Sdtrk: ‘Lovely head’ by Goldfrapp

More Actroid-chan puzzle pieces are starting to fall into place here. Dig this:

Do Androids Dream of Becoming Newscasters?

At RoboCup Osaka 2005, “Anna-san,” an android with a striking resemblance to a human female, is the focus of much attention. Whenever a person approaches Anna-san, a “female announcer robot” developed by Osaka University in cooperation with the private sector, she holds out her microphone to begin her interview.

“I want to work as a newscaster in the future,” she says, explaining her dream. “Where did you come from today?” Anna-san asks an attendant who approaches the Intex Osaka booth.

“I’m from Okinawa,” the attendant answers, to which she replies, “Oh, you’ve come a long way, haven’t you?” When people tell her they are from Osaka, she responds, “Oh, you’re a local, aren’t you?” Anna-san, who has earned the nickname “Ando” — short for “android” — chooses her words based on the location provided.

So the version with the pink jacket and the microphone would be Anna-san. Good, cos as you know, there’s multiple versions of this lovely Gynoid, and they’re all either named Actroid, or Actroid Repliee, or Actroid DER. It’s very confusing..

Stating that I’d love to see any of the versions of Actroid would be a desperate understatement, but upon reflection, me meeting her in person would probably be a bad idea.
ANNA-SAN: ‘And where did you come from today?’
DAVECAT: ‘Aaahh, the United states..’
ANNA-SAN: ‘Wow, you’ve really come a long way!’
DAVECAT: ‘Yes, yes I have. AND YOU’RE COMING BACK WITH ME!!’ *deftly whips around behind her, picks her up, and starts running as far as her cables would allow*

Sdtrk: ‘Spooky loop’ by Nurse with wound

Saturday eve, Monti and I had another fine eve of dinnerin’ and conversatin’ at our favourite Japanese restaurant. We both ordered the same thing: tendon, which was tempura shrimp atop a rather big bowl of rice, unagi gunkan, and she had a tako nigiri as well. Very delicious, and quite filling! Rice’ll do that to ya. *pats stomach*

But following our dinner, she and I got round to her workplace, where she passed on the HTML for the latest tagboard you see before you. I’ll undoubtedly have to add some CSS for time/date stamps, as well as to change those colours, but I barely know my way round CSS, and it makes my head hurt. So maybe later!
In the meantime, feel free to post, by all means. And of course, thank you very much, Ms Penda!

Ps.What in shitting hell is wrong with Gravatar?

Sdtrk: ‘I like Mozart’ by France Gall

This morning, like I’d said, I managed to stumble out of bed and successfully type out notes to my most recent dream. Hoorah!

It occurred during a morning in late Autumn/early Winter, cos I remember the light had that kind of super-clarity that you only get during the colder months. There wasn’t any snow on the ground, but it was definitely brisker than I like it. After walking along the stretch of small office buildings on northbound Livernois between Eight and Nine mile, I entered one of them. Soon, I was in a room about the size of your typical small office centre, where there were rows of desks, of the same sort that you’d find in school. There was even a chalkboard down the front. As I sat down in the rightmost desk at the front of the class, other people started arriving, and took seats of their own, and shortly after that, Boyd Rice entered with two other blokes, all of whom were wearing cold weather coveralls. They all sported either some kind of bag or backpack, and one of them went to the chalkboard and started writing things on it, whilst Boyd and the other bloke (Michael Moynihan?) began walking up and down the aisles, distributing papers and pamphlets to everyone. Boyd caught my eye, and he acknowledged me with a ‘Hey, Davecat,’ to which I gave a wave. The person sitting behind me had gotten up for a second to leave the room, so Boyd took a seat.
‘Hey Boyd, what’s been up?’
‘Man, I feel like shit. I’ve got this pounding headache, and my sinuses are all screwed up from this cold I’ve got,’ he replied, and I could see that his nose was indeed runny and puffy. There was a little bit of snot too; it was kinda gross. ‘But you ‘ll never guess what’s getting me through this.’
‘Err, Sudafed?’
‘No — Pepto-Bismol! It coats everything, and it’s so pink and reassurring. In fact, I took some last night and it helped me get some writing done.’ He reached into his bag and pulled out a bubblegum pink notepad, with copious sentences written out in longhand in blue ballpoint ink. ‘Check out how much I wrote!’ He sectioned off about 3/4ths of the pad’s pages with his thumb and forefinger.
‘Damn! Not too shabby!’ I replied.
‘Also,’ he continued, ‘I’ve been speaking with some people, and it turns out they really want me in the role of The Master in the upcoming season of Doctor Who.’
I was impressed. ‘Wow. You’ve been busy! Which reminds me — I saw a flyer stuck onto a telephone pole that says you’re running for some kind of office?’
‘Yeah, actually, that’s why I’m here now, in order to speak to people.’
‘Well shit, I’ll let you do your thing, Boyd, and we’ll talk more when you’re done.’ And then he stood up.
‘Okay, cool, we’ll talk in a bit.’ As he got back to handing out pamphlets, I wondered to myself — I had seen that flyer on a telephone pole in Ferndale, which is in Oakland county. Now, since I live in Wayne county, would I be able to vote for him? *stroking chin*

And that’s it!
Hrrm.. Boyd Rice as The Master. On the one hand, he’s no Anthony Ainley, but on the other hand, he’s no Eric Roberts, thankfully. Plus, he has had a goatee in his life. And been accused of being evil incarnate.
Personally, I think he’d be better running for office. But what the hell kind of office would he find suitable? Furthermore, Ferndale is like a Fisher-Price city — it’s about two-tenths the size of Detroit. What kind of motions would Boyd pass, if elected?
I’m sure he could bring back the Circus Maximus, for starters

Sdtrk: ‘Pull out’ by Death from above 1979

Just so you know, I’ve not deleted all the comments made on ‘Shouting etc etc’; HaloScan appears to be having a midlife crisis right now. The comments are still there, you just have to open them in a new tab to view them. Well, I have to, anyway.

Better post soon. I actually managed to take critical notes on a dream I had!

UPDATE (1.18pm): Well, HaloScan has addressed half of their problem whilst I was writing this, but you still have to open the comments in a new tab. Unless they fix that while I’m typing this hint hint

UPDATE (3.22pm): Nope, the numbers are zeroed out again. Goooo HaloScan! 😛 At this point, I’m ready to go back to Blogger’s comments hosting, but if I were to switch now, I’d lose all of my existing comments. Get back to fucking work, you HaloScan shits

Sdtrk: ‘Melt away’ by Galaxie 500

After much deliberation and furrowing of brows, I’ve gone ahead and added a tagboard to ‘Shouting etc etc’ (lower left in the sidebar, of course), so that humans can post comments without having to shoehorn them into unrelated articles that are currently gracing the page.

My tagboard rules are very simple. Spamming, typing in sTiCKy cAPs, ‘txt msg spk’ or otherwise desperately inadequate spelling, and general shitwickery gets you permabanned. Like I said, very simple!

I’ll undoubtedly be tweaking it over the course of the week, as I want to change the font to Arial, and that shade of green’s too dark for my liking. Nevertheless! Begin posting.. now

Sdtrk: ‘Do you remember the first time?’ by Pulp

Grades are out!

That leaves me with eleven courses to go. Woo hoo!

So the aforementioned Bad News is that I was outside yesterday, for the purpose of grabbing a new course schedule for Fall Semester, and to drive out to a certain location in downtown Detriot, in order to scope out that area for the upcoming RealDoll documentary. I drove to my campus in Royal oak first, as that would be a shorter trip, and it was just hot. I mean, I knew it was supposed to be inclement outside — I wore a t-shirt without a cardigan, which is something I rarely do, as I loathe wearing collarless, short-sleeved shirts — but it was stifling out. Not humid, mind, but it was still oppressive. So after obtaining a catalogue, I briefly stopped round a bookstore for the latest issue of Newtype. It was then that I’d noticed that even being in an airconditioned store, I was sweating a wee bit, due to traveling through all that oven heat. Now, since Allison and crew were going to be filming us outside, picture me carrying Sidore-chan round in that kind of weather. And since I’d be wearing a long-sleeved shirt, cos I wouldn’t want to be seen on camera not dressing like I normally do, I would either collapse of heat stroke, or burst into blazing flames. Or both. Who wants to be filmed on fire? Not me!
In short, it was so fucking hot out that I decided to pass on the idea of going downtown to check on the location. And if it’s as hot as it is now, and filming is slated for the first of August.. well, you get the idea.

