If, for any reason, you reckon I might not have your postal address, and you think I should, this would be a good time to provide it. Likewise, if you've moved since about 2007, I once had your address, and you still don't object to my knowing where you live, please tell me your new address.

Comments are screened.

I am rarely aware of my own accent. I know it's there, and I know it sounds vaguely Irish to most non-Irish people, and vaguely non-Irish weird to the Irish, and sometimes archaic to everyone. I have always used 'ye' as the second-person plural, for instance, instead of the more modern Hiberno-English 'yous' or 'yiz'.

However, in the progress of a recent Living And the Dead session, I noticed that due to accents, only sabayone and shootbambi can pronounced the word 'realm' correctly every time. olethros, carawyn and I always insert an extra vowel - a sort of mini-u - between the l and the m. utterlymundane, being a well-spoken young fellow, gets it right about two attempts in three, but falls on the third hurdle.

Myself, I seem to be physically incapable of excising that extra vowel - and now that I've noticed it in my own speech, I can't un-hear it. Terribly irritating.

It's time for GAELCON!

I am leaving work shortly, and while I may be online over the weekend, expect little coherency or attention. If you want coherency or attention, turn up to Galecon 2009 and bring me something I can sell for charity at the Bring & Buy stand.

Otherwise, I'll see teh internetz sometime around Tuesday next week.

We're running the bring and buy stand at Gaelcon again this year. If you're in Ireland, and have games or gamer-y stuff you want to get rid of, please let me know. 20% of the sale price goes to charity - you can give more, of course - and the remainder back to you. Gaelcon's charity fund basically goes to children's charities of one kind or another, so it's a good cause.

Gaelcon happens on the weekend of the 24th of October, so let me know soon if you have stuff.

(If you're abroad, and willing to post stuff, let me know that too.)

As a note, if you're intending to try the new Adsense on Livejournal thing - I am - you'll probably want to disable the setting under the privacy tab in LJ's options that says

"Search Inclusion [] Minimize my journal's inclusion in search engine results"

... cos otherwise you won't pick up much, if anything, from Adsense.

Anyone else opting in to this?

I've just finished setting up a new blog. Yeah, I know, I do that every few months, and you're all getting bored with it. However, in this case, it's new and different because it's not for me, it's for work. Check out the Elucidate Blog, add it to your feedreaders, and prepare for an onslaught of about a post a day on Stuff Drew Thinks About The Internet.

Any statements about post frequency here are aspirations, not promises. There will be contributions from other writers as well.

It is, as observed by many of you, my birthday. Some people have asked if there's anything I'd like. There is.

I would like you to come play Everquest II with me. EQII is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. I think it's very good. I would like more people to try it. Also, if I can get people to sign up for it, even for one month, the nice people who run it will give me a free month's play per person (there's probably an upper limit to this, so you don't ALL have to sign up). There is, in any case, a two-week-long free trial.

If you might be interested in this, leave me a comment with your email address (or mail me at gothwalk@gmail.com, if you don't want your email visible), and I shall get you one of the special refer-a-friend trial invites, as they get you more benefits than the ordinary trial (I think), and get me my free month if you decide to buy in after your two week trial.

If you don't feel like Everquest II, or indeed MMOs, are your thing, that is, of course, your particular brand of crazy, but I probably still like you.

So a kid - a teenager, to be fair - in a school uniform got on the Dart this morning. He looked a bit unwell, red-eyed, pale. He started to sneeze just as the train moved off, and I swear, there was a tidal wave of people moving away from him. He looked around and said, "Dudes. Hay-fever."

sabayone, paape and I are going to Tuska '09. Tuska is an outdoor metal festival held in Helsinki, and it's this weekend. I know some of the bands playings, but I'm doing brief bits of research on the others, so as to have SOME idea which stages I want to be at when. So far, I've the following in mind:

( Schedule )

Apart from Korpiklaani and Amorphis overlapping on different stages, it's fairly nicely distributed.

So, anything else there anyone would recommend?

A bloke I follow on Twitter (@JohnBatDell) posted a brief competition today - tell him why you're the biggest geek, and win one of these: http://www.dypce.ak.com/html/products/gaming/rocker100/

I replied, concerning Shakespearean MMOs, and the next I know is there's a message saying I've won. Rock!

Having completed various runnings around today, we sat down, and since it was a truly manky day here, lit the fire. shandri_cat came to sit on me, and sabayone took some pictures, of which this one is my favourite.

The date for our annual summer party - now with brick barbecue - has been settled. You should be making your way to our place on the Sunday of the August Bank Holiday Weekend, that is, Sunday the 2nd of August. We'll be starting to cook in early to mid-afternoon, will refuel the barbecue a few times during the day, and will keep going until such time as people leave or fall asleep.

For anyone not reading dukestreet, I'm now making contributory posts to the overall efforts at Quilldragon, a group blog about fantasy literature. Go over and have a look, add us to your feed reader, that kinda thing.

Elucidate are doing a survey of business changes in 2009 in Ireland, and we'll be circulating the results at the IIA congress next week.

If you're in business in Ireland, we'd love to have you fill in the survey.

And feel free to pass that around to other people as well - the more data we get, the more useful it will be!

One Dreamwidth invite code available; first person to comment here gets it.

Feel free to leave more comments; I'll undoubtedly have more codes in future.

EDIT: Excessive use of semi-colons; no apologies.

Thanks to cissa, I now have http://gothwalk.dreamwidth.org/ - still debating exactly what to do with it, but go ahead if you want to add me there. I've applied for invite codes, and note with some pleasedness that paid accounts there can add Google Analytics on their journal pages, which is rather nice. Not quite enough to make me get a paid account yet, but if I end up using it regularly, it'll be a strong persuader.

Alright. Someone send me a Dreamwidth invite code, please.

evilrobotshane does a gaming podcast. It's rather good, and I'm not just saying that because he and his co-host had me on to talk about K2. But they did, and if you feel the need to hear about K2 (or just hear what I sound like), have a listen.

It appears I don't hate the sound of my own voice anymore, which is nice. I can't place my own accent, though...

I've known brucius since he was born, which is, uh... 25 years. He's my brother, so that may be cheating. Other than that... I think I've known kehoea since about 1991, which is... 18 years.

So, sometimes I am more than half convinced I'm in some sort of music video.

This morning, crossing Baggot Street, I was passed by a black convertible sports car, trailing cherry blossom from the raft of the stuff on the bonnet, driven by a woman wearing a white wedding dress and dark glasses, blasting out Bryan Adams[1] at top volume.

Thirty seconds later, a robot dog ran past me.

Now, the robot dog was pursued rapidly by three film students[2], one with a camera, one with a remote control, and the guy with the remote was shouting "fucking thing won't stop!", but still... it was a nicely offbeat start to the working day.

[1] (Everything I Do) I Do It For You
[2] I assume they were students; they were all wearing identical UCD-branded polo shirts.