The Last DJ

I know drugs policy has been in the news a lot recently, and possibly there's a whole other post on scientific advice to government. Nonetheless, I have been of the opinion for a while that prohibition isn't the answer to "the drugs problem", despite having never partaken myself.

This short rant seems to cover quite a bit of the ground pretty well.

One thing I like about this novel is how obviously the characters are living in today's world. They look things up on Wikipedia - and discover that everything says [citation needed]. They punch addresses into their satnav. They keep a blog, and post about their personal life when they can no longer keep quiet. They hear a mysterious name, and their first instinct is to google it - from their mobile.

I especially like the fact that the internet isn't all-powerful. Tim tries to search for information about City of Gold, and at first finds only the official website and testimonials from satisfied parents. He has to try several combinations of search terms before he finds Sonia's blog. I've read plenty of novels set in the age of the all-powerful internet, where the characters just have to send their sentient software to find everything that exists; I think it's neat that my characters only have Google.

Their reliance on mobile phones, however, has offered me my latest snag. Tim needs to give his number to someone who's going into City of Gold, so that she can keep in touch from the inside. Writing it down in normal form would arouse too much suspicion, so he's going to encrypt it so it looks like random nonsense, or almost like poetry.

Another character has to decrypt it later, and I really can't see a way to write that without providing the encoded number. I know television companies have a special bank of telephone numbers for such purposes, but I don't; the only possibility that springs to mind is to use my own mobile number. This is spectacularly bad for the code I'd like to use, having as it does no fewer than three zeroes, but I can't really see a way round it.

Finally, I'd like to share this line with the world. Tim is explaining why he looks unnervingly like a teenager: "The reason I look so young is I had low testosterone levels. I didn't go through puberty properly until I went on hormone replacements."

This Summer gothindulgence, surje, marchosias444 and myself visited Kew gardens in the company of a few ladies. It was a great day out, and in general the security there were fairly cool about us taking photographs.

We had several models along with us, first up Katharine who had travelled up from Brighton to work with us.



( More shots under the cut. )

( The rest are cut. )

Blackpool is rarely a fun place to visit - in fact, many of our visits have been horrible in one epic way or another. But my mum offered me a free hotel room, and I just couldn't help myself.

The day started reasonably enough: rising ridiculously early after another November all-nighter, an easy run up to Leeds with the bonus of free on-board wi-fi, and a long haul across country to Lancashire. In Leeds, the sun shone brightly; in Burnley, a rainbow sparkled on dark clouds; in Blackpool, it was tipping it down. We managed to avoid a repeat of the Mancunian navigational fail, but the walk to the hotel, with the rain soaking through our clothes, was long enough to be unpleasant.

Having checked in, we caught a tram down to the opposite end of Blackpool. On arriving at the football ground, we realised what a thoroughly rotten day this was going to be. Bloomfield Road is still partway to being a very nice ground, but the shiniest and newest stand still lacked its safety certificate. This meant that, for twenty-four pounds fifty a ticket, we would be sitting in the same temporary stand we occupied three years ago. The one without a roof. In the rain.

We made the best of it, huddling under umbrellas and singing about how we were getting wet watching Scunny, but I was thoroughly fed up before the match was fifteen minutes old. True, Scunthorpe had improved several hundred percent over their miserable performance last week, but we weren't putting the ball in the back of the net. In any case, I was so wet and cold that nothing short of double figures would have warmed me up.

Andrea, without my ties of loyalty to the team, began the pleas to go back to the hotel after about half an hour. We bought her a waterproof poncho to stop the damage getting any worse, and Karen fed her steadily with Starbursts to keep the crisis at bay. Half time came with the score 0-0; we talked longingly of matchmaker's tea, hot mulled wine, and five Scunthorpe goals in the second half.

As the second half got underway, Andrea demanded a trip to the toilet - quite an undertaking, in a poncho made for an adult. As we returned to our seats, I asked Karen whether we'd missed a goal. "No," she said, "but Hayes should have scored. He was just one-on-one with the keeper." Almost as soon as she'd said that, Hayes was through again, racing clear of the defence to lift the ball gently over the Blackpool keeper. I watched it roll into the net, but I was still too cold to celebrate.

