It’s about time I cleaned this blog up a bit. I look back on it and have a few questions: Why on earth did I pick func-auton.net as the URL?* Why weren’t post titles also permalinks? Why was a blog that had a few good posts once but was quickly turned into a massive, fluff [...]

Functional Autonomy has been neglected a bit of late, for which I’m sorry.
I’m gearing up for both the London Games Festival and GameCity, both of which I’m going to be working on.
I plan to grab relaxation as and where I can this week; there won’t be much time for it, and probably none the week [...]

In future, I’m also going to be posting over at Pixel Love as TK422 with Toby Barnes. There’s a minor update to the “about” page in line with that.

BarCamp London 2 was amazing. Met loads of interesting and fantastic people. Marvelled at the incredibly techy venue (One meeting room had a smart glass sound proof wall with a pure SF, switch operated sliding door :) ).
Played werewolf, which is one of the simplest and most compelling games I’ve ever played. A perfect mix [...]

For online text, this is a fairly long essay. Deceptively, the “read more” link makes it look like a widget. Attention conservation notice: Experience of media on a screen is expansive rather than exclusive.
I’ve begun to make a slightly arbitrary distinction between two types of blog: Widget blogs and essay blogs. Essay blogs rely on [...]

I will be there.

Four days and counting.
Me: “Net’s down”.
Max: “It’s a good job our lives don’t revolve around it… hold on.”
Both: “Shit!”
Normal service will be resumed as soon as tech support stop flannelling us or we get another provider. I have been reading paper books and baking cakes.

If you happen to be a reader and find you can’t access this site from a particular net connection, you’re quite possibly running as part of a botnet. Sort your AV and anti-spyware out for everyone’s sake, please.
Also, for those of you who happen to be real spammers rather than software: Please bear in mind [...]

Finally, a SpamKarma2 and Akismet compatible Wordpress plugin that prevents self-referential pingbacks. They’re messy, and manually deleting them is an annoying way to fritter away time.
Thank you very much, MDA.

Finally hacked this site to work properly with Internet Explorer. I’m a little unhappy that browser is still so popular; it’s a nightmare to work with from a design point of view (Nearly 50% of visitors here are still using IE). Anyway, no more padding issues on the right border. I’ve hacked to the extent [...]

Basic definition of functional autonomy: One thing leads to another, but that subsequent other can grow to operate independently.
The term originates in a psychology paper by Gordon Allport, and has been used by a number of theorists including Abraham Maslow and Konrad Lorenz. The concept applies to genetics, behaviour, culture, and the interactions between all [...]

Hooray, the blog is online, but dented. XHTML/PHP page layout is wonky, leading to non-standards compliant pages. The sidebar is a tad barren, header image should probably be reshot, and no IE hacking has been done yet.
Too bad, I’m off to London for a day or two in 10 hours, and sorely in need of [...]