Felix Atagong's Unfinished Projects

Dr Death and other assorted figures...

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 21:06:02 +0200

When George Melly visited The Cromwellian club in 1965 he found quite a few wrestlers at the bar, what was no coincidence as the club was owned by four of them.

At the left side of the ring we find!
Paul Lincoln also known as Doctor Death!
Judo Al Hayes also known as The White Angel!

At our right side!
Rebel Ray Hunter and
Bob 'the wrestling Beatle' Anthony!

After the fight visit the craps table under the guidance of croupier Randy Steed!
Our club contains many famous guests: Brian Epstein, Georgie Fame, John Lennon, Lee Marvin, Paul McCartney, Omar Sharif, Ringo Starr...

and perhaps... Iggy the Eskimo!

Dr Death and other assorted figures... tickets now available at the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit.

Ariane's Second Date

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 15:12:48 +0200

My latest ArianeB related post dates from end July 2010 when ArianeB 6.45 was released and it is pretty sure to be the final version of this (free!) adult simulation game that has attracted a couple of million players.

Unfinished Projects more or less unwillingly surfed on the same wave of success. I started playing the game in 2007 when I discovered the fourth generation of Virtual Date Ariane, probably because it had been mentioned on Shark's Lagoon. I found the game witty, intelligent and sexy - let us not forget the sexy aspect - and it had quite a few expected and unexpected situations.

Should you happen to be one of those people who don't know what ArianeB, Virtual Date Ariane, Ariane Barnes or Ariane Brodie is all about (all the previous names have - at one moment or another - been used) then here is a summary, taken from one of my first walkthroughs for the game:

ArianeB or Virtually Date Ariane is an adult dating simulator with a lot of different scenarios and outcomes. The story is fairly simple, make a date with Ariane and try to get her in the sack! Of course this sounds easier than it is and that is exactly what makes this game worthwhile. The best way is to experiment with the different situations the game offers and to learn from past mistakes. (Taken from: Behavioral Studies, 2007.)

I wanted to explore all possible scenarios in the game (an impossible goal, I realised later) and started to note down my findings although the truth obliges me to say that I pinched most solutions from websites and forums from all over the globe, especially the Shark's Lagoon forum that had (and still has) a quite active adult gaming section. Unfinished Projects soon became the Internet spot containing the most complete collection of solutions for Virtual Date Ariane. I have to thank the fans of the game who send me solutions before I even had the chance to go looking after it or who discovered situations that I didn't see.

The game itself mushroomed, not only in size - rising from roughly 580 images to about 1300 - but also in popularity, and so did evidently my walkthroughs that were upgraded whenever a new version was released. This brought a new set of problems as I merely had been altering or completing previous walkthroughs so that, after a while, nobody could find back anymore what they were looking for.

I found a solution, I think, by adding an ArianeB link on the top right of every page that will automatically lead to the most recent walkthroughs of the game. It might have helped because a couple of days ago I found out that my blog has celebrated its second million visitor.

ArianeB v6.45 is the most recent release of Virtual Date Ariane and it seems that it will be the last for quite a while. Its maker had already hinted in January that he had quite a few new scenarios but that he was thinking to use these for a second game and in April he expressed the wish to 'wrap this project up and start something new'.

Bit by bit we get to know the (graphical) direction the new game will evolve into. In August it was announced that work on an ArianeB sequel had started and that its maker has been redesigning some existing backgrounds, like the town centre with the lingerie shop and the bar, the burger joint and the downtown restaurant.

While the maker has been hinting that Ariane's Second Date (my title, not his) will see new scenes in a hair salon and a movie theatre, he is very reluctant to let us know something about the new scenarios, and quite rightly so. So for the moment all we can do is look at some very promising renders of the new neighbourhood and to forget that there are still over a thousand images to create…

ArianeB, Virtually Date Ariane, Ariane Brodie or Ariane Barnes can be found on about a dozen places on the web, but the official version can be found here, playable online or as a download: http://arianeb.com/dategame.htm.

The most recent bunch of walkthroughs can be found at: All in one

The official ArianeB blog is located at: Ariane's Life in the Metaverse.

Gravy Train to Cambridge

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 12:38:17 +0200

Some changes here at Felix Atagong's Unfinished Projects. Our sister venture the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit has been vegetating for the last couple of months, due to the fact that the main subject of its existence, Iggy or better said Evelyn, has been found and is alive and kicking at the British seaside.

As the main quest of that blog was exactly that, finding out if Ig was still around, The Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit is now confronted with the fact that its primary goal has been reached.

A crisis meeting was organised and it has been decided that all Syd Barrett related news, that was usually published at Unfinished Projects will now be handled by the Church.

A first post, using this policy, has now been published, so if you are looking for a review of the most recent Syd Barrett compilation called: An Introduction To… we gladly invite you over there: Gravy Train to Cambridge.

Over the next couple of months some Barrett related articles from this site will be transferred to the other, until utterly confusion will be reached and nobody will find anymore what they are looking for.

The Relic Samples

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 15:38:29 +0200

There was a time when I would put in the latest Orb CD and murmur blimey! Blimey because The Orb pleasantly surprised you or blimey because Alex 'LX' Paterson and band utterly frustrated you. They had that effect on me for years from their very first album Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld (1991) until the quite underrated Cydonia (2001) and often the wow! and shit! effect could be witnessed on the same disk, most notably on Orbus Terrarum that probably contains the freakiest ambient track ever (the heavenly Oxbow Lakes) but also some of the worst.

