SPOILERS FOR: Christmas, Eragon/Eldest by Christopher Paolini, Resident Evil 4, The Sally Lockhart Mysteries by Philip Pullman.

1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters whose names begin with that letter and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

Anke, possibly foolishly, gave me the letter S. However, because I'm not feeling contentious enough to follow either my obvious first impulse to mention Satan, or a fleeting idea of mentioning Susan Pevensie because frankly she has no character beyond an Enid Blyton caricature of The Worried One Who Tries To Be Grown Up, so we're safe on the atheist score.

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Art for Vinchers on the Jack forum art exchange.

It's an attempt at her style with a little bit more realism, which I don't think was very successful. You still can't tell he's a raccoon, but if I'd been much more realistic you wouldn't be able to tell it was Vinci. So much for characters with very defined styles. I considered pulling back and showing the tail too, but went for a closeup on the breath instead. The idea for the fog and nose smears comes courtesy of Piper. (That cat is surprisingly helpful with ideas. I just recently used his typical eating habits as a model for Yavu, a starved street boy.)

I've already lost a decent chunk of weight (around 4.75kg, depending whose scales you use), which I'd expect in the first week. It helps being an old hand at this. I can tell myself from experience that the hunger (on Saturday I informed my bro I could dismember and eat a cow) disappears rapidly. And I'm detecting the bad breath, which means the hunger has indeed gone. *pops Listerine Active breath strip things*

An unwelcome return of the random discomfort down my right side that shows up whenever I'm walking, which I'd forgotten about. And I do want something to chew. They make flapjacks as well as the shakes. I may get some next week.

Been craving fruit in particular and other sorts of food, but I am maintaining a pretty philosophical outlook: "there'll always be quiche, there'll always be onion rings, there'll always be grapes marked down on special offer and there'll presumably always be stalls full of pomegranates and custard apples and figs oh my gods I am going to kill all humans". I'm taking B12 this time, as well as keeping up with vitamin tablets and some oil capsules, so I think I'll be fine nutrition wise.

Also enjoying informing certain parts of my body that they are to be "mass vanquished". Whatever gets you through the day.

Self-googling meme:

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I and three of my characters did a "Which famous leader are you?" test for fun and profit boredom.

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Loving Wordpress's scheduled posts. Here's one I did way back halfway through the month, but it seemed too sad to post it then.

Vespers, Charly, Snog, *shotgunpump* we will have words. I like erasers, so Charlie is off the hook.

Today, probably vaguely spurred on by having read a few reports of people getting ink, at which I generally roll my eyes, I asked myself what I'd get as a tattoo if I absolutely had to get one. Rolling my eyes at myself, I proceeded to apply logic.

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Eyeballing angles game. Fun! I was expecting to be rubbish but got 3.89 (the lower the better). And I was hopeless at the triangles. I'm much worse in real life, though.

"Me" questions in this meme refer to the person you got it from. In my case this is: Charlycrash.

01) Are you currently in a serious relationship?
I have lots of serious familial and friendly relationships, thanks.

02) What was your dream growing up?
I've never had any idea what I want to Do With My Life, only what makes me happy moment-to-moment. And that's weird to say, because most people for whom it would be true live lives completely opposite to mine. I don't bungee jump or go clubbing or take drugs or anything.

03) What talent do you wish you had?
I was thinking the other day of something I wished I could do... I can't remember. Maybe accents. Or general hearing acuity; I'd like to be able to tell what a schwa is or when something's out of phase. Hell, just not falling asleep to the sound of certain specific people's voices would be most handy in meetings and presentations...!

04) If I bought you a drink what would it be?
How would I know? If you know my drink preferences, it'd be something like grape juice with peach, lychee juice, melon juice or things of that nature, although I'm quite happy with apple. A virgin strawberry daiquiri if you're really trying hard. Please talk me out of ordering the carrot juice; I keep forgetting I hate it.

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Ganked from Charly. Results behind the cut, because the graphics are both large and bad.

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Art and personality test. Fun! Even if you hate art, which I sort of consider myself to.

