Be Excellent To Each Other

If only we had a topic or two for this Elite chat. What a world that would be.

My first lesson was, erm, OK. Much like your first driving lesson trying to remember everything at once feels completely alien. Hopefully it become easier in time.

Now I have to buy a Bass guitar AND find somewhere to go off and practice in order to still keep it secret.

Be careful your life doesn't turn into a romcom where Mrs T thinks you're sneaking off because you're cheating on her and nearly leaves you but it all comes good in the end. If either you or she has an outrageous best friend that's always getting up to 'hilarious' hijinks it's a raging certainty.

At least you don't have to practice the drums. I imagine that would be very difficult to keep a secret.

Does anyone have to practice the drums?

She went to a festival at the weekend she told me the tale of Saturday night where a man was wandering around with just a waterpoof mac tied round his bottom half shouting "ALAN, ALAN" and trying all the tents. Did this for two hours apparently until security took him away.

Sitcom it is then.

That Gorilla in that Cadburys ad. Must have taken ages that.

Alright grandad. We'll try to keep the noise down too.

Bloody youth of today with their wargaming miniatures and spoddy space trading computer games!

I was the only one in school just about with a BBC Model B so I had literally nobody to talk to about Elite. None of this fancy internet stuff where you could exchange stories (in the wrong thread).

I ended up becoming mates with an absolute tosser just because he also had a BBC so I could talk to him about the stuff that I was playing. He probably thought the exact same thing to be fair.

There's always one on the Thursday night at Glastonbury, and we have spent several hours there each of the past two years. It is brilliant.

I have a video of how mental it went when they played 7 Nation Army and everyone starting singing about Jeremy Corbin. It was fun.

I signed up to Lumen5 last month when I was looking for options for creating little explainer videos on the cheap. I didn't end up using them for the final project, but the idea is interesting - you just feed it a blog post URL and it'll create a nice video automatically based on snippets of text in there, and trying to automatically match it up with appropriate imagery too. It's obviously a bit inaccurate at times, but you can refine the text and images anyway or just build from scratch.

The reason I mention it though, is that it automatically picked up the RSS feed URL from the site I gave it and now it automatically makes videos and sends me email notifications.. all for free. I'm wondering how it'll fare if it was fed with Beex post links instead.

Hmm.. I had to choose the text bits manually from a post link, but it kinda worked (although I'm not sure why it picked the photo of the woman).

I scraped Mimi's latest post about a cardigan she has knit for Darwin, and it produced this fairly quickly.
http://mimicodd.com/2017/07/the-coddfis ... nture.html

That's pretty amazing!

There's a few new Dreamcast games coming out in September and one of them is the classic, Flashback.

Apparently the owner of the source code has made it available so that some clever people can convert it to the Dreamcast. I have a soft spot for the Dreamcast and Flashback looks lovely in one of their PAL boxes.

Can't wait!

I tried to do the Wayback thread and it failed miserably because it wasn't logged in

Lovely stuff.

Here's a thing. A man (20-22, at a guess) was walking down the hill towards me today wearing a black tshirt with the artwork from Unknown Pleasures on it, but about the graphic was printed in white block text 'Pink Floyd'. So, is that knowing and ironically wrong, or is it unintentional?

If you are talking about him and what he was wearing, objective completed. Malicool.

That's quite an accurate description of the Malicool concept. So many things make sense now.

There's no way Pink Floyd or Joy Division would agree to that, right? It must be some dodgy knock-off, possibly worn ironically.

It's like the t-shirts with The Godfather on, with the text "I'm going to make him an offer to which he cannot say no."

Or the Ghosbusters pic with, "Who are you phoning?"

They make me laugh more than they should.

Oops. It's just sent me an email saying it's created three more videos from posts on here automatically. I quite liked this one

Oxford Mail: New vision for guided buses and trains

Otherwise mundane article about potential infrastructure developments in the Shire made childishly amusing by repeated use of an unfortunate (and totally not deliberate) metaphor.

(Smirks)

Even when not on BeeX the Internet makes me think about Beex.

Yup. We're all Mexican boy scouts here.

Leather shoe wearing Mexican boy scouts

Is that Grim... and GJ in the banner?

Is that sodastream advert a tie in with a TV ad or something? If it isn't, then I have a lot of questions....

Why does that woman have to thrust her chest out at that weird and implausibly uncomfortable angle to sell a machine that makes fizzy water?

And why is she on safari, or an archaeologist?

And the bloke on the right, who is he meant to be?

It's grim...

It would at least be funnier if it said 'Hodor now' on the button.

How short the memory...

I remember.

But only because I had to Google that it was actually Blossom.

Hold the door, i have got it

Blossom from the kids TV show?

Yep. Now Amy from Big Bang Theory

What the fuck - people still see adverts on the Internet?!

Yeah.

Mine are all for Pig masks and Adult nappies for some reason.

Maybe he's at work? Our infrastructure mob have recently blocked the installation of browser extensions so the only reason I've still got adblock is because I had it installed before the block came in. I live in terror of ever having to reset my Firefox profile now.

We disable browser extensions, in fairness. But then, we also add an ad blocker to every account because we're not insane.

Some sites, Eurogamer is one of them, have started detecting ad blockers and blocking content if you're using them. For the those I just disable the ad blocker and if the adverts get too annoying, then I'd just stop using the site.

I've also noticed that ad-blockers can stuff up the functionality of some sites. When I was looking at bikes on Evans Cycles the other day the filter controls didn't work until I disabled u-block for that site. Seen it a few other places too.

I turned off Adblockers a couple of years ago after reading about how a lot of the sites I visit depend on ad revenue (especially newspaper sites) and I ended up buying a Richard Herring dvd through one of them.

I don't notice them in the main - that one caught my eye because it's clearly as a result of the sodastream thread on here now Blossom is stalking me all over the shop.

That'll happen if some of the functionality relies on Javascript that's pulled from a blocked domain. I get this kind of issue a lot at work not because of adblock but because the corporate level site-blocking picks some really weird shit to not like sometimes. Rotten Tomatoes is a mess for me here because we've apparently decided that Flixster is social networking for some reason. Similarly, image galleries on Engadget just don't work at all, though I haven't ever managed to work out why.

Fuck Engadget though, they've recently added auto-playing video bullshit that sliiiiiiides out in the middle of article pages when you scroll down far enough. It still happens even if you have adblock but it skips the advert part and goes straight to auto-playing the content from their own 'Tech Hunters' article series. That annoys me even more than an advert because if I wanted to watch your stupid fucking video I would've gone to that article in the first place; especially because it sits right at the top of the site (and fucking auto-plays there as well!) every time I arrive. Wankers.

I don't block ads because I rely on them for some of my sites to be financially feasible and it would be hypocritical for me to then block other sites doing the same.

I thought they dropped that idea about 24 hours later because of the immense backlash?