I received Skyrim on Saturday and have played thirty hours since then. It’s not enough. Supposedly there are about 100 hours of gameplay, but there are also endless generated quests, so I could (theoretically) play this game forever. The interface is such an improvement on Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and even on Fallout: New Vegas (my second-favourite of Bethesda’s games, which I have played about sixty-four hours of, according to Raptr) and I am utterly obsessed. It is such a beautiful game.

Oh yeah, and there are freaking DRAGONS.

This game reduces me to tiny fangirl noises. I am so thrilled by it I cannot even speak.

For those who are also playing: I am a dual-wielding mage/warrior female Imperial badass. Who steals a lot of stuff. A lot.

Related (Skyrim) Links:

• Why have Bethesda put the entire continent in Skyrim? Amazing.
• The Life and Death of Lydia. The video killed me.

I’m a pretty laid-back owner who isn’t bothered about hands on interaction, so she suits me just fine.

She’s a pretty poor Chinchilla substitute though, if I’m honest. It’s no slight against her; she’s a lovely pet. I just miss Magic and Gypsy terribly; sometimes it still surprises me when I walk into a chinchilla-free bedroom. Or when I walk past chinchilla toys in a pet store. As a matter of fact, walking past the dog things still upsets me, and it’s been over two years since both of my family dogs died! Apparently I take a while to get over dead pets.

Back to Penny! I took some photos of her last week, so here they are:

I was going to make a quiet exit from the fanlistings scene, but I could not resist this one. I also can’t seem to get rid of any of my other ones! So, I guess I’m still here.

I asked my brother for hamster names (for my back up list) and he listed all the characters in Madagascar. I think my brother is awesome.
@JenCarpeDiem

My brother bought me a copy of Deus Ex: Human Revolution (we played the crap out of Deus Ex when it was brand new, srsly) and IT IS AWESOME.
@JenCarpeDiem

“The only thing that scares me, like, REALLY scares me… Is that movie Signs.” – My brother. brb laughing forever.
@JenCarpeDiem

Bonus: My favourite tweet from last week. @tingedfringe is my boyfriend/partner/fiancé/insert-relationship-word-of-choice.

Missing @tingedfringe. Reading his older tweets. Favourite w/o context: “I’ve always thought that all psychics needed was a good fisting.”
@JenCarpeDiem

P.S. Yes, this is just a thinly veiled excuse to try out the Twitter Blockquotes plugin. ;P

After some consideration, my boyfriend and I decided to get a small rodent (less commitment: chinchillas live 15-20 years and I just can’t do that again so soon) and eventually settled on a hamster. We were initially thinking of a big Syrian hamster, but I’ve had two of those before, and wanted something a bit different.

Meet Penny, the Chinese hamster.

We’ve only had her for four days and she is already getting quite brave. I’m very pleased with her progress! Penny is just a lovely, tiny creature who I’m looking forward to getting to know.

It is a type of software called a CAPTCHA, which sounds like ‘capture’ and stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” which is exactly what it does. You’ll see this kind of challenge when you attempt to submit a form at any website which is trying to combat spam; it won’t always look like the box above, because this is a specific type of CAPTCHA. Variations include digit-only challenges, where you need to type the numbers you can see, or random images of objects and a command to click on the correct image. This works because computers can’t recognise objects without having been told what those objects are: it would have no way of knowing an apple from a banana unless it had been programmed to recognise them (or programmed to learn what they are, if we want to cover all bases here!)

CAPTCHAs have been used for quite a few years now and reCAPTCHA is a way of capturing (ha) the work humans were already doing in deciphering images. A lot of people miss what the reCAPTCHA box is trying to tell us and thus miss the entire point: “Stop spam. Read books.”

reCAPTCHA isn’t there to ruin anybody’s life — it is there to convert scanned books into legible text. It’s a project started by clever folk at Carnegie Mellon University which uses images of words from books rather than randomly generated nonsense words. It was purchased by Google in 2009 and, according to the website, is currently being used to digitize old editions of the New York Times and books from Google Books.

By serving a pairing of a “control word” (one which reCAPTCHA does know) and an “unknown word” (one which is fresh from the scanner) it is able to both determine that the user is a human and not a computer and assumes that, if the user is human and typed the control word correctly, the unknown word is being typed correctly as well. Sometimes that word is illegible but sometimes it is very easy to read: Enough identical interpretations result in the word being upgraded to ‘known’ and whichever book it was originally from is one word closer to being successfully deciphered.

I mention that some of the words are illegible, but this can be for many reasons and is not reCAPTCHA’s fault but simply unavoidable. The unknown words which are served are words which the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software could not interpret: occasionally this is the result of bad spacing (too large a space will result in the second half of a word being interpreted as a wholly separate one; too small results in two words merging into one) or even ink smearing or errors in the original printing. These words are then distorted further — intentionally — to match the distortion of the ‘control word’ and make it more difficult for OCR software to recognise the control word and get through the protection by typing gibberish for the unknown word. This is a flaw which I have heard of some users exploiting by typing gibberish for the unknown instead of bothering to type what you can see (which is the whole point) because they haven’t noticed the best feature of the reCAPTCHA box:

You can also click on the little sound icon to hear a CAPTCHA instead: recordings of human voices saying numbers aloud, which you must type into the box. It takes a little longer than the text version, because you have to wait until the recording is finished, but it makes this fantastic piece of software usable for sight impaired people as well… Which is something a lot of websites and software manufacturers don’t seem concerned with. I’ll probably write about that some other time.

Further reading:

• reCAPTCHA
• reCAPTCHA Mailhide: Display your email publicly without worrying spam!

There’s some new stuff here, but if you’ve visited December16.co.uk in the past, you’ve probably seen it all before!

Naturally, this is a work-in-progress and you may notice some parts of the website going a bit wonky. Just pretend it’s not happening and everything will be fine!

My little brother is TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD TODAY. Look at how little he was!

Having a moment, ngl.

Ellie and Carl

I watched Up on Saturday and fell in love. What a beautiful story, a beautiful movie and a beautiful love played out in its entirety on screen. Really just a wonderful film which has only cemented Pixar as my favourite studio. This film made me cry twice! I can’t say enough about it; just gorgeous.

I also watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 this weekend — it was a spur-of-the-moment decision to catch the very last showing (ever) at my local cinema. I knew I’d regret not going, so I went. It was utterly brilliant; I was thoroughly blown away and I can’t wait for the conclusion this July. Battle of Hogwarts FTW!

• Up @ IMDb
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 @ IMDb