jack

Rules: http://liv.dreamwidth.org/459251.html

List of things in the order I like them, with one removed, and with three more added at the top, middle and bottom:

Maths
Twitter
Stuffed Dinosaurs
Nessie Ladle
Undercooked Aubergine

I'm sad the Nessie Ladle is so low down! It's totally awesome. But I decided Stuffed Dinosaurs were even better :)

I also took the liberty of mutating the rules, which wasn't explicitly asked for, but is implicitly in the rules by virtue of how humanity works :) And because I thought it might get ugly if I had to play "think of something worse than gender essentialism, think of something worse than that, ok, now worse than that..." Even if other people can make that an interesting conversation!

Happy bad pun day!

A word meme about five words associated with my journal.

Programming

This is what I do every day. And am interested in. As do/are many of my friends. Hence, I talk about it. Although funnily enough, I don't talk about it as much as you might think. I think I'm often embarrassed to do so, because of the chance I'll seem ridiculously ignorant about something, when I'm supposedly earning my salary as a programmer, or ridiculously pretentious for caring about something other people don't bother with.

Magic: The Gathering

I think Magic is a great game for geeks. I got into it slowly because I knew it would be a time and money sink, but it fulfils many of the criteria that are really enjoyable: it's possible (if you don't make a deck too ridiculous) to play a quick game in half an hour or less; it passes the time in a social fashion; there's enough skill and randomness that the better player usually wins, but that it's rarely devoid of interest; it has microcosms of just about every aspect of game theory; many of the cards are just shiny; it's a rule system that geeks love exploring; there are many different formats, ranging from completely casual to fiendishly competitive.

Of course, there are problems with it: if you get into it seriously, you will spend money one way or another, because the cards are ultimately produced by a company; it often draws out people's obsessive geeky-competitive tendencies (I don't know if that's because it's antisocial, or because it's social enough it's the only place you met people who will tend to be obsessive); the rules are quite well written, but undeniably complicated to pick up at once.

The weird thing is, it's one of the very few things I like I'm embarrassed to admit to many of my friends (obviously excluding people who like it like I do). Most people I know are tolerant in the sense that they won't blame me for liking something, even if they do think it's puerile. But (I'm not sure if this is accurate) I still get a vibe that liking magic is somehow "sad". That although you can like many hobbies, pouring energy into magic is a disproportionate obsession the way liking TV or roleplaying isn't. And I think I subconsciously know what people mean, but I can't put words to why that should be so.

Fantasy

I'm going to assume this is about fiction and not about unfulfilled dreams :)

At some point when I was a teenager I started liking science fiction and fantasy. I can't remember a clear transition. Partly that's because scifi/fantasy is what a lot of children's books quite naturally are.

I remember finding Asimov's "Caves of Steel" sophisticated and intellectual when I was about 10.

I can't ever remember noticing a clear distinction between science fiction and fantasy until I made friends with the sort of people who argued about that sort of thing at university. I mean, I would have known there was a difference, but I would instinctively be drawn to either.

In principle, I would have thought what would draw me to the genres was the interest in hypothetical questions. I'm sure I did like much classic SF on that ground, and still enjoy (rare) engineering-heavy SF. But in fact, a lot of what drew me in was the sort of stories told, which are often more evident in fantasy than SF.

Things mostly under control, though still much faff to do in the evenings.
CTS, gah, should have advertised beerfest instead, couldn't becky have said *before*?
Thinking about over summer, acting etc.

( Temporarally cut for broken html )

You know what I'm doing from so many of my other posts, so I'll just say: I am happy.

(Despite work not being quite as productive as it should be this week and today, but I'm only about half an hour behind, and should be leaving by 6.30)

Code: <div style="border: 2px solid darkgreen; padding: 3px;"><p style="text-align: center"><b>Monday and Friday meme</b></p><p>Most people tend to blog when they feel a certain way, which gives a distorted impression of them. To add extra representativeness, choose two times a week and copy this meme, every time, posting how you feel right then, however briefly.</p><p>I choose Monday and Friday 2.00pm (except bank holidays)</p></div>

How many times has someone on your friends list posted about something and you were really confused, but you didn't want to ask because you knew you SHOULD know? How many times have you felt 'guilty' asking a close LJ friend a question that should be 'obvious'?

Stupid guilt. It's maybe inevitable, but I think encouraging asking "By the way, what did you mean about...?" is good. It's the best way of finding out interesting things about me, especially things I wouldn't *write* a post about :) But there are *other* reasons for not asking, such as not wanting to be impolite, or to intrude, or not getting round to it.

If you've missed a few things, missed an entry and are confused, ask me any thing. Even something EXTREMELY basic, like where I live! I'm not allowed to get even slightly irritated at any of the questions - we've all missed things before. In turn, you may repost this in your own journal. ;)

From eni: very insightful. ( Over half of Americans are officially cartesiandaemon. )

Wow, I use the word 'dick' a lot. (here, if you want to see the meme) This surprised me: afaik I don't use the word 'dick' at all.

It's not something I tend to swear with. I generally use something inventive, or 'fuck'.

It's not something I call people -- to me someone being a 'dick' has a subtle distinction from similar insults, suggesting someone who is obnoxious, and not deliberately maelevolent, but specifically accepts their behaviour and makes no effort to change it.

It's not something I call a penis except in occasional jest. I've annoyed or endeared a couple of people by being basically unable to call a penis anything but a spade penis.

And then I remembered - I had a long post about translating spotted dick into spanish. That was probably it.

It reminded me of Gene Wiengarten testing his spam filter. He found several emails about female dogs, gut men porn at monmouth, and the like vanishing, and then when he was thinking the threshold was too high, got a "see a teen girl do it with her horse its[1] free", and commented "They still have some kinks to work out of the system. As it were."

This sort of thing keyword filtering isn't going to catch, and indeed would be quite difficult to filter for even with fairly decent language processing, though normally gives itself away by having html, pictures, non-existant words, links, or 1En copies.

[1] sic.

I'm the tarot hermit. I suspect a lot of people might be -- all my answers were veering between literature and science. I am intrigued by the tarot, though predictably don't have any belief in the supernatural. But it was going to be instrumental in a short story, and I like the heritage, and the idea of different decks representing the same thing in different ways, and perhaps even the idea of a reading just as introspection.

Piers Anthony has several books obsessed with it, another aspect of him that I find quite pleasing, slightly worrying, and overwhelmed by others.

There was a choice of five decks: cat, chinese, dragon, fantastic and winged. I expected the dragon to be coolest and the cat people to be kinky, but of all the pictures I liked this old man the best.
( Read more... )