Entries tagged with misc

Current Mood: restless

Entry tags:

miscellaneous

This is one of the best optical illusions I've yet seen: http://www.patmedia.net/marklevinson/cool/cool_illusion.html Focusing on the central cross, a moving green circle appears, and if one really focuses, all the purple ones gradually disappear.

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The beta of Inform 7 was released a day or two ago. And it is such a radical redesign over what Inform 6 used to provide that it may very well actually push me back to writing Interactive Fiction after some years' absence. Besides the unified GUI enviroment so that I won't need to struggle with compiler/interpreter/editor, the language itself has been redesigned to the point that its source reads like natural English..

Really it's so amazingly radical a redesign that it feels inappropriate that they didn't change the name "Inform" completely... Or atleast call it "Inform++" or something.

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I dunno what I was thinking but I signed myself up for the femgenficathon orchestrated by

gehayi The prompt I was given has already sparked some ideas. The deadline is far enough ahead that I'll probably have the time to turn them into a story too. Probably.

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Iraq is #4 in the most failed states of the world listing. Same ranking as last year but the numerical score has actually worsened. Not much surprise there, just more bitter validation of the stupidity of invading it in the first place.

Greece is in the 26th *best* place -- while Scandinavia tops the list.

Current Mood: relaxed

Entry tags:

misc

misc

Three new books today -- "The Wee Free Men" and "A Hat Full of Sky" by Terry Pratchett, and the "Rachel & Leah" book by Orson Scott Card. Coolness. Getting right into them.

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Anyone at all interested in me doing the "DVD commentary" thingy for my own stories? To understand what I'm talking about go see what e.g.

gehayi has been recently doing with her own stories.

To tell the truth I can't think that that many people would be interested (I'm neither as prolific, nor as widely-read as *most* people doing this, I think). And it'd feel even more like wanking than usual to do this "dvd commentary" without anyone at all being interested in it.

*g* But eh, if people really are interested, please reply with which of my stories I should do this thing first. Comments of generic support without such a stated preference I will appreciate but not treat as indications of *real* interest. Sorry about that! :-)

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On a different matter, I think I'll get myself a more proper blog for the *politics*-related posts. Livejournal doesn't feel like the best available medium -- it lacks trackback and other such functions that would allow me to be a more integrated part of the blogosphere. Plus, ofcourse, having fandom, politics and personal issues all in the same journal of mine probably bores the hell out of those friends of mine that wouldn't give a damn for two-out-three of these things. :-)

I'm gonna go check out some blog services, to see what's the best available around...

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And yeah, I'm looking forward to "Googlepages" becoming available to everyone. Wanna move out of Angelfire too, and don't want to again become dependent on my ISP (Otenet), since I may soon want to switch away from there.

Entry tags:

misc

New icon scheme!

All three icons, courtesy of

homasse. If you like them, bless her talent -- if you *dis*like them, blame my requests and source images. :-)

"In the prosperous excess, the people had already become as gods."
"The Absolute, sufficient heretofore as "God", could not also forgive this affront, and thus His punishment rained down."

The words are Tokyo Babylon (a manga), the image is a map of Numenor (from Tolkien's universe). This will, for the time being atleast, become my new general-purposes icon.

Two more new icons also, one I'll be using for all sorts political/international posts, and one for fannish issues.

The verse is from Les Miserables. The only problem with this icon is that you can't see well enough the oceans of blood -- I'd been thinking of something slightly more obviously apocalyptic. ;-). Ah, well: Still a great icon.

Now for fannish issues, there was a choice of two:

I liked them both, but in the end I think I'll be going with the first one -- Though I really love the "I forget them after I kill them" in the background of the second, I think the first one shows more clearly why I chose a Peter Pan reference for my fandom-related icon.

*g* I may change one or more of these icons, mind you, in a while, after I've learned to make icons of my own. But for the time being, these are it. Thank you again j-chan! *g*

Entry tags:

misc

Internet Activism?

Taking this (word for word, link for link :-) from

gehayi:

Reclaiming A Word:
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The word "Jew" has been googