Black Dog Blog

Archive for November, 2007

Classic!

In case you're wondering at the lack of news coverage this week, I've been staggering into work at 10:00 or after, when the news is already done by my efficient colleagues. My work has flexitime, so I'm staying late to make up the hours. Ever-so-helpfully, this makes me more tired and gives me more incentive to skip sleep in order to get to spend some time with my bro in the evenings.

Are you getting enough? Sleep, that is, lol, we made a innuendo.

Blast, was that me just now using the phrase "looks like a stack overflow" to dis a page layout? Aloud?? The comparison made sense in my head in that moment, I swear.

(For the record: Orange. Purple. Crazy CSS positioning. None of it our fault.)

Platitude of the Day is positively savage this morning.

I have nothing to add. It's pretty much perfect.

Here's the story and some background on the religious aspects. Readers' views (I espeically like "The teacher was misguided, whereas the children were malicious. They must be brought to answer for their blasphemy").

Kicking-at-the-air-and-missing went a little better last night. I've got a t-shirt, yay. I'm also a pathetic excuse for a physical, animate being, I panic when there's nobody in front of me to watch or anyone behind me waiting for their turn, and my sodding hips turn too much. In short, yay for balance and coordination! (Which are, more or less, the object of the exercise. Ability to pound idiots into a pulp is a far more distant goal.)

I'm barely average!

This meme, ganked from Thad, supposedly measures how much of a bad influence you are. It has a few dodgy questions, though. Going to therapy, taking painkillers and being injured are EVUL on the scale of, er, buying porn or same-sex kissing, apparently.

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I got props from a forum full of DragonForce fans for my parody/tribute. Frickin' sweet. \m/ \m/

Oh, and last night we were invaded by vampires. And lo, it waseth hilarious. Certain parties are still fuming at certain alt-universe versions of certain bandit queens. <3

edit: Transcript now available thanks to Anke!

Because I believe we have some folk/acoustic heroes in our midst:

The BBC has just negotiated the rights to include commercial music clips in podcasts, which, I understand, is a pretty complicated dance.

New podcasts, available from bbc.co.uk/podcasts, will include one of folk and acoustic music from Mike Harding's radio programme. Obviously because of the 30 second limit they'll be clips rather than full songs, and I think the podcasts will be broadly in the form of recommendations and reviews. Enjoy.

WordPress Intruder Detection System

I'd been wondering when we'd hear from these fellows. I've been testing Gareth's WP Lockdown plugin for a while, since before he joined that team and combined it with their project.

Now to install and give it a whirl…

25 million child benefit records, including bank details, lost in transit…

Now read this. ROFL

Christian activist challenges court ruling, wanting to bring a private prosecution for blasphemy over Jerry Springer – The Opera.

Damn. I wish I'd worn my JSTO baseball cap into work today. Just in case, y'know, anyone in the world should be incognisant of my position on this one.

This religious nonsense detracts from the fact that the show is a satire on the media. A rather awesome satire, imo.

Has Islam got a sense of humour? No. Have Muslims? Many of them yes, many of them "yes with limits". The fundies, like fundies in any religion, have not. The Prophet used to laugh and joke? Sssh, we ignore those hadiths.

(I was going to link a different page there, but couldn't find it. Here's an alternative, also written by a Muslim but with a lot more gravitas.)

'Incest man' saved from lynch mob. Pity. Also a rare example in the news of an angry mob saying "God told you to do it? What do you take us for?" instead of "God told us to picket/dramallama/threaten to kill/kill you!"

A couple of months after China passed regulations on the movement of souls after death and we all had a good laugh, the Dalai Lama has suggested he may choose a successor as whom to be retroactively reincarnated. Smooth, Tenzy.

Imagine the scene.
Tenzy: "China, you come at us with soul bureaucracy. But we have… dun dun dun… soul time travel! Go, my custom S-101, back into the past!"
Stereotypical Foreign Chinese Villain: "O noes!"
The S-101 vanishes in a portal of swirly light. The 14th Dalai Lama dies with an expression of serenity and nobility and enlightenment and all that shit.

