7:20pm: Co-op gaming
We've been playing some co-op games on the Wii. We still don't seem to have found anything great, but some of it has been okay:

Secret of Mana

This is not as great as I remembered it. The combat system is very frustrating. You walk around and attack with your weapon, but when you hit something there's some hidden to-hit roll going on, so against tough enemies and bosses you miss most of the time. But there's not even any feedback to let you know you were aiming in the right place. Then there's magic, which never misses and does huge amounts of damage, but you don't have many magic points to spend. Enemies get magic too, and there's not much you can do other than grin and bear it and heal yourself afterwards. Most of the bosses are just a question of whether you will run out of magic points before they die. Also, using magic and items pauses the game, which isn't a lot of fun in multiplayer. Oh, and the plot is confusing and nobody ever gives you reminders if you forget what you were supposed to be doing.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time

Has some promise, but is hard to get into. For a start, you need a copy of the game for every player. We're playing with Keirstan on the Wii and me on the DS. One player (whoever is on the Wii) is the leader and gets all the plot and conversations. The other player just gets a lot of disdain from the NPCs who will only have a proper conversation with the leader. The game is very complex and has no tutorial. It's not a pretty game. I'd say that while Secret of Mana may be much lower resolution it's much clearer and prettier than this.

House of the Dead Overkill

This is hilarious. I really like the whole awful horror movie theme, with the cheesy voiceovers, sloppy cutting, grainy quality and ridiculous dialog. It's probably been my favourite of the co-op games so far, which is a bit of a shame, because I really wanted an RPG that we could enjoy together. We didn't get the Wii zapper despite the guy at Game insisting that the game would be "much harder" without it. I still have no idea how it is supposed to help.

4:39pm: On Endings
Having finished Matter last week, I found myself somewhat underwhelmed by the ending despite enjoying the rest of the book. Indeed, I'm not sure what books I've read lately that had really good endings. The end doesn't lack action, but really doesn't provide a lot else. There's a conflict that comes to a climax and then bam! it's over. Then four pages of epilogue that focuses on a single character. I don't require a Return of the King beginning of the end, middle of the end, beginning of the end of the end sub-saga, but I find this abruptness quite disappointing. I had hoped for some degree of revelation into the motivations of the major players: What did the Oct think they were doing and what was the point in their grand subterfuge? Why was tyl Loesp such a bastard and what were his dealings with the Oct? Did the Aultridia have any actual goals or plans of their own? And who was supposed to have put the thing buried in the Nameless City there in the first place?

I'm not sure what I expect from an ending, but I think part of it is that I take certain things as promises of future explanation, and if they are left unresolved I feel cheated: either the author knows the explanation and chooses not to tell us, or worse, the author hasn't a clue and maybe things are completely inexplicable.

I can't help but feel there's something more subtle that I'm missing here. I'm sure I've read stories that were deliberately ambiguous and not felt the same sense of disappointment. Perhaps it's the difference between something that presents itself as an enigma and something that feels like a cut corner. Does anyone else know what I'm talking about?

11:26pm: Apologies in advance. My laptop imploded and it has been very stressful.

Star Trek, in brief

( spoilers )

11:18pm: Music
myrninerest keeps asking me how I can be so oblivious and/or uninterested in music. I still don't know why I don't seem to have the drive to find music, but I may have observed why I can never remember anything about it. Keirstan watches some music TV channel now and again, and I have discovered that it plays (and she listens to) the same five or six songs OVER and OVER and OVER. Having had far too much exposure, I can recognise at least a few of them (though I'm not entirely sure of their names): one where Katie Perry berates her husband-to-be and knocks down a guy in a hot-dog costume. It's called something like Hot and Cold or Black and White. I quite liked that video, although I hear she's not the nicest of people. There's one where Pink sings about how much she is over her ex-husband. I can't really remember it so well, but Keirstan likes it. Lastly I can recognise the one by The Killers, which drove me crazy trying to figure out what he's singing. It sounds like "Are we human, or are we dancer?" even though "denser" might make more grammatical (but not any other kind of) sense. I actually really like this one, probably in part because the lyrics are strange but compelling.

I guess if I had the determination to listen to the same songs twenty times in a night on a regular basis I might actually be able to remember them better. Still, it seems like sucking an ice-lolly until you've gotten all the flavour out and you're just left with ice. There's only so much there to appreciate. I think I'll stick with computer games. (And turning down the sound on the game and listening to music instead is just about the worst thing imaginable! I remember Stephen used to do that when we were young and it drove me crazy. I really don't like playing games without their sound-effects. I can't stand to miss out on the information in them.)

8:51pm: Defective Friday
Not a great day:

• I discovered I've lost my bank card. I haven't used it since Tuesday, I think, and have no idea when it might have gone. I phoned in and cancelled it. They said a replacement might take up to 7 working days to reach me.
  
