'd already been ignored by the guy's agent

4qI1iuYTlE8

Mostly with Chris and Tonsko on this. I notice it, it distracts me, and that makes it a blemish. Art direction should be able to step beyond a sacharine and overused type of colour contrast. One of the reasons I enjoyed Tron: Legacy was that it largely avoided it, and it made me a little sad that it was such a refreshing aesthetic change. I still almost want to fire up photoshop and put some teal in elmuerte's avatar though.

Sorry to hear that Speedy. I know you feel shit now, but your heart can't stay that way even if you try to keep it there. Take time to grieve, but then focus on doing all the other excellent stuff in your life. Or something. The anecdotes are potentially libellous and I'll only share them by request in a PM. Ben enjoyed them Here's a safe one: I once intensely annoyed him during a lunch meeting, by quipping to a commissioner who mentioned friends "[boss] doesn't have friends for tax reasons". She laughed loudly, and he treated me a little worse from then on. I knew before I said it that I was going to burn the bridge sooner or later. Most entertaining were the messages of support I got last year from other people in the industry, after putting a single gripe on Facebook. The best described my former boss as "a solid gold cunt". I saw him for hopefully the last time today. I ignored his unreasonable demands, and asserted my own. Grumbling and inept attempts to tell me off at first, followed by total capitulation from him

Yes, this was by far the strangest scene. The word causing him to suddenly change his mind seemed like a terrible switch to throw in, and made the earlier dialogue seem like weird filler. Later linking it to a memory palace* then having an awful sequence about it did not feel neat or necessary. Still enjoyed it though. *a legit and effective memory technique, though usually for remembering short lists; a good magician/illusionist might be able to use it to remember fifty or so items with a load of practice.

A friend just posted this: http://thewirecutter.com/leaderboard/cameras/

Definitely read reviews on dpreview. Personally, I'd recommend Panasonic as a brand. My last few have been theirs, and plenty of friends have bought other models too. All happy with them, and they tend to have decent ergonomics. Not sure what budget you're on, but at the moment the GH3 is about £450, and is an excellent camera. Much lighter and smaller than a DSLR due to being a micro four thirds camera, but with similar capabilities. In terms of compacts, I'm a bad person to ask.

Not really, I've shied away from anything libellous and/or public about him. I'll send you a juicy PM though. The anecdotes aren't so great, it's the things other people in the industry say about him that are the best bit I might post a bit more about it once this week is over. Favorite moment: The time he admitted to me that, when he was in his twenties and lived in London, he was basically Nathan Barley. He didn't know that was the nickname one of the other company directors had for him

It's a UK thing.

My absolute bellend of a former boss got in touch last week, asking for something from me. It's a book I borrowed before leaving. I have no problem with giving it back, but at my convenience, not his. He keeps emailing demands that suit him and not me. It's been fun so far

Even further North Also, just edited my post to include this:

I think it's something that should happen, Sombre. Good luck negotiating it with your boss. I imagine you'll have to talk to people from marketing and at least one charity to make it happen. Oop North. Even more northern than the midlands

Companies have done it, but are generally incredibly paranoid about it. I heard that a UK chain of pizza restaurants used to donate leftover dough to a homeless shelter, but someone kept some in the fridge for too long and got food poisoning. Result: They now cover the dough in blue food colouring and bleach before throwing it away. It varies from business to business, but I understand the use by dates are generally applied in a paranoid manner to mitigate risk, and in turn the businesses are paranoid about those and want to avoid any related risk. I totally agree with you on waste from supermarkets, it's pretty shocking. I went to stay with an art student in another city early last year; she's very poor and I'd offered to buy food during my stay, but she asked me if I wanted to help her get food from the bins behind Waitrose. I expected filthy, stinking bins full of scummy black deposits, but saw the stuff they throw out is clean and better than the stuff you can buy in most supermarkets. Whole bags of pasta thrown out, boxed, because they had small holes in. Boxes of drinks chucked because one had leaked, etc. Within ten minutes, three people left with a week's food and a load of fresh flowers for the flat too, and hardly scratched what was there.