Int. biker bar, 32 years into the past.
S-101: "I need your body, your boots and your motorcycle."
Biker: "You forgot to say please."
S-101: "I'm a non-corporeal floaty thing, dickwad, I don't have to be polite."
The S-101 possesses him with obligatory hackneyed 'smoke flowing into his mouth and nostrils' special effects and walks out.

[snip Chinese officials discussing Tibetan resistance]

Int. womb of pregnant woman in a free country not ruled by China.
Foetus on point of ensoulment: "Gasp surprise! Who are you?"
S-101: "Hola, baby. Come with me if you want to live… again."

Etc etc.

Man, this thing writes itself.

I could barely force myself to step out of the door this morning, and before that it was a battle against all-over tremors to get the door open. Fabby.

Miserable all the way into work. It's partly the familystuff¹ and partly my watch being missing, as well as general illness. However, on getting into work, someone who heard me remark on its absence actually asked if I'd found it and forwarded on an email from someone who'd found a watch that could well be mine, which is nice and helpful. I'd worked myself up into a panic thinking it'd been nicked. But now I'm at least not too miserable to function.

I'm fond of that watch. It was a 21st birthday present. From myself. (More family angst…)

edit: It's back on my wrist and I'm a happy, albeit still cold and tremory and sick, puppy.

¹ Should anyone actually care, I can explain this under an LJ friends-lock, but it's heart-sickening and mind-preying enough already. I have no idea if talking about it would help.

Plants genetically engineered to make fish oils. As a vegetarian who won't eat cod liver oil¹, I think this is great.

¹ (For one thing, even with the gelatine-coated capsules — another reason not to — the smell of fish lingers on the breath. Ugh! At least flaxseed oil only tastes of, er, flaxseed.)

Janet and John in favour with retro people.

I never read them. (At 26, I'm probably too young.) I started to read with flashcards and such epic classics as Smoke and Fluff, a story about naughty kittens. However, I progressed to things with polysyllabic words in them fairly rapidly, meaning I don't remember many of my baby books. One or two good Janet and Allan Ahlbergs, plus the classics (Very Hungry Caterpillar, Where the Wild Things Are).

Terry Wogan's parodies are occasionally amusing. If you like your morning smut lame, tame 'n' eccentric. (Which, if you're a Brit, you have to. It's a tradition or an old charter or something.)

Lovely. A sentence of six months' prison and 200 lashes, handed out by a Saudi court in a gang rape trial, has been criticised as unjust.

This is because it was handed out to the VICTIM.

For getting raped. And then appealing against her initial punishment. WHAT A DEBAUCHED SATAN, OMG STONE HER.

Saudi Arabia is my favouritest country evar.

Rowan Williams isn't "welcoming" enough and the CofE is "obsessed" with gay priests.

I'm glad. It highlights what a dinosaur the stupid institution is. Some sweet day, people will notice.

This story does the same for the RCC, as if we needed any more evidence. Disgusting parasitical organisations thinking they can muscle in on real life; annoys me so much.

As for old Karol becoming a singing star, well, it practically parodies itself (Cher robot: "Do you bel^ieev_ve in life after death"), so I'll merely note in passing the totally unbiased title of the record. "Saint now!"

(Follow-up to be called Apocalypse Soon, We Think, We're Curiously Unspecific on the Date But It's Totally Happening This Time, Honest (P.S. the Seven-headed Beast is Moral Relativity or Something, it's Definitely Not Us), in stores across the Holy Land soon.)

We saw Beowulf instead of Stardust — I was more interested in the former, anyway, having found the Stardust book very unfilling — and quite enjoyed it. Reminded me of a video game cutscene throughout, which take as positive or negative depending on the quality of games you play. At least, unlike The Witcher game (which has hellhounds in it, yay!), people's hair didn't routinely waft about on the breeze while passing through their shoulders, backs and sword hilts. Grendel's speech = win, because, uh, it is.

Neil Gaiman (writer of the film along with another dude) links to a review of Beowulf that takes aim at positive and negative points. Personally, I don't have trouble with this kind of dual-level film. It's an Exciting Adventure and also a bit of a send-up, and those aren't mutually exclusive; I can take any particular aspect as one or the other or both. The only aspect that really tried my patience was the sequence of 'zomg male nudity' visual jokes, which are old hat (old sword, old convenient broom handle, etc) to me.