• Of course, I only discovered that when I went to withdraw cash this evening, so I only have £3 on me.
  
• Also discovered that my mobile phone has died without warning. I thought it slightly odd that the battery had run out today. When I got it home and plugged it in it made a horrible strangled noise and now it won't do anything.
  
• We decided to order pizza online, but then they wouldn't accept Keirstan's card for no obvious reason. (Actually, I suspect it might be because the site forces you to pick your address from a list and the format it's in there doesn't match what's on her bank statement.) We managed to scrape together enough change to pay on delivery.

Oh well. Nothing catastrophic, but all rather frustrating nonetheless. Perhaps some Spelunky is in order...

12:37am: Please exit the building in a calm and orderly fashion

Please exit the building in a calm and orderly fashion

My thanks to kest, who pointed out that Livejournal have just laid off a fair chunk of their US staff, including all the developers and designers. I have backed up my journal and comments placed on my posts just in case. I used this Python tool to do it, although I understand that there several alternatives. I don't anticipate the immediate collapse of Livejournal, but I would not be surprised to see deterioration in the quality of service and the attitude to users customers consumers.

Are you thinking of leaving Livejournal? Do you already blog elsewhere? How do you keep track of your friends' writings? I quite like the Livejournal friends page and I'm not sure how to replace it. I really hate the Facebook news feed, which is just an endless stream of drivel that is a pain to filter out. I like Google Reader for reading RSS feeds of public blogs, but I don't think there's any good way to keep track of non-public (e.g. friends-locked posts on LJ) stuff if all your friends are on different sites. Does anybody have any suggestions? I'm curious about FriendFeed, but I don't think it's a solution to this particular problem.

4:39pm: Bit chilly here
Back in Dundee, I woke early in the morning to be reminded that our smoke alarm needs a new battery. I knew that before we left, but we didn't have any 9V batteries in the flat at the time, and it only chirped at us very occasionally, and always during the night, so we kept forgetting. I clumsily dismantled it at 6AM and went back to bed, and today I got a new battery and installed it. Problem solved.

It was only after contemplating the clock that I actually realised why the smoke alarm chirps at you at night but falls silent the next morning. The clock was struggling to move its second-hand past 9 when we got home yesterday. But a few hours later I noticed that it was running normally. Getting an idea, I adjusted it to the right time and left it. Sure enough it was stuck again this morning. I think the mostly-spent batteries are unable to function in the icy-cold of night, but are able to eke out a bit more work when we warm the place up. So there you go, short of running a proper experiment, that's why the smoke alarm always chirps at night but stops during the day. Oh, you knew that already? Never mind then. Ignore me.

1:18am: Machines
Turns out my complicated theoretical machine for moving faster than the piece of wood pushing it was orders of magnitude more complicated than required to demonstrate the principle. Try this instead:



(Found via Boing Boing.)

I'm pretty confident now that the downwind-faster-than-the-wind thing is possible.

12:50am: Question for the physics experts
Is it possible to build a mechanical vehicle, powered solely by the wind, that travels directly downwind faster than the wind? It seems there are some big arguments on the internet over this and some Youtube videos claiming to show such vehicles. Here's one that looks cool, but it's not entirely clear what's keeping it steered onto the road, suggesting that the video might be faked, possibly by just towing the thing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJpdWHFqHm0

Here's another video of a little contraption of a similar design that is demonstrating the same feat in a difference frame of reference: rather than travelling faster than the wind over a static ground, it travels against the motion of a treadmill in static air:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pSYALWQ-nI

Now, whether or not these videos are fake, is such a thing possible? We're not talking about breaking conservation of energy or momentum: there's lots and lots of moving air, so we only need to decelerate some of it to speed up our hypothetical cart. It seems unintuitive, but it's not immediately clear that it should be impossible. Pulleys and levers can seem unintuitive the first time you encounter them.

I'm actually inclined to say it's possible. Am I wrong?

7:02pm: Bizarre priorities
You wouldn't have thought that given the ongoing economic turmoil and the upcoming US election that we would have a shortage of news. And yet the big story seems to be all about Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross. In short: they have a comedy show on BBC Radio, they were going to interview Andrew Sachs, but he couldn't make it, so they called his home phone and when it went to the answering machine they left a message which spiralled out of control. You can hear the result on YouTube. It was funny, rude and completely inappropriate. I think they stepped over the line, but then again, they're comedians. It's hardly unexpected. It probably wouldn't even make it into the top 100 list of unacceptable things celebrities have done on-air. What I do not understand is the media and political furore.

As I write, this is still the top story on the BBC News website. Brand was forced to resign and Ross is suspended. Questions were asked in parliament. Doesn't parliament have anything better to do? Why wasn't there this level of attention when Brand prank-called a police station? In my mind that's far more serious. The whole fuss seems ludicrous.