Come sail your ships around me.

• ladyserpentine's Talhalla pics.

• Mathematics is good for the soul.

• Web 2.0 bullshit generator.

• World's greatest audiophile snake oil.

• This is a real toy. And check the TV ad. (Perhaps these guys could blame it.)

• I don't think cooking is on her mind. Bet it sells, though.

• Apparently capitalism beats burglary. Or cheap Chinese factories do, anyway.

• David Blaine to be filled with custard and fired into space.

I will be using redcountess' phone while mine is lost — number here (locked).

Two hundred and four five photos from dreadnoughtclub are up here (and another three two are waiting for approval). There are lots of missing names and probably several wrong; your corrections are welcomed. Photo policy.

The first round of shots were on the PowerShot S110, a.k.a. Ixus v, which I was aiming to sell. They are beeyootiful. It does better in low light than the Ixus 50 as well — I can pull a lot more useful information out of the noise. (Implying it's the DIGIC II operating system in the later cameras that's getting overenthusiastic on the noise.) The only minus points for the old Ixus are (i) it's thicker than the Ixus 50 (ii) it's only two megapixels (iii) it's a thirsty bugger if you use flash and the LCD all the time. Every old Ixus owner always brings spare batteries.

The second round was on arkady's Fujitsu A202, after the Ixus had guzzled all the batteries. The photos from this seem noticeably harsher; looking closely, this is because the fluorescent setting is bluer, the colours are not as saturated and it oversharpens the JPEGs — Canon leaves it to you to apply sharpening. So the images are full of JPEG artifacts. Low light images are quite recoverable and it's pretty versatile; not a bad camera by any means, but I prefer the Ixus for my purposes.

May I also note that th3lly is incredibly pretty and utterly photogenic. Thank you.

Revenge of the creatively barren.

Most pointful remake evah. I eagerly await the movie version of Legend of Zelda. (They already did Space Invaders.) And I can't wait to see how they tackle the love interest in the movie version of Tetris.

I blame baralier.

Edit: I'm now picturing a Moscow winter's day. Cold, snow, sunlight. Two games programmers, a bottle of vodka and a whole lot of Russian angst.

Hold my dish-rag body tall.

New pics up: November 2004 UK visit from ashbet, at long last. And since no-one screamed in the last few days, I've unlocked the photos from Saturday's party. (And don't forget the narnee Goddesslike beauty collection.) My goodness, those old Ixuses take good pics. Most of those are just as they were out of the camera, EV set to -1/3. I got a Powershot S100 in the post this morning, a.k.a. the original Digital Ixus. Slow and thirsty, but damn fine photos.

arkady has a a new 1:6 dollie for sale on eBay, for those of you who love the dollies but can't afford a couple of hundred quid for a custom 1:3. Note that the last two went within 24 hours of being listed.

Today was wonderfully stupidly hot (eighteen degrees twenty-one tomorrow OH MY GOD) and I need to find my shorts. My weight is down to 93kg — which would worry me if my upper body wasn't still bulking up nicely; I'm not interested in the bulking per se, but it's a nice side benefit of my back exercises — so I might not even look like a faded black denim sausage.