HOME Wednesday, 6 June 2001

I've been downloading some games from the Net lately. My excuse is to give my nieces something to play when they visit us, since I've never had games on my computer before, except the pathetic ones that come packaged with Windows.   But, of course, I can get addicted to them, too, particularly the platform types. One of the best sites I've come across is GameHippo (http://gamehippo.com). It's neatly laid out in categories and the first category (New Games) is already open when you go there. Categories include (among others) Adventure, Action, Arcade and Paddle, but it would be a mistake to think you won't find one sort of game in another category, so you have to check them all.   The variety is astounding, from text-based adventure games from the days of 64k computers to games made using the most modern methods. The total number of games on the site is now approaching one thousand, so one could happily wallow in it all night, if it were not for the cost of staying connected. The quality varies wildly, as well, with the age of a program making little difference. The Paddles section is a good example of this. Here you will find Breakout in all its amazing manifestations and mutations, workaday, glorious and mediocre. Another thing that attracts me to the site is that all games are guaranteed to be absolutely free. The site owners go to great lengths to confirm this with the authors, so that you will not be annoyed by finding something you fancy turn out to be insidious Shareware, or that you have to play it online.   One thing that annoyes me, are games that give you no opportunity to exit from them. No matter how excellent these games may be, the coders can't seriously expect you to have them making their noises and flashing their designs on your screen for the rest of your life. It does not seem right that you have to resort to Windows' Close Program facility to get rid of the blasted things. Nor does it germinate friendly feelings towards the program.

Thursday, 7 June 2001

So, I've just voted No in the referendum to ratify the Nice Treaty and, if it were not for the publications of the Referendum Commission, I would have been more vague as to what I was voting about.   I've noticed that the politicians are not talking about voter apathy this time around, probably because they think the clueless voters will do what Daddy Politician tells them to, because Daddy Politician, of course, knows best.   But what's best for the politicians may not be best for the rest of us, is something people should always bear in mind. Those who think that politicians are concerned for the country, or the people thereof, should remember that people like that have never existed and probably never will. Their concerns are not whither their actions will reduce poverty and crime, but whither those actions will win them votes and whither they themselves can be happy and rich. Beware of a politician bearing gifts.   Still and all, it's hard (not being a politician), to see what giving the bigger countries of the EU greater power over the rest of us will gain them, except more trouble in the future. All countries may not be equal in terms of power and wealth, but they are equal as countries, just the way a rich man and a poor man are equal in their humanity. Greater wealth and power can never give the right to exploitation, to violating the individual, but human beings are quite good at overlooking little things like that. If humanity is the experiment of some Great Being we don't even know about, and the various religions are the guidelines, then it's an experiment that has failed. If that's the way things are, then pretty soon, we can expect to be discarded, as all failed experiments are.

Monday, 11 June 2001

Well, they didn't take that very well, did they? The reaction to the Irish voters rejection of the Nice Treaty has been a pulling on of jackboots and arrogantly contemptuous remarks by the other heads of Europe.   So the mask is off, and that is what they really think of us: Ireland, the pet country of the continent that dared to bite the hand that feeds it!   The least offensive remarks has been the equivalent of "Heel, Boy", by our own politicians, whose long-term behaviour reminds me of a bit of verse from a history book of my school days. It was talking about the Act Of Union between Ireland and Britain, but it might have been tailor-made for the present lot:   How did they pass the Union? By Perjury and Fraud, By men who sold their land for gold, As Judas sold his God.     One might, perhaps, leave out the perjury part, but there is, as always in politics, a lot of deception going on and the politicians and their rich friends stand to gain much more out of it than the rest of us.   The Yes campaigners ( the three main political parties in the country), relied heavily on the deception that a No vote would bar the applicant countries from joining the Union, when five countries can already join under the present treaty and there is nothing specifically that debars others from joining, too, except the desire of the bigger countries, particularly Germany, France and Italy, to dominate the rest of Europe. In fact, one commentator remarked that Germany may well achieve under the Nice Treaty what it failed to achieve in two world wars!   Most of the No campaigners were pro-Europe, in spite of what the politicians said, only they want a better, fairer Europe than the Captains of Industry and Politics have lined up for us.   The reason that most people voted No was that they didn't want a European army outside the control of the individual countries and the rearranging of the voting system that would leave the smaller countries with almost no say in many decisions that would affect them adversely.

