Book of Imaginary Things

Anyone noticed LJ ads lately? First time I've checked in a while.

The ad even pops up if I try to go to my friends page.

Current alternatives I am considering:

- Dreamwidth
- Blogger
- A hosted Wordpress account

Though it irritates like an itch, this decision is not high on my current list of priorities. A quick web search for "Wordpress Hosting" found packages more expensive than ".NET hosting" which can't be right so I need to spend slightly more than a couple of minutes research on the topic.

I just got forced to watch a small car ad clip when logging into LJ.

Is this what they're doing now? Because if so, this is where I start looking for how to import my LJ into some other blogging platform.

That last post, by the way, is my October burn-out in full throttle.

This is how fluid my sense of passing time is: I forget about it every year until I'm well into it. I'll be all frustrated and bored and anti-social. Insomnia will kick in, as it inevitably must, and as it certainly did last Sunday night. Finally I'll have a day like yesterday.

And then I realise I go through this every year.

The days are getting short, the cold's getting some bite to it, and it's been a while since I've had a good break.

But I have (provisionally) RED to go and see on Friday night with tallarn, a week off coming up (more programming study - but interesting study) and Christmas isn't far away (whatever it is I end up doing). I can look at the horizon while waiting for my train and see the red glow of sunset, and maybe the brightening Moon above it.

So yeah, I'll be fine. Just got to get through October.


When you're reading something, does the voice in your head change when you hit some brackets the way it does in mine? If the parenthesis is a real long one, I end up with what's almost like tension in my head that can only be released by a closing bracket. And if the closing bracket is missing, it just messes me right up.

There was a day at my first IT job when I remember spotting a more senior developer leaning over a desk and leafing through a technical requirements document with what I recognised, despite how little ability I have to read people, as despair.

As of today, some six or seven years later, I know that despair for my own.

There is a striking difference between a sentence that explains something to another person and a sentence that serves purely as a self-reminder. If my internal clients could do more of the former and less of the latter, I would like working for them more.

I'm not even angry. I should be angry but I lack the will.

in almost every picture #7


I wonder if some of the kids in the earlier ones are adults in the later ones.


Monster Commute - Goth Inside


New webcomic! Interesting enough that I've worked my way through about six months of archives.

And, well, my WoW habit isn't exactly common knowledge at work.

A short book set in Asher's Polity universe detailing the beginning and early stages of the war between the AI-run Polity and the Prador.
 
One of Asher's strengths is in his novel world-building. His planets are always populated by a fascinating range of monstrous predators. In his Spatterjay books he even fleshes out an entire vicious food chain. The Prador benefit tremendously from this. They're huge cannibalistic crab-like aliens with a nasty life cycle and, as they discover when they finally encounter humans in person, a real taste for human flesh.
 
(Not only are they entertaining villains, but he even gets you cheering for one or two of the plucky first-children in their perilous and usually fatal fight to reach adulthood.)
 
That said, Prador Moon is really more for people who are already invested in Asher's Polity universe, which I guess I can say I am after reading seven of his other books. It opens up some of the backstory of his other novels, giving interesting details about how, despite having the advantage of AIs, the Polity really struggled against the Prador in the beginning. I was also interested in the way he rolled technologies back from where they are in some of his earlier books, what with this being set in the past of those novels.
 
Plus, Jebel "Ucap" (Up Close And Personal) Krong - Asher always brings the cool stuff.

A Few Notes on the Culture

Need to read this later.

I had to work my way through fourteen episodes of House to figure out what this song was.

Nembutal for that dilated childhood



What with all the heavy-duty antihistamines I was on as a child, this really does feel right.

Particularly today. Took a mid-strength antihistamine this morning and got the full mood-swing side effect. I don't know how I got through today without screaming. I could hardly stand being there.