WillWybrow.com

Everybody except a slim band of people at about university age is too old or too young to understand this painfully simple concept.

A cassette player is called a cassette player. It plays cassettes. It is not called a cassette because cassettes are the things that a cassette player plays.

A CD player is called a CD player. It plays CDs. It is not called a CD because CDs are the things that a CD player plays.

AN MP3 PLAYER IS CALLED AN MP3 PLAYER. IT PLAYS MP3S.

It is not called an MP3 because MP3s are the things that an MP3 player plays.

Obviously the best film you are going to see this year will be the sequel to Nolan’s take on the Caped Crusader, aptly (but unusually) titled the Dark Knight.

It is the first film not to have the word ‘Batman’ in the title, and I think that reflects the difference between the films. Nolan has veered away from the ‘comic book’ style Batman that has been made time and time again and brought Batman into the modern age. It didn’t take Nolan too long to secure his dominion over comic book adaptations for years and years to come.

The Dark Knight began where Batman Begins promised to lead; the mad and cruel Joker is at large along with the residual lowlife of Gotham city and the Scarecrow. It is often remarked that the mental paths of genious and insanity have much in common, and Nolan and Ledger’s Joker seems to have perfected the union of the two into one.

More on that later, however. You are all going to see the film at some time or another, so it’s probably pointless to advocate it. If you’re still in doubt, go anyway. You have nothing to lose. Bale is amazing, up to his usual standard, and Heath Ledger has probably given one of the best performances in the history of cinema, which makes his recent death even more grim.

Since you will all be seeing the film, it seems pointless to go into further detail, as whatever I say about it will make little or no difference to what you’ll think coming out of the cinema. So, if I may, I would like to talk a little about the Joker character.

Tonight’s Entertainment

Who is he? We do not know. How did he get to be the way he is: gifted and quick-thinking whilst also insane and cruel? One of the more intriguing things about the Dark Knight is the omission of any backstory development for the Joker. While you’d think that this is a gamble normally, that we won’t understand the character and he won’t be convincing, no backstory is precisely the right backstory.

What makes the Joker so terrifying? It is his chaotic manner. The clarity of his thoughts is twisted by the instability of his goals. His methods are made up as he goes. He leaves no trace but a swath of destruction. And even Gotham’s billionaire hero has trouble tracking him down and stopping him, and he’s pitting the world’s finest resources against a homeless lunatic.

He does enough damage and becomes infamous enough to make threats to the whole city. He is fearsome because of all of that. He is fearsome because of his cruelty, his disregard for human life. He achieved so much in such a little time with the smallest drive: his own amusement.

I like the Joker. He’s everything I would want from a villain. He’s creative and clever whilst not letting that get in the way of heartless maiming and murder. He’s strong and brutal and, above all, fearless; when faced with his own impending demise, he cackles madly into the night, letting everyone know that he is the Joker, and he is mad.

Further aiming to dispel the notion that all writers find inspiration in the shower, I wanted to talk to you all today about personal hygiene.

Human beings are disgusting, aren’t they? They must be, to require daily cleansing using all these wonderful chemicals that are bottled and sold to us. But why must there be so many? Surely all the fluids we use to wash various parts of ourselves would be far better combined into one?

What brought this on was a delightful discovery that I have made. Take a look (if you want) at this Wikipedia article. To summarise the important bits, here is the opening sentence:

Body odor (spelled body odour in the U.K.), often abbreviated as B.O., or bromhidrosis (also called bromidrosis, osmidrosis and ozochrotia) is the smell of bacteria growing on the body.

Fine, so why do antiperspirants not have any antibacterial action? Honestly, just a few more chemicals put in there would make their product so much more effective. If you don’t sweat a great deal anyway, it seems a shame to waste all that money on a can of antiperspirant when it isn’t really going to be that great a help. So what about this:

Right, so there we have two bathroom products condensed into one. Next: shampoo. Now, I appreciate that washing hair is very different from washing skin, but when you need to buy conditioner on its own? Come on, guys!

And how bad would it be if you used shampoo everywhere? It’s not going to not clean you… Hell, I expect that most of the ingredients of shampoo and shower gel or soap are the same if not very similar. What a waste of time.

