Added a donations button to the front page using PayPal... just in case anyone fancies giving me dosh for the Neverwinter Portraits. :)

I love the Interweb, when people put in the hard work to create beautiful, thorough, clearly written and well-laid-out sites like the one over at Nausicaa.net.

Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind is an awesome, epic Japanese comic-book, a sort of post-apocalyptic Lord of the Rings with an environmental cautionary message. It's beautifully drawn and realised, one of the very best manga.

Brighton based photo weblog and links over at bytheseaside`s Fotolog

Especially this. :)

Visit the weird, the wonderful, the Amelie-esque IS THIS YOU? and see if there's anyone you know there. This should be so much bigger. Lots from Brighton...

Today, I am as happy as a little girl...

If the site below wasn't rude enough for you, try these Random Insult Generators for more comedy rudity.

Rude blogging here. Infantile, lots of swearing. Not big and not clever.

Having an 'ugly day'? Cheer yourself up over at mingers.com - home of the facially inept.

Send annoying emailers this link and giggle: WWW.SPAM.COM :D

Shocking absence from the Blog Cabin. Have been wasting time here and occasionally here. Will attempt to write something constructive again one day soon, possibly comics-related. :)

Ever wondered what WTF means in emails, forums or IRC? The extremely handy Acronym Server Simplified is here to serve you. Know your IDSN from your ISDN. My favourites so far are CHIP, responded to by FISH. :)

King Lear is on tonight in Cornwall at the Minack Theatre. I couldn't be there because of the MA Dissertation... it looks beautiful:

Image courtesy of the Minack Webcams. :)

Yaaaay! I have finally completed my dissertation and my MA.

I'm tempted to post it here... but with frame grabs and scans of comic book pages it's about 6 megs. :)

I think it's pass material (if not distinction). The theory in brief is that when a viewer watches a film, it's the process that they go through to create its meaning that is important. The theory is based on Wolfgang Iser's The Act of Reading, where he makes the same claim for literature.

I'm now unemployed, no play, no MA... so I might actually post here more often. :)

Anyone looking for a cheapo scooter in Brighton could do well by nabbing one of these. Road Radio in Hove do 'em even cheaper. They took bastard ages to deliver and got right on my tits, but you gets what you pay for. Vroom. :)

Yet again, no news for ages, and of course it's cos I'm in a play - King Lear at Brighton Little Theatre. Playing this week up at Lewes Castle... :)

Another Brighton Blogger and lover of StrongBad: chuzpe. :)

All quiet on the Blogging front. I should be getting on with my MA - correction, WILL be getting on with my MA very soon. In the meantime, am wasting my life awaiting the delayed-in-the-UK release of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for the Xbox.

Strong Bad rules. :)

Being a games geek, I tend to follow the development and release of certain titles via their forums service. Amongst the two or three I'm keeping an eye on at the moment - in the name of Media and Cultural Studies as much as geekery, of course (*ahem*) - is the new Tomb Raider game at Eidos Forums - Tomb Raider - The Angel of Darkness.

Lara, it seems, is in a certain amount of trouble. The game has been released to poor reviews and reports of bugginess in the US, and with UK ane European gamers - including myself - clamouring for its release, a firm date is yet to be announced by Eidos.

They're planning a trilogy of next-generation games for Lara, and, having been a fan of the series since the original, I've been looking forward to ths immensely. But there's a lot of anger amongst the fanboys against Eidos, for a) being so tardy in releasing the game, and b) allowing it to end up in such an unpolished form.

In the UK we face a dilemma - part wishing for the game to be released ASAP so we can get out eager mitts on it, but now partly hoping they'll hold it back to clean up the problems it seems to be hitting in the States.

Check the link above for more fanboy ranting...

I was alarmed to find an apparent disappearance of this page... or at least a slowdown... related perhaps to Lycos' new Ads policy?