For a few glorious minutes, it looked as if our insane devotion was going to be rewarded. We had a couple of other chances, notably when Sparrow got through down the wing but mistimed his pass to Hayes, and Blackpool had offered very little thus far. I tried not to tempt fate, but I could almost feel the warming effect of three points.

Then we started to let them attack us. The ball was spending too much time at the far end of the field, which I couldn't see because the people in front were standing up. I didn't see the move that let to the goal, but I heard the roar from the hitherto silent Blackpool fans. That was not the best way to ensure three points, but I didn't give up hope. We had let in an equaliser against Derby and gone on to win.

And so we might have done here except for what happened next. Another Blackpool attack, and the ball was fairly harmlessly out of play. But there was a knot of players surrounding the referee, and a flash of red. The news came down the stand to us that Murphy had carried the ball slightly outside the penalty area; according to the most ridiculous law in football, this is a sending-off offence. Murphy trooped off, and Sam Slocombe hastily prepared to come on. After a long delay, Blackpool had a free kick on the very edge of the penalty area. It went through everyone, and Slocombe had his first opportunity to pick the ball out of the net for the Scunthorpe first team.

His second came soon after. I don't remember much about it, but we were suffering from lack of ideas as well as lack of personnel, and it showed. At one point, Karen suggested that Blackpool had four or five extra men, rather than just one. The steady rain had given way to a vertical downpour, and the only reason I didn't get up and leave was a sense that we'd suffered enough that we might as well see the whole thing through.

The scoreline was now identical to my last visit, the glorious day when we won the league despite defeat. The contrast between that day and this struggle was almost too much to bear, so Blackpool helpfully added a fourth goal to erase the parallel. The Scunthorpe fans who were marginally less stubborn than me departed; Andrea had fallen asleep in her seat to give me an excuse not to follow. The announcement of four minutes of stoppage time was met with a groan: the match was long gone, and every minute was another sixty seconds of soaking.

As if to prove us wrong, loan signing George Friend worked his way down the wing and put in a ball to Forte. The ball rattled around the penalty area, and someone stabbed it into the net for a much-needed consolation. But no, the flag was up over on the far side, and we were denied even that. It seemed to sum up our afternoon.

crazyscot's recent LJ post about a factor-of-20 speedup of some code reminds me that I've never written down in here the story of my first summer job, despite it being a standard anecdote I use in real life when I get into those ‘the worst code I've ever encountered’ geek war-story conversations.

( some of the worst code I've ever encountered, and how I too sped it up by a factor of twenty )

The boss took one look at the speed test, and shook his head. ‘We can't ship that,’ he said, ‘it's far too embarrassing. We'll have to deliberately slow it back down again, and ship lots of incremental speed upgrades.’

I laughed.

He turned out not to be joking.

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

( Whitby Goth Weekend )

I went for a wander around the internet. ( Might you like to see what I found? )

We have interweb! It worked! whitepaw rocks.

The letting agent has fixed...some of the things. Not yet the washing machine.

Over dinner last night, we talked a little about RSI. One thing that came up was that using the shift key and another key at the same time with the same hand (e.g. left-shift + q) puts your hand in a funny shape, and often makes RSI worse. People taught to touch-type don't do this, but others do.

It occurred to me that you could get some bit of X to only make opposite-shift work (at least for letters, sorting the punctuation characters out might be a bit harder), and this would fairly rapidly educate typists to DTRT. How hard would it be?

Blindness to the difference between positive and negative incentives. If there are two options, of which someone is currently choosing option A and you'd like them to choose option B instead, you can attempt to achieve this in two ways. You can increase the attractiveness of B to more than that of A, or you can reduce the attractiveness of A to less than that of B. Both of these have a good chance of changing behaviour, but the former makes the people it affects happier, while the latter makes them less so. Doing the latter when you could reasonably have done the former, or acting all surprised when you do the latter and people mysteriously don't seem to be happy about it, considered irritating.

