Book of Imaginary Things

I heard this on a Virgin Media ad during Flashforward. None of my flatmates knew what it was called, but one assured me entering "Virgin Media ad" into youtube would bring it up.

And it did.

It's been a music on youtube night for me. I can find songs on youtube that I can't find on legitimate mp3 download sites. If it wasn't also annoying, I would find that very funny in a world where the cost of digital storage space is trending towards zero.

Long before pirates vs ninjas, there were hippos vs crocs.

Caught on camera: hippos kill crocodile in rare clash


The photographer mentions mutual respect between animal groups. Clearly such respect is tenuous when it's based on teeth.

I love the great sea of information at which I peer via the screen of my laptop.

The Oy of Cooking

Humans.

Feh.

Normally when something becomes an internet meme or goes (relatively) mainstream, I lose interest in it, which is sort of what happened with me and the Cthulhu Mythos a few years back.

On the other hand, this is mildly funny.

Once, I watched a movie-length Justice League cartoon with some friends just because I wanted to prove it carried a not-so-subtle message for children everywhere: nuclear disarmament is bad.

Top 10 Bad Messages From Good Movies


Speaking as someone who loved his Lego as a child, I really hadn't thought of it that way, but it makes an eerie kind of sense.

You know the feeling of being locked in battle with the urge to write the story that is not the story you are doing for Nanowrimo?

There should be a word for that.

I wonder if the Germans have one?

I brought one of our campaigns to a grinding halt for ten minutes today when I tried to make a very simple enlargement to a field in one of the databases table. The lesson is learned: do not do such things to tables with millions of rows during work hours.

It really is an armpit-dampening experience, waiting for the cluster services to hop to the other node and for the database manager system to run its recovery scans of the databases, all the while aware that behind you the campaign team are taking calls but unable to log them.

A day when you learn something is a day not wasted, eh?

It's twenty past eleven and I haven't written a god-damned word. I can't even think of a title for this post.

Malaise seems more general though. Can't get interested in anything.

I may blame the Japanese beer I drank with dinner.


EDIT: Found half an hour's worth of words. We press on.

On the odds that aliens would be bipedal, like humans.

Will E.T. Look Like Us?

The back-and-forth at one stage points out there have been something like fifty billion species on Earth, and only one of them made it to intelligence. But it also touches on the possibility that if intelligence were more likely, then you could expect generations of intelligent species, perhaps separated by large amounts of time, to emerge from a single life-bearing world.

I've only ever seen this idea done well (if at all) in David Brin's Uplift novels and that was with genetic engineering.

What would it be like, a few million years hence, for our slender, smooth-bodied descendants to turn a single line of their thoughts towards Earth and see some new rough primate-types discovering a stone axe can be really useful?

The Apocalyptic Machine may have some design problems.

Baguette Dropped From Bird's Beak Shuts Down The Large Hadron Collider (Really)


Somewhere along the way, science lost the art of making doomsday devices. I weep for the future.

It would probably be worth my time to read a decent book about being an introvert one day. Not that there's likely to be any huge mysteries in it for me, nor is it likely to be therapeutic as I made my peace with being who I am a long time ago. Nevertheless, self-knowledge is always useful, and I'm not going to pretend I know everything about myself.

The Introvert's Corner

I've searched for ways to write about Spook Country without actually giving away the plot. Fortunately, Cory Doctorow beat me to it.

Spook Country


A fascinating novel. If you enjoyed Gibson's other books, you should like this one too.

Nanowrimo, eh?

Well now. Hmmm....

h/t petermball

I was just making myself a coffee.

"Do you know anyone who has a spare room and doesn't mind living with a drug dealer? He's trying to get out of his parents house. He only deals weed."

I had a weird fascination with certain police procedurals on TV a few years back. I also enjoyed the Discworld novels with the Nightwatch in them, particularly when they were whodunnits. I figured the Inspector Rebus novels by Ian Rankin were worth a look.

I rapidly established that neither branch of my local library has the first book. They have several of the much, much later books, but not the early ones. I went through various friends in London and came up empty there too.

Finally, I was in Pulp Fiction, the speciality book store in Brisbane, looking for a couple of books to get me back to London, and they had the entire range. I grabbed one I thought was the first and discovered, after half a dozen incidents of looking at the Rebus novels, that they have the volume number conveniently printed on the back.

I read part of the novel while unable to sleep on the flight from Brisbane to Singapore, and finished it slumped on a couch in Singapore's sprawling Changi Airport while hallucinating I was on my way back to Australia. Despite being exhausted, I was rivetted to the book. It's a well-written detective novel with a fascinating main character set in a nasty vision of Edinburgh, with some uncomfortably honest moments.

I got to the end and wondered where else he could go with it. After all, there's something like twenty or thirty Rebus novels. But wherever they go, I know I've got at least a few more of them in me.

So I went down to the Sainsbury's in Chiswick because I'd run out of antihistamines and cleverly forgot to put a new packet in my bag.

The place is busy. I'd love to use the self-service checkouts, despite how long they take to use, but I know from experience my purchase will require a supervisor's code. I go to the cigarette counter instead.

The old lady who I spotted holding up the entire counter as I went in is finally hobbling away. The line begins moving again. I step to the back of it.

An old guy with the grubby, weatherbeaten look of one of London's homeless meanders up to the line and joins it beside me. He is not, in the strictest sense, directly in front of me. But he's positioned in such a way that he has jumped the line.

"Mate," I say, "I'm in the queue."

"I know!" he says. Then he hurls the newspaper he's holding on the floor in front of me and shouts, "You buy it then!" He storms off.

I share a look of mixed embarrassment and amusement with the lady ahead of me in the line. I even pick up the newspaper and hand it to the guy who serves me.

No idea if the homeless guy grabbed another newspaper.

It feels like longer since I updated this.

This afternoon as a meeting wrapped up, my manager* said that I was very quiet today.

"I'm heavily medicated," I replied.



* I no longer have a single manager. I have a diffuse cloud of people to whom I report and through which my daily existence is managed. I have no idea which of them is supposed to give me a pay rise. If ever.

Been on antihistamines all week. I tend to forget how seethingly antisocial that makes me.

No client managers or team leaders were harmed in the course of this drug bender.

The Cosmic Horror of John Coulthart's Lovecraftian Illustrations

As surreal and horrible as you might hope for.