I only wish they could trust us to incorporate the ads into the body of our sites. The text-only blog-related ads are an improvement, but the frame does naff up the look of the site. I'd be happy to build in a text-based ads bar. Maybe you can change the colours and so on... I'll check it out.

Phew, little posted for a long while. As always, this has been due to my involvement in theatrical endeavours, playing Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger.

Today, been working on somewhat stereotyped pictures of figures to represent academic theories, for the A2 level Comms course. Check 'em out:
The Feminist
The Postmodernist
The Marxist
The Postcolonial

Wahey! Star Wars geek fun with Star Wars Kids: Arena: Who Said It?

I got the first few wrong and then hit my stride... Mwahahaa! Fear my Geek Skillz! 8 )

Hurrah for Muhammad Saeed Al-Sahaf, your friendly Iraqi (mis)Information Minister! Since the 'end of the main combat phase' in Iraq, Mr Al-Sahaf has been absent from our TV screens.

Since the war started, and we started to see his cheerful denials on various news stations, I've been wondering what would happen to him. His possible death at the hands of the 'Coalition' forces struck home the consequences of war more than any other carefully-constructed human interest stories about civilian casualties.

A website has been started - ostensibly called We Love the Iraqi Information Minister dot com, though the domain name seems not to be registered. They, of course, are also interested in following the fate of Mr Al-Sahaf:

-- Still no reliable evidence on the fate of Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf (M.S.S.)... Iranian newspaper Mardom Salari reports rumors of MSS suicide, but no substantiation.

Check out the site for some great quotes and ongoing information as to his whereabouts.

Whilst waiting for geek mates to play Dvorak with, and/or before I pressgang my girlfriend into playing :), I've developed Dino Dig - a Solitaire Dvorak Game... so I can play with myself. Hmmm....

Following on from discovering Dvorak (see below), I came across The Games Journal, with an archive of many articles on games and gaming. If you wonder why so many writers are German, there's an article on that, too...

BTW, if anyone I know is looking in, take a look at Dvorak... I'm itching to try a game...

This Rules: Welcome to Everything@Everything2.com.

It's a polished version of a wiki - an interactively created website, a hyperlinked encyclopeadia of the trivial and the crucial. (I've mentioned wikis before - there's a link to one on the left.) Happy browsing!

This one to keep Marina going till Sunday week... 24 Dreaming
:)

Top stuff in Dvorak - A Nomic Card Game, and the most playable version of the self-recursive rule-bending philosophical game of Nomic I've ever seen. Now to find someone as geeky as me to play it with...

Hehe. Nice to see that my nickname has entered into NWN slang...

Neverwinter Vault - Portraits - Claennis
WOW! That's one of the best Crosbie's I've seen! Very nice!
10

Damned if I can get archives to work properly. There's some bloody JavaScript problem. I think it's Lycos' fault. Consolatory thought:

"You can never plan the future by the past."
-Edmund Burke
Quoteland

Finally implemented my expanded Theatre Pics in the Ready Room. Hurrah! Pics from ten years of acting and directing to be found on that page, with no especial selection criteria apart from I found them and scanned 'em in.

Aha! Blogger is up and working again (at least so far).

I still occasionally get people asking about the Neverwinter Portraits. It's nice to still get this feedback, and to feel that this site is useful for something.

I guess the key to a successful website is not glamour and groovy design, but simply to offer something people want, and offer it for free. If it's good, it'll generate its own linking and publicity... after a little nudge or two by the webmeister.

The content of the Blog Cabin isn't exactly a selling point... if I wanted to make this 'work', I'd have to give it a theme, give it content.

But it's a personal homepage... and the point of it is a space for me to blather about this and that. It's an addendum to the other stuff I do. If someone ends up in here, they get to see a few things I'm up to, have a little look inside my head, maybe find a link or two to something they might otherwise not have found.

Hey, that's a blog for you.

