Unfortunately, it's still as horrible to use as ever. Made to look like Photoshop but unaccountably different from it in a myriad annoying ways. Incredibly straightforward operations like selecting part of an image and moving it require arcane keyboard commands. Tools keep on resetting.

Still, I struggled on, learning its ways, making progress. I saved the file I'd been working on and went to talk to my housemate. When I got back and re-opened the file, it was completely scrambled:

Good-bye, two hours of work since the last backup. I'm now uninstalling this scrapheap from my machine.

PS Neat Stuff Will Eventually Appear Unless Dave Is Driven Insane By Computer Gremlins.

So when I sat down just now, it called up the definition of the word "corpulent". Well, thank you, computer.

Apart from that it's a pretty neat machine.

(More ramblings to follow.)

The most nauseating thing in 2012 will be the huge amount of public money indirectly ending up in private coffers. The government is using public money to build giant facilities and carve a gash deep into London, closing businesses, displacing people. And who will benefit from this money? The contractors. The TV channels. The corrupt Olympic organisation itself. The companies who advertise in the Olympics.

This abuse of public money (my money I pay in tax, I realise, worrying slightly at the bourgeois flavour of the thought) is excused by a strange mix of nationalism (it brings nations together), regionalism (aren't you proud of London), and a general sense that you couldn't possibly be against public sports.

Well, to be honest, I am. I hate public sports. The fake sportsmanship. The corruption. The seething nationalism. The huge amounts of money changing hands. The way that a sporting event ends up displacing something that actually matters from the headlines.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with "private" sports. Moving your body, playing games, teamwork, all of that is fun, and good for you. I don't want to abolish local football teams, or people going for a jog in the morning.

And what of the people getting displaced by this behemoth? This is obviously rampant in China, where the government sees no problem in just bulldozing whatever they want to make the stadiums. But the same thing is happening in London. It was kind of difficult for me to process, the idea that the government is actually allowed to take away your land just because influential organisation #7 wants it.

Two years ago, when the world cup was on, I got attacked by a bunch of drunken teenagers. My friends got attacked by another bunch of hooligans. I didn't feel safe that summer. When the UK failed to make it into the euro cup for this year, I was insanely happy.

Now people will probably accuse me of being mean-spirited. But could you just allow me to express this: if the millions of pounds being poured into this country-wide masturbation that is the 2012 Olympics were put into say, hospitals, wouldn't this make for a better world?

So who's joining me? Against the 2008 Olympics. Against the 2012 Olympics. Against any Olympics. Against corruption, your money ending up in rich bastards' wallets, and a fake "Olympic spirit" we're all supposed to buy into.

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Compared to dev 5, it has much better performance, and you can now choose to run the game in fullscreen or in a window, as you prefer. You can also run the game at your native resolution, which makes for much crisper graphics, and more map real estate.

Specifically, if the game doesn't want to go fullscreen for you, try using "native resolution" and "force fullscreen" in the settings.

It's not done yet, and there are some problems with flickering and compatibility, but it's shaping up pretty nicely. Expect an update in maybe two weeks.

...and later continued in the medium of icing...

At best, they are an absurd expense for a piece of inert glitter required by social norms. They mean that for many couples, the first act of their wedded life is to go into massive debt. Add to that the diamond engagement ring and the lavish wedding, and you have yourself a ball-and-chain that will outlast any enjoyment you might gain from the stone.

At worst, they are blood diamonds, the cause of wars, of genocide, of relentless exploitation.

One thing is certain: diamond rings are a pretty new invention. They were popularised in the early 20th century by a massive advertising campaign run by the the DeBeers cartel, which just happens to control the majority of the diamond trade.

What is a diamond? It's a pretty stone, but a really expensive one, and one that only means "I love you" because people think its absence means "I don't". With diamonds as the social norm in many countries, marriage is like a game of chicken - neither partner can broach the subject of not getting a diamond ring, because to do so would sound like less than total commitment.

So what do I propose? Giving couples a moment of clarity. Get both of them at once, and show them just why a diamond ring is a ball and chain, a vote for evil, a defeat of individuality in the face of advertising. Give them a chain of reasoning at the end of which is a different ring. And hopefully, before they quite know what they've done, they've told each other that they're at least considering having a different ring. Point out to them that a diamond does not mean love, but defeat in the face of the everyday horror of the world. Show them that that accursed stone has no place at a wedding.

How and where to do this? One place could be outside of wedding shows. There is a whole industry of wedding-related companies, and they periodically put on a kind of trade shows for people to look at their dresses and services and whatnot. Stand outside and hand out flyers. Talk to people. Stand inside if they let you. Don't break the law - there's no need to.

You might say that what I propose is an intrusion into what is supposed to be two peoples' Happiest Day Of Their Lives. But: you're doing this at a wedding show. Marriage is big business, and in the face of a hundred people telling the happy couple to spend, consume and conform as much as they can, a single voice of dissent can only be a good thing.

Some of you, readers, will have switched off at this point, thinking, "oh well, another idealist rant".

One of the most insidious and stupid ideas around must be that whoever is still attempting to make the world a better place is a deluded quasi-adolescent who needs to grow up, wake up, enter the real world.

Well, screw that. Screw that, and the worry that you've got too many problems to take on someone else's. And the worry that you mustn't offend anyone. Screw that.

Let me tell you a little anecdote:

About half a year ago, on the bus home, I noticed this young women and her kid come onto the bus, carrying a bunch of plastic bags. The little girl was pretty hyperactive and kept zooming around the bus, despite being repeatedly told off by her mother. Eventually, I noticed something - the mother was crying. I had another look at the (translucent) bags, and noticed that they were haphazardly stuffed with lots of clothes.

I might have jumped to conclusions there, but to me this looked very much like the two had just been thrown out of wherever they had been living. For all I knew, they didn't have anywhere to go.

So of course, I did nothing.

What should I have done? Gone up to the woman, and asked "Pardon me, it looks like you've just been turfed out on the street. Do you need help carrying your bags? Would you like a cup of tea? Do you need somewhere to sleep? We have a sofa."

Well, I'm a guy. Pretty tall, and clothed mostly in black. The last thing she needed at that point (turfed out or not) was having to deal with a random stranger, trying to figure out whether I could be trusted.

I probably should have asked, but that's not how this fucked-up society works.

So you can just stop reading now if you want. You can be too cool to care, or you can bask in your own self-importance by declaring that you have more important problems of your own.

I'm going to try and give my stay on Earth some meaning. I can't say that I've succeeded too well so far. There's all those things that we're told to worry about, and I've been pretty busy worrying about them. But these worries have decreased for varying reasons, so maybe I will find the time and energy to do something.

The first rant will follow shortly.

It's been a bit more than a week now since I released Space Exploration dev 4, and I've received nearly fifty feedback form submissions so far. About 1500 people have downloaded dev 4, so that's a response rate of one in thirty - which is very good, given this is the Internet. The volume of responses has allowed me to quantify what people want from further releases, which thankfully coincides pretty well with what I want to do: More encounters, better user interface, a combat mode, etc. As a result, I now have a pretty long list of to-dos for the next release, and will have to make some kind of decision which ones will make it into dev 5. There will of course be a few more encounters, but I won't write most of them until the game's nearly finished. Right now, the encounters are there to test and showcase what the game engine can do.

That said, I'm currently working on a different project, which I shall call Project FF for those in the know. So expect the next release of Space Exploration in about two weeks' time.

I think you'll like it.

I think it was worth it. And yes, the 4th photograph is a trivial bit of Photoshop. I couldn't resist.

Version 3 of Space Exploration (788 kB)

I've added support for equipment management (installing and uninstalling systems) and limited the number of weapons you can equip at one time to two.

There's now also support for Specialists, extra crew members who can join your ship and lend their skills in encounters.

Finally, there's a number of graphical and GUI enhancements, as well as some new encounters.

Next up: some pretty pictures of Southend pier.

Thanks for your comments so far!