I just realised I never posted these after all. You should've reminded me, guys!

For those who haven't been watching long, I received these pictures after winning the art exchange on the "Jack" webcomic's fan forum with my picture of SwarmCrow. I worked hard on the picture and was delighted to win. Since all the members are furry artists, for my turn I asked for Weft drawn as a Tonkinese.

Here are all BUT ONE of the images I received of Weft-as-Tonkinese-furry.

(The BUT ONE is a Third Picture™ by Salkafar, and thus NSFW. Salkafar is the resident furvert on the art exchange and likes to draw all the entrants in bondage gear.)

Special mention to Skurvy. Damn, dude. My soulful little self-loathing killer never looked so huggable.

In working out what mental gymnastics Weft needs to go through in order to reply to a question, I got down to first principles. Here's the first draft of my workings. St Benedict, that old advocate of whipping young boys, was a little helpful in this case, though my general reading and absorption over the last few years working in religion was probably moreso. The Mercies have a lot of (the sensible bits of!) Islamic attitude in the mix, and even some ideas from religions of more recent mainstream recognition.

read more...

A bit late for the 4th of July, but Will Smith has managed to upload a virus to the mothership, which luckily runs MacOS just like his laptop, to steal the aliens' World of Warcraft passwords. This is true and if you don't believe me you can ask Cpl Xfigh'mistper'kelebug'gerzut, who is very upset that all xes time spent exp grinding was wasted and has released this statement in xes alien language: "WTF HAX GTFO U N00B".

Giant panda cub. Or not so giant compared to its mother. This video is WHOA. Stronger neuterthings than me would wince at those teeth.

I live in the second happiest place in Britain. (And also the self-harming capital. Not sure how that works.) Britain's happiest places mapped, with video.

Files on secret agency revealed. With great quotation about putting an abbess in charge of a brothel.

Not content with exclaiming "Ruddy ducks!" as a descriptive yet therapeutic safety valve, they've now moved on to shooting the things.

Meanwhile, fish are saving everyone the trouble by just randomly dying.

The latest eviction from the house - spider-style!

Here's more about the camel 'spider' (an arachnid, but not a spider: rather they're their own order, like scorpions), and a video. It seems there are quite a lot of Iraq troops posting videos of themselves playing with camel spiders.

A man who chose "Lloyds is pants" as his telephone banking password said he found it had been changed by a member of staff to "no it's not".

This just in: raising dogs and raising children have notable similarities. Practise on your children before getting a dog.

Social factors - rather than genetics - are to blame for huge variations in ill health and life expectancy around the world, the WHO concludes. This is a bit 'no shite, science!' but at least it leaves nobody with any excuse for trying to claim poor Africans die young because they've got cruddy genes. You have any idea how much genetic diversity Africa has compared to us pansy north-westerners? Cradle of hominids, dimwits...

Seal's return to wild put on ice

Conservationists in Cornwall had to rescue him twice from warmer waters near Africa and Spain. 'Rescue', huh? Is there something wrong with allowing him to move south to warmer climes? He can, y'know, swim vast distances...

Gene therapy 'may repair hearing'. This is awesome because it's... well, it's hair regrowth therapy really, innit? And packaging it as that, rather than helping the deaf and hard of hearing, is where the money is.

Pink Floyd get Polar Prize

Rottweiler fights pit bull to save boy, while Staffies are being bred to fund the drugs trade.

Disabled access to Herm is far from ideal, the island's current manager has admitted.

This great tip has just allowed me to do something very clever-seeming at work:
Manipulating SSI variables with regular expressions

If the above phrase means nothing to you, have instead a puppy with hiccups.

Plans for new Torchwood revealed. I predict moar zomgmalekissing.

Well. Say what you like about the juvenility of it all, at least someone's doing it. Let's hear it for saturating the market! Because I'm jolly sick of gay kisses making headline news as though they're rare and pervy and controversial.

As an asexual, I wince whenever there's an on-screen kiss, including gay ones. As a bleeding-heart liberal I constantly worry that this makes me look homophobic, or even subconsciously be homophobic. Am I not a prize idiot? I suppose I'm glad to have the opportunity to stress about such petty things instead of worrying where my next meal's coming from.

(Also, there's a rainbow flag flying from one of the flagpoles along my walk into work. I don't know why it's there, but it makes me vaguely yay, even though weirdly-gendered asexuals aren't actually guaranteed to be any more safe and accepted among GLBTs than among other folks.)

