Thoughts (of a Dying Atheist)

 [a gapping void]

previous webpage \/

31/08/2004: The best time to write updates is when drunk (and possoble when listening to Dire Straights.....(damn the album finished!)

25/07/2004 Yes it's been a long time, no not much has happened in the last month, and yes it's the middle of the night and i smell cos i've been out drinking and moshing (as i did last night, last week, and the week before!). I've been 'working' the odd day (if u count being a retarded warehouse operative as work), earning just about enough so far to cover going out expenses and my recent computer upgrade. Caution, geekiness follows:

AMD Athlon 64 Bit 3200

Asus K8V SE Deluxe (Motherboard)

1Gb (RAM)

NVIDA GeForce FX5700 with 256Mb onboard

160Gb Segate Barracuda SATA (Hard Drive)

It's always makes me laugh at how pathetic the specifications of the, pretty much, top notch computer systems are in relation to the power that will be available several years down the line....let alone a decade or so! But for the moment i'm happy with this setup (could do with a nice big new screen, but hey!), it runs Unreal Tournament 2004 at full res and detail without a hint of hesitation, so i'm happy for now.

So, apart from making a protracted list of the details of my 'social' half life (i.e. the odd new friend in passing and the occasional passing interest of a rock chick), i've been in a 'band' that's practiced twice in a local pub. It's been a change, but the singer can do nothing like what his title would imply and the construction of songs has been getting nowhere fast, hence the imminent break-up of the group (i.e. dumping the singer).

Above: my newly made T-shirt (all lyrics of OK Computer on it).

Below: new interest in drums has spawned a big setup of ole.

I have once again realised almost exactly what i want to do with my life for the foreseeable future, apart from finding the non-existent girl whom will actually be compatible with me (of course, duh), and that is: practical research and development of artificial intelligence (with a little evolutionary modelling en-route). In a peanut shell. I have been indulging in this in some free time, but can see no non-miraculous way of being able to do this full time in anything like my own way due to goddamn monetary limitations (i.e. i have exactly none).....+ the very few vaguely related uni-courses are, in my mind, out of contention, seeing as i already have a student loan hanging over my head, and i'm fed up of what misguided people call learning; when they actually mean passing irrelevant exams to enable being forced into a better paid shit boring job than perhaps otherwise.

I what to be truly engaged in work that makes at least a slight difference to the world. It seems that may well be asking too much!

The middle two are only sharply focused on foreground plants deliberately for effect. Directly above is the water tower which i paid a visit to after having it ingrained on my perception of the local horizon for many years. I may change my web page top picture to one of the top 3 at some point, who knows.

I only initially decided to post there pictures up to separate out large lumps of text (after all, who wants to read yards of inane babbling when u can just wiz though looking at easily digestible pictures?), but i've created a whole new page for the majority of the off-putting spillages of text :

 Thoughts (of a Dying Atheist)

(* for each thought topic, + for sub sections/appendices to these topics)

Above outburst was due to my sister having to do homework consisting of a story exactly 50 words long; i got carried away helping....

Also had the idea of writing a complicated synopsis of the same, limited length:

Oh, and as everyday events go: went out last night (Simon&Laura, their friend Mike, Stevey&Barney) and became significantly inebriated on 'gey' beverages. 3 hours sleep and several hours of deep meaningful contemplation later i started work at Excel's Rugby corporate whorehouse....i meant warehouse of course (i'm not really anarchic at all!). Achy!

Candles didn't work at all to heat up the air, even after it was inflated with a hair dryer. So stuck with the 2kW fan heater to fill up the envelope and float it a few meters up...still, it works as specified. Thinking about burner designs to fulfil the power to weight ratio necessary for lift off was a good excuse do indulge in some pyro-maniacal tendancies:

(just a normal wax candle with several pieces of kitchen roll as wicks. Burney! Burney! metholated spirits burn well too, but too blue to see well on camera)

14/06/2004 6:12am  Ok, seeing as i'm awake and trying not to die of boredom, i've Googled myself (yet again). Seeing as "Lewy" appears most commonly in the context of 'Lewy nodes' in dementia, i thought i'd do my proper name next:

My foremost namesakes are:

• A long standing, neurotic American stand up comedian

• The founder of 'Richard Lewis Communications': a global consultancy firm.

• An Associate Professor of Psychology Linguistics and EE & Computer Science in the University of Michigan (very interesting work actually)

• Some boring Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer

• This nutter who collects lead toy animals and is otherwise known as Zooman!