The Millennium Orb

After 2001 Paterson continued to make albums under the Orb banner but the wow! effect had largely disappeared and his most prolific output lay on quite a few (from good to excellent) compilation and/or remix albums: Dr. Alex Paterson's Voyage Into Paradise, Auntie Aubrey's Excursions Beyond The Call Of Duty (containing an Orb remix of Rick Wright's Runaway), Bless You (the best of the Badorb label), Orbsessions I and II (outtakes), Back To Mine, The Art Of Chill and last but not least The BBC Sessions.

For ages The Orb has been called the Pink Floyd of ambient dance but the only fusion between both bands was the use of some Pink Floyd samples on early Orb anthems (the four note Shine On You Crazy Diamond signature tune on A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld) and the presence of Pink Floyd bass player ad interim Guy Pratt on a couple of Orb albums. Contrary to a stubborn belief the so-called ambient (and illegal) Pink Floyd remix albums from the Nineties were not the work from The Orb, nor from Alex Paterson. Neither will we ever know Pink Floyd's retaliation: when the band worked on their 1994 The Divison Bell album they ended up with so many left-over material that - in the words of Nick Mason - "we considered releasing it as a second album, including a set we dubbed The Big Spliff, the kind of ambient mood music that we were bemused to find being adopted by bands like The Orb".

Rumours...

Exactly one year ago Alex Paterson, who has always been a bit of a bigmouth, revealed: ‘I’ve just started work on an album with David Gilmore (sic) from Pink Floyd which I think every Orb and Pink Floyd fan will want to hear' but that news was hurriedly demoted by David Gilmour.

On the 17th of August of this year, however, the David Gilmour blog had the following to reveal:

David is not working with The Orb on a new album, contrary to some reports, but you may remember that he had been in the studio jamming with Martin “Youth” Glover in recent months. (…) Alex Paterson was not involved in the sole jamming session and the only plan initially was for David to play guitar on that one track.

However, as it turns out and as you can see, the result of that jam session has now been spread across the next Orb album, Metallic Spheres, which will be released as ‘The Orb featuring David Gilmour’. So there you have it. He was working on an album with The Orb. Sort of.

If I may read a bit between the lines I feel some friction here between Sir David and this Orb thingy. But the next day, David Gilmour's official website had the next comment:

David's 2009 jam session with ambient collective The Orb has grown into an album, Metallic Spheres, to be released via Columbia/Sony Records in October. David's contribution to the charity song Chicago, in aid of Gary McKinnon, sparked the interest of producer Youth (Martin Glover), who remixed the track and invited David to his studio for a recording session.

With additional contributions from Orb co-founder Alex Paterson, the album took shape from 2009 into 2010, eventually becoming Metallic Spheres, to be released by The Orb featuring David Gilmour. (underlined by FA.)

Calling LX Paterson an Orb co-founder is technically not untrue, but it feels a little weird when you have just been presenting Martin Glover. It is comparable to describing Syd Barrett as a Pink Floyd co-founder while discussing Bob Klose. Agreed, Youth (from Killing Joke fame) was probably around when The Orb saw the light of day but it is generally acknowledged that the band was formed in 1988 by Alex Paterson and Jimmy Cauty. Cauty's primary project however, the Kopyright Liberation Front (with Bill Drummond) pretty soon outgrew The Orb and when - at a certain point in time - some Orb remixes were released in Germany as KLF remixes this provoked a rupture in the co-operation between the duo as Alex and Jimmy started fighting over… copyrights.

After the split between KLF and The Orb Martin Glover helped LX out with two tracks (on two separate albums): Little Fluffy Clouds and Majestic, but he did not become a member of the band. Only in 2007 Youth will join The Orb for a one album project: The Dream.

...and gossip

Together with the announcement on David Gilmour's website, and then we're back on the 18th of August of this year, a promotional video for the Metallic Spheres album is uploaded to YouTube. Depicting only Youth and David Gilmour several Orb fans wonder where LX Paterson, and thus The Orb, fits in this all. The first, original movie disappears after a couple of days for so-called 'copyright' reasons but is rapidly replaced with a second version, containing some hastily inserted images of LX Paterson strolling through the grasslands and recording some outdoor musique concrète. It feels, once again, as if the Floyd-Orb connection didn't go down well at the Gilmour camp and Paterson's image was only included on the promo video after some pressure had taken place. But the above is of course all pure speculation and not based upon any fact, so tells you Felix Atagong who has been closely following the band for over two decades.

Bit by bit we hear how the album came into place. It all started with David Gilmour's charity project for Gary McKinnon, an X-Files adhering half-wit who hacked into American military and NASA computers in order to find out about extra-terrestrial conspiracy theories. Because of this he faces extradition from England to the USA were apparently they take these kind of idiots very seriously, see also the 43rd president who governed the country from 2001 to 2009.

It is note quite clear if Gilmour asked Youth (David Glover) to make a remix of the Chicago charity tune or if Youth got hold of the project and proposed to help (I've come across both explanations). The two may know each other through Guy Pratt who played in Glover's band Brilliant in 1986 (LX Paterson was their roadie for a while). In 1990 Youth founded Blue Pearl with Durga McBroom who had toured with Pink Floyd for the previous three years. Amongst the session musicians on their Naked album are Guy Pratt, David Gilmour and Rick Wright.

This isn't Glover's only connection with the Floyd however. In 1995 he teamed up with Killing Joke colleague Jaz Coleman to arrange and produce a symphonic tribute album: Us and Them: Symphonic Pink Floyd, but only The Old Tree With Winding Roots Behind The Lake Of Dreams remix from Time combines a modern beat with romantic classical music.