Vandals damage dead royal dude's tombstone

Wind farms harm bats

Hawk (up)drafted in to kill seagulls

What a surprise! As I predicted, a brilliant new plan to deal with seagulls without telling people to stop strewing rubbish!

Let's go and fly a (red) kite! (That man has a bukkit.)

Take up thy robot legs and walk. This is great. As the article says, just moving as they evolved to do is hugely beneficial for legs. It must surely slightly increase the chance of recovering some nerve function. (Plus, robot legs. Dude. If I'm ever spinally pwned I want robot legs.)

Red squirrels get pox protection

Most people have an "above average" number of feet. Surprised? Er, not really... Myself, I have the modal and median number of feet.

What to do when planes lose pressure. (Eat the pilot!)

All pupils to learn about slavery. Odd. I thought it was already compulsory, I guess because I remember we studied it. (Apparently I can chillingly well put myself into the mind of a slaver, according to my homework grades. I hope this reassures you.)

Computer sold on eBay with bank details. Luckily, it was bought by an honest man. Mmmmm, BBC server room...

KILL THEM. THROW THEM OFF A TOWER.

There's stuff about self-harm rates in Manchester and Scotland, but you'll have to look those up yourselves if interested. The subject makes me too furious.

Have Germans got a sense of humour? Ja, and it involves trousers?

T-1000s just around the corner, reports Intel

We are literally watching technology move at an ever increasing pace. Literally? Only if you're watching the world land speed record attempt.

Argentina's latest reluctant celebrity is a middle-aged mother named La China, who has discovered that no good deed goes unpunished after she saved an abandoned baby human.

Bizarre ER gets animal spin-off show. I misread one paragraph as "featuring a toad with a cyst on its head that had a tooth in it", which really WOULD have been bizarre.

Why do Asians hate dogs? (British usage of 'Asian', meaning South Asian) It'd never struck me as a racial thing before, either. Good article.

An in-depth article about Coptic Christians/the Coptic Orthodox Church, brand new and shiny. (No, really shiny. Look at Shenouda with his rather impressive hat.)

For the Jack forum art exchange. Prof Hunnydew requested blind dates of their character with the entrants' various characters. So, of course, I put in my favourite of all.

The oddest of odd couples - full picture and text behind cut.

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A picture of Piper doing what he does best, or at least most enthusiastically, apart from eating.

Very rough sketch in between drawing something a little more sensible.

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.

Bah. Not that I'm surprised.

I don't know if it's a side effect of the summer or what, but there are practically no religion news stories. We divide our news into religion news and ethics news nowadays and on the last two days there have only been three religion stories. Not even enough to fill the feed on the homepage!

Oh, and the cat-led¹ smear campaign against dogs continues! Now pets make you snore, which causes cerebrovascular accidents.

In other words: in Soviet Britain, dogs stroke you!!!

Rare treasure found on farmland

An end to spaghetti power cables, which will please the coworker who's desperately trying to stop people walking past his desk because his external hard drive's power supply is so temperamental that footsteps keep stopping it in the middle of processing huge files.

Combat plan for seagull nuisance. Any bets it will involve telling people to stop being so filthy and strewing rubbish in streets and landfills? Hah, fat chance.

Misheard lyrics. Patronising presenters and horrible members of the public murdering songs! Mmmm, Paranoid Android.

Isn't it irritating when people cock snooks at people who know stuff? Yes, those of us who bother learning the words are in the wrong! Like oh my gawd, who is sad enough to read the little booklets in their albums? (Also, if you can't make out the words on telly, what's wrong with subtitles, moron?)

Oh, and the Beatles lyric they mention is right. I think it may be "matter" instead of "matted"; either way, there certainly is custard dripping from a dead dog's eye. Oh you crazy Liverpudlians.

Speaking of Message in a Bottle: Message bottle found 23 years on

This one is sad. The little whale who's been trying to suckle from passing boats has been put down. Obviously I think they should've done more...

This is cool. Reminds me of the oldschool hard white-hats who used to sneak into buildings and leave little cards reading "Bomb".

Apparently this is the best joke at Edinburgh! What? Sadistic smirk territory at most, and to boot it's just a generic joke adapted to the stupid celebrity of the moment. I'm dismayed if there's nothing funnier than that out there.

Postage stamps mark Olympic Flag handover

Can Brits make bucks from blogging? Never occurred to me. Hey guys, subscriptions to this blog now cost, um, $1 or something?

What are bridges for these days? If you thought it was for crossing rivers, canals and railway tracks, think again. Like blogs, bridges too are for profit. Monetise your viaducts today!

