Reading List and an announcement.

Finally dug through the reading list at the side and updated a few links to things that aren't there no more. We had to remove *Kimimi's Blog which I found had closed down (seriously I'm a Jonah for good works) and have replaced it with Back Of the Cereal Box which is my kind of idiotic humour.

Furthermore, I've found some good stuff online to read about today so will present to you a reading list of things to well, read.

Like reading about big cats, have news of some strange feline hybrids here. Were talking about a Lion / Leopard / Jaguar hybrid baby.

There is a big interview with Derrick May which I've gotten to the halfway mark of, about the origins of techno and such.  Probably some nostalgia for Detroit people of a certain age too.

Oh and Cookout from Cruise Elroy that is super relevant to my announcement (see below). It looks like its made by Nintendo circa 1984 for one of their arcade games.  We found this on twitter of all places. EDIT now with video.

Announcement.

Next month I'm going to be blogging about Nintendo all month long.  Unless something good comes up then you'll probably get two blogs a week from me.  Its going to tie in to the very English idea of the Christmas biscuit assortment of the type Rover put out. Namely a selection of games based around a theme and done by indie devs for current gen consoles.
See you soon.

*thankfully not gone for good as she still has up her excellent twitter feed on Japanese curiosities and that.

Slide scanner and snes.

First up  here is some news about an undumped commercial SNES game that for all intents an purposes got missed out on.  Its not especially good mind but it is in Swedish so there's that if you will. 

The game is Tintin In Tibet a crappy late era platformer that got about 40% in Superplay back in the day (they did a list of all the worst things you could get attacked by, which includes such things as bells and a pacifist Buddhist monks) and as noted before it had an official if undumped Swedish translation.

Been reading through Byuu's twitter updates as he has been dumping out obscure SNES and Super Famicom games for preservation and he casually mentioned it was part of a collection he was rom dumping.  Not earth shattering but thought it worthwhile sharing here.

Also have an Ion Slide scanner now so I can make headway on the backlog of slides and negatives we have indoors.  Will be backing up everything to disc and external HD just in case it all goes to hell. 

So far its not a bad device you'll get most of the negative in shot when scanning and it has basic image manipulation properties.  Mac owners are going to be disappointed that the last version it supports is 10.7 which is Lion, but other than that its good at what it does.  (don't ask about linux  I haven't tried it and you'd need WINE to get the program disc installed).

You can have this picture as proof of concept.

Echinocacti at Los Christianos

We Wuz Cheddar Man

There's a excellent article in the Grauniad (no seriously) where scientists have resequenced the DNA of one of the first inhabitants of the British Isles, and its proven some food for thought.  Previously thought to be white, Cheddar man, as he is known, has the markers for blue eyes and dark or black skin. 

Of course there will be people saying that its not like that, and there's me working out, that if Cheddar man is black then what kind of modern day tribe would he have come from.

Other questions arise such as, when did whiteness arise as such in the UK population?, were the Neanderthals white? seeing as they had a good 300,000 years on Homo Sapiens, and why does he look like a town drunk.

I had a cursory look for Berber's on Image search, due to notion that they were Africans with blue eyes, and there is quite some variation in skin tone, there.  True most of it is through mixing races and such but I can't shake off that his skin looks like Mahogany and would love to see what he would look like if he had more of a natural skin tone.  

Childhood books.

So Ursula Le Guin died recently and its set up a few things in my mind that never were. Namely she wrote a book about a girl that could turn into a bear and that.  Can remember it so well, as a child it was one of the books that we were read to in class by our teacher (possibly by Miss James or a Miss Grealey) along with the Lion The Witch and  The Wardrobe.

Sadly after a few hours fruitless searching it turned out it was a false memory and what I  was actually remembering was the book Ursula Bear by Sheila Lavelle.  A girl called Ramona (Not the same one from Ramona and Beavis) finds a book of spells in a library that can turn her into a bear.  By repeating I'm a Bear she could change and by reversing it and saying Raeb am I she changed back. 

With this aced I decided to look for another book or series of books we had at school (Mid 80's this would be, complete with school milk and full on Garbage Pail Kid craze to boot).  This was a series of books featuring a dog called Shorty which were I suppose for less capable readers.  I  read these while I was supposed to be paying attention to the teacher (this time a Mr Bissett, he could play the piano and was cool). This was actually much easier to find as they had a picture of a scruffy mutt on the cover which after all these years I could pick out on Google Images.

Written by James Webster  they were a series of books starring this dog along with other stories too.  Its been ages since I've read them, and the artwork alone is enough for some serious nostalgia trip for me. 

This is the sort of thing we read.