Mat Bowles

Weekend, Salute, Full Thrust, Questionable Content

Questionable Content:

Dora: I love a man who roots for the psycopath in the hockey mask.
Marten: How can you NOT root for him? He’s doing evolution a favour by massacring these insipid coeds.
Dora: Such misanthropy! You SURE you don’t have any goth in you?
Marten: I’d twist that into some kind of innuendo but I’m honestly not quite sure hwo it’d work.

Anyone else think Dora is completely wasted on him? (Yes, I’m aware she’s just a webcomic character, but still…)

Got home from work Friday in a bit of a hurry, intending to grab stuff, get changed, make some sandwiches and leave again. Nope. Opened up the fridge to getthe margerine and the cheese to make the essential sandwiches. When you open a fridge, cold air is supposed to leave it, and warm air go in, right? You’re not supposed to get a blast of warm air out from it, right? The fridge is buggered, the cooling mechanism seems shot and it’s overheating trying to compensate. Not good. Suffice to say, the cheese was off, so sandwiches didn’t happen. Making yesterday a little more expensive than it could have been. Ah well.

Had a good day yesterday, stayed at ’s Friday night and we took a (very) early coach from Penn Inn to the ExCel centre in Docklands for Salute. Overall, a good day out. There were some exceptional display games (which I utterly failed to take pictures of), including a very well done Rorke’s Drift and a number of Ancients games. Some good traders, nice to see Frank’s Mongrel Miniatures going strong, saw Fat Tony (who I haven’t spoken to for years) at the stand for Black Scorpion Miniatures, which is basically him marketing Adam Clarke, a former customer/GW designer (I taught him the basics, now he’s running his own company, git - not that there’s any money in it).

Spent a small amount of money on some space ships for Full Thrust (from GZG, and did some digging last night re colour schemes. The site he found inspired me to write up a little rant re industry backbiting for here. John Tuffley is a good games designer. Unfortunately, he’s also a small minded insular fool with no understanding of economics. Ah well.

April 24th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | no comments

Best of British

I’ve mentioned it before, but every week, does a round up linking tot he best blog items he gets nominations for written in or by a Brit. This week it’s here. Why do we care? Because is on it this week.

Oh, I just got up. I haven’t had any coffee yet. I’m unlikely to be going to GeekSoc. I will probably instead start work on my new space ships.

Have fixed entry in my previous post, ate the extra text, must remember no long text messages for future posts.

April 23rd, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 4 comments

I SALUTE you sir

Going to big wargames show in London = cool. Sitting opposite a daft kid using ADHD as an excuse for everything = bloody annoying. Still, Jason and I’ve gone halves on the new Full Thrust fleets so I might actually start painting again. Might. Anyone want to lay odds? Coach is crap as well, but for the price can’t really complain.

April 23rd, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | one comment

Intuition thingy

Ms is more emotionnally intuitive but less scientifically intuitive than me*. She also has a better tag for this sort of thing, egocentrism beats showing off any day. however is the other way around. Not sure about this one, but it’s better than most of the recent ones I’ve done.

More Scientific You have: 77% SCIENTIFIC INTUITION and 62% EMOTIONAL INTUITION

The graph on the right represents your place in Intuition 2-Space. As you can see, you scored above average on emotional intuition and well above average on scientific intuition.Your scientific intuition is stronger than your emotional intuition. Your Emotional Intuition score is a measure of how well you understand people, especially their unspoken needs and sympathies. A high score score usually indicates social grace and persuasiveness. A low score usually means you’re good at Quake. Your Scientific Intuition score tells you how in tune you are with the world around you; how well you understand your physical and intellectual environment. People with high scores here are apt to succeed in business and, of course, the sciences. Try my other test! The 3 Variable Funny Test It rules.

*Consideting what she does for a living, is anyone else scared that this humanities BA gets a better Science result? Oh, wait, it’s a silly meme

April 21st, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 3 comments

Meh, ads round up & stuff

Firstly, brings the funny. Next, polls it good. brings a sense of perspective.

The vast majority of folks who pay for Paid do it for A) convenience (say, for the Livejournal.com e-mail address) or B) because they want to support Livejournal. A smaller subsection want the extra userpics. Six Apart apparently believes that they can get as much money in advertising revenues to make up for people deciding they don’t want to do the public television model of support.

At the end of the day, I use LJ to keep in touch with my friends, 90% of whom are now on here or syndicated. I’ll be staying. I don’t, actually, mind ads that much (I use them to pay bills on my sites, right?), I just dislike the way they’ve, effectively, broken a promise.

Although, they are doing it in a fairly cool way, and even when logged out and looking for them, it’s not MySpace. For the record, I now cannot load most myspace profiles, my dial up simply gives up. That is one really badly put together site, but hey, Murdoch is paying for the bandwidth.

Given that it’s Thursday, I really should have gotten around to doing my “I had a great weekend” post like wot I meant to on Tuesday. Suffice to say, I had a great weekend. Two people I’m close to had birthdays, and seeing either of them always cheers me up. Also, free chocolate.

Tomorrow, I go to ’s to play Kingmaker and sleep, then first thing he’s taking us toa coach meeting point; we’re off to London for Salute.

April 21st, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | no comments

Shark jumped? Livejournal finally gets the ads working

OK, the post went live a few hours back, I’ve been reading and messing around. exists, currently, just so I can mess around with different advert settings. I may also use it just to see how ugly I can get a default layout, but that’ll be a side project.

They haven’t announced it, but there are new Terms of Service and a new Privacy Policy. (both via ). has written up an analysis of the changes in LJ’s Social Contract, but my principle concern is the impact on the business model.

LJ used to be a Public Commons; free to all, and those that wished to support it financially did so and got extra perks, but we were mostly paying to support the site overall. Now, the site has adverts (and boy are they annoying; log out and trawl around the main site to see them), so I’m not paying to support the site and the services it provides to all, I’m just getting my perks.

So, from now on, I am merely buying a service from them, not supporting a site. So, I switch into annoyed consumer mode rather than site supporter. They’ve taken away the model that made LJ a great community, and turned it into just another revenue stream. Still, at least free users only see the ads on “sponsored+” journals and not the main site. Paid users (while logged in), never see them anywhere. So at least there is a reason to keep paying that I can see the point of.

/geekery - everyone have a good weekend?

April 19th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 11 comments

Book meme, birthday fun

May have done an earlier version of this before; the top 25 sci-fi/fantasy books on What Should I read next; liked/disliked/want to read. Annoyingly, doesn’t have “wouldn’t touch with a barge pole” or “can’t be bothered to read” which is why I didn’t also do the top 25 contemporary, as while there are some good books on that list, there are some meh and some I just don’t care about.

Best advance fee 419 EVAR

Dear Friend

(via )

April 17th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | no comments

Covering all the bases

Interesting blog post

April 17th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 6 comments

Exeter: Memories of Mum, a variety show for charity

K, not that long ago, ’s Mum, Bridget, passed away. Cancer. I never met her, but spoke very highly of her, ergo she counts as Good People.

In her memory, the pair of them are organising a series of fundraising events, the first, in Exeter, will be “a variety performance which will be on Saturday the 24th of June from 7pm until midnight in The Showman (formerly the Roadhouse)on Cowick street.”

I’m currently open for suggestions as to what I’ll be doing, running and hiding seems like a plan, but I probably won’t get away with that.

More info on the community they’ve set up, , it’s all for:
and

Would be a good Exeter LJ meetup type thing, all for a good cause?

April 14th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 5 comments