(no subject)

Oh, wow...

my business partner and his wife just had their baby a week early...

It sounded almost like one of the mad stories you read in the newspaper, they thought she had a really bad tummy ache, took her in to get checked, discovered she was heavily dilated, a few hours later: BABY!

They were so unprepared, they don't have a name yet, bless 'em!

schizophrenia comic book

tallguywrites has a book coming out in early 2010 called Psychiatric Tales.

It looks pretty ruddy excellent. Click the link for the chapter on schizophrenia.

The Magic of the Wookie Hole Witch

Huge Anglo-Saxon gold hoard found in Staffordshire

This is in the county I'm from, if not in the actual zero-horse town I grew up in (the guy who found it is from Burntwood, and they don't travel much round there... he may have made the two mile pilgrimage to Cannock on a religious holiday).

I can't say I'm the least bit surprised that the only interesting thing to have happened related to Burntwood in the last century (other than my own birth signalling the End Times) was due to the place being so backwards that nobody had looked in a particular field for hundreds of years.

What I am surprised about is:

a) that the bloke didn't consider metal-detectors to be the magic of the Wookie Hole Witch

and

b) having found SHINY METAL, the bloke in question hasn't been immediately elevated to the status of God Emperor and the first born of the village immediately sacrificed in his name.

Obviously Burntwood has evolved to the point where electricity and metal now only provoke suspicion rather than fear.

"I have this phrase that I say sometimes; 'spirits of yesteryear take me where the coins appear', but on that day I changed coins to gold," he said.

"I don't know why I said it that day but I think somebody was listening and directed me to it.

Yes. That's probably exactly what happened, you crazy old bastard.

(So what you said was "Spirits of yesteryear, take me where the gold appear"? That would be your Burntwood grasp of the English language hard at work, there.)

I can't wait for the inevitable gold-rush of teenagers ripping up farmers' crops, looking for treasure. It must be the first gold to come out of Burntwood in the last hundred years that didn't come in a cardboard presentation box from Argos.

As is customary in Staffordshire, once catalogued, the finds will be melted down and turned into hoop-earrings for the local mewling, rat-faced, inbred, track-suit-bedecked, dole-scum populace.

That is, if the village's remaining one-legged, demented ironmonger can summon forth the long-lost magic of fire.

Failing that, they will sell the lot and spend the money on a giant fucking turnip.

SWEET, LEMON-SCENTED VICTORY IS MINE

Ah, thank fuck.

Another good day, and I've almost pulled myself back to level with the dayjob.

I'm still spacking about in mac land like something of a n00b, but I'm starting to really get my feet in xcode and objective-C. Well, enough to have pounded out a goodly bunch of code today.

Splash screens, menus, transitions, layers, scenes and buttons, oh my!

You do get a lot of whizzy visual effects either for free, or for cheap - I begin to see why even the most paltry AppStore offerings have magical slurping effects all over them.

Most of all, though, I've got a fucking game loop / message pump and a bunch of objects whose lifecycle I control and understand and can begin to set the universe up the way I'm accustomed to.

Maybe I'll actually code a cocking game over the next week.

I hope so, anyway, as that's the deadline for this milestone.

Haw haw haw... shit.