That film is amazing in it's awfulness. It's best watched with a lot of other people, especially for the sex scenes; a single nervous laugh will set everyone off. I enjoyed the latest Sherlock, with the exception of all of the overused beepy techy sci fi computer sounds. At one point they were used for a sequence about Holmes' brain. He was meant to be in a memory palace, but it looked like a cosmetics advert with all the sciency guff floating around close ups of his face.

Pssst. ekQW3GHxgpA Edit: Wrestle has directed me here: http://www.forum.consolevania.com/index.php?topic=3680.0 This tweet indicates it's the same guy: https://twitter.com/#!/87th/status/155320000851349505 So it seems like the youtube channel has Rab and Ryan's blessing, and we'll get easily watchable, full episodes.

I wrote a volunteer handbook for my last client. They know me very well, but wouldn't let me put my job title in it as "Professional Bad Example"

If you can shave your face competently with a safety razor, you can shave your balls with one, disaster free. Definitely not one of these though:

I was about to give some useful advice. Then decided not to type that post. Just, er, concentrate and don't rush

This is kind of long. TL;DR version: I projected my angst about a game into my character, as angst about the universe he was in. It's also about needing a way to say "The End" when something feels endless. ----- I had a two week trial of Eve Online. I'd messed around with markets before, and MMOs too, so it felt familiar yet advanced. It was kind of like playing Space Crusade as a ten year old, then taking a look through the rules for Warhammer. Exactly that feeling. The early game was a churn of mining, making paltry amounts of money, then buying upgrades. It was tedious even when it didn't require my full attention, and I got burned a few times by buying things then finding I didn't have the right skills trained to equip them. I also realised I was unlikely to find the same kind of niches that had allowed me to prosper in games like Kingdom of Loathing. Eve didn't quite feel futile, but I realised that to succeed in it would require a lot of study and effort. This wasn't a small, friendly market. Looking at all those figures felt like staring into an endless and turbulent void, filled with noise and difficult to extract useful information from. As this all sank in, I'd been playing the game for a week, in the background to everything. Eve was so alt-tab friendly, and the "Warp drive active" voiceover on long journeys so lullingly calm. Sometimes, I'd flick back to it during trips, just to watch space. The game had got under my skin, despite the way I now felt about playing it. I wasn't going to be able to leave by just logging out and not looking back. My character needed a fitting end, so I decided he'd take a last journey. I was a minnow with no involvement in the politics of Eve, so there was only one thing that seemed meaningful. I wired all my money to another player I knew, picked a route, and set the autopilot. For a few hours, the game had my undivided attention. It was a long journey through 0.0 space in a small, weak ship. The scenery was captivating. These systems were things most of the players hadn't seen, and might never. I think it took a few hours to get to my destination, and I was probably very lucky in that nobody ambushed me at a gate. When I got to the last star system, I looked out into nothing and had a quiet moment at the edge of the galaxy. I didn't have to go far to find some NPC pirates to blow the ship to bits. After making sure they weren't following me, I put my capsule into orbit around an asteroid, then logged out for the last time. I made a map for it, though was only part of the team later on. As someone who didn't play it online much, one of the weird things I found with Thievery was how professional the core players became. It led to some amazing match reports and replays of people taking risks, but they understood the system so well that as I newbie, I felt like I didn't stand a chance on either team. It even extended to metagaming. Sound propagation in UT99 was pretty basic, and I think there was some kind of hack to attempt to make sound propagate along pathnodes. Once, I was crawling through a flowerbed very slowly and carefully, and a player controlled guard inside the house ran out the front door, around the side, into the bed and beat me to death with a mace. (That makes it sound like a horrrible community, but it wasn't. The most active players were generally all lovely and helpful).