Been having terrible problems with the Blog Cabin... something to do with Blogger not liking Lycos and/or vice-versa. The template seems to have got scrambled too... but I'm in the process of fixing her up! :)

Away from the cabin and the Ready Room for a few days... but I've been scanning in some old theatre pics (see below), and hope to get around to redesigning the Vanya Pics page soon to incorporate them. About time there was some update in content on the static ol' Ready Room.

For more interesting developments, keep an eye on the SUDS Website. Much more happening there. Some of my old theatre pics are up there at the mo, too. :)

I've discovered - having had the info forwarded to me me by my doppelganger, Crosbie Fitch - that the Blog Cabin is listed amongst a load of other Brighton Blogs in this corner of the Brighton and Hove Festival 2003 website. My previous link was out of date (see post of 8/3 below).

Thanks to Jane for listing me and letting me know, and double thanks to Crosbie!

Progress is now well underway on 'Sudsweb'... the server appears to be down tonight though (bugger) so I can't get any further.

Thank heavens for Blogger and its easing of the web-publishing process. The site has a chance of continuing beyond the reign of the techies because of the idiot-proof posting system. Long Live Blogger!

Check out the progress, if you're interested, at suds.webk.co.uk.

Brighton & Hove Festival of arts is coming up soon, and it seems they're compiling a list of local Bloggers. I've been looking for nearby Bloggers since I started this page - see the Blogroll list to the left for some I've found. If you're one, you can add your name to a list they're compiling at Brighton & Hove Virtual Festival 2003. Actually, the page header was 2002 - it may be that the whole idea is a year out of date, or maybe they just haven't updated the header...

The beginnings of the new SUDS website can be found here and here...

Some lovely Bloggerable webpage designs on this site: E y e F o r B e a u t y - Linkware/Journal Templates

Another Brighton Blogger, Jonathan Pascoe, has caught up trying to chase the stars... Jonathan is at Sussex Uni, and a Drama Soc luvvie like me, and may well be working on the much-talked-about but not-yet-forthcoming SUDS website.

I was most surprised, and even a little delighted, when a student of mine brought to a Media lesson a CD from a band I was in for about three weeks in the latter half of my time at university.

Purple Phat Fish, now simply Phatfish, were a jazz/funk band at the time when Jamiroquai were big. The then drummer, who lived next door, heard me and my pal playing bass and guitar and yelled up at the window that his band needed a bassist. I soon discovered that the entire band were committed Christians, and being as I was about as secular as they come, we parted ways after a bit of jamming.

What really surprised me was the mention of my name as an 'additional musician' in one of their albums ("Purple Through the Fishtank")! I'm guessing I must have contributed a bassline or idea in those few weeks, though the album was recorded much later. They've become a seriously Christian band now, and the drummer I knew has also moved on. Their website is very nicely done... check it out. :) [It requires Flash.]

Oleanna is over, and has gone very well, with lots of the kind of random strangers telling you they love you that we actors thrive on.

Next up is Medea, and a short film being shot by some media students at the university. I've also got to get going on the SUDS website... more info as and when. :)

From Quoteland...

"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous."
-Ingrid Bergman

Silmarillion was nice enough to host all of my NWN Portraits on this beautiful page, along with others by various artists. Looks like his page is a useful NWN resource. Cheers Silmaril! :)

A big Hi to Marina if she's looking in... she might find this article interesting: expressandstar.com:features:women :D

I'm appearing in David Mamet's Oleanna at Sussex University at the moment, which is my current running excuse not to be keeping regular updates to the Ready Room. It's a great play, and I've wanted to do it for ages. It raises many questions about gender relations and the nature of education, and tends to divide audiences on the issues. For reviews of the 1994 film version, click here.

I'm occasionally brought back to the site as people continue to get in touch about my NWN Pics... which, let's face it, are the only major draw to visit this site. I keep meaning to add new content, but my time is always full with college, uni, and theatre at the moment.

SUDS, the univesity drama crew, have asked me to design a website for them, though. That might just bring me back to the internet 'fold'... news and a link as and when it happens... x

No entries for a while, but cure your boredom by playing with The Dialectizer...