<insert crazy ramblings here>

Small boy fails at chemistry, tickled my inner Geek.
It's the that sort of strip that keeps SMBC on my trawl list. At times the Black Comedy is a bit too Black.

I've certainly suffered from the too many email accounts problem. I've been trying to tidy up my address book, since I lost my phone, and I've got about 5 email addresses for some people.

Hey it's one of the Myers-Briggs personality test thingies. I've never got around to taking it before.

Seems I'm ENTP.

Extraverted 56%
Intuitive 50%
Thinking 12%
Perceiving 44%

It's all just seeing what you want to see, but fun nevertheless. (Please don't hate me tiny Carl Jung!)

Just try it look up your opposite and I bet you can still see lots of places where you think, "yeah, that's me."

Seen on johncoxon .

Can anyone explain how A5 letters fit through my letterbox with ease, but DVDs and CDs which are shorter in width and length do not? Forcing me to go down to the post office to pick them up.

While we're on the subject, I don't think I've ever received my Council Tax demand until after the due date. The council say they post them all on time.

*sigh* It's enough to drive you to drink.

Incidentally, I found that I was out of honey last night. Sweet liqueurs (Glayva in this case) make an excellent substitute for honey, in a honey mustard salad dressing :)

( Way Out? )

I saw this a couple of days ago while wandering around Holborn. It felt like I'd run across one of those phone booths that can get you out of the Matrix. I was going to try the door, but I like it in here ;)

Prompted to post by seeing this post on the need for emergency entrances.

Yes it's puerile and immature, but I love it when foriegn words sound rude in English


Silly shops in Paris, France.

Inspired by

Silly shop names in Cologne, Germany.

{edit: Just in case Superfluous Apostrophe reads this post, here's a comic for you}

Stone by Adam Roberts.

( Disclaimer )

Plot:
A criminal (a one in a billion throwback) is helped to escape from a very ingenious jail in a star. A condition is he must kill every human on a planet somewhere, or he will be turned over to the police. This is even harder than it sounds as all humans (except him as his punishment) have nanotechnology keeping them healthy. The only contact he has with his "employers" is via an AI grown in his skull.

He visits a few of planets, and cosmological phenomena, before, well, the resolution of the book.

A series of incoherent thoughts:

Quantum Mechanics is weird:
The main conceits are Nanotechnology and Quantum mechanics. It's used a few times to explain how things work in this universe, that don't currently in ours (such as FTL travel, and Intelligence). It's internally consistent, if not completely in accord with what I understand about the real world. That makes this Space Opera, but not Hard SF. Not that that's a bad thing. I do think the explanations of technology were at a good level. We get given some theory, but don't get bogged down in it. Then again, maybe I'm not the best judge of that, I like lots of infodump ;)

Characterisation:
This story is told out loud, by a Sociopath, about his earlier solo mission. It's pretty clear this story isn't going to be about relationships. The other characters who he does run across are all quite distinct, not cut from cookie cutters, and enjoyable. Ae himself though is quite likeable for someone who's trying to murder a planet.

Language:

One aspect of the world building is a language. There's lots of foot notes on the translation of the language into English. This language is supposedly derived from English, but has drifted over the years. This adds some sense realism as it really does feel like the sort of issues that translators come across. However, I found it quite jarring.

I felt the language drift was conveyed much better in the "Wellhello", which everyone says a greating. It's a nice bit of slang that: shouldn't become dated, is easy to decipher, and never appears in the middle of paragraphs, so doesn't give you a jolt. Plus I tend to associate "Well, hello" with the start of a Cory Doctorow's podcast, so it already feels futuristic ;)

Damnit!

As soon as I get an internet connection working on my phone, TFL remove the Live Departure Boards from their WAP site.

I'll just have to visit their WWW departure boards to figure out if Archway or Finsbury Park is down today.

So far I've found Gmail's, librarything's WAP sites.
Any other good ones I should know about?

There's been a lot of lesbians in webcomics this year.

I can't recall as many in previous years.

Is this a trend, a coincidence, or have I just not been observant before?

{edit: Cross posted to Snarkoleptics }

Sod any attempt at making this flow too nicely. I've already got a couple more posts planned on explaining why I hate writing.
I'll try and treat, the early posts at least, as some sort of stream of of conciousness, and not spend forever agonising of the exact word to use in each place. This post in particular I'm going to write damn quick, and resist any editing.

There's a weird contradiction going on here. I can speak pretty rapidly, and with excessive verbosity, but when I write I usually end up with very terse documents. Occasionally to the point where context is missing, and people have difficulty understanding it. I'm really bad at going back and padding out things where I have a word limit, but feel I've said it all. Another example is redundancy. Redundancy is too redundant for me. People will act on my emails, and docs, but have missed one or two sentences that are clarifications, or warnings, and miss them. This probably stems from being a very slow writer as a kid. I hated writing anything twice.

As a couple of examples from the last a posting policy (I decided did need re-writing).

I wrote: "I guess I should just go with what feels right. But when I have to slow down and linearise my thoughts to the speed I can write at." Which firstly sounds horribly pretentious, and secondly is completely redundant with the "I'm probably overthinking this" which followed.

I spent ages trying to find the right word for this sentence "Entries are on point".
I did have "Entries are on a topic" but then I thought: well that doesn't capture what I mean. It sounds like What I mean is that any individual entry is about something other than the authors own life. Like a link dump, or a review, or a newspost, or something. But that's far too long, and untidy for a bullet point, and I don't want to to expand each point into a whole paradise.

Even though I've tried to treat this as a stream of conciousness, I've gone back and added lots of clarifications as I think of them, and realise that the don't fit when I think of them, and the sentence can be read ambiguously.

Ick. This is so introspective it hurts.

Also I'm writing this (offline) on a train, and I think it's taken over 30 minuets! And I'm really trying to write this quickly. If each post takes this long ... Still there's a tale I heard that someone (Leonardo da Vinci?) decided that he needed to learn to draw, and took pen to paper, and drew an appalling portrait, and said "Well only 999 more rubbish drawings to go".
So come back in 997 posts is you want some coherency ;)