Wow! Am i ever glad i did that! (well, it does beat subjecting myself to live Big Bother coverage by a significant margin)

No pictures in this entery?! that's no good! Here's some Mini-Me's i made ages ago using some MSN thingy and a South-Park site respectively:

Which d'u think's the least crap? And don't say the pink handbag one cos that was just being silly!....

Oh look, i made one of Sumner too. I must have been as bored as i am now!:

(Mini-Moooooooose! <tee-hee>)

12/06/2004 (Saturday night) Have had the longest sleep in ages 3am to 6pm, a night on the little, ole hometown capped off a long, odd and unexpectedly sociable day or so.

Drove to nottingham at 2am on friday morning with the hope of getting some sleep there before getting my results at 10am....course i managed all of 2 hours. Then something odd happened when i talked to my tutor: he told me i had passed my degree course....ok, didn't really see that one coming!   Richard Lewis BSc .... nah! Can't be, i'll believe more it when i c it in writing!

Now time for some goodbyes and a bit of Frisbee throwing.

I'm only half saying goodbye to mark, cos he'll be back in Rugby for during holidays n such. So that's y the picture of him is really badly framed!

Goodbye Tinky-W....er, Graham. As u can see, he appears to be susceptible to random Pavarotti disease not in his room during all his spare time:

Goodbye next-door neighbour Tim...

.....other neighbour: Sutton (right), X girlfriend and housemate Laura (left) and her associate Philippa (middle ish).

All of whom obtained degrees or marks to their satisfaction.

Time for the final (?) drive home from my third, year long, temporary residency.

Bye house! (and Laura's head and arm) as i drive my laden car southwards through patchy weather....

....just in time to meet Barney, Morley and Stevey in Spoons an hour late for celebratory drinks.

Was meaning to get up 8am ish as the apparent transit of Venus across the face of the sun was due from 7-12am today (Tuesday), but if it hadn't been for the heat in my bedroom i don't think i'd of even have dragged myself up at 11 like i did to take a piccy of the image of the i projected using my 8 times magnification binocular.

I've fiddled about with it in PSP7 to straighten out the geometry a little and drastically modify the brightness/contrast. Yes, that tiny little black dot (upper right) is what it's all about!!! Ignore the dark line down the left, it's just a mark on the piece of paper i was projecting onto....+ it's upside down....for proper good astro pics go here.

Purrr-ty wall flowers (with artistically blurred mountain background).

Even more randomly i saw this huge moth on the outside of my window 2 days ago:

Fuzzy-wuzzy!!

Oh, and i noticed i'd forgotten to put these GTA screen shots up ages ago:

Its funny.....cos there's a cone......on the status's head.....<girly giggle>....and i did the same to a real statue......<hehe>

And what in the name of buggery was the graphics engine doing here?! "Callahan Bridge"! Yeah! in 3 to 4 months when they've finished building it!!!... Good job i'm driving my hover car today!

I think everyone in the worlds gona say i'm a "strange, sad little man" for liking this shot (even if they hadn't realised that i'd personally modified the player 'skin' to have a 'Pig Wheels' logo, from my floppy belt's buckle, on the back of his jacket), but what the hey! I say this picture has a certain blunt charm to it's composition, i've even just considered printing in on an old T-Shirt.........

"YOU'RE A SAD, STRANGE LITTLE MAN LEWY!!!" .........OI YOU! Feck off!!!      (DRRRRIINK!)

I'M HOME!!! Unemployed, single and will shortly have officially failed my degree! But it's so lovely and green i don't care! WOO!!!

at least it created pretty pictures unexpectedly:

If u really want to know, which i know none of u do, this picture is a 0.002 by 0.002 meter square area of a 2D cross section though the space inside a simulated 3D solenoid (0.3m long, 0.1m diameter with peak magnetic field strength of approx 17 Tesla) where diamagnetic particle (water droplet) is suspended stably against gravity. The brightest white shade in the picture correspond to starting positions of the particle that set it off on an 'orbit' which brings it back to the original start point after just 1 oscillation in the x plane. As the colour gets darker more oscillations are required, meaning a more complicated orbital pattern, eventually the black regions are were the correlation between x and z axis motions becomes so chaotic the particle never repeats the same orbit.

So now u know, and i no longer do because it's all been erased from my memory....what was i saying?

(down by the lake on campus)

Which actually makes sod all difference to anything, but it's funny.

I have found the odd one wondering around on my desk, it seems they have a limited plastic bag cutting ability and will even wedge themselves into the lip between lid and base of the 'foraging area', on the right. But, it seems, they only turn to such desperate escape efforts when water's run out though.

