Why is it I have a cold any time I come back from anywhere interesting? Foreign germs I guess...or maybe because it rained in Rome and Edinburgh only when I chose to step outside the door....well, either way it sucks! :( Reviews for our show were initially shocking! But then, they went on the first night, and going by the standards of the first night I personally think they were being very kind. (No tech & no dress rehearsals in-venue, the in-house techies buggered up all the lighting & sound, which is sort of integral really, and everyone else forgot their lines. We had to cut bits as we went along because we were so behind time - I'm not surprised they didn't like or follow it cos I couldn't either and I was on stage!) But as of Tuesday we were on fire and the people sensible enough to come after that liked us - we had 30 people in on Wednesday, which was our best night by far! Hooray! I think they said we had 120 or something during the week, which by Fringe standards isn't bad, and Fest magazine (http://www.festonline.co.uk/review.php?id=303) gave us 3 stars, which is more than they gave Ed Byrne, and recognised the genius that is my friend Brad. So, as the director's dad said when he was taking all our cast photos...."bugger The Scotsman!" :)

Although, in hindsight, we were in Scotland at the time so I hope not too many people heard us! :)

sounds like you had a good time all in all ZK. So do you have the festival bug then ?

Ah, good old Fest. The deputy editor's a friend of mine, so thank your lucky stars ZK you weren't rude about it!

[svitc] Because they're too hard, or technical problems with posting.

D'oh.

[small] Fear ye not, I haven't played any of the games for about 2 months. No-one seems to have noticed! :)

[ZK] Do not think yourself ignored - you said where you going, so notice would have been redundant.

Glad you're back though.

How can anything be redundant when it wasn't dundant in the first place?

I must object. I have, on occasion, been dundant. [Dunx] Thankyou, although I just meant that the only game I'd been on in ages was this one, as my humble brain has burn-out and can't cope with the other ones :)

[ZK] Well, not at all a bad notice from Fest, who even note your youth, although whether that's good or bad is perhaps moot. Very good to see you back though.

Had a postcard from Bob the Dog and family yesterday (who if you remember have gone to Cornwall for a holiday). The postcard had the simple message, "WET!".

Clearly monolexemia runs in the family.

[Projoy] When do you want that Dracula vid back btw?

I have some DVDs in now, so you could swap it for one of those if you like.

On the grounds that a new game slot has been left open for days, I've dropped the game limit to 10, which is any case is a nicer number than 11.

That's a pretty sweeping statement rab. Would you care to back that up or are you just going to go around willy-nilly declaring some numbers to be more nice than others ? I think we should be told. It's a slippery slope you know. First its "oh 10 is nicer than 11" next thing you know its 4am and the police have smashed in your front door and you are in teh back of a lorry with a sack over your head being shouted at in Welsh.......

Re: shouted at in Welsh - I think I just was :)

That said, the number 11 sends shivers down my spin on account of its being the typical size of a group of butch ladies brandishing hard sticks.

rab] and what is wrong with dutch ladies ?

11 game slots? It's ridiculous. It's not even funny.

Numerologically, 11 is a much better number than 10.

... and 11 is the number of TimTams in a packet...

No, 11 may have a certain richness compared to ten, but is horrible as it is nearly 12 but not quite, and 12 is the best number. It is also the number of Apostles left after Judas quit (despite 1 Cor 15:5). And it's a prime number, which is bad. Ten is more satisfying all around.

Yes, but asserting the supremacy of 10 is to glorify the Western decimal system of counting over other, equally valid, numerical systems from other cultures, which have been marginalised by the patriarchal hegemony of the Western attitudes to number, particular the oppressive and unholistic notion of the integer. You might as well stage a Nazi revolution, frankly, as say 10 is good. I favour the number bleen, which in Afro-Sino-Mesoamerican cultures, represents, of course, the number that is blue.

all change to hexadecimal. I like letters.

Let's use base 36! It would use the entire Latin alphabet, and would have many opf the advantages of base 12 (ie lots of easy to use fractions). And numbers would be shorter to write down, so we would save on ink and paper.

The best bit about base 36 is that I would be 11 again... although, being 25 in hex sounds quite promising too.

For superhumans, Heinlein ("Gulf") suggested that base 60 would be suitable. With the 60 digits also doing duty to represent the 60 phonemes of a new language, there would be 216,000 words of just three letters, most of them monosyllabic. With the speed of speech and thought this would make available, effective lifespan would be extended by many times.

That sounds exciting - it would certainly make life easier for rappers and poets..

[Flerdle] 11 TimTams to a packet? The only packet I ever see has a hole in the cellophane and only 10 in it. BTW, The National TimTam vault is now replenished. They're back in the country.

[Raak] Are there 60 phonemes which the human voice can produce? I thought there were far fewer. (And I wrote a speech synth once, if that gives me any credibility, which I doubt!)

[Darren] Many more than that, if you add up the inventories of all human languages. Of course, you might have to be a superhuman to reliably distinguish them all. English has between 34 and 50, depending on how you count them.

[Raak] ...or in what base... ;)
I just came back from Tuscany today, a land where I was rained upon for about 45 minutes out of 2 weeks... to a land where it's been the wettest August since 1912, I heard. Ah, good old Blighty.
On another note, I see there are less games available now - is this an EU law, or a gesture against empathy?

[Tuj] I don't know that they are less, but there are certainly fewer of them :-)

Watty] I am a pedant myself, and it doesn't really bother me about less or fewer. Now I look at it, it's slightly ugly... but what makes me reach for the chainsaw is comma splicing (nnng!).
On a lighter note, why are there fewer? If people come up with more games, or ones with prizes / cash incentives, can there be more (or manyer?;) again?
Oh, and no I don't actually have a chainsaw.