Lost Girls

So I finally found myself a copy of “Lost Girls”.  I’ve been wanting to read this piece of work for so long. But the unavailabilty of this in the UK did prohibit me. I even considered paying the hundred odd quid to get it from a US comics dealer from ebay and ship it, but common sense prevailed. Mind you I paid a fair amount for it here, but it was to a UK independent comics store, so that’s OK. It’s also a lovely boxed hardbacked set, so I think that was well worth the 25 pint cost. For those of you who do not know about this comic, and cannot be bothered to click through to Wiki, then Lost Girls is a “erotic” novel about the fantasies of Wendy (Peter Pan), Dorothy (Wizard of Oz) and Alice (you get the drift).  They are all now grown up and boring, and look back on their lives.

It has been banned from being published in the UK as Great Ormond’s street hospital own the UK copyright and refuse to allow a UK publication. Not at all sure I agree with this, although perhaps the fact that it is a Children’s hospital should give them some leeway. Is this hypocritical of me? Should I donate money to them as a way of assuaging any feelings of guilt, or should I refuse to do so from a moral point of view. Tricky one.

Alan Moore is an excellent writer, and apart from Promethea, I’ve loved everything he’s done. I read all Promethea, but I must admit towards the 4th volume it got a bit silly. I could never quite escape the niggling thought in the back of my head, that he was sat laughing his socks off, at the thought that a reader would be seriously reading every word he wrote. To be truthful, I hope that he was! On the other hand the art and the concept was well worth the read, and I’m glad I did.

Back to Lost Girls, Moore ended up marrying his artist (Melinda Gebbie).   The quote on the wiki page says “I’d recommend to anybody working on their relationship that they should try embarking on a 16-year elaborate pornography together,” joked Moore. “I think they’ll find it works wonders.”

Let’s hope the book is as good as its hype.

multi room music playing goodness without paying for it?

Well. I decided that I really needed to be able to play the same music in all my rooms:

  • Installed and configure MPD on my Mythtv box
  • Used Theremin to control this.
  • Setup Icecast to broadcast a ogg stream
  • Setup MPD to broadcast to a Icecast server
  • Used mplayer on the Mythtv box to play the stream and VLC on the Mac.

Except it doesn’t work. I just cannot get less than about 0.5seconds latency, which does not sound much but is enough to make it painful to listen to!

Ok then let’s think of another solution.

I am very impressed with MPD though. It’s a very cool way of playing music from my laptop, direct through my speakers (along with my awesome Rel sub!). Basically it is a remote control client to play music on another computer. MPD plays and publishes all music available on that remote computer, to any connected remote clients. So I can use Theremin to search for and play music through my main system whilst sat on the settee with the laptop! Funky!