Schrodinger's Fox

I just woke up, and the light coming through my window is orange. The sky is bright orange. And it's really, really creepy. Either it's the end of the world, or just a really damn big duststorm.

Or maybe we're all just suddenly in D'ni. One can only hope.

I'd never seen this before, so I thought I'd share it :)

Exams can be fun sometimes, particularly when you're allowed to take in with you one double sided sheet of A4 paper containing hand-written notes of your choosing. I've just spent the last 3 hours squeezing every last piece of information onto that bloody sheet in as small a font size as I can legibly produce, so that the entire course is now contained on a single piece of paper.

The only question now is - what the heck does any of it mean?

I read this on the back of a bathroom door today at uni. The door was covered in graffiti, to which someone had obviously taken offense:

"Taggers are complete and utter c***s! (Responsibly expressing myself in pencil)"

The following chain of responses ensued below, each presumably written by a different author:

"You have the support of my pen!!"
"And my AXE!"
"And thus the fellowship was formed"
"The pencil, pen & axe in union."

"Oh shit guys, I think I hear orcs in the cistern!"

Most awesome piece of bathroom scrawl I've ever seen :)

This video is made from it:



... with the possible exception of the dude trying to sing.

Most of you probably haven't seen or probably even heard of Thunderbirds (except perhaps for the recent live-action movie, which was crap), but it's an old TV show from the 1960's that I've loved since I was a kid, and seeing Parker (normally a quiet English butler) DJ'ing is absolutely priceless :)

I love these guys. Their videos are always made of win.

I've been meaning to write an entry for a few days now about what happened last weekend with Mini-Animania, but every time I've come to write it I've never been able to express myself properly. Someone poke me if I don't post it up soon, there are some awesome stories I want to share.

Right now though, I've just come out of a torturous session of script writing, in which I wrote nothing but a whole ton of crap. Once again, I'm trying to bring Silent Paranoia back out of hibernation, but this is the point where I always fall over - I really, really suck at writing scripts. Truly do I suck. Of epic fail my scripts they are made. I did have one shining script with the New Year's Special, or at least compared to my usual standard. But what I usually write sounds so dull and boring, just fact after useless fact on conspiracies nobody cares about.

Part of the problem I think is that I'm writing in the wrong medium. What comes out onto the page when I try to write things isn't a script - it's a journal article. It's something you'd submit to a blog or newspaper or some such thing. It's not written to be said out loud, it's too detailed, too comprehensive. I'm trying to say too much too fast, and yet at the same, too little too slowly. And no matter how many times I realise this fact, and try to shift myself into a better writing style, I always end up spewing forth the same stream of typographic diarrhea that no-one is going to want to have to listen to. I can usually only stand a few hours of this utter frustration before throwing in the towel and giving up.

One thing I've learnt though is that I need my cohost. Dr. Brown is an awesome character to have onboard, because he's someone I can interact with to liven up the scene. We can poke fun at each other, bounce off one another to advance an idea, and some of the skits I've come up with to bring a given segment to its conclusion are really quite amusing. The first real success I had with the segment was the one he first starred in, the Tin Foil Helmet's episode, and I think that's the reason that the New Year's Special worked so well - because I never got the chance to start detailing conspiracy theories and writing great paragraphs of information, it was pretty much just me and him having this mad little adventure through space and time, as well as quite possibly the Twilight Zone.

So here I am. Stuck here, with no motivation whatsoever to start working on it again, but knowing that deep down, I really do want to bring Silent Paranoia back. But I want to do it properly, I want to do it justice, and I know that what I'm producing isn't what I want.

There isn't really a point to this post, it's just something I need to get off my chest. If I might ask though, if anyone's got any ideas on things I can try, or what they'd like to see in the segment, please feel free to suggest them. I'm all ears...



...well, not literally, anyway. That'd be kinda creepy.

...other than that I really, really hope that the damage isn't permanent - that's far too awesome a suit to have destroyed like that, even if it was somewhat hilarious to see it happen.

EDIT - As I should have done when I first watched the video, I just checked the date on the video - July 2008. I've seen this fursuit in action in the Further Confusion 2009 video by BBF (click here), so apparently that stuff does come out :)

Going for my dental surgery in about an hour to get my wisdom teeth out. Wish me luck.

I knew I should've checked...current timezone is EDT, not AEST. 8:00 PM AEST = 9:00 PM EDT...*sighs*...right, well if anyone's coming, I won't start anything major until 9...EDT that is...

For anyone who's interested, I'm going to be running a series of tests on the UStream video service tomorrow night, and it really would help if a few people could come along to help work out some of the bugs. I've kinda got in mind to start up some sort of live broadcast version of one of my previous two endeavors, Uplink or Silent Paranoia, and I'd like to be able to get a feel for the format and see if it's going to work out or not.