Next… This last one is going to take a bit of convincing, I can tell. Toothpaste. It comes with calcium and fluorides and all sorts of other crap, but if you’re going on holiday, do you want to take a tube of toothpaste with you? Wouldn’t it be easier if there was one product that did it all? Well, you probably also mention that toothpaste is flavoured. It has to be, people don’t want to taste soap when they’re brushing, do they? Well, then tell me this. Toothpaste is allegedly mint-flavoured, but is it really? Can you honestly say that a glob of toothpaste in your mouth would be as pleasant as a Polo? Who likes the taste of toothpaste? And I don’t mean, “who will tolerate it,” I mean if Colgate released a toothpaste dessert, who would go out of their way to experience that taste when they don’t have to? Very few people, I would imagine. So fuck toothpaste being flavoured, it could taste like anything. People aren’t going to worry about it.

So, some sort of universal, antibacterial shampoo with calcium and fluorides in it could possibly serve every need.

Anything I’ve missed?

Who wants to come see Alestorm with me in Peterborough on the 5th of September? It’s only £5.

Web publicity, or weblicity. Not really adverts, but to the effect of adverts, I suppose. Anyway, take a look at this bad boy and let me know what you think.

Another to come soon.

For some reason that is beyond my understanding, I had the weirdest dream last night.

My family and I were in a house, we might have been moving in. But it was new to us whilst having been lived in before by others. We were exploring the house and coming across signs of the previous occupants’ lives.

Now, my dreams always tend to play out as though I were watching a film. This includes things like camera panning and tracking shots, which is strange enough in itself, I suppose, but last night there was this really cool flashback effect where the camera would move around a point in the house while the scene transformed into the same shot of the house back when its previous occupants were living in it.

The story unfolded like this: there was a couple and their children living there. They had a teenage daughter who got pregnant and gave birth to a son. But through her negligence, her baby ended up being crushed. Her family shunned her for what they perceived as murder, and she became reclusive, hiding away in the basement with the remains of her child as she slowly slipped into madness. Her family kept her down there when she eventually tried to escape, and she became a prisoner.

Back in the present, my sister and I found a boarded up trapdoor which we broke into, and we descended into the basement. One final flashback scene showed the girl cradling her broken child to her, sobbing “fragile little skeleton” to herself over and over again. Then as we entered the old basement, we saw the crunched up baby inside a mouldy old shoebox.

I am calling it a ‘nightmare,’ because it was a distinctly unhappy dream, and descending into an old house’s basement and finding a sad story of death and madness has an odd Japanese horror kind of feel to it.

I can’t think what caused it. The only thing that really differed yesterday from my day-to-day routine was polishing off a bit of wine in the evening. For lack of a better explanation, the wine shall therefore be the cause.

I was watching a dog-owner for a while yesterday. Her dog, a pathetic little thing, ran into this man’s dog, a majestic-looking, well-disciplined German Shepherd. The owners didn’t talk very much, but the man proceeded to throw a ball and have it fetched for him by his dog, with the other, pathetic-looking one halfheartedly chasing it down too.

Every now and then, the man would pull a treat from his pocket and make the woman’s dog sit in order to earn it. And I thought that such a thing was very intrusive; maybe the woman didn’t want her dog trained to sit. Or maybe she wanted it to “shake” to earn its treat.

But, on the other hand, fetching balls and sitting down are pretty common “tricks” to teach to dogs. You might even say that they’re… standard tricks.

IEEE 964

I give you the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association’s inter-breed guidelines for standardising protocol and communication between dogs and dog owners. IEEE 964 outlines the key and mandatory procedures for standardising the teaching of and initiation of forced recollection of all tricks and subroutines of dogs across the known domesticated spectrum.

Developers at the IEEE are putting together the white papers for the standard. The researchers aim to have the papers on the market for trainers and trick-developers by the end of Spring 2009. The introduction of this standard will create typical interfaces for the most common communications, as well as defining the limits for customisation and the special inter-owner handshaking that needs to take place to define customised communication outside the scope of the standard.

Of course, there will be existing communicative channels and protocols that do not conform to the standard. This is why communications will need specific handshaking before initiating. This handshaking will involve timestamping communications to verify they are recent enough to require conformity (the threshold dates will need to be hardcoded by hardware vendors), and invalid handshaking will be sufficient indication that the IEEE standard has not been implemented in this model. The IEEE will offer minimal support for upgrading existing units. Their official stance has yet to be confirmed, but initial press releases and conference outcomes suggest that they will encourage replacement models to be purchased, models that comply with IEEE 964.