But it is funny how the experience of a film changes if I've completely misinterpreted how it's meant to be taken. The characters in Moulin Rouge suddenly breaking into modern pop songs angried up my brain something painful until I realised what mode I was meant to be in. Most of the time, though, playing completely counter to aspie stereotype, I'm pretty hot at spotting when tongue is firmly implanted in cheek. Maybe it's some form of grouchy cynicism at play. It's that component of the mind that knows, for example, that you don't expect the same quality and comprehensibility from a comic book as from a written story, and can put the right parts of the brain on hold in order to enjoy James Bond books despite the "asexuals = evil, lesbians = rape victims who just need cock, foreigners = unattractive stereotypes".

Enough of that. Saturday morning was the neurologist appointment. I'm to be sent for an MRI scan in however long these things take, probably around 10 weeks. At this stage nobody's particularly expecting something wrong to show up on there; mum's convinced it's B12 deficiency, the doc didn't venture any guesses and I have no opinion as to what it is. I'm mainly quite interested in seeing the scanner. According to a family member who has had one recently, the noise levels are quite amazing and you have to stay still for varying lengths of time while it clacks at you. 'S a while since I did medical physics. Should look up and remind myself how they work if I can muster any energy.

Oh, and some more blood tests, mainly repeating B12 and thyroid. Nothing terribly interesting there, and no results yet.

Back to work tomorrow. Not feeling any better despite week off. Just depressed for not achieving anything. Oh, and although I'm not gaining weight (according to the scales, which I'm reasonably sure are not mendacious), my arse is getting bigger. It's the damnedest thing. I think I've done myself minor psychological damage with this diet, because I seem to be thinking in terms of "well, maybe I'll just starve myself for a couple of days, that'd be easy enough".

Heart-powered pacemaker. Dammit, that was MY money-making idea! :D

*grumble grumble* US, Canada… *grumble grumble*

The eee just doesn't look as exciting without the charity and innovation aspects. Only about a gig of storage on the 4GB model after OS and partitions. And if you wait for the 8GB you'll get a bigger screen, apparently.

Synchronised shaking for secure data link authentication. Hmmmm, yeah. Right. If all you want is to prove they're in same room, what's wrong with taking air temperature and pressure, ambient noise, …?

And "You could just grab someone else's phone and shake to share something" really points out its own flaws.

HEY WTF! ;)

I may be very slow on the uptake – very slow indeed – but here, Sam & Max webcomic.

Must also buy the new episodic game at some point.

'Polar rain' auroras.

And there, that's yer lot. I aten't dead, but I dreamed I was fairly close. Grrngh. Medical appointment on Saturday. If I owe any posts anywhere, I'll try to write those as soon as I'm in less of a funk (and/or there's anything for me to reply to).

Continuing Mutt's Personal Amusement Month, Slen has The Witcher. I have watched Slen play it through the early stages and have noted the following:

1. He is Grunge Sebbie. Because he is.
2. Apparently all men (except the main character, and dwarves and elves) are utter bastards.
3. Also, all women have big boobies.
4. There are Barghests. WIN for Barghests.
5. Quite a few bugs and gameplay issues.
6. Interesting combat and levelling systems. Nothing new or special, but fairly extensive.
7. Dwarven dice = crack
8. Elves = squirrels
9. Dwarves = Scottish (GROAN)

In terms of sense of humour, it's like a darker version of (the recent) The Bard's Tale without the fourth-wall-breakingishness.

edit: Just met a character that reminded me spookily much of Pranciskus. Slen saw the resemblance too, thankfully.

Have I mentioned that a Steph Swainston version of the Wild Hunt is about the sexiest thing I can think of at the moment? Hell to the yeah. Modern Times wins for that alone. (Third in series with The Year Of Our War and No Present Like Time. Published as Dangerous Offspring in the US. Buy at least the first.)

I mean sexy in a platonic sense, of course. Although the obligatory sex in this book was hilarious.