As the ants lack of circus tricks was getting dull, i introduced a little spider friend for them to play with. However, he seems more scared of the ants than they of him, as they blunder straight though the little webs. In fact, i'd go as far as to say that they couldn't give a toss, and nothing happened for the whole 4 days they were together!

However, a enormous, nearly double sized winged ant did appear one night, which is odd cos i didn't put one in 10 days ago, or whatever.

So a normal looking ant it must have spontaneously decided to metamorphous into the flying variety, which i read is either a female, or more usually male, sexually functional model.

Anyway, the worker ants didn't seem to want it around and it died the same night, quite possibly drowned in the bottle-top swimming pool sized watering hole.

.......to catch as many as possible and set them up a home in a old jar with sand. Blatantly!

Look at part of the tunnels they dug all around the edge of the jar!....wow!

Got my swanky new laser printer in the post today (Brother HL1430) and it ACTUALLY does 14 ppm! full quality.

(need as had past exam answers and a dissertation to print out, but no working printer + was fed up at inkjet breakdowns and general sloth)

In the lovelelely ground of Walaton house (museum inside!!! OOo!)

Eventually get around to a 2 on 1 multiplayer game of TA:

(not cheating there i hope stevey...?)

Impartial game review: Lewy held out courageously for several hours against seasoned played Matthew Linnett and rookie sir cheat a lot (above). After which elapsed time Linnett conceded, such was Lewy's impenetrable defence and superior tactics, leaving Stevey to be annihilated momentarily later.

A rummage in the (not so hidden) parents drink store later, a bottle of vodka 8 years older than me! was liberated, so it was decided to out to O'Hagan's, again! (seeing as those guys still had the same clothes on they wore out the night before!). That's the 2nd most drunk i've even been, which certainly helped with 'dancing' on the deserted dance floor.

Arh, the good old days of technic lego! Well, actually, I made this today....great isn't it!

"What the **** does it do?" u say....well, if u don't know i ain't gona tell ya!

But i did use part of it in conjunction with my camera to make this cool time lapse movie of the 'unkillable' tumbleweed plant unfurling:

977Kb download. DivX type clip (DVGigaAVICodec) works in my winamp 5 but i may have an additional codec pack installed....

2004-04-06 Those who missed out on having their shoes photographed previously:

Mavelous...

Smashing...

Great...

Also, i think Stevey asked if i'd taken any good photos of him:

Lookin Good!

05/04/04 My desk is shaking as I type. Is it an earth quake at about 4 on the richter scale?....no, just deforestation out back....

Woken at 9am by the song of the lumberjack chainsaw...

It may sound poncey, but I grew up with these trees here, they were part of my safe and secure childhood surroundings, so I can't help but feel some loss... <desk shudders> ....as they are clumsily chopped down, uprooted and shredded.

It really does depend upon what mood I'm in at the time though, having now come back from the dentist with a full unviolated set of chompers, sun shinning after the rain, I can see the situation in a optimistic light, and even be mildly inspired by the big machinery.

04/04/04 OOOoooh, freaky date! It must be time to play:  WHOSE SHOE IS IT ANYWAY?!!!

Here's your HOST (camera man, and total looney)..... LEWY!!!!

....<complete lack of rapturous applause>

And the other participants for this evening!; The lovely couple from a land called "MOOOOOO!": Simon and Laura!!

<imaginary audience "awwww" with cheering>

And not forgetting Miriam and last, but in no ways least, RAVI!

So! It's Ravi to break off first......he shoots....

.....and the balls go "Bo-oin-g"!!!

Now Simon steps up and SLAMS one in at lightning speed!:

And another!!! He's really going tonight!

<Stupid sound effect>

That can only mean one thing! IT'S TIME TO GUESS WHOSE SHOE THEY ARE!:

Will it be shoe number one?:

Or perhaps shoe number two?!:

Look at those! It's shoes number three!!:

Taking us neatly to number four! Whose are THEY?!

Finally, and you're only getting a hint at this one, shoe five!

<tick-tock, tick-tock, Baa-da! Baa-da! Baa-de-de-ba!!!>

AND OUR SURVEY SAYS!!!!........:

"SOD OFF! NO ONE GIVES A MONKEYS!!!"

(OOooo, how rude)

31/03/04 SUN!

Catching a few rays up top, then go to a gig in the evening...nice!

Laura's cousin Lee on guitar on the dark part of the stage.  ^

(turn your monitor brightness right up and u might even catch a hint of him)

29/03/04 Got out the ole Scalectric track and half fixed the cars for a bit:

Groovy.