I got a call this afternoon from one of my associates, telling me that word about the rumour-mill is that the Warwick Atheists are going to receive the title of Best New Society after all, but will be losing the £100 prize money as a sanction for, I guess, unprofessionalism.

I was pleased to hear that the award would be coming back. However, I had just woken up, so wasn’t at peak cognitive performance. Having had a number of minutes to assimilate this (potential) news, I have come to the following conclusion:

Not Good Enough

What else could they have done about it? There’s a big board up in our Union’s “serious” building (versus the “fun” building) with the names of societies who have won awards each year. There is a column for “best new society.” There are no blank spaces. So, they can’t very well leave a blank space up on the board. It would look ghastly, for a start. And it would provoke questions, and could even become more famous than the infamous Warwick Atheists poster itself.

Plus, how bad would the Warwick Oriental Community (amusingly abbreviable to WOC) feel if they were awarded the prize after we had been stripped of it. Second place? That’s off the scale unfair to WOC and to the Warwick Atheists; the award should go to nobody if it doesn’t go to us.

This puts the Students’ Union at a bit of a dilemma. Do they leave a blank hole on the wall and keep our award from us? That’s pretty infeasible. Do they give the award to the runner-up? That’s even more infeasible and it devalues the award itself. So how, then, can they keep a strong front (to lend credibility to their unreasonable actions banning the poster and stripping the award) while also managing to appear reasonable and considerate. Well, they already know by this point that the award can only go one way - to the Warwick Atheists, but how are they sanctioned by that? Do they get away with their crimes? Does the Union then admit to being wrong?

Of course not. With the award out of the question for the purposes of punishment, there’s only one thing left to take away: the prize money.

As a start, taking away anything over £50 is grossly unconstitutional. But what’s more is that they have impotently taken away everything they possibly could in the given situation. They have taken away 100% of what they possibly could. That doesn’t show they’ve backed down at all. It doesn’t let us know that they’ve taken into consideration the beautifully worded letter that the Wingman sent them. It shows that they’ve ignored our every protest, and just spent this time (this entire term) deciding how they can still fuck us over.

Let me know what you think, but I am certain that we’re being raped as hard as we can be.

I was traversing the internet (more specifically, the parts of it that I write) when I came across a little article I wrote in January 2007 about my previous webhost, a company called 4sitesnetwork. You can Google them if you want, I am not going to link them.

One of the article’s reader comments says that the article in question “comes high up on a Google search for 4sites,” so I decided to look into that. And, what do you know, here we have the evidence:

Lo and behold, there she is, second in the list.

So if anyone wants to look for some impartial reviews of 4sitesnetwork (instead of the incredibly biased customer testimonials), they might search the internet for them, and come across that exceedingly well-written yet uninformative rant. But I don’t want a senseless rant to be my public stance on this particular hosting company. It’s not very helpful, for one, and doesn’t reflect the genuine problems that I could detail.

Mainly, however, I figure that if a post of mine hosted on a free blog can get so far up the Google search page for keywords that apply much more to pages made by the actual company, particularly when it isn’t actually a review, I figure this post can get even higher.

Alex Robinson - a Review of 4sites

4sitesnetwork will offer what initially seems like a reasonable deal for webhosting. UK based (to save those nasty conversions come checkout time) and quite cheap, you think you’re getting everything. Until you realise that the “company” is actually just some Welsh guy running things from his mother’s house.

But you can’t say that on your 4sites hosted website. You can’t say anything critical about the company or its employees at all. You know why? Because 4sites hate freedom of speech. Even if you make a good point about the quality of the host in reference to downtime, and have evidence to back up the validity of your claim, you will still get shut down as quickly as Alex Robinson can manage.

Other than being the totalitarian dictators of budget UK webhosting, the trouble I got into with slandering Alex Robinson all kicked off (both times) with my site experiencing unpredetermined and unexpected downtime. My website was offline for a considerable amount of time when I posted my angry comments. 4sites’ own unreliability forced me to make critical comments, which then forced (sort of) Alex Robinson to ban my site and delete all my original work. About 95% of it has been salvaged from archives, but it’s messy and somewhat haunting.

Anyway, to sum up, find a different web host. Honestly. The unreliability and arbitrary censorship isn’t worth the discount they offer in comparison with alternative companies.

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