John Walker's Electronic House

Today, in episode 68, we are not discussing: Are the councils bowing to politically correct madness in banning bunting for health and safety craziness?

But instead we talk about an upgrade to business class, and then with exceptional timing review 2007’s Portal. At length. W inevitably move on to discussing our complete lack of interest in tomorrow’s wedding, before moving on to some questions from Twitter. The first being, what are the ladylike things we do?

There’s chat about the inappropriateness of men taking their tops off in public, a trip to the zoo, some extreme snobbishness, and education reform. Oh, and is happiness a good thing?

Please consider writing a review on iTunes. It’s a really good way of raising our profile. And keep on tweeting and so forth.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter @rumdoings. If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, which apparently people still do, you can do that here.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

Or you can listen to it right here!

[audio: http://rumdoings.jellycast.com/files/audio/rumdoings_e68.mp3]

Sorry about the lack of Rum Doings. It’s because I’m a terrible person*.

Now, if Nick would only agree to visit Bath we could record a new one.

*was in America, then working 15 hour days all the following week.

For episode 67 of Rum Doings, you join Nick and John in one of London’s most average hotels, where for some reason they’ve taken a room together. While we don’t discuss whether we’re sacrificing children on the altar of working mums, we do instead moan about the mediocrity of hotels in the UK.

Each of us offers some racism that we exhibit, there’s some discussion of radio continuity, Mel Gibson’s films, and the difference between uninterested and disinterested. We try to stop people stopping the war, the future of Dexter, and British beers. John has forgotten all of his chemistry A Level, and then it turns out we both have precisely the same recurring dream. Dreams takes John onto confessing his sleep-based infidelities, which takes us into a somewhat uncomfortable discussion about the real world.

We’ve both got a new t-shirt, talk about anti-Semitism, and somehow get back to naughty dreams again and the King James Bible. You know, those subjects that always go together.

Please consider writing a review on iTunes. It’s a really good way of raising our profile. And keep on tweeting and so forth.

If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, which apparently people still do, you can do that here.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

Or you can listen to it right here!

[audio: http://rumdoings.jellycast.com/files/audio/rumdoings_e67.mp3]

Goodness, it’s Rum Doings 66. While not discussing whether the decimalisation experiment has been a failure, we tuck into Christmas pudding wine. And then dig up the argument over whether the Amiga or Atari was best (it was the Atari). Then we embark on an episode based on discussions inspired by the following randomly selected Wikipedia articles:

Bosko (cartoons, Loony Tunes Back In Action, Mary Poppins, CAP Alert)

Humber—St. George’s—St. Barbe (Yorkshire Ridings, island hopping, aeroplane maps, long flights and upper class, the S9 mp4 player, They’re Back, the Kindle, sharing is bad)

Tiny Broken Heart (Tragic Songs, alien robots)

Silchar (Why we don’t want to go to India, Chinese democracy)

Ribbon-tailed Astrapia (what we can learn from peacocks, John’s split wedding, the plan for cream teas, complete lack of million pound donations)

Nut (nuts)

Atasca (moth wrangling, the biggest thing we’d kill, The Man With Two Brains)

Please consider writing a review on iTunes. It’s a really good way of raising our profile. And keep on tweeting and so forth.

If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, which apparently people still do, you can do that here.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

Or you can listen to it right here!

[audio: http://rumdoings.jellycast.com/files/audio/rumdoings_e66.mp3]

Filled with the spirit of Spring, in episode 65 of Rum Doings we don’t discuss whether we’ve forgotten the true meaning of Easter. Then almost immediately start complaining about how rubbish schools are. And urinals. In fact, there’s much wee-wee discussion, including an innovative idea for bed weeing.

Also, wow, we have way more listeners than we thought. You’re one of around 10,000 people, so thank you so much for all the word-spreading you’ve done. Keep going, we may become famous or something. Nick’s too bashful to talk about that for long, so we move onto the Kickstarter project to create an open score for Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

We raise our issues with Comic Relief, discuss Prince Philip, and then spend a good long while proving some very silly factoids wrong.

Please consider writing a review on iTunes. It’s a really good way of raising our profile. And keep on tweeting and so forth.

If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, which apparently people still do, you can do that here.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

Or you can listen to it right here!

[audio: http://rumdoings.jellycast.com/files/audio/rumdoings_e65.mp3]

Yay salt for my chips! Welcome to Rum Doings Episode 64, a very special episode scripted by former Doctor Who helmsmen, Russell “T” Davies.

As part of their multiracial, intrasexual, post-masculinism relationship, Nick and John discuss the lameness of John’s name, the tendency for Victorians to not die properly, and how we actually recorded this episode before the Ben Goldacre one.

Our Welsh accents make another appearance, we discuss Old Man Murray, and John explains the full glory of the Cat Moustache puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3. THAT HE NOTICED FIRST.

