Simon Butcher

Okay, so I broke my blog. Again. I really should stop tinkering when I have no time to fix things I break. If you're reading this, I obviously got it working again.

Internet Neutrality is a nasty subject, and something I have strong feelings about. So much so, I support Save the Internet. However, there's something else that really rubs me the wrong way.

I'm referring to the ongoing control of the Internet by the USA. While I understand the yanks have a long history with the network, but the time came many years ago for them to relinquish their grasp over the network and allow it to become more autonomous and internationally unbiased.

All is well in the world of smart-phones since Fring arrived not too long ago. Despite having a logo that looks like it was designed in a few seconds of fierce MS-Paint wiggling, this application is actually becoming pretty useful to me.

After being dragged back to Walibi after only one week, it's turned out the park still has many early-season problems. The park itself has been heavily criticised in the media over the past week, including a scathing report on the Belga news-wire, «Walibi a vu du monde, mais a connu quelques soucis».

The short of the article is this: While Walibi's opening patronage was higher than the previous season (10,500 people), many attractions were closed for “temporary” reasons. Some of the rides were particularly rough on the opening Saturday, and technical staff worked overnight to help fix the problems. This may go some way to explaining why some rides did not open until the afternoon of the second day of the season.

The article goes on to state that the park management have invested €4m with special attention paid to increasing capacity of the existing rides, which is indeed visible in many places, but it looks like some rides have been somewhat neglected.

For a few years now, I've been hearing about The 1 Second Film, but I've never really paid attention to it. The idea is simple: For charity, put together a one second animated film (made up of 12 frames, each frame repeated twice to make one second of total footage) using donated funds.

Simple? Not really. When people donate money, they are essentially buying a producer credit for the film. Each credit costs $1.00 or higher, which means there's likely to be a huge number of credits — So huge, in fact, that it's predicted the credits for this film alone will last 90 minutes. To make things more impressive, they're shooting this extravaganza on 70mm film stock.

Ninety minutes of credits on 70mm stock — Unbelievable.

How could I write an article about my rollercoasterholicism without returning to Walibi on the first weekend of the 2007 season? Well, as it turns out, I couldn't possibly do such a thing, so I went today.

The interesting thing about Walibi is that the start of the season is always quite dreadful. Last year I arrived on the very first day only to find a messy park full of jerky rides and incompetent staff. I'm happy to say many of these problems were solved during this opening weekend, but perhaps not quite in the way I would have preferred.