In driving home, an idea suddenly struck me — there’s a Japanese restaurant that Monti and I frequent every so often, and they have a little room off to the side for private gatherings and etc. Maybe if I were to ask management if that room would be available for a film crew of two shooting three other people *cough two Organiks, one Synthetik cough*, that could be the answer to our problems! Brilliant! What could go wrong there? Well, you’d be surprised..
At home, I flipped through the course catalogue to select my impending Fall classes. As it turns out, the two main ones I want to take are on Mon and Tues evening, starting 1 Sept. Heh. Allison and crew were slated to show up the eve of Sun 31 Jul, and leave the eve of Tues 2 Aug. So I was thinking, what if we sped round to that restaurant early on Monday, and crammed in the shoot? Sorry! Cos it was then that I remembered that 95% of all Japanese establishments are closed Mondays. FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

I ended up writing an apologetic Email to Allison, asking if she would be alright with postponing filming until October. It’ll be nice and cool then, and we wouldn’t be as pressed for time. She had originally suggested the first week-end of August when we spoke over the phone, as she had a previous engagement to jet out to in the Midwest, and would simply fly from there to Detroit for filming. I suggested the last week-end in July, which would’ve worked, but Grant (the film ‘crew’) would be out of town with his previous engagement. Man o man.
So! October? Hopefully she’ll agree, but I’ll keep you all posted..

Did I mention that I got a B in my Transcription technology class?

UPDATE (3.57pm): Just got off the phone with Allison — she’s not only bought her tickets already, but she’s arranged an intricate series of back-and-forth flights between Detroit and three other states.
On the upside, she and Grant will be arriving Sunday morn, as opposed to the evening, so we might have a chance to get round to the restaurant, plus I won’t miss my class Monday eve. Cross fingers, people

Sdtrk: ‘Lesson 3003 (Part one)’ by Pizzicato five

As a matter of fact, yes! I just had a rather pleasant catching-up phone conversation a couple of hours ago with Elena Dorfman, and she informed me that after four years of work, development, and setbacks, the book ‘Still Lovers’ is finally coming out this September. All feckin’ right! 🙂 It’ll also be available at Barnes & Noble, which we found strange, as it was an uphill battle to get any American publishers to buy it in the first place, but nevertheless. So preorder a copy! Hell, preorder a couple of copies! Make Sidore-chan a happy Doll!
Also, Elena mentioned that her partner-in-crime, Elisabeth Alexandre (of the oft-mentioned ‘French shoot‘) is releasing a book as well about RealDolls and their companions, entitled ‘Des Poupées et des hommes – enquete sur l’amour Artif (Dolls and Men – Investigation into Artificial love)’, which is also due out in September. I can’t remember which, but she’d mentioned that either Elisabeth’s book would also be released in English, or Still Lovers would be released in French, or both, but there ya go. How cool is that?

And it seems that Shi-chan and I will be in front of a camera again, as documentary filmmaker (documentarist? documentalist?) Allison de Fren will be filming us at the end of July, for her as-yet-untitled lives of iDollators project. She had put together a brief film about the ASFR (alt.sex.fetish.robots) community back in 2001, and shortly after that, she made a post on the online forum where we iDollators congregate, asking if there was anyone who’d like to be interviewed for her documentary. I’d messaged her saying yes, but didn’t hear back from her until this past week. So we’ve made plans, and unless something unforseen comes up, she and her cameraman will be jetting out to Michigan, and filming myself and the Missus in an outdoor setting at the end of this month. Fab? Yes. I just hope it won’t be altogether too hot that day..

Finally, Vol.5 of Mitsukazu Mihara’s Doll should be out this week. The difference between supposed release dates and when merchandise actually appears in stores is sometimes vast, so I’ll believe it when I see it, but that’s still good news..

I’m excited. Are you excited?