Of the styles of art we picked for the experiment, your answers suggest you like Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

(Not really. It's more that I either hated or was unimpressed by more or less everything in there.)

In the personality profile you had a high intellectualism score, which suggests you like to think about abstract ideas and have a creative imagination.

People who are the same age and sex as you are most likely to prefer Impressionism
People who also score highly in your dominant personality trait are most likely to prefer Impressionism

[Personality results:]
Average extraversion [WHAT]
Average agreeableness [WHAT]
Average conscientiousness
Average emotional stability
High intellectualism
Average emotional intelligence [WHAT!]

I was disappointed that it separated the questions into "do you like this" and "how talented do you think the artist is", for some of which I gave widely different answers (I loved the black squares, but any fool, dingbat or child process can draw black squares), but then seemed to lump the answers back together agan.

So, how do you judge art? My criteria are pretty unsophisticated. I thought about what I was thinking about while rating those, and here's a rough schema, roughly weighted.

Overall: is it colours I like? (or if black and white, is there plenty of grey OR are the lines at least very clean?) Is it shapes I like? Can I tell what it is at a glance? (important) (if it's abstract, that's a "no") Is it NOT very busy? (important)
Subject: is it a painting of something? (important) Is something happening in the painting? Is there a prominent animal? (very important)
Style: is it in a realistic style? (important)

Generally, only if the answer to most of the above is "yes" will I give it more than a brief glance. But prominent animal auto-wins at least a slightly longer look.

I can count the pictures I actually liked on one hand: the tree-shade with the glasses, the winter mountains with dogs, the volcano and two sets of abstract black squares. And the cubist calf, but only because it's an animal and the artist seemed to get animals.

There's also a synaesthesia test, and lots more, but the synaesthesia one is useless because it doesn't differentiate finely enough. I don't colour letters or numbers, but do colour the odd-numbered weekdays moderately strongly and very consistently...

Long questions meme from Altivo. (Lunch break, didn't do news this morning, so you get rambles instead.)

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The Blogalyser reveals...

Your blog/web page text has an overall readability index of 12.

This suggests that your writing style is conventional
(to communicate well you should aim for a figure between 10 and 20).Your blog has 24 sentences per entry, which suggests your general message is distinguished by verbosity
(writing for the web should be concise).

CHARACTER MATRIX

male		female
self		world
past		future

Your text shows characteristics which are 53% male and 47% female
(for more information see the Gender Genie).
Looking at pronoun indicators, you write mainly about yourself, then the world in general and finally your social circle. Also, your writing focuses primarily on the present, next the past and lastly the future.

Find out what your blogging style is like!

Thanks, I just needed to be a bit more gender-insecure today. Cars, women, trains, flying boats, football! Football! Spruce Goose! Motorcycles! Märklin Storchenbein! Ruby on Rails! Twitter's irritating API! Microformats! The results above could have been formatted with CSS instead of little graphics! I am pedantic, boring and lacking in social graces! Oh, and let's not forget dinosaurs! Dinosaurs and Devonian tetrapods! Acanthostega! Icthyostega! Archaeocetes! Ambulocetus! Alligator-wrestling! Pork rinds and beer! Beer! Cars! Trains! Boats! Aeroplanes! Football, lots and lots of bloody, bloody football! (Yeah, next time I take this test I'm laughing.)

What the effing effing eff. More intellectual than everyone's favourite zenbunny? I don't FINK so, nah mate!

I like music. I like dogs. I like coconut. I like clubbing. Seals. I like films. Write short sentences. There, that should skew the average a little, with any luck.

I'm so boring! I'm vegetarian, a non-drinker and don't like tea or coffee.

If I ate meat I'd be open to trying a lot of this stuff. Except fugu (because DEAR LOKI, ARE YOU PEOPLE INSANE) and the cruel stuff.

Edible and inedible meme. Bold what you've tried, italicize what you'll never eat again, strikeout what you won't eat, asterisk for you haven't had a chance, question mark what you don't know.

(I looked everything else up. I'm curious.)