Thursday, 14 June 2001

My web server, the good ship, Terrashare, has gone down with all passengers, the crew having abandoned it in the icy wastes of the Internet Ocean. I am now, with all the other passengers, swimming around desperately, searching for a life boat in the shape of a new web server.   The remarkably good services of Terrashare have made me choosy. I have tried Moonfruit, which tempt with Free web space and no adverts! but the interface of the thing is clumsy and slow and it does not appear to let you to upload your own web pages. It expects you to make them with its fiddly slow editor and after being unable to figure out how it worked after about an hour, I gave it up.   Homestead, which hosts some of the sites I visit, seemed more promising at first. I knew what was going on and I could work its editor, but it appears to have some serious defects, which include the disability to format the text in its text boxes and I am not sure if I can upload text directly on to the page, and whither it would spread all over everything if I did. Again, I see no evidence that it allows you to upload your own already made web pages.   So I have decided on Anzwers, which already hosts my writing group's page. It allows you to upload an already made site and, so far, it places no advertisements on it, although I believe it reserves the right to do so at any time in the future. If I get so popular that it's economically viable for them to do so, I won't mind!

Sunday, 17 June 2001

I am reading The Brothers Behan by Brian Behan (brother of Brendan), which I got in the library. It is very entertaining in parts, quite ordinary in others. On a lot of occasions, apparently, Brendan's first response to annoyance was exactly the same as it would be for most of us: "Fuck off!" As we all know, this is all that is left to say when our store of cleaver responses is empty.  The author has been trying sincerely for most of his life to find an abuse-free system of running human affairs that works, without being able to come up with one. He is, naturally enough, now of the sad opinion that no such thing can exist. Who could dispute this as long as human nature remains in its present state?  The fact is that nearly all of the proposed systems are workable, just as long as human beings are not left in charge of them. The fault is in us. As long as human nature remains unchanged, utopias will remain works of fiction, non attainable in reality. For any ideal system to work, as the originators truly intended, it is necessary for everyone to consider the welfare of other people above their own. If everyone did this, all would be perfect. There would be no hunger, poverty, or wars. It seems so simple, but to a human being, it is the most difficult thing in the world.  The human animal is conditioned to put itself first, which, perhaps, wouldn't do too much damage if this particular animal did not have the power of thinking. If we are going to embrace thinking as something that defines a human being, then we must do away with instinct. Logical thinking on its own would produce the perfect society, but the disease of instinct infects it and produces something that is more deadly than both.  If the Book Of Life is a hundred pages long, then we have not even come to the end of the first sentence. We need a few million years yet.

Monday, 18 June 2001

Rain, rain, rain. Slow, insidious, deceptive rain. Ah, it's light, you say to yourself. It's not really wet. So you go out to do something and come back indoors a quarter of an hour later, dripping like a wet rat. The rain hides behind the air, so that the air itself is wet. The leaves droop miserably and the sky looms sulkily, so you say to yourself, that perhaps God didn't intend man to be outdoors at all. (You do a lot of talking to yourself in this kind of weather, mainly because the things you say to yourself, you couldn't decently say to anyone else.)   It's the kind of weather that drives you to books. Television isn't really an alternative. About sixty-odd channels to look at, but nothing to watch.   Even books can let you down. It is a rare modern book, indeed, that can rivet you to its pages. Most are only to be glanced at and never read, the better ones to be read once and forgotten. So many trees dying for no good reason, so many thoughts that have benefited nobody.   Even if a book gets a good review, I usually wait a few years to see if it will last, then I wait for an opportunity to buy it cheap. This doesn't always work out. I remember seeing Watership Down when it cost 35p as a paperback. About eight years later, when I came upon it again, still a paperback under the same publisher, it cost over six pounds. I still haven't read it. The concerns of rabbits are not my concerns. For much the same reasons, as regards foxes, I read the first of Tom McCaughren's fox books and declined to read the rest. I live under this rule: if animals leave me alone, I will leave them alone.   All this is not to say that I don't read a lot of rubbish. Reading is a more than a bad habit with me. It's an addiction. If I'm deprived of reading for more than a day, I start to twitch and look vacant.   When the books are only so-so, I could be reading about five at the same time. I have them in various places where I might relax, and I drift around from one to the other, reading until the interest ebbs. Sometimes I get interested and then I read until my eyes are in danger of falling out. I mostly read old books that might be said to have stood the Test of Time, although Time's taste is sometimes rather odd. I find Robinson Crusoe monumentally boring, and how Scrooge (In A Christmas Carol), especially when a boy, could have found it interesting, tells us more about Scrooge, perhaps, than about the book.   Now where did I put that copy of Tintin In Tibet ...