Things that are simultaneously interesting and tiresome. Whether it's a potentially interesting topic of discussion but most people tend to focus on the boring bits, or whether it's interesting in principle but long since done to death, or whether the tiresomeness of the fact that it needs to be argued about at all is in opposition to the interestingness of some of the actual arguments, or whether the interesting and tiresome parts can't even be separated like that and the problem is just that my brain can't make up its mind whether it likes it, or (in extreme cases) all of the above. It's fair enough in this morally complex world that things can be both good and bad, but one might naïvely have thought it should at least be possible to reach a conclusion about whether any given thing was interesting or not. Gah.

You may remember how, last December, I jokingly suggested NaNo would be easier at 4k a day. This was quite possibly a tactical error, because my brain went ahead and interpreted it as something to aim for. According to this week's goal list, I need to have 24k by Friday.

I have a good set of plot cards, and a fair idea of where I'm going. With self-discipline and careful avoidance of distractions, I can write a thousand words in approximately an hour. The obvious conclusion is that I'm screwed. Football is a powerful motivator - I promised myself the last few minutes of the Champion's League if I could write 2k this evening - but sleep isn't quite tempting enough.

There are three parallel stories happening, and all of them involve mothers sending their children to the same vaguely sinister place. There are no fathers present - I think we have two single mothers and one mother delegated to do the dirty work of a joint decision.

Caroline's parents probably have the best excuse, since she's obviously suffering and CoG are offering an apparent miracle cure. Maria, Micky's mother, wants her son to be a bit less annoying, and she is somewhat defensive about what she's doing. Tim and Hannah's mother is just a thoroughly nasty control freak.

Since CoG is an international organisation, and the resistance similarly worldwide, I decided at least one strand had to take place in the US. Unfortunately, my only experience of America is through books, films and the internets, so I'm bound to be making a botch of it. Witness the fact that I don't even know enough to pick a city for my American characters to live in, which suggests a way of killing two birds with one stone.

Would any of my American readers like their home town to feature? All you have to do is read the American bits and point out where I'm going horribly wrong...

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

A brief list of people who have failed today:
-Letting agent and their foolish "we can't use a phone" fixit-people: still no washing machine, still a drip above the front door.
-Virgin Media: still no contract, still NO BROADBAND. They don't answer the phone, so I am sending them a letter; if they don't answer the letter I'm very tempted to get on a train to Swansea and shout at them in person. I can work up a good shout when I have NO INTERNET.

[Backstory to the Extra Virgin Media fail: we ordered their failsome service on the 27th, they sent us an email saying "we'll send you a contract and then we'll send you a start pack". No contract, but they did send us a start pack, which claims it cannot see the internet, and they have set up a direct debit from my bank account. Usual story about phoning the morons up on my mobile and them not answering and wasting all my money, etc. So now I am sending them a letter through the post saying this is what happened, we have no internet and your customer service sucks, sort it out by next Friday or I cancel the direct debit and become evil.]

Work is...scary.

Slightly odd request, does anyone have any idea where to look for those plastic hammers which squeak when you hit something with them?

I was going to write something cheerful about NaNo (2.7k so far!). Then I read this.

It is not necessary to have undergone hormone treatment or surgery. In other words, a pre-operative man could apply for a job in a women — only rape counselling service and, if refused on grounds of his sex, could take the employer to court on the grounds that "he" is legally a "she".

The whole article is full of the usual bullshit, but after yesterday I find this part particularly difficult to stomach. It's a perfect example of why I will now be terrified every time I have to use the toilet at Glanford Park. Trans people are all lying liars, dirty deceptive perverts who just want to sneak in where they're not meant to be. It doesn't matter what our paperwork says - our gender will only ever be worthy of scare quotes.

Yes, Julie Bigot, you have now made your point clear. We are not human. We do not deserve an actual life. You were once generous enough to condemn active violence against us, but you're a positive advocate of denying us anything that might help us live and waiting for us to do violence to ourselves. Now that you've said it, repeatedly, is there any chance you could shut the fuck up and stop rubbing it in?

