Alasdair Watson

I do not like this Things Other People accomplished website. It is depressing.

Regular readers will be familiar with my fascination with Gene Ray, the man behind the Time Cube. I am currently listening to a weird MP3 of some of the time cube material read via a computer speech synthesiser and set to a chilled beat. With added copacabana strangeness.

Some nights, I have to force myself to do anything useful. It’s not that I’m lacking in energy or ideas, even on a bad day, just discipline – a combination of bad time management and laziness means I get next to fuck all done.

Other nights, like tonight, I’m exactly the reverse. Tonight, I have been out socialising, come home, gone to the gym, come home again, tightened the dialogue on SIX STRINGS, written the character description I promised Natalie a few weeks back for 2 BEATS SIDEWAYS, worked on the sci-fi idea that occured to me the other week, put a bit more meat on the bones of the plot I have, and jotted down some notes about a mad idea I had on the bus the other day. Oh, and I read two volumes of RISING STARS, too, and will probably crack open something else to read before I sleep.

If I could figure out how I worked, every night would be like tonight.

One of my major interests, this. The more I study occult theory and weird fringe philosophy, the more it all just leads back to the seriously primal stuff. Sometimes my studies lead to a refinement of understanding as to why this stuff works, sometimes it’s just interesting to see the lengths people will go to to achieve the same thing while looking educated and refined.

But I digress: there’s a nice article on Shamanism just gone up on Barbelith. The article is a sequel to this one (which also has a rather good reading list for anyone interested in learning more) and I recommend them to anyone interested in an quick overview of this practice.

A state of enlightenment sought in Zen meditation. A glimpse into essential truths about oneself, one’s relationship with the universe and the nature of everything. A moment of enlightenment, of perfect understanding and perfect comprehension.

In my experience, the big problem with satori is that it’s awfully hard to tell apart from mad bollocks.

I was delighted when I heard that he was putting out a new album. I was overjoyed when I heard that in fact it was not one, but two albums. I am slavering with anticipation now, because I have just downloaded the same tracks available at this site, and I really can’t wait for May 7th.

You know your meme is doing well when people are making parodies. So, I’m happy to see this, and alarmingly funny parody of They Fight Crime! done by Yami. (Found via Anna.)

So, I’m trying to get PHP to sort the order it displays some infomration in based on the last modified time of the files containing the info. It isn’t working. I’ve got PHP telling me that it knows what I’m walking about when I ask it to display the values in the array, and the keys associated with said values. The values are what I want to display, the keys are the timestamps for the lastmod dates of the files. It knows that the values are strings and the keys are integers.

So, why does ksort(arrayname) not work? If anyone out there is a PHP genius, and can give me an idea where I’m going wrong, please, please, please drop me a line.

Things they don’t tell you when you sign up to the gym: You can’t quit. Not even for a little while. Between illness and holiday, it’s been about three weeks since I last went to the gym. When I went tonight, I was expecting to be a bit behind where I was three weeks ago.

This is not “a bit behind”. Before I went on holiday, I was doing 4 miles in 25 minutes. Tonight, I barely managed 2 and a half in fifteen before needing to stop. Likewise, I was about five kilos down on all my weights. It’s going to be a month or so, just to get back to where I was, dammit.

Saw the film last night. Were it not based on a true story, it would be revoltingly schmaltzy, and I’m sure the true story has been heavily fictionalised in order to make it play well as a film, but it was an excellent film, which surprised me quite massively, as normally Akiva Goldsman’s (the writer of the screenplay) involvement in a film is a pretty clear signal that the film will be shit. But no, this was good, and well worth the time.