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| The Pier at Weston-super-Mare today |
In computing textbooks they sometimes give you a sample program which just about works. In real life, you'd have to add in extra stuff of course. The booking system for 'Dismaland' is one of those naive tutorial systems.
First you select the date and time of your planned visit (there is no reservation-window facility); next you exhaustively enter your personal and credit card details (these are not cached or stored); finally, the system looks in the database to see if any tickets are still free, but as demand vastly exceeds supply, in practice the system merely confirms that the slot you wanted has already been sold out.
You then start the process from scratch, until your patience is worn out.
I suppose it's quite amusing in a way, a satire on modern Internet booking systems. Still, it's the reason we were at Weston-super-Mare today, on the last day of summer, walking around outside the walls of Dismaland, listening to truly awful music playing from inside.
Here's Steve Sailer's take on Banksy:
"The clean little secret of Banksy, the masked “graffiti artist” who paints on public walls in the middle of the night, is that he is a highly gifted and well-trained traditional artist. Rubens would have hired him as an apprentice in his studio. ...Hard to argue with that.
Granted, Banksy would be even better if he had more interesting concepts. But the world is nuts enough today that even his trite, safe little SWPL “provocations” sometimes get turned into something amusing by the powers that be."
We had a very pleasant walk around on the sand.
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| The Paddling Pool at Weston-super-Mare with the tide out |
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| Nigel and Clare at the seaside! |
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| A Triptych |
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| Your author on the seafront |