I plan to start the broadcast at 8:00 PM Australian Eastern Standard Time. The show may be found here. With luck I'll be able to work out some material so as to put on some sort of show too, so hopefully it ought to be a fun evening :).

EDIT - To clarify ('tomorrow' is a little ambiguous), the broadcast will hopefully start at 20:00 hours, Aus EST, on Friday 20th March.

I has them:

Today has been curious. It started out well enough by the simple fact that I woke up. You can't ask for much more than that. I mean, starting the day without waking up is just weird, and can lead to some rather dangerous and unpredictable consequences.

But getting to the point, I spent the majority of my day hanging out at my old school, judging a Year 10 science fair on request from one of my old science teachers. It was interesting enough, getting to read over the various projects submitted by the students, but I swear, the number of rotting apple/mouldy bread/bouncing tennis ball experiments I saw, it did get a little repetitive. Judging consisted mainly of first reviewing each project and scoring it on its academic and creative merits, then interviewing each of the students as they explained what they'd done and scoring them on their responses. Then afterwards some of the judges, who are usually ex-students like myself or scientists somehow connected to the school staff, give presentations on what they do as part of their jobs. Inspired by my success at Mt. Stromlo, I gave a presentation of my own this year about all the extra things you can do at University, such as my scholarship and other such things, and I think it went over well.

So the day was fun...lots of science and talking and catching up with old teachers and school friends...until it came time to go home, and my mum (who was also a judge) and I got back to the car to find one of the rear windows smashed in. No other damage, no obvious projectiles, nothing stolen - just an act of apparently random vandalism. Suffice to say it put something of a damper on our previously happy mood, and we spent the rest of the afternoon reporting the incident to police, arranging for repairs and cleaning the glass off of the back seat.

Meanwhile, in other news, last Saturday's rocket launch went superbly, with a set of 4 reasonably successful flights, and all rockets recovered - we didn't lose a single one, which makes a happy change for me :). The Lighting flew once, landing with a half-failed chute, and the Superbird's only flight was marked with a rare double-chute failure, but it still survived the fall. Finally, the Barracuda put on a spectacular show on both its first and second flights, both times deploying its parachute, but unfortunately it sustained moderate damage in the form of a large dent to the body tube near the leading edge of one fin. She'll fly again, thankfully, but it'll take a bit of work to repair the damage. Photos of the day can be found here, and I've almost got the video up, but the Youtube uploader is being evil.

And finally, just a note - Secret Plans v2.0 are underway, but they're still in their infancy, and although I'm going to try and keep a better lid on these than the last time I tried this sort of thing, it's likely I'll eventually need a bit of help on this one.

...and also because this is just too damn hilarious:

Tomorrow I'm going to the first rocket launch I've been to in 6 months, and I'm really looking forward to it. There's just something about that particular smell of burnt out rocket motors, the atmosphere of the launch pad, the sound of ignition...the trudging around in waist-high grass for an hour looking for the damn things afterwards, that I simply can't resist. It's awesome :). Unfortunately, all the people who I invited to come along all ended up not being able to make it, but it should still be a fun launch.

After a general inspection last night, my fleet of five airworthy rockets are all ready to go. The four original members are shown below:

Link to picture

From left to right, we have my first rocket, the Apollo, then the Lightning, the Nova (with a Lego Luke Skywalker as payload) and the Superbird. All of these fly on engines between A and C class, and can reach altitudes of around 1000 feet.

Then there's this one:

Link to picture

That rocket is called the Barracuda, the newest addition to the fleet and by far the most powerful. It's about 4 feet long, and takes engines of E and F class (each letter represents a doubling in total impulse from the previous letter - ie, double the total thrust) and can reach an altitude of some 2600 feet. Tomorrow though the most I'll be flying her to is about 1500 feet.

( Slight rant about pointless stuff under here... )

Anyway, photos and videos will be upcoming after the launch tomorrow. Video from the last launch in August can be found on my Youtube here.

PS - Props if you can tell me where the title of this journal comes from :D

I spent a fair chunk of my time tonight drawing up a map on Google Earth that shows all the places I rode to on my bike during my recent stay in Canberra. I guess I was bored, but also curious to see exactly how much ground I managed to cover. And I have to say, I'm actually quite impressed with the result:

( Map behind cut... )

It's amazing what you can do with enough spare time and energy :). Ursula Hall was the place where I stayed, and everywhere else was reached with pedal power. Next time I'm in Canberra for long enough, I hope to be able to extend this map, hopefully with the company of others.