Kerrang awards, including inspiration award for Metallica.

Venerable monkey puzzle tree avoids chop

Corruption threatening China rainforest. Oh, just wonderful.

¹ You mark my words...

Ugh, metallic taste in the back of my throat. I can't tell if it's the eye infection (I tasted metal all the time my tooth was infected, too) or the spray deodorant I've been using the last few days (I normally use a 48hr roll-on - much kinder on skin).

UGH.

Either way, I don't like the taste of heavy metal. (I wonder what hyper speedy happy power metal tastes like. I think it tastes like pomegranate, white grape, peach and white chocolate. Not that I'm saying I'm a woofter or anything, oh no...)

Also, one of my 'spensive earbuds went and broke on me this morning. >:( Next time I'm getting external noise-cancelling ones. I prefer in-ear, but they're too damn fragile. Ah well, another thing to research and purchase.

Oh yes, need messenger bag too. Rucksack's zip is barely holding on to life. I've had this thing since my uni days, despite not particularly liking it (think it was a present). I don't replace stuff until it unequivocally dies. (I'm going to go for an expensive type recommended by people on GeekUp as very robust.)

Which reminds me, new battery for QuadruPod too. Darn stuff. Roll on biotech engineered from invasive nanomycelia, I say! Or, alternatively, solar patches and motion power.

We have a winner! It's "take your dog to work" day for one burglar.

Some monkey business on a Japanese train station. It looks rather like those macaques you see bathing in the hot springs.

Twirly trees in Liverpool. I have concerns for their root system, but measuring the effects of even sunning would be a great experiment. You can't, needless to say, normally do that with trees.

Clegg of the Lib Dems unveils a green energy plan and it's shiny and wonderful. And not at all spurred by oil wars in Georgia. Either way, green energy self-sufficiency is about the sexiest thing I've heard all day.

Black holes 'dodge middle ground'. It seems that you can have a little one or a big one, but they haven't found any middleweights yet.

There is, of course, the obvious problem when trying to look for a BLACK hole in SPACE. They get round this by looking for distinctive X-ray noise, rather than sticking pins in patches of black.

Wetlands created for rare birds. Hey, birdies! Look at this nice digger! Now nest where it's been! Good job birdies are dim.

Superdoctors - "the Indiana Jones of surgery". A non-surgical treatment for club foot, brought about by necessity (shortage of surgeons) in Malawi, proves to be better than the standard UK procedure. Everyone wins.

New steam loco arrives for tests

Drop in East European migration. :(

Six key species get woodland aid. With mugshots. Warning: includes red squirrel doing the Puss in Boots pose - you know the one.

Look, no. NO. If someone has served his time, come out of prison and started his own business, this is a good thing. Good! Not grounds for media kerfuffle!

Hidden historic snails unearthed in a stately home.

Fruit juice 'could affect drugs'

Have you ever heard the phrase "tiger kidnappings"? New one on me. It's nothing to do with tigers, except in the tenuous sense of hunting by stalk and ambush.

Dog stolen from animal sanctuary—oddly, not a purebreed.

No 10's Clarkson video is a joke. And a funny one. And a cheap one (just look at the quality of production). So lighten the heck up.

Actually, speaking of video editing, here are a couple of really cool demos from the SIGGRAPH conference. Unwrap Mosaics and using static photographs to enhance video. Really cool. If you still thought you can trust what you see with your eyes, well, you can't, so there.

Africa in pictures purple!

This is not news. [insert generic despair for mankind]

This shouldn't be news! Why should it be unusual for girls to take leading roles? Even if this is a film about Playboy models and starring a very conventionally beautiful blonde girl and I find it reeheeheeeeally hard to believe it's feminism.

Cavemen's descendants traced. Lucky things! That's so cool!

'Zero tolerance' over stray dogs

I can't decide if this rivalry with Aus is ridiculous or just a bit of fun.

Machine 'sniffs out skin cancer'. Know what's also good at this? Dogs! Dogs for everyone! More canine super-surgeons! Cost less to train than humans.

Robert Winston talks about the downsides of surgical robots. I'm liking these recent promotional clips with actual content in them (this one's plugging a TV programme tonight). It gives them more permanent value.

Bus stops to have recycling bins. Bet the driver still ends up having to scoop everything in.

Putting percentages in context, aka "why percentages bandied about in headlines are pretty much guaranteed to be meaningless, I mean honestly, stop and think about it for a second".

And finally, cow beauty contest.

