The Lost Realm

We've all heard about the exploding whale, but I know you all want too see pictures. You're just that sort of audience, I can tell. So, here you go: pictures of exploded whale guts. I'm glad I'm not the one cleaning that mess up.

My beautiful wife just walked past and wanted me to include some nice comment about her, though I'm not sure she understood that the topic of this post was exploded whale guts. I guess it's easy to say she's more attractive, and definitely not as smelly. I don't think she's ever exploded across the streets of an asian city, either.

I'm going to get in big trouble for this later.

Inspired by Kaba Kick: russian roulette for kids, I have created a new web gizmo: russian web roulette.

Knock yourselves out, kiddies.

You may have noticed something slightly different about the site today. No? Have a quick look… yes? That's right — I've removed the barcode.

Oh yes, and redesigned the layout, added some colour, and fixed a number of bugs in BLAT. But I know you're really missing that barcode. Sorry, there just wasn't space. It was a big barcode, you know.

I have a more ambitious layout planned, but it took me so long to throw together this test layout (which includes content before the sidebar) and get it working on IE (which sucks) that I thought I should just throw this up there. Given my current development speed, you should expect the real layout sometime in 2036.

It's tested under Mozilla and IE6, but if it breaks for you, do let me know. Standards are such fun things, aren't they?

Things learned today:

• Accidently changing your computer's date one month ahead is not a good way to start the afternoon.
• When your afternoon appears to be progressing so slowly that it never quite reaches two o'clock, you really should stop to work out what's gone wrong.
• Having a program in the background that synchronises your clock with a timeserver can cause strange things to happen.
• Especially when your clock is technically a whole month into the future.
• This is even more true when it will only adjust your clock ten minutes back at any one time.
• Maximum effect is, of course, reached when the said program runs exactly every ten minutes.

I spent my entire afternoon safely within the bracket of 1:47 to 1:57pm, concerned at how slowly the afternoon was progressing, but also extremely proud of the amount of work I was getting done within an hour of finishing lunch.

Needless to say, I was both happy and dissapointed when I was suddenly informed by another clock that it was 4:43pm and nearly time to go home.

Continuing the previous views into the world of those not quite like the rest of us, here is a series of paintings made as the artist fell into schizophrenia. Even taking into account the fact that the “sane” paintings are of anthropomorphised cats, it is extremely obvious that the artist did not see the world as the rest of us do. The cats slowly take on a manacing look, as would be expected from someone slipping into paranoia, and the textures and patterns are astounding.

The extreme conditions induced by drugs and mental illness alter our perceptions to a degree that we can see the differences through behaviour and art, but how different are our “normal” perceptions? Do I see the world differently from you? Is my straight line the same as your straight line? Is my circle rounder than yours?

While I haven't spent much time reading kuro5hin lately, I did happen to stumble across one of the most addictive literary experiments I've read in years. As a warning, it contains strong language and some rather adult themes, but it is certainly a unique way of telling a story.

Do yourself a favour and give it a go.