And Spring has definitely gone 'ba-doi-ng', so bike ride time!

My definitive sunshine shot of Rugby for 2004 me thinks. Yeah!

22/03/04 There's no palace like home, from windy Nottingham to even windier Rugby....umm, WIND!:

Then it was mother's day....or so I'm told:

And right now it's Monday morning, 8am, I still haven't got to sleep and I hate scenery that's invisible until 2 seconds after you've crashed into it with your highly sensitive, explosive rigged, super swanky car!!!! (i.e. an invisible lamp post):

To top it off, I'm currently teething (wisdom tooth) and my mouth is filling with ulcers, again. So I'm off to bed, again.

(think I'll post up my sleeping hours over the last 2 months, I've been keeping a log of my insanity)

14/03/04 I've decided to admit defeat and acknowledge that this is actually a fully fledged blog.

With this in mind I've turned the whole page upside down so that the most recent trash is immediately visible at the top. How sensible......

......What's not sensible are any of the following:

http://www.pointystick.com/

or

and particularly:

The most innocent looking evil around....really, be careful, but enjoy! (this insanity was brought to Lewy by Simon Sumner)

12/03/04 A long, busy and bruising day...10am lectures, 1.5 hours of squash in the afternoon, cinema in the evening: 'Lost in Translation'

Lewy review: beautifully subtle film, genuinely funny at first rolling effortlessly into serious soul searching with a really mellow ambience that will fill you with calm if you let it. Not for action movie fanatics or the impatient. It gets a Lewyriffic 9 out of 10 from me, too unique to compare directly to any other flick of the last year.

11/03/04 A monumental day for my project work! (yes I actually did some of the aforementioned activity)

Not only did I find an interesting set of 2D orbits of my simulated, levitated, diamagnetic particle, I managed to create cool looking burification diagrams!:

I can tell you're excited!....

What's more, look what came in the post this afternoon!:

And I only ordered it the day before!

Finally, the weather report; this week it has been mostly raining polystyrene beads.

10/03/04 Oh dear (jelly suspension) my pages seem to be turning into a games review site! Argh!

Anyhow, it's Wednesday and my only lecture's been cancelled, not due to AUT strikes like the 2 yesterday, but it's still just as none existent, so I get to be bored in the comfort of my own room. Marvellous. Last weekend I have been mostly eati....erm, playing (and completed) Carmageddon TDR (THE DEATH RACE!!!!) 2000, which really was quite tedious.

Mostly the in game physics is quite realistic (except when I occasionally got stuck in scenery or passed though it), but I must say I much prefer the 'feel' of driving in the recent GTA games. A major let down is that it appears to be impossible to complete most, if not all, of the races by racing! Even on the easiest setting, running over plenty of zombies (as above) and picking up the odd bonus time power-up is not enough to finish before your time runs out. Basically this forces the game play into constantly having head on collisions with opponents to destroy them, receiving a relatively huge amount of bonus time in the process, then repeating till all your competitors are burnt out out shells. Maybe I'm missing some important tactical driving skills...or maybe it is that arthritis-inducingly repetitive by necessity.

There is the ghost of a plot which tentatively strings together the missions between races, they usually consist of collecting a bomb or parts thereof, to blow your way though a wall into the next driving environment. There are vaguely amusing parts in the satirically ludicrous tasks you accomplish (below).

It's a pity that all but the most rubbish of cars available to buy for yourself are massively too expensive for the number of credits you can plausibly pick up. Again, perhaps I'm missing something crucial, but the only way to drive anything significantly faster or  cooler than the car you start with appears to be to use cheats (which I didn't do).

The police are the same as in the original Carmageddon and you get to bend fenders with the 6 wheeled supreme police tank thing again (below), but not drive it, which is a real shame.

Overall as a game it is getting on a bit now and it's not all that bad as a general waste of time. It allows you, as a matter of course, to indulge in the kind of automotive destruction you long to engage in when bored to death by any one of a myriad of lifeless driving/racing games. Plus, it's farther was the mother of 3D computerised hit and run game (so to speak), even if they did end up forcing the makers to replace the pedestrians with less realistic (and importantly green blooded) zombies.

That's my final verdict: it's kinda ok, so there!

(PS: my favourite vehicles, for incomprehensible personal aesthetic reasons)

25/02/04-26/02/04 The best game in the world ever:

It says 1982 on the back but I believe I had it bought for me closer to 1990-1991. You are snoopy and you have to hit all  the balls back, Charlie Brown serves slow balls to any of three positions, and his sister (I think) returns your hits some of the time but at twice the speed. It's basically a real time scheduling nightmare that keeps getting faster and more complicated with 2 points for slow returns and 3 points for fast ones.