Island Jam

To spice up the Chicago remix Youth invited David Gilmour in his home studio and out of it came a twenty minutes guitar jam. Glover soon found out that he could expand the session into an ambient suite and asked old chum LX Paterson for his opinion and to flavour the pieces with typical Orbian drones and samples; rather than to turn this into a sheepish Fireman-clone.

The Orb featuring David Gilmour can only be a win/win situation. Orb fans have dreamed about this collaboration for the past two decades and that will add to the sales figures for sure. And although artist royalties go to the support of Gary McKinnon there will always be a spillover effect for the artists involved, good news for The Orb whose last album Baghdad Batteries sunk faster than the Kursk in the Barents Sea.

Rest us to say that an Orb album is an Orb album when it has got the name Orb on it, whether you like it or not (and in the case of Okie Dokie, not a bit).

Metallic Spheres

Metallic Spheres starts with Gilmour's pedal steel guitar over some keyboard drones that makes me think of those good old days when the KLF shattered the world with their ambient masterpiece Chill Out (LX Paterson - as a matter of fact - contributed to that album, although uncredited). But soon after that Gilmour's guitar wanders off in his familiar guitar style with axiomatic nods to The Wall and The Division Bell albums. A welcome intermezzo is Black Graham with acoustic guitar, not from Gilmour but by ragtime busker Marcia Mello. The 'metallic side' flows nicely throughout its 29 minutes and has fulfilled its promise of being 'the ambient event of the year' quite accurately.

The CD is divided into two suites: a 'metallic side' and a 'spheres side' (and each 'side' is subdivided in five - not always discernable - parts). The second suite however, is more of the same, clearly lacks inspiration and ends out of breath at the 20 minutes mark.

So no wow! effect here (but no shit! either)... Youth has done what was expected from him and produced an all-in-all agreeable but quite mainstream product leaving ardent anoraky Orb fans with their hunger, but perhaps winning a few uninitiated souls.

As far as I am concerned this is about the best Orb CD I heard for the past couple of years, but it is still far from Orblivion, U.F.Orb or Ultraworld. But as this is 2010 already you won't hear me complaining.

Previous Metallic Spheres posts
Metallic Spheres
Pink Dreams

Previous Orb-related posts
Andy Hughes (1965 - 2009): gone to Orblivion
zORBa, the G|r|eek
The Orb On Mars
The Orb Lives On
Obscured by Fluffy Clouds
Apples and Oranges
Perplexed Orbbery
U.F.Orb 2007

Dymocracy (True Story VI)

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 17:41:12 +0200

I can be such a prick sometimes and I wouldn't like to be one of my own colleagues.

Because Dell delivered a truckload of computers at the place I pretend to work I found it a pretty neat idea to stick some labels on the machines. I knew there had been a Dymo label maker in our company before but it had disappeared in the mist of time.

Time to call the office equipment department. The office equipment department (OED), in our company, is regarded as the earthly equivalent of a black hole. It is a mysterious place known for sucking in things, like paper, tape or pencils, with almost no chance for the paper, tape or pencil in question to ever appear again. It is a constant fight for our people trying to balance on the office equipment department's event horizon hoping that something might fall out.

One sunny day, a few years ago, I had purchased some laptops but because I would be away for a couple of days I wanted to secure these. So I strolled over to the OED and asked one of the wayward witches if I could put the laptops in their safe. "No way.", was the answer, "There is no place in the safe because we keep our staplers in there." I immediately believed them as it is easier in our organisation to get a new company car than a stapler.

You need to know there have been several stapler wars going on for the past decades in the company I work for. In one of these battles I emerged as a freedom fighter although the OED general staff probably will define me as an Al Qaeda inspired terrorist. One day a stapler squad team, lead by one of the witches, sealed off the building to do a physical inventory. They entered my office and saw my stapler on the desk. "Aha! A stapler!", they triumphantly sneered. Before I could make any move they produced a paper. "Sign this!" I laughingly asked what the paper was for and was explained, in the same tone US marines use when they unexpectedly break into an Afghan hut and ask the owner what he has been doing at his own place, that I had to agree that I was in the possession of a company stapler and that I would be physically and economically responsible if this piece of equipment ever went missing.

I refused. This was clearly a reaction they didn't expect. I took the stapler that had been serving me for the past decade, caressed it for a while, and handed it over to the squad leader. "Here.", I said with a sob in my voice, "I don't need it anymore." I haven't had a stapler since. (Although you probably won't believe me, I assure you this is a true story.)

But, like I have written some paragraphs ago, I now urgently wanted an embosser to stick some labels on some computers. Sweet memories encompassed my mind from decades ago when I was still a young boy and one could conquer the world with a Dymo embosser in one hand and a View-Master in the other.

To my amazement it was immediately agreed on that I was worthy of getting this and, probably a record in the history of our company, a carton box with D-Y-M-O written all over it was brought to my office a couple of hours later. I had hoped for something I could squeeze inside my pockets but the box didn't exactly predict good news.

The apparatus that came out of the box could be easily described as a secret doomsday weapon from a Star Wars movie with more buttons than an average jet fighter. It also came with a USB-cable and a message on the box proudly proclaimed that you could type (and obviously print) your labels using your computer keyboard, making the zillion of buttons on the machine somewhat redundant.