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In each case you can rescue one from destruction, but not both. (For the sake of argument, in each case both of them are equally extant and you don't know any more about them than is stated.)

Which will you rescue?

a) A child or an adult
b) A stranger or your dog
c) Hitler or Lassie
d) Your partner/mate/spouse or a Nobel laureate
e) A dog or a weasel
f) Your entire family or the entire family of Canidae
g) A bottle containing the cure for cancer or your brother
h) A bottle containing the cure for cancer or your brother, who just gave you one of his kidneys

Taken from here. I'm compiling a list of ethical dilemmas for work. I need more anecdotal ones (like number 16 on that page).

(I can't imaging what sort of butthead would make a distinction between g and h, unless it was to take into account a probably somewhat shorter lifespan for live kidney donors.)

(My response to questions like b is generally prefaced with "Is anybody looking?"...)

Ooooh! Vocabulary meme from Altivo and Anke.

Where did you grow up: Cheshire and Greater Manchester counties

WHAT DO YOU CALL:

1. A body of water, smaller than a river, contained within relatively narrow banks.
Stream, canal (if man-made), tributary, the Bollin

2. The thing you push around the grocery retailer to carry your intended purchases.
Trolley

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Meme from Snoggie and others. If Charlycrash isn't first in with two of these in particular, I will grin and poke him. ;)

1. On your current playlist, hit shuffle and pick the first twenty-five songs on the list (no matter how cheesy or embarrassing, but excluding instrumentals).
2. Write down one or two line(s) of the song. Try to avoid dead giveaways, like lines that include the title.
3. Wait for your friends to comment and identify the songs. If they cheat with Google, they are stinkybutts.
4. When someone guesses correctly, strike out the lyric and list the correct name of the song next to it.

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Lots of random links and news from my afternoon trawl update... and a meme from Animist, because dogs. DOGS!

Can different species 'talk'?

Non-news link: Deadpool fans... uh, yeah, don't look here.

(The joke is that Deadpool, a fictional comic book character, thinks the real-life actress Bea Arthur is wonderful. Bea Arthur is one of the 'Golden Girls' depicted there. (OK, yes, uncalled-for minor geekery, but I have only recently finished reading the last Cable & Deadpool and am still cheesed that one of the titular protags somehow got co-opted out of his own finale. Whut. (Still, Deadpool always was carrying the show.)))

Raven spotted.

I forgot it's Pi Day. Silly people putting the day before the month. :)

Europe develops Moon rover plan

I saw Peter and the Wolf. Didn't think it was all that good. You couldn't tell what was going on, and this is from someone who heard it plenty of times as a pup.

Yahoo makes semantic search shift

New human interface devices

(You can put in a fake email address.)

Labrador Retriever
The Caretaker

Your family is what makes you tick, and you never "flea" from an opportunity to hang out with the whole gang. A family picnic complete with hot dogs, deviled eggs and a refreshing swim in the lake is hard for you to stray from. Your sparky temperament and dogged intelligence mean you are not only a blast to hang out with, but great to work with as well. Your close pals appreciate your patience and forgiveness, knowing you'd rather let sleeping dogs lie than dwell on the mishaps of the past. Your dashing good looks may one day lead to a modelling career, if only you can tame the unfortunate clumsiness that sometimes causes you to go flailing from the catwalk.

"Tick"/"flea". Wise Dog sees what you did there.

Seeing as my sisters were Golden Retrievers, I can't say I'm surprised. The blurb is so much nonsense, of course.

A little girl has been found alive.

More on the great heartburn conspiracy from earlier today.

£30k iPod on display

It's a Shuffle, looks like, so it's only 1Gb or possibly 2. Epic fail.

Notice the video player? It's called the EMP. We pioneered that on our Passion site! One day before the rest of bbc.co.uk had it! </flag-waving>

And another EMP clip:

Teaching a speech machine. It spelled Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious right, and caught the glottal stop in Slartibartfast. Not bad!

Meme stolen from animans_animus. You cannot spot where there were two numbered questions missing and I cunningly inserted some.

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