Wild dolphins teach each other to tail-walk ("darling, I learned it on that spa trip, it's the latest technique...")

American 'Bigfoot' is gorilla suit. I can't pretend to be surprised (I mean, have you seen the photos? They're rubbish)... or pretend not to be just a little disappointed.

Of course, one fake Bigfoot doesn't disprove anything to do with English spectral hounds, which clearly exist, because they're too cool not to.

The magpie is the 'only non-mammal' 'proven' to recognise its own reflection. All you parrot owners who give your birds mirrors: your birds are stupid and think it's another bird. Wow, science. *shakes head*

Rare Bechstein's bat found by UK research team

Metal elegy for British soldier who died in Iraq (no clips, sadly)

Back pain eased by good posture. (Wow, science.) What this story's really saying that the Alexander technique, which teaches good postural habits, seems to work better than massage or throwing painkillers at it. (Again, wow.)

Horse news!

Obese horse numbers increasing. Gratuitous baby palo ahoy!

Woman jailed for selling 'dangerous' pony to child

All in all, I'm reminded of Thelwell's ponies. (Fox lovers, check out his hunting images.)

Martha, hand me mah lynchin' boots.

Audio slideshow of Ripley's Believe It or Not! exhibition in London. Worth it for the duck at 1:21. Aren't those fun-house tunnel things fun? Darn, now I want to go.

Teddy camera catches carer thief. Sheer greatness. Who'd want to be pwned by that? (pictured on linked page)

The mystery of the humming noise! (No, it's not an overheating iPod nano.)

Pedigree dogs plagued by disease. This, to be fair, does depend somewhat on the breeder. For example, when my father got his dog it had to be a pedigree (of course *rolls eyes*) and the breeder had certificates to show that their dogs were free of hip dysplasia, which is a notorious problem with Labs and Goldens. Breeders aren't daft and pretty much know what they're doing, so if you get one who thinks it pays to be ethical you should be relatively ok.

Puppy farmers, on the other hand, should be suspended from the annoyingly loud industrial-style air conditioning pipes in this office and flogged with... hmm... those empty coat hangers and drying umbrellas over there. Yeah, ok, I'll think up something more creative when my brain's switched on.

Another clip.

An ailing brain with imagination undimmed

You're Britain's second best-selling author, also called the most shoplifted, and the papers have never heard of you except when they want to stir up fake rows with JKR. Then you get a little brain disease, and suddenly...

The secrets of the brain. Surgery. AWESOME. The brain is so beautiful.

Brain's counting skill 'built-in'

Police dog saves thief from river

Antidepressants link to poor driving. Yet another reason I don't bother. (Others being that I wear contact lenses and am dyspraxic, and consider those to be two real dangers to the public should I ever get behind the wheel of a death machine.)

Firefighters in dramatic double pet rescue!!!

Yew cuttings used for chemotherapy drugs

Woot, victory! Check out the ending quote from someone who sounds like a despicable person: The Supreme Court's desire to promote the homosexual lifestyle at the risk of infringing upon the First Amendment right to free exercise of religion is what the public needs to learn about

Advocates for Faith and 'Freedom' huh? How about the freedom to impose your blind, irrational superstitions on others instead of resigning when it becomes clear you won't (not can't) do the job you're paid to do? Is that a good use of your constitutional rights? Yeah!

Because OMG, a lesbian somewhere is having a child! This prevents me eating bits of Jesus on Sundays and forces me to convert to Druze!!!!!!! Dear Xolotl, these wankers make me so angry.

Dramatic pictures of a woman artificially 'aged' to show what sunbeds do to you.

Worldwide battle for water (yeah, no kidding)

Monks' drinks business to develop

I'd advocate corporal punishment for this creep, but what'd be the point? Make 'im wear a pink shalwar for a week...

Islamic authorities in the Nigerian city of Bauchi have reportedly launched a crackdown on sex workers identified by the Red Cross in a census. But don't worry, they say they're only arresting them and inspecting them for HIV. Or something. Yep.

Picnics without plastic. I'd still point out that disposable anything isn't ideal. Making paper (etc) plates still uses resources. Personally I have no objection to people buying solidly-made plastic dishes (or any other tough, hygienic and safe material, of course), bringing them home and reusing them.

......

I only wish the penguin had been given a hereditary peerage.

Huskies and Japanese lunchbreak

Ohh, well done BBC, just heard of ReCAPTCHA there...

Haredim in Jerusalem

Legal battle over Watchmen film

Best.