I was willing to boldly go where no man had went before and although the Dymo doomsday machine looked pretty ridiculous next to my slick laptop, a bit like hanging a trailer behind a Porsche, I opened the typical white envelop that contained the software cd and inserted it. The installation went smoothly, but something in the EULA bothered me. The first sentence of the End user License Agreement read:

BY OPENING THE SEALED DISK ENVELOPE OR USING THE SOFTWARE YOU ARE AGREEING TO THE TERMS OF THIS SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT AND LIMITED WARRANTY (collectively, the "Agreement").

What I found pretty weird was that some obviously overpaid and overzealous lawyers of the law firm representing Dymo had decided that shredding some paper to pieces in order to grab a CD already was enough to limit their warranty. Probably they had suffered from a million dollar lawsuit in the past by someone who had cut a finger by opening the envelop. I found the first sentence so intriguing that I read the second one as well, that went:

IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT, DO NOT BREAK OPEN ANY SEALS OR USE THE SOFTWARE. PROMPTLY RETURN THE UNUSED SOFTWARE ALONG WITH THE REST OF THE PACKAGE CONTENTS TO YOUR SUPPLIER FOR A FULL REFUND.

That one made me laugh out loud and several people from the office hid under their desks because they thought there was a hyena on the loose.

Because: in order to read the agreement one has to open the sealed envelop and insert the CD in a computer.
But: if you do not agree with the agreement you are not allowed to break the seal, but that knowledge is only given after you have opened the envelop.
That is what I call a contradiction.

I am aware that Superman with his X-ray vision can read letters through envelopes, but I doubt that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster gave him the ability to read texts from a CD, bit by bit, as CD-ROM technology was pretty rare in 1932, so I wrote a letter to Dymo explaining my dilemma.

And guess what. They answered. Dymo told me there was indeed a contradiction in their EULA and added they will ask their legal department to come up with a better version. The rain stopped raining, the grey clouds suddenly disappeared from the sky and a giant golden sun painted a rainbow in the skies.

Just a small step for Felix Atagong, but what a giant leap for the world. And I don't even ask a fee for it.

Other True Stories on this blog:
True Story
True Story (the sequel)
True Story (part 3, the horror returns)
When in shit, call IT (True Story IV)
True Story V, Atagong's continuing struggle with helpdesks...

iPod Random Generator September 2010

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 19:24:08 +0200

My iPod statistics for the month of September 2010.

Every month a graph will be published here, the playlist of the month will appear on my MySpace blog and the overview of the year will be glued on my MySpace entrance page. Nothing to be excited about.

For those who still want to know the how and what and where and when I give you this old link: Random Blueß aka sucking for statistics

And here are the last 10 songs that enjoyed my life:

The Mole From The Ministry The Dukes Of Stratosphear Miss U Less, See U More Faithless White House Blues Charlie Poole Homburg Procol Harum Heroes And Villains Brian Wilson Elected Alice Cooper Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) Florence & The Machine Mafia Kelis Feat. Markita Imagine Me There Ringo Starr.

If you want to know how the graph looked like last month: iPod Random Generator August 2010

Opium

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 21:44:04 +0200

Procrastination is a constant thing in my life even at a point that I frantically dive into one of my famous unfinished projects for pretending I am busy while, in fact, I am just delaying something else. So I had to force me to write the following…

Diet Belgium

It is now a certainty that the two halves of Belgium are going separate ways and even the Walloons have commented that they have to think about a future without Belgium as it exists today. The latest rumour I heard is that Wallonia and Brussels would further continue as Diet Belgium and that a new country Flanders would be conceived.

Practically this is an impossible scenario as Brussels is geographically surrounded by Flemish territory. Does any remember after-war Berlin and a patriotic speech that ended with Ich bin ein Berliner? I already see Barack Obama giving a speech before the Brussels NATO headquarters and ending with: Ik zèn nen brusseleir.

Lucky for us, we Belgians (Fleming and Walloon alike) are mediocre, lazy and inefficient and frankly too chicken too take up arms and shoot at each other like they did in former Yugoslavia… and probably we are incapable and don't have the guts to form a guerrilla movement like the IRA or the ETA, which is, I guess, a good thing…

Bombing Belgium

There have been two terrorist movements in Belgium, both between 1982 and 1985.

The amateurish CCC was followed by the state security from its start, as no Belgian can keep a secret until he enters the local pub, but the powers that be didn't intervene until one of the bombs killed a couple of firemen. The militant communists were sentenced for life, which means they are all free now as life has got a different meaning in Belgium than in any other country of the world, and the former terrorists even have got their own website now.

The far more efficient and eponymous 'Nijvel Gang' (or 'Brabant Killers') was probably extreme right and killed nearly 30 people in military commando style operations. The mystery has never been solved but the group was probably linked to extreme-right army and police officers, dodgy politicians and shady industrials.
Fact: in the Eighties NATO had sleeper commando units and secret weapon storage places in Belgium for when the USSR were finally going to invade us.
Theory: the deadly 1982-1985 raids may well have been a kind of general repetition, goes one conspiracy theory.

Thirty years later justice still doesn't know who really was behind the killings and as it is improbable, even for Belgian standards, to stay that ineffective for 3 decades rumours about a cover-up are abundant.

Anti-Semite Belgium

Another point in the news that caught my attention were the obscene reactions against euro-commissioner Karel De Gucht when he, in a Belgian radio interview, stated that there was an important Jewish lobby in America and that it is difficult to have a rational discussion with Israeli people regarding the Palestinian issue.

Although these statements are hardly world shattering the commissioner was immediately crucified as a blasphemous anti-Semite and he had to officially apologise. De Gucht is not one of my political friends but I quite like his sharp tongue. As an anti-clerical liberal he was only using his freedom of speech for stating that you can't have a serious conversation with people who, according to their religious beliefs, think they are always right in what they are doing.

