Then I could have titled this post “JoCo rocks Soho” which would have been awesome. Alas, instead he rocked Camden while I drank SoCo, which has much less dynamic flair to it.

It’s taken me just forever to get round to writing this, because as everyone knows, I’m pretty terrible and disorganised. And it’s going to be a pretty terrible blog post anyway, because I’m think I’m already starting to get typing-fatigue. Anyways, the show was fantastic, I kinda wish I’d thought to take a camera because there are pictures I’d love to show you, but I can’t. So I’ll have to resort to pushing you in the direction of Youtube and Flickr, which are no doubt full to brimming with media by now.

Anyways, the attendees were Dickie, Josh, Sarah, Samir, and myself.

Once we’d met up, we had trouble finding the venue. We walked all the way up the road to the Roundhouse, walking past the actual venue (Dingwalls in Camden Lock) by a heck of a long way. The moral of the story was that people shouldn’t listen to me when I say a big line of people doesn’t look like a queue. It was an amazingly huge queue, it stretched right around the corner and threatened to spill out onto the road, and it took ages for them to see everyone inside.

Finally we got in and found some (albeit cramped) seats. Which was lucky, as the show was a sell-out and thus the venue was filled to capacity. First impressions were that the place was filled with our people, our tribe, as it were. We spotted people wearing xkcd, HL2, Portal & Penny Arcade T-shirts. These people are our people. After buying some drinks, the man himself came on stage, apparently amazed himself at the number of people who’d turned out. The crowd was incredibly enthusiastic, cheering, screaming, the works.

The set started with Over There, contentious seeing as how it’s basically insulting us all, but I think we collectively took it in good humour.

According to “Tart” at http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2008/02/29/london-calling/#comments:

Set list was: Over There, The Future Soon, Ikea, Shop Vac, I’m Your Moon, Baby Got Back, Still Alive, a Billy Bragg cover called The Saturday Boy, Someone is Crazy, I feel Fantastic.

Set two was Tom Cruise Crazy, Better, Skullcrusher Mountain, I Crush Everything, Code Monkey (with new toy backing up the guitar), Creepy Doll, Drinking With You, Do They Know It’s Christmas (Feed the World), Chiron Beta Prime, Millionaire Girlfriend, Mandelbrot Set, You Ruined Everything, re: Your Brains and for the encore: First of May.

Highlights included Code Monkey featuring his brand-new Tenori-on, the impromptu Bandaid cover with riotous audience participation, the sweet-as-heck introduction to I’m Your Moon (it’s Charon singing to Pluto!), and general laughing and singing along all evening.

Everyone seemed to enjoy it immensely, and I have to say I’ll be first in the queue to buy tickets for another show in London. And I’ve been listening to pretty much nothing but Jonathon Coulton music since the gig, so that pretty much says all that’s required.

Arthur C Clarke was one of the best science fiction writers who has ever lived, and possibly ever will live. He was visionary like few people are; his vision of the future of humanity is one we can all aspire to; where men and women have reached out into the solar system, and our inventiveness and curiosity know no bounds, where science and reason and technology can take us further than any magic or superstition.

The big three of sci-fi (Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke) are all dead now. I hope the next generation of writers can take up the mantle.

I noticed a while back that when the escalators at Green Park  tube weren’t working, when I stepped on and off I felt this weird "jolt", like the escalator was moving, even though it was stationary.

The reason is fairly obvious - I use the two escalators at Green Park twice a day every week day, so with the constant repetition has caused me to develop what I can only describe as an unconscious adaptation to my walking response which smoothes over the transition between the moving escalator and the stationary ground. This is really pretty interesting I think, and makes me wonder how many other automatic adaptations my brain has developed without me noticing. Do I walk differently on surfaces I know to be slippery? Have the years I’ve spent in education subtlety altered my thought patterns?

I heard of one experiment where you wear mirrored glasses that make everything appear upside-down; your brain corrects for this after a few hours and makes the image appear the correct way up. I guess it’s another example of how bafflingly complex and impressive the brain is. The visual and audio processing of the raw information coming in from our senses alone is just unbelievably complex, automatically correlating the inputs from each of your ears and eyes to perform spatialisation.

Guess that’s my thought for the day!

So I’m just having a look at the stats for this site.

Top search terms for all time:

1. andy simpson
2. asuseee
3. weeping angel doctor who
4. sally sparrow
5. weeping angels dr who
6. weeping angel dr who
7. andy simpson music
8. revision sucks
9. weeping angel
10. office 2007 student deal

I think this rather clarifies that my core audience seems to be people interested in me, followed by Asus EEE users, then Whovians.

