Reading the new SFX Heroes special and this:

Jayma Mays (how sad her name makes her sound like a female version of the gorilla-faced car journo)

made me hoot with laughter and made pink_weasel very indignant (she’s a bit of a fan, you know).

Very True Mood: amused

I saw this Build Your Own Stonehenge kit in the shop yesterday. A miniature Stonehenge. How Spinal Tap is that?

And on Amazon: “20 used & new available” … does anyone want a second hand Stonehenge?

ObWargames: Not sure of the scale but I suppose it would work quite well with 6mm or smaller figures. Or with a 28mm rock band…

Very True Mood: amused

Another day, yet another social networking site. So, I signed up to Friendster and what do I think?

Design is a bit plain and corporate looking, even a bit old fashioned. There are some limited skinning possibilities, including the ability to write your own CSS - I cut and pasted in the standard Very True Things CSS and it worked reasonably well. If I wanted to I could probably make the page look fairly decent with a little effort.

Signing up was straight forward. The profile is composed of preset fields (once more I did a quick cut and paste directly from Facebook, which I cut and pasted more or less directly from LiveJournal and so on…) and like LiveJournal and MySpace some of them allow you to enter HTML code for extra formatting. University and school details were easy to fill out.

Once again there’s nowhere on my profile where I can enter the URL of my web site, and also it lacks the ability to import my blog RSS feed so that I can update my main blog and have the posts appear automatically. Like Bebo yesterday this lack of interoperability is going to be a major downside for established web users.

Friendster charge for blogs although an ad-supported standard also exists. Setting up a blog was easy and the system supports trackbacks (which puts it ahead of LiveJournal for starters) but the post didn’t show up on my profile page straight away.

None of my friends seemed to already be members already.

Overall, competent but unexciting.

Very True Mood: calm

I’ve just taken a look at my posting rate, and being a science nerd I ploted it out on a graph.

( Do you like graphs? )

So what does that mean? Well, clearly my posting rate has been in decline for the past year and working huge amounts of overtime can only be partly responsible (seeing as I’ve never had a problem taking ten minutes to write a post in a break at work). Partly it’s because some of the subjects I posted about before simply aren’t generating an news storues to comment on anymore, and partly because I’m no longer making any regular thematic posts (e.g. the Counting the Cost of War(games) series.

The spikes in the spring of each year are down to the Six Nations/Doctor Who double bill that always gives me some reason to post.

Another day, another social networking site. So, I signed up to Bebo and what do I think?

In looks it’s a classic Web 2.0 site - big chunky navigation, rounded corners, bold colours combined with subtle fades, lots of white space.

Signing up was easy. The profile had just about the right mix between preset fields and flexible fields that you can customise as you like (or cut and paste directly from Facebook, which I cut and pasted more or less directly from LiveJournal and so on…)

But there seems to be a walled garden approach. There’s nowhere on my profile where I can enter the URL of my web site and it lacks the one feature that really sold Facebook to me - the ability to import my blog RSS feed so that I can update my main blog and have the posts appear automatically on my Facebook profile.

There are also far fewer of my friends already signed up than on Facebook, MySpace, Last.FM, LinkedIn or LiveJournal. And no “Also on…” feature that lets me list my membership of all these other network memberships.

Sorry, but my online presence is widespread and diffuse and any site that doesn’t join the party is going to get left out.

So, okay design, good usability, but poor networking. Probably not something I’ll be coming back to regularly.

Very True Mood: curious

Via juggzy

Your Score: Nemesis

33% Extroversion, 100% Intuition, 55% Emotiveness, 42% Perceptiveness

You are a normally quiet person with very strong convictions and a marked activist streak. You have a clearly defined sense of right and wrong, and you like seeing people punished for their transgressions. You are Nemesis, goddess of punishment. You are a champion for the defenseless, you love poetic justice and, if karmic retribution doesn’t have its say, then you’ll have yours. You are astute, rarely fooled, and idealistic.

Your defining characteristic is your internal and inflexible system of morals. Because of your highly intuitive nature, you possess the theoretical nature required to define those morals, but you sometimes lack the ability to verbalize and expound on them, especially on the more nuanced parts of your worldview. Regardless, you have strong instincts which often prove to be correct, and rather than preaching, you act on them. You don’t compromise — ever.

You can sometimes be a person of great internal stress. You don’t have double standards, and so you expect the same of yourself as you expect of others. You might find, sometimes, that you have just as hard of a time in living up to those expectations as the people around you. As a result, you are rarely at peace with yourself, but you’re also likely to think of this in a positive light — you’re always forcing yourself to improve, and you avoid making mistakes.

You tend to be a private person, and don’t like to talk much about those staunch morals of yours until, that is, they become violated. Once that happens, everyone is going to know exactly where you stand. You have a distaste of nihilism and intellectual relativism that will make you naturally compatible with scientists and certain kinds of philosophers, even if they don’t share your activist streak.

Famous People like you: Goethe, Voltaire, Susan B. Anthony, Robert Burns
Similar Personality Types: Prometheus, The Oracle, Hermes, Orpheus
Avoid: Icarus, Dionysus, Agamemnon, Atlas
You may or may not be able to get along with an Odysseus — it will depend on his/her upbringing.

Link: The Greek Mythology Personality Test written by Aleph_Nine

Right, not too bad this time with some fairly accurate insights. But this is more how I’d like to be than how I am actually am.

Been here before but today received the latest issue of Floreat Domus…

So the JCR has held a black tie ball instead of a summer event, and voted to end opposition to formal hall, and the rugby club has swapped its traditional multi coloured strip for rather dull navy and white. And this is meant to make me all nostalgic for the old place and cough up some money?

Very True Mood: confused

Went down the Croydon yesterday, bought two mauve shirts (what was I thinking?) and then went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - not a lot to say about that, a did a fair job of making a decent film out of a book that’s more teenage grumpiness than actual plot. It’s now quite clear that some of the teenagers simply can’t act and that some of the veteran thesps can’t be bothered to do anything except ham it up. Excellent special effects with the exception of the CGI creatures which still look like they’re made of plasticine.

But before the film they showed a trailer for the film adaptation of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising.

Oh dear.

You see I don’t care what sort of changes they make to Harry Potter, or how they redesign the Transformers, but when you start messing around with The Dark is Rising you’re messing with something very important from my childhood.