I wanted more from the book. More about virtually everybody in it. And more Shift. I was perhaps not so interested in Cyan, at least until the end (now am positively frothing, chewing and Wall-building to know what happens), but Swallow's development was very good (and personally satisfying), I'd give good chocolate money to know what Lightning and San talked about, more Tern could never fail to be a good thing and I wanted to see Rayne comforted at the end, because a character who has been pushing 80 for almost 2000 years demands respect, dammit.

Jant remains a very satisfying narrator. Even Tanager, a character you'd expect me to be pretty uninterested in, towards the end was indeed interesting me. The mention of Dunlin (from the first book) was tantalising. The worldbuilder in me was left feeling especially cock-blocked and hard-done-by and emo-builder by all the hints and things left dangling about the Shift and how it works – mission accomplished, therefore, if the mission is to sell me more books. I was also surprised not to see more of how the Insect happenings turned out. Come to think of it, there was a lot that needed to be mentioned at the end and wasn't. At least this wasn't the last of a trilogy, if the author's comments elsewhere are anything to go by.

This time around while rereading the first two books I decided to introduce my own slightly counterintuitive pronunciations for some of the Awian words and place names. For no other reason than that "Avendunn" sounds prettier to me than "Aundinn" for Awndyn, "Avia" obviously makes more sense than "Aweea" for Awia, Rhydanne obviously need an antisocial shrug of a schwa ("rhuhdan" instead of "rye-dan") and fyrd is cooler as "furred" than "feared". This was only for fun and I wouldn't be surprised to learn I'm completely wrong; Swainston doesn't include pronunciation guides, and I'm not going to write and ask her (though she does seem to answer correspondence, which is awesome).

(aka "Do they even TRY to make films not based on children's toys or comic books any more?")

Went and saw 30 Days of Night last night with both brothers and two friends of the not-technically-related brother. (Slen and I cut quite a dash in the long black elven leather coats. Also, I am still extremely scared that my baby brother can drive now.)

The film was ok. I very much liked the setting, thought it was utilised reasonably well, enjoyed being several steps ahead (as usual) of the dim cast of characters in working out what was happening, thought the plot was so-so and found the villains rather uninspiring. Got to have a minor geek-out during the end credits, where one of the villains (who weren't named in the film) was listed as "Strigoi".

I have written this time off as research. Research, in the name of Science and Adventure. Yes. Mwa ha ha ha!

It is the east, and Juliet is the Weft.

Which work of Shakespeare was the original quote from?

Get your own quotes:

This thing is spooky.
"Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments / Will hum about mine Weft, and sometimes voices." SCARILY ACCURATE AND TIMELY.
"How now, you secret, black and midnight Weft!" squee.
"Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts! Unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top full / Of direst Weft." Oh, Lady M, I luv you.
"Fear no more the heat o'the Weft / Nor the furious winter's rages." So what you're saying is, OTP.
"Give thy Weft no tongue." (…Let's not go there.)
"This above all: to thine own Weft be true." So what you're saying is, OTP.
"The tempter or the Weft, who sins most?" Mutt literally LOLd. (Slen can bear witness that am not misusing the word "literally" here.)

Nothing much to report, my troops bitches gadabout cohorts. I've been rereading the first two of Steph Swainston's Comet Jant Shira books (The Year of Our War and No Present Like Time) and have at last got on to the third.

The third is Modern Times — a less inspired name, I feel, although it may turn out to have some clever relevance — and is a signed copy, a thing of gamine book-next-door attractiveness, which I bought from eBay because it wasn't much more than the hardback price. I am going to return to it as soon as I get offline after posting this.

Looking forward to my week off. Nothing in particular is planned, apart from going to see Stardust with Slen. Although I didn't think much of the book, I'm cool with putting money in Gneil's pockets, and I have to admit I'm curious to see the… unicorn. >:}

The other problems I've mentioned seem as though they'll continue, i.e. Family Upset (which, I reiterate, doesn't concern me directly, which is great news for my sanity, but the whole thing is sad nonetheless, like the death of a craven, doddery parakeet) and health (I have a neurologist's appointment booked next Saturday morning; maybe he will cure me of this parenthetical asideosis).

True or not, it satisfies the major Friday afternoon requirement, i.e. is funny.

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