So people interested in me, you’re in the right place. Congratulations.

Asus EEE folks, you’ll want to check out eeeuser.com because it’s a fantastic resource, the wiki is well worth having a look at. Also, if your institution has some sort of VPN-over-insecure-network as a way of connecting to their network, it’s a hell of a lot easier than trying to hack in WPA Enterprise.

We all love Sally Sparrow. This seems to be a universal truth. The fact that we’re instead getting Catherine Tate, a re-run of Martha (she was OK, I guess…) and Rose (again? They don’t make barriers between parallel worlds like they used to) for the next series of Dr Doctor Who is just brain-numbingly painful to me. I sometimes wonder if Russell T. Davies actually has some kinda soft mulch inside his cranium, instead of the finely-tuned ninja-writer-brain possessed by pretty much everyone else writing on that show. Is the head writer supposed to be the worst of the lot?

I mean, I think the biggest achievement of the Sound Of Drums / Last of the Time Lords two-parter was to make you not notice the huge plot holes. I mean, why exactly did the Master go to all the trouble of becoming Prime Minister? One would think that controlling an army of 6 billion armoured robotic spheres would do the job well enough.

Never mind that the Doctor said he permanently fused the controls on the Tardis, only to then fix them again at the end of the episode. Maybe he just locked the controls out with private key encryption or something, but it seems ridiculous that the Master could turn the Tardis into a Paradox machine, but couldn’t fix the controls.

Awesome tangent. Anyways, I think my favourite term not in that list is “insipid boom-fest” for which I’m randomly the top search result on Google. Weird.

Thanks to Dickie for inspiring me to look at search terms, mine are all much duller than “ugly fatties”.

Update: I forgot to mention, I saw a League of Gentlement / Doctor Who actor/writer Mark Gatiss, as well as another Doctor Who writer I recognised but couldn’t name in Forbidden Planet in London. It was cool, and made my sister angry, which is always fun. Felt too lame to ask for an autograph, so I didn’t.

So lots of stuff happened that I pretty much forgot to blog about. Whoops. So I’ll have to perform some kinda compressed info dump, which is not necessarily in the right order:

Went to RCSU RAG ball. Nice venue, alright food, alright company from everyone not called Sarah (ah, I jest), drama, a DJ mashing up “By The Way” (FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY!?!), freezing cold winds on the way home… it had it all.

Drank some Fairtrade wine at a wine tasting. Nice.

Handed lab report in a whole 24 hours (!!!) early. Double nice.

Had cheese and wine party at Rowan’s. Lots of wine consumed, with predictable results. Then someone produced a bottle of port, and one of sambuca. More predictable results.

Installed IE8 beta. Buggy. Do not recommend yet.

Bought tickets to aforementioned gig, and which acted as a catalyst to get me listening to JoCo’s music. Which is awesome, so you should all do it.

Continued staying off MSN for unknown reasons even to myself. Probably should go back on before everyone thinks I’m dead!

Thought the Hawking thing that was on tonight was actually kinda lame. They used the same clip of a sphere exploding over, then the same clip of some points of light on these funny planes over and over, and they had to keep saying “Other people got to it first…” because Hawking’s famous, but hasn’t exactly done anything ground-breakingly interesting for ages. I guess saying physics is a big collaborative effort isn’t as sexy as a race to be first to create the theory of everything.

No wonder people think that physics is an impenetrable subject practiced only by geniuses in their ivory towers if this is face being presented to the public at large.

Oh, and they kept presenting string theory and supersymmetry as basically facts, which they’re not. There isn’t a single shred of evidence to support either. If the LHC doesn’t detect any of the predicted supersymmetric partners of fundamental particles (like the electron should have a partner known as a selectron) then it’s going to put a massive nail into the coffin of these theories. Or hypotheses? Theory is surely a term reserved for something that’s actually supported by data and not a theoretician’s appeal to mathematical beauty.

Hmm. That wasn’t compressed.

Bought a Stanley Kubrick box set, which includes: Full Metal Jacket, 2001, Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut, & The Shining. Personally, I’m none too keen to ever see a movie with Tom Cruise in ever again, but hell, the others are worth seeing. Also part of me wants to play a GlaDOS / Hal duet. 

All you need to know, people: £15, at Dingwalls London, apparently, AND AFTER TERM ENDS.

http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2008/03/04/london-tickets-on-sale/

If you played Portal, you should come. He also has awesome other music. Go listen:

http://www.jonathancoulton.com/primer/listen