I believe that my previous highest score was 1200 or there about, pretty amazing......however, I picked it up tonight at 10pm (have bought some new batteries for it at Sainsburys) and on my first go made it all the way to 9998 points, where upon the damn thing ran out of digits and anticlimactically reset to 0 without missing a beat.....I stopped playing shortly thereafter at 1am. It appears I have grown too good for this game that always used to have something set aside to beat me. Now my biggest problem was the 'up' button not working occasionally, so missing the odd quick shot, kinda disappointing really. Still, great game!

24/02/04 Pancake day!...

(Nice flick from the wrist demonstrated here by Laura)

An ode to one of many pointless wastes of time. Having completed GTA Vice City, nicking a couple of tanks, getting bored, completing it from scratch again, I've now found the best and second most difficult item to nick is the very cool Apache helicopter sitting at the back of the heavily guarded army base. It may be damn near impossible attack anything with, but the working rockets and machine gun are still pretty neat.

I must say that this is without doubt the best game made to date, for it's shear expansive, free roaming, highly playable, vastness, involving storyline and all the little details. There are niggles such as vehicles spontaneously disappearing when u turn your back on them, and irritations such as getting arrested by a lowly bobby on the beat whilst at a temporary standstill during a romp in a tank, but these are easily tolerable given the great many virtues.

21/02/04 Up to Grandma's for the day with her <cough> birthday coming up.

Had to include this great typical pose by dad....

20/02/04 Snowboarding in Tamworth: Rhea (above) completed lessons 4&5 to be recreational level before me and Laura even arrived.

Unfortunately I didn't manage to catch a picture of anyone on their arse, despite many opportunities, hehe.

15/02/04 [backdated entry] Enter a day and 3 hours of playing HALO, to completion, naturally.

Yes, it's blatantly an orbital directly lifted from any of  Iain M. Banks amazing Culture novels. Add a story line that's a fairly convincing excuse for shooting many, many (and in some instances an excessive multitude) hostile aliens/malevolent entities, steal a few more terms from the master author, add a good blend of fashionable sci-fi and you've got what is a pretty sturdy game.

Main characters: you (the super cool cyborg, born for battle), Cortana (an A.I. construct, who I'm pleased to say has a large part to play in the story, I'm very much for the acknowledgement of artificial entities as humans with human rights, and anything to help raise a dim awareness of this in the public mind is welcome) and Captain Lock (with a 'neural lace').

Also, a small, anally-retentive sounding drone thingy turns up later which has got to be Mawhrin-Skel from Player of Games; small, white, spheroid who floats around being obnoxious...

Friendly soldier co-operation is especially useful when driving around in the widely used warthog:

But the coolest vehicle by far, in my humble opinion, is the tank! It's such a shame u only get to use one once in the whole game, and for what seems too short a time....

"DON'T MESS WITH ME PUNK: BANG!"

Won't put any real spoilers in, just in case you've not played it yet, because you really should!

One final silly screen capture of me going for a swim....well, a brief walk under water.

14/02/04 On way back from playing squash, before a romantic night in playing multiplayer first person shooters with mark..... (for those who did not notice the date of this entry, I must point out the romance part is bitter sarcasm, though it wasn't a bad day overall).

BTW, saw 'School of Rock' the previous day and it definitely kicked arse, best film that there's been for a long time!

02/02/04 3 weeks of facial hair experimentation, had to have had a beard of some kind by the time I was 21.... Shaved off shortly after this, not due to the peer pressure I must add.

01/02/04 Wooooo-H......errr, well, happy birthday me! (nearly) Nice of some of the guys to come anyhow.

26/01/2004 One televisually inspired potato gun.

Videos of that morning of air freshener igniting fun:   Gun Fired at wall | Pringles tube exploded | Gun used as mortar

potato\gunfire2.MOV (9.38MB) | potato\pringexpl.MOV (3.99MB) | potato\vertlaunch2.MOV (2.21MB)

They're in QuickTime and aren't all that amazing to be honest, they mostly consist of me laughing stupidly.

Dowload player: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/

13/01/2004 Police car screeches to a halt outside my window at 4am, apparently the white van had been nicked then abandoned in our road with gangster-rap still blaring.

03/01/2004 Christmas Family Gathering New Year 2004 (yes, this was the best photo).

31/12/2003 - 01/01/2004 (New Years) Party at Morley's house:

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