See behind the scenes for how we come up with our topics to not discuss. Then we moisten our palates with a mixed fruit cider. And then wedding cakes. We continue our hatred of the blind, ponder Brian Blessed’s continued existence, and the collapse of Leslie Nielson’s career. Especially of late.

Our CGI voices will dazzle you. And we finish by discussing those naughty hat websites, and enacting modem noises. (Nick’s are incredible.)

Tweet it, Facebook it, ask strangers on Formspring about it. And writing a review on iTunes brings us more attention.

If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, which apparently people still do, you can do that here.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

Or you can listen to it right here!

[audio: http://rumdoings.jellycast.com/files/audio/rumdoings_e64.mp3]

We’re very pleased to say that in episode 40, 50, 60 and 63 of Rum Doings (a four-way simulcast, and double-length), we are joined by very special guest, Dr. Ben Goldacre. The man behind the Bad Science blog and Guardian column, and the book of the same name, allows us into his London studio to discuss the subjects about which he and we are passionate. We think this was a unique opportunity for the subjects to be discussed with enough space to consider them properly, and for the good doctor to speak in a way that five minute radio interviews cannot.

In a sweary episode, we begin by talking about the peculiarities of those who threaten to sue Goldacre for libel, and the way quacks will create misleading statistics. Then via Nick’s desire for robot doctors, we discuss whether doctors are obliged to tell the truth to their patients, how new technology may change the role of doctors in diagnosis, and the potential for conflicts of interest depending upon how doctors are paid. And Nick lets John speak after the first half hour.

We ponder the potential privatisation of the NHS, and the impact that may have on patients and doctors, what happens when you privatise blood donation, and in turn, the nature of an altruistic act. We ask what doctors should be doing with drugs they know don’t perform better than placebo, even if they appear to help patients.

Dr Ben puts out the interesting idea that doctors should not be the final gatekeeper to a patient’s access to drugs, and indeed whether there should be legitimate access to outlawed drugs. There’s chat about how we should react when we see the vulnerable being tricked by quacks, how much John gets paid for writing in The Cat Magazine, how we can encourage big pharma to get out of their patenting model, and Nick’s LBC caller gets a good few outings.

All three of us express our concerns with the Comic Relief Walkers Crisps campaign, we hear Ben’s “Everything In This Box Is Bollocks” suggestion for letting adverts lie as much as they want, and Nick trots out his Trotsky theories. The idiocy of DRM rears its head, then Nick and John leap on Ben when they see a glimmer of an opportunity to evangelise free software models. And then a last second chat about Richard Stallman brings us to an end.

Spread the scientific word. Tweet it, Facebook it, ask strangers on Formspring about it. We really do need you to do this. It makes a difference, especially with a special episode like this. And writing a review on iTunes brings us more attention.

If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, which apparently people still do, you can do that here.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

Or you can listen to it right here!

[audio: http://rumdoings.jellycast.com/files/audio/rumdoings_e63.mp3]

Last week on RPS I spent quite a bit of time with a story about the Wikipedia entry for Old Man Murray being deleted. Rather than re-explain that here, you can read the original short post on the matter over there. But in short, one of games writing’s most significant, influential and hilarious pieces of history was removed from the encyclopaedia on extremely spurious grounds.

After we addressed this, and other high profile sites picked up on it, a review of the deletion quickly resolved the matter. In the end what it demonstrated was how efficient Wikipedia really is, and how effective its administration usually is. Of course, being made up of individuals, within their numbers will be those who make wrong decisions. This just happened to be one that affected something that we care about very deeply.

(continue reading…)

Every now and then I remember to listen to this theme song, from the adventure game Legacy: Dark Shadows.

[audio: http://pool.cream.org/legacy/legacy.mp3]

And my day gets better.

This is the game that featured these two moments of dialogue, that I’ve written about so many times:

[audio: http://pool.cream.org/legacy/legacy1.mp3] [audio:http://pool.cream.org/legacy/legacy2.mp3]

We’re really sorry that this is a clicky episode. We have no idea what causes it, and there’s nothing we can do to fix it. It’s really not that big of a deal.

In episode 62, Nick’s broken voice becomes the first point of discussion, once we’ve established we won’t be talking about whether the English have forgotten how to make a good cuppa. We then move on to talking about Nick’s wife’s breast milk ice cream, Nick introduces a new indication law, and John tells the story of the crazy Welsh ex-policeman at his door.

We have a discussion of Sweden, talk about why John’s risking becoming a rapist by playing Bulletstorm, and then chat about violent videogames.

Make sure to tune in to next week’s too, when we’ll be releasing episodes 40, 50, 60 and 63 all in one episode, with a truly excellent celebrity guest.

Tweet it, Facebook it, ask strangers on Formspring about it. We really do need you to do this. It makes a difference, and makes our egos happy. And writing a review on iTunes brings us more attention.

If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, which apparently people still do, you can do that here.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

Or you can listen to it right here!

[audio: http://rumdoings.jellycast.com/files/audio/rumdoings_e62.mp3]