Teeth

Just back from seeing Teeth. Which was great, in the same way that Ginger Snaps was - a film that takes the fear of our own bodies (and other people's) and makes the metaphors real, spicing them up with a sense of humour without going for slapstick, and keeping things unpleasant enough to ground them.

A minor gem, and well worth seeing at some point.

Birthday Joy

Despiute the odd hiccup I really enjoyed my birthday. Lots of people (I think 36 overall), a reasonable amount of alcohol, a load of pizzas, various kinds of music, and various silly conversations make Andy a happy man.

Got up this morning to find that channelpenguin had been up for two hours and done the washing up. A finer present I could not ask for (although I did get some damn fine ones).

Then I went and ran a game - which was fun, but could have been better, had I had any time in the last week, or more sleep. I must try and remember that in future - although I still enjoyed it, and the players generally seems to have done so too.

One more week of festival and then it all goes quiet for a bit. I'm looking forward to that _so much_ right now that you wouldn't believe it...

Future TVs

There are now DivX certified DVD players for £40.  These can also play MPEG files perfectly happily.

There are HD versions for around £150.

And yet the standard for transmitting High-Def sound/vision from a device to a TV is to have the cable or player box take the original stream and unpack it to the right resolution itself.

How long, I wonder, until TVs appear that stream video files direct - either direct from file shares, or from a UPNP server.  There's no need to worry about fiddly proprietary cabling and expensive interconnects when your TV takes a standard ethernet cable (and so does your HD player).

Or is this the kind of thing that only geeks will ever find useful.  And for the cost of a £40 piece of functionality, is that something TV manufacturers aren't prepared to take a gamble on?

William Gibson - he wrote a good book once

Tito slouched in his chair. He might have been Cuban-Chinese. He might have had Soviet connections. But he didn't care, because he knew the readers wouldn't. They would be happy so long as they thought something vaguely techy and wacky was going on.

Gibson's latest, digested.

Photos?

Anyone get any photos at my party? If so, leave them in a comment!