As usual, the best laid plans went astray: today's major hold-up was my body's insistence on catching up on the sleep I'd gone without while mustering omens. We got to Caythorpe just after midday, ate what should have been a lucky pre-match meal of egg and chips, and set off at about one. This meant arriving at Glanford Park at twenty to three, by which time the ticket office was packed. But we fitted everything in somehow, and settled down in our new usual spot beside a young lad who had dressed as a skeleton in honour of the day.

The early stages were uninspiring, to say the least. Scunthorpe tried to play the game at the slowest imaginable tempo, as though the City game, far from inspiring us, had sapped every ounce of energy. Worse, we kept letting Swansea run around with the goal; they twice created shooting chances that skimmed just the right side of the post with Murphy diving helplessly.

Finally, the inevitable happened. Swansea won a free kick about ten yards from the edge of the penalty area, after what looked like a perfectly innocuous challenge. It went straight through everyone and into the back of the net.

We managed to keep hold of the ball, after a fashion, and went in search of an equaliser. But Swansea knew what they were about, and we didn't have enough ideas to break them down. The players seemed unconnected to each other, with individuals making what would have been lovely moves, if only their teammates had been in tune with them. Since no-one was ever where they needed to be, it was all worthless.

Andrea and her new friend amused themselves by roaring at each other, pretending to be monsters. "You want to see something really scary?" I asked. "Just watch the way Scunthorpe are defending." Half time was in sight, with the hope that, somehow, we could turn it around.

We did look slightly less dreadful in the second half. Sparrow and Woolford came on, and we began creating moves that actually looked as if they might work. But somehow, there was never a decent shot at the end of it.

Andrea's friend demanded a toilet trip, and I slid into the spot at the front of the terrace that his dad had just vacated. From there, I could see the goal, so in the improbably event of the ball going into the net, I wouldn't need to rely on crowd noise.

In fact, the ball did go into the net - the one at the opposite end of the pitch. A forward move, a cross flashing across the face of goal, turned in by someone I couldn't see. At one goal down, we had the hope that a moment of genius could bring us back level; at two goals down, there was no hope.

A few minutes later, the day got even worse. I took Andrea for her only toilet visit of the afternoon. As I left, a steward fell into line beside me and said, "This is the Gents; you're not allowed in here." I asked why not, and a random person stopped to point out where the Ladies is. "But I'm not a lady." The steward said "Sorry," but I couldn't work out whether that meant "Sorry for thinking you were a girl" or "Sorry, I don't care how you identify, you count as a girl."

It was the third blow to my masculinity within a week, not counting the testosterone depletion of three defeats. I sat down on the terrace and wept. For the first time ever, I really wanted to leave early: not as an angry protest against the Iron's ineptitude, but because I didn't feel like I belonged. Was the steward watching? Had the tears convinced him I was a girl?

All I wanted was for the match to end so I could flee to the relative safety of the Iron Bar. The final ten minutes seemed to take forever, but the final whistle came at last, greeted with boos by most of the terrace. I went straight to the Iron Bar, slumped in front of the big screen, and tried to pretend my misery was as simple as everyone else's disgust at our performance.

Hokay. Washing machine still doesn't work, have huge pile of washing, may be going to work naked by Wednesday at this rate. Launderette may be necessary. Thanks letting agent, like a hole in the head. Wheelie bins also left full by builders - GEE THANKS. So we can't throw anything away until next week and have house full of rubbish. Yay. I am living like a cockroach.

I considered giving myself a day off omen-chasing, on the grounds that nothing I did could save us; after some thought, I decided that there was always a chance, and carried out all the usual superstitions.

We got into Manchester shortly before five, then wasted an hour in epic navigational fail. I stopped to look at a map - and promptly walked for twenty more minutes in the wrong direction. Finally, with a few helpful words from a local, we found the hotel, checked in, deposited a few things it didn't seem wise to take to the ground - like railway tickets and my swiss army knife - and returned to Piccadilly Gardens by a much more direct route to catch a bus.