If you liked the above rant you might like this one as well:
Kopfgeburten

Gay Belgium

Which leads me to the following. Past week there was a documentary on the telly about homo-aggression in Brussels. The figures are staggering: one out of 10 gays in Brussels has already been physically attacked and one out of 6 has already been verbally insulted or spit on.

The aggressors are, almost without exception, young islamic boys, often operating in gangs and the ones who usually go whining, whenever television cameras are around, that they are so misunderstood and discriminated. Why do we need to be tolerant to people who abuse civil liberties in order to attack others? As usual the Belgian islamic congress, nor any imam, found it necessary to condemn these practices, what only feeds my dichotomous opinion about islam in Belgium and the rumour that this religion is incompatible with the western credo: liberté, égalité, fraternité.

If you liked the above rant you might like this one as well:
Escape from Kuregem

Paedophilic Belgium

Saturday my progressive newspaper De Morgen (the morning) had a complete white front page with only one small sentence on it. It informed that reading the paper would kick you in the stomach.

The much-debated catholic sexual abuse commission presented its report and the end result is that paedophilic practices, by catholic priests and monks, were omni-present in schools and youth organisations in Belgium for the last 50 years. The catholic church did everything to cover up these crimes and still does today, by the way.

Although the 200 pages report could be downloaded in its entirety, I refused to read it as the parts cited in the newspaper were already making my stomach turn and my blood boil, raping two year old boys, for god's (!) sake.

Suddenly I can understand the anger of islam boys against (what they consider) immoral actions, and even physical attacks suddenly don't seem that repulsing to me. If I would be confronted with cardinal Danneels today I would be seriously tempted to kick him in the face and plant my shoe in between his balls. Chance is he would probably like it, one never knows with those men in frocks.

Today (Monday, the 13th of September 2010) the cardinals and bishops gave a much attended press conference. A priest - who has been supporting and representing the church victims for over a decade - tried to attend the meeting but was violently pushed outside - manu militari - by the Church's body guards.

Business as usual.

If you liked the above rant you might like this one as well:
Matthew 19:14
Holy Wars

Fahrenheit 9/11

Last but not least, last week a preacher, whose flock is actually smaller than the followers of the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit, turned into a world-wide phenomenon because he threatened to burn a few korans. Instead of giving the poor man a valium and ignore him like the dog turd you have just stepped in he was given a prime-time pedestal to divulge his sick ideas. Even Barack 'my white friends call me uncle Tom' Obama needed to ventilate an opinion although I would have appreciated it more if he had finally given a date to cut the Guantanamo Bay ulcer out of the American body.

As if this was not enough international whorenalists then probed for the average mohammedan protester's opinion, who are invariably chosen by the amount of bad teeth they can flash at the camera. Well, answered an illiterate item who enjoyed every moment of it, for every koran burned we will kill a catholic priest. Apart from the fact that killing priests isn't a bad idea to begin with the answer did not really shock me. What does one expect?

Imagine, for a second, that the man would have replied: for every koran burned we will... burn one bible as well. No, no, make that two bibles! Laughter all over the world with the same impact Dr Evil had for asking a million dollars in order not to destroy the world.

Epilogue

But not these nutcases are to blame, they just enjoy Andy's glorious fifteen minutes. I blame modern journalism that has been degraded to a doctor Caligari freak cabinet with the morals of an Endemol game show.

Also last week an Iraqi candid camera show placed fake bombs into cars of innocent bystanders, just for the fun of it. We will all be amused to death, whether you like it or not.

iPod Random Generator August 2010

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:51:40 +0200

My iPod statistics for the month of August 2010.

For those who still want to know the how and what and where and when I give you this old link: Random Blueß aka sucking for statistics

And here are the last 10 songs that enjoyed my life:

Like A Bird Komputer Girl From Ipanema Goes To Greenland The B-52's Expo2000 Kling Klang Mix 2002 Kraftwerk Wat Ze Doet Doe Maar Open The Kingdom (Liquid Days, Part 2) Philip Glass Free Bird Lynyrd Skynyrd Long Cold Winter Cinderella Pyramania The Alan Parsons Project The Go In The Go-For-It Grandaddy The Lebanon Human League.

If you want to know how the graph looked like last month: iPod Random Generator July 2010

Metallic Spheres

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:40:48 +0200

About, let me count, thirty-four to thirty-five years ago I was seriously investigating the so-called UFO phenomenon. Or whatever serious means for a sixteen years old adolescent who urgently wants to get laid but has found out that the chance to witness an encounter of the third kind is statistically more probable than to have an close encounter with the opposite sex.

I was a member of the Belgian Sobeps association, long before the Belgian UFO wave hit the skies and as the Internet was still a science-fiction thing we had to rely on their magazine Inforespace and the books, case files and real UFO pictures they sold by mail-order to their members. They also had an electronic UFO detector in their catalogue what made me wonder, already then, if they just weren't a bunch of petty crooks. I must still have a Betty and Barney Hill picture somewhere that I bought through their shop and who were then (and maybe still now) regarded as the proverbial Saul-stroke-Paul of the Holy Church of Ufology.

After a while opportunity knocked, even for me, and I didn't see the purpose anymore to devote my life to the flying saucer - abducting people for out-of-orbit enemas - enigma. But I am still mildly amused by the phenomenon, especially from a historical perspective. Not that long ago (at least not on the cosmic timescale) I partially read The Coming Race (1871) from Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a (rather tedious) adventure book that apparently inspired Nazi-Germany to start building flying saucers. An internet search lead me to through several dubious websites, some that might even be legally forbidden to consult in my country as they vehemently propagate what I will mildly describe as Aryan beliefs, and only strengthening me in my opinion that for crackpots from all over the world the internet is Ultima Thule indeed.

If I have understood it well American secret services grabbed nazi occult mysteries by the truckload although it is not clear if they could ever restore the phone lines to the Aldebaran star system that became an après-guerre nudist resort for the mystical and mythical Vril Society pin-up girls (see image above and try not to drool). Thanks to these secret nazi inventions the Americans not only landed on the moon (although paradoxically enough conspiracy theory buffs deny this ever happened) but they also tested anti-gravity engines in earth-designed flying saucers and solved the so-called zero-point energy problem.

How do I know all this? Because Gary McKinnon told us so.

Beam me up Scotty

Gary McKinnon is a Glasgow hacker who thought for a while he was a Lone Gunman on a mission against the American government. Wanting to prove the things mentioned above he hacked into 97 United States military and NASA computers over a 13-month period between February 2001 and March 2002, using the name 'Solo'.

Hacking is not really the term one should use here, more trial and error. Consulting a 1985 copy of Hugo Cornwall's The Hacker's Handbook McKinnon copied a Perl script that looked for Windows computers without a password and to his amazement there were still lots of unprotected computers residing in the NASA and military networks 15 years after the book appeared. One can duly wonder what these CIA, FBI and military secret service IT security guys had been doing in the meantime. Playing Pong, probably.

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.", wrote Douglas Adams in the twelfth chapter of Mostly Harmless (1992). That quote may not be entirely his. Nobel price winner and inventor of the H-bomb Edward Teller noted down a couple of years before: "There's no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool." Anyway, in 2002 Gary McKinnon was the fool who undermined the American's pigheaded assumption of safety. Military security thought they had devised this big unsinkable Titanic and all it took was a entrepreneurial nerd with a screwdriver and a sack of sugar to pour inside the gas tank.

Rather than admitting they had done an enormous security cock-up the American powers-that-be turned Gary McKinnon into a terrorist super-hacker whose sole intention it was to metamorphose American secrets to putty and hand them over to Al-Queda, who - as we all know - have been praying a long time for this UFO technology. In consequence Gary could face a 60-years prison sentence if condemned before an American judge. Unfortunately the UK voted the 2003 extradition act making it possible to extradite UK citizens for offences committed against US law, even though the alleged offence may have been committed in the UK by a person living and working in the UK. A review of the extradition act was voted down by British parliament although there is a growing consensus amongst British members of parliament that Gary McKinnon will not stand a fair trial in the US.

Several charities have been raised to help Gary McKinnon in his struggle against the extradition and in August 2009 David Gilmour, Chrissie Hynde, Bob Geldof and Gary McKinnon recorded the Chicago (Change The World) single. The only awareness it ever raised was that extraditing Bob Geldof to Guantanamo Bay would be a benefit for mankind to say the least. Perhaps the US authorities could consider that for a while.

As a Pink Floyd collector for over thirty years now, with over a dozen legit versions of Dark Side Of The Moon, I was obviously offended. Probably I am just being jealous here but I still can't grasp the concept that a lawbreaking idiot with a UFO fixation got a chance to make a record with one of the ten best guitarists of this world while moi who has in his possession the ridiculously shaped Love On The Air (1984) picture disk and Gilmour's lamentable Smile (2006) single will never get the change to meet his idol from less than a 100 meters distance. Phew, nice I have finally got that off my chest.

Pink Florb

Last year, in the aftermath of the Chicago single, Alex Paterson of the ambient house band The Orb made a strange announcement:

I’ve just started work on an album with David Gilmour from Pink Floyd which I think every Orb and Pink Floyd fan will want to hear.

The news was almost immediately downsized by David Gilmour who acknowledged he had jammed a bit in a studio with Martin 'Youth' Glover but that nothing had been confirmed 'with regards to any structure for the recordings or firm details re: any release plans'.

But this week David Gilmour's blog had the following news:

David's 2009 jam session with ambient collective The Orb has grown into an album, Metallic Spheres, to be released via Columbia/Sony Records in October. David's contribution to the charity song Chicago, in aid of Gary McKinnon, sparked the interest of producer Youth (Martin Glover), who remixed the track and invited David to his studio for a recording session. With additional contributions from Orb co-founder Alex Paterson, the album took shape from 2009 into 2010, eventually becoming Metallic Spheres, to be released by The Orb featuring David Gilmour.

The album will be divided into two 25 minutes parts with five movements each, a 'Metallic Side' and a 'Spheres Side'. The Orb will consist of founder Alex Paterson (sound manipulation, keyboards and turntables) with part-time member Youth adding bass, keyboards and handling the production. It is not certain if Thomas Fehlmann (full member of The Orb since 1995, absent on The Dream (2007), but back on Bagdhad Batteries (2009)) and long time Orb and Pink Floyd collaborator Guy Pratt will be present or not. For the moment it looks like a three men line-up with David Gilmour contributing guitar, lap steel guitar and some of his Chicago vocals.

Simon Ghahary created the artwork (see image above) and all artist royalties will go to helping Gary McKinnon fight his extradition.

When Gary McKinnon logged in on the military computers he allegedly found proof of extra-terrestrial involvement in the NASA space program, but unfortunately his telephone line did not allow him to download the pictures and documents. The only tangible result of his actions will be a Floydian cooperation that Orb (and some Pink Floyd) fans have been dreaming about for the last two decades.

Long live Gary McKinnon, long live the greys! U.F.FlOrb is finally on its way! And don't worry, I'm sure those pretty Aldebarans will rescue Gary if he ever gets imprisoned in the land of the free.

Pink Dreams (first announcement of the Gilmour Paterson cooperation)

The Orb section: Orb Weavers
The Pink Floyd section: The Pink Thing

Experiment succesful, patient dead.

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:30:20 +0200

PC Jeux is a professional French gaming magazine that gives away a free game every month. Of course the previous sentence contains at least two mistakes. First: French and professional don't go well together, but that we will discuss further on. Second: there isn't such a thing as a free game. In Belgium the magazine costs about 8 and a half Euro and I have always thought I actually bought a game and received the magazine for free. Most of the time I take the DVD (it used to be a CD before) immediately out of its shrink-wrap and the magazine itself lands in a dustbin before I arrive home. There's another computer gaming journalist's dream I've shattered to pieces.

Not that I have bought plenty of PC Jeux magazines. I tried last in 2007 but the game refused to start-up because it was expecting a French PC, with a French keyboard and a French windows version. I don't recall the answer anymore the editors gave me when I complained, something along the lines that they were very sorry I was using a Belgian keyboard and an English windows version and that I could bugger off if I wanted a refund. Tough luck.

I had been playing Penumbra: Black Plague recently combining a fairly decent story with some horror elements and puzzle solving and wanted something more of the same at:
a) a decent price and
b) if possible from a small but innovative software company.

In a Brussels' railroad press shop I saw that PC Jeux 149 had eXpérience 112, the ultimate adventure game if I could believe the blurb, which of course I didn't. I still remember the catchphrase for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989): "Why are they putting seatbelts in theatres this summer?" Soon as I watched the movie, I knew why, simply to prevent people from sneaking out before the end credits.

But reviews for eXpérience 112 weren't that bad at all and as the game was generally praised for its uncommon steering system of the avatar (more about that later) I was willing to halt my 3 years old PC Jeux boycott.

I nearly immediately regretted my purchase.

Slashing away

The game starts on an abandoned freighter that contains a secret military base. This means a lot of corridors and small rooms to investigate. After the introduction and the exploration of the first rooms, basically a tutorial how to control the protagonist and the various devices in the game, the first real assignment starts. In order to enter a laboratory, containing one dead body, you have to find the access code. To get the access code you need to browse through the personal files of the deceased. So far so good. Typical adventure style stuff that you either love or hate. Here is how you have to proceed:

Open a computer session.
Type the dead scientist's name.
Give the password.

(That password is written on a piece of paper, stuck to the wall, also a typical adventure game trick).

Open his personal folder.

Quite some information can be found on the ship's intranet, so most of the time you are mimicking on your computer that you are using a computer.

Read a file that seems to contain some valid information.

An error screen jumped on. These things also happen regularly in adventure games. But the error screen seemed a bit too genuine when I took a closer look at it. It read:

ERROR: UIDocumentTool::import: Can't open file 'interface/documents/interface\documents\part_codes_nichols.xml'!

(For computer geeks: there is a mixture of forward / and backward \ slashes in the code, and perhaps that is where the error comes from. All in all it is sloppy programming.)

It seemed I was not the only one with the problem and the PC Jeux forum received several complaints from other gamers. PC Jeux contacted Lexis Numérique and 39 days later - an eternity in computer land - a patch was offered that took care of most, but not ALL, of the problems (as the programmers are French professionals the patch made other information files illegible that were readable before, but passons).

I still had another huge problem, making it impossible to continue the game, and contacted creators Lexis Numérique en direct but they didn't even acknowledge my demand. I suppose they are of the opinion that a game sold is a game sold, not that it has to be actually played. Thank god for Internet fora and gamer didi75ma for offering me a solution as otherwise it would have meant another PC Jeux freebie in the dustbin. Now I could politely tell these goody-goody, lah-di-dah-di, hoity-toity, know-it-all, prim-and-proper, up-your-arse frog eaters from Lexis Numérique to fuck off and finally start playing. (The attitude of the consumer service of Lexis Numérique stands in shrill contrast with those from Frictional Games, who designed Penumbra. They answer so fast and thoroughly on every, even trivial, question that you feel rather ashamed for taking their time. The obvious result is that they have a loyal fan base.)

Das Boot

In eXpérience 112 (The Experiment in English) you are an operator of a closed circuit TV control room with access to all surveillance cameras on a top secret military ship. The freighter is abandoned, if you don't consider the dead bodies, with exception of a slightly undernourished Lea Nichols who happens to wake up just when you switch on the camera. The question what happened before is ignored and, just like trying to find out who triggered the big bang, it is better not to fry your brains on it.

Here is where the so-called innovative guidance system kicks in. In about 99% of contemporaneous 3D games the player immerses the protagonist and steers him or her through an artificial world. The avatar can be first person (Penumbra: Black Plague) or third person (Mental Repairs Inc) and some games will let you switch between both systems (UFO: Alien Invasion). Usually an avatar will do absolutely nothing when the player doesn't give orders, although a notable exception are The Sims who will carry on with their own business when they are not told to do a certain action. Most of the time you feel like a kindergarten cop correcting The Sims when they are up at their own.

eXpérience 112 is a mixture of all the above. The first person avatar is an anonymous surveillance camera operator who watches third person avatar Lea Nichols strolling through the ship while she is looking for clues. As she has no idea where to go looking for the operator has to guide her by activating lights, switching on electrical devices or opening doors from the control centre. Whenever a trigger has been activated, Lea will walk towards the X-marked spot and starts investigating the area. The operator has got no influence on Lea's direct actions and she decides for herself if she will be looking in cupboards, consulting notes or letters, operating computers and so on…

The result is awkward, alienating and voyeuristic at first but soon becomes strangely familiar, although not that familiar for Lea to change clothes in front of you. She will ask you to guide her to a secluded spot away from the cameras before she ever attempts that.

It's a pity though that Lea doesn't do a thing if you don't give her a clue. As with The Sims, I would have liked it if she would rummage on her own, occasionally even finding something, but she just stand there, like a puppet on a string, awaiting orders from the puppeteer. But perhaps that is what military life does to you.

Remote control

As you may have figured out by now the operator spies on Lea using a closed TV circuit. The operator screen can multitask and open several windows at the same time. Here the programmers missed a few opportunities that would have turned the game into a top-notch experience.

The camera windows can not be seamlessly resized. You only have the choice between small, medium or large windows. A new camera window will either clutter on top or hide behind the other screens. As most of the time you are looking at three camera windows and a map, tile and cascade buttons would have come very handy indeed, but they are absent.

A radar monitors Lea's position on the boat but it fails to scroll automatically when Lea moves outside its borders. It would have been a handy gimmick. Often you are so busy adjusting the map that you don't have time to look at the cameras.

As in real life, the surveillance cameras can be set to follow Lea and to switch on when she enters their radius. Unfortunately this has been so appallingly designed that they do not recognise the walls (or other objects) in between. A long shot camera, at the end of a hall, will be constantly interrupted by others switching on - filming the wall inside the rooms - when Lea passes by. This is not just quite annoying, it is lazy programming. But as this is a military set-up perhaps the awkward functioning is just standard procedure.

Throughout the game you (or better said Lea) will find software upgrades. After a while the cameras will have night-vision, thermo-graphic function and an auto-focus, but some are obviously broken beyond repair and will only transmit garbled images. It adds to the weird voyeuristic realism as well.

By hacking into the accounts of the crew and reading their personal files and correspondence you find out that the members of this top secret military base were acting like Big Brother game show contestants. The avatar browses through pages of gossip, quarrels and amorous frivolity and finds out that even Lea Nichols had a fling with at least one crew member, suggested in the obligatory shower scene. Another flash-back has Lea sunbathing but those hoping for a Jacqueline Bisset's The Deep clothing show will be disappointed.

The crew had one thing in common, they all had the itch to steal passwords from others and pass these on to their friends. This makes it relatively easy for the player to read through everyone's personal files that contain everything from trivial (an invitations for the next card game evening) to top secret. Although these personal files are designed to contain video and audio messages this has only been scarcely used by the programmers, a fine example is a spy camera zooming in on yet another password. (Also in the Penumbra series the information was mostly passed through written files and not through moving images. Small companies don't have the time nor the resources to program these extra features.)

Puzzling

The puzzles are not extraordinary difficult for people who like to play these kinds of games, but they are not always realistic or logical in a real-life situation. I quite enjoyed the decryption puzzle following the Vigenère cipher method, but why would someone encrypt a password if he uses it on a daily basis? These are classic adventure game traps, just like in Black Plague where a scientist still managed to hide a tape after he was murdered.

But despite all the bugs, the inconsistencies and the flimsy story (an amnesic girl on a barren boat, a spy in the camp, a secret society, an extra-terrestrial threat) the game works. One of its cute unexpected details is that Lea will reprimand you and mentions the hours you left her alone after you load a saved game. Typical female: here is this chick who has been vegetating for 34 years in suspended animation on a ghost ship and the first things she does when she wakes up is complaining to her saviour that she doesn't get enough attention. (The fact that she has been sleeping, without ageing, for over 3 decades on an empty ship is one of the biggest inconsistencies in the story and will never be properly explained. Who took care of her (food, hygiene, muscle rehabilitation) during all these comatose years?)

After you have explored the ship, in search for some medicine Lea urgently needs, you honestly wonder what will happen next. It is then when the adventure goes underground, or better said, underwater. Lea changes into the kind of wetsuit that would make the extra-terrestrial lizards of V vibrate their tongues with lust, but to humans it looks rather tacky and nothing like Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in The Abyss (to name just another underwater classic).

After a thrilling submarine sequence Lea discovers a second secret base, the size of London Heathrow Airport, located at the bottom of the sea but there the game drags as if the programmers were out of breath, inspiration, resources or all of the above. The map didn't help either and I was hopelessly lost for a while. But the base is just a temporary transit zone as it opens a gate to the final part of the adventure.

The idea of opening a door to an extra-terrestrial world by means of a holographic key, projected by 5 strong laser beams that all need to be exactly positioned, is sublime. Now if only I could make it work as this is where the game halted a second time on me and this time for good. Exit Lea Nichols. I will never know her secrets.

Epilogue

The above review is based on the PC Jeux (French) version of eXpérience 112. Apparently gamers who have bought the normal retail version do not have all of the above problems, especially after applying the (French) patch that can still be found on the official website. As eXpérience 112 sells at 6.14 Euro on Amazon France one can ask why the (more expensive) magazine version was altered unless it was to keep in line with the tradition to make PC Jeux free games unplayable. I have bought about 10 PC Jeux magazines (and their games) in my life and 7 of these gave up at one point or another.

I suppose I will not buy PC Jeux magazines anymore for the rest of my life.

Some reviews I consulted:
Puzzle vs. Experience.
The Experiment overcomes its clichéd beginnings with original gameplay.
Demo Review.