That took us to Eastlands before the turnstiles were open, so I bought a programme and settled down to read it while Andrea ran round in circles and convinced a young lad's parents that she was his new girlfriend. The programme made interesting reading, advertising a friendly in Abu Dhabi on one page, and talking about Scunthorpe on the next just as if we were part of that world.

The turnstiles opened, and we made our way inside. I foolishly admitted that I hadn't been searched, and was sent to be patted down by a female steward. One of these days, I will either develop enough guts to say, "Can you not search me like you're searching all the other men?" or start passing well enough that it isn't an issue. I soothed my irritation with the usual refreshments: the balti pie had the almost unheard-of luxury of a pastry crust, and Andrea contrived to annoint the stand with most of her Fanta.

I kept my eyes out for Karen, but it was hard to pick anyone out in the huge away following. Andrea ran down to the front of the stand to shake hands with the Scunny Bunny, then shook hands with a strange blue object, despite my warning that she would catch Manchester City from it. Then, just as the players were finally lining up for kick-off, she decided she needed the toilet. By some unseemly haste, we managed to get back to our seats before a ball was kicked.

We made one run in the first couple of minutes that looked almost exciting, and resulted in Shay Given having to make a save. But any hopes that we would make a game of it took a battering a minute later. It looked for a second as if we were going to build something from the back, but the ball fell to a blue shirt. Two passes and one "shit, they're going to score" later, Murphy was picking the ball out of the net.

This was not the start we needed, and Scunthorpe fans responded in time-honoured fashion by getting on the players' backs. Chief object of their frustration was Jonathan Forte, who did have some difficulty holding onto the ball for long enough to get past the City defence, but didn't look bad enough to merit the calls for an immediate punitive substitution.

We played a few passes around in areas that were never going to threaten City, and the situation looked hopeless. Then Marcus Williams was racing through on the left-hand side, playing the ball into the middle, and someone stabbed in in a generally goalwards direction. It took me a moment to believe it had actually gone in the net, and a minute more to realise Forte had made at least some answer to his detractors.

We enjoyed our ten or so minutes back on level terms, but when our defence failed for a second time, we dropped into sullen silence. "You only sing when you're drawing," jeered the City wits, but we produced a little more support as we saw out the remainder of the first half without things getting any worse.

At half time, we wandered the concourse, hoping we would somehow find Karen. Andrea did her best to improve our chances by muttering "Karen, Karen, Karen," and sure enough, Karen crossed our path a moment later. To Andrea's exaggerated devastation, she didn't have any chocolate to offer; she forestalled the tears by finding a packet of chewits, which I think Andrea would happily have guzzled during half time had it been physically possible.

We returned to our seats for the second half, not really expecting anything but not despairing either. The Iron managed to just about hold out - never really more than that - until the ball ended up in Murphy's net from a corner. Andrea took time out from demanding a sweet to ask me whether I was sad. I pointed at the scoreboard and invited her to guess. A few minutes later, another corner and another goal. Carlos Tevez, Jolean Lescott - City's highest-profile summer signings were queueing up to put the ball past Joe Murphy.

In 2006, when Andrea was a babe in arms, we lost at Eastland by three goals to one, having been in the lead at half time. I told myself that City have come a long way since then, but that was no comfort. They've only gone from mid-table Premiership to the fringes of the top four. In the same time, we've gone from trying to stay in League 1 to trying to stay in the Championship. There was no explanation that didn't depress me.

At some point, they added a fifth goal, a long-range shot that Murphy couldn't quite get his hand to. The City fans proceeded to demonstrate that, whatever else money buys, it doesn't buy class, taunting us about the fact that we only have what we've honestly earned rather than several squillion pounds of someone else's money. Andrea suggested that we should go back to the hotel, but I insisted on waiting for the final whistle.

Unlike at Peterborough, I was willing to applaud, since it wasn't as if we'd played badly. We just weren't in City's league. I tried to tell myself the experience would somehow make us better able to pick up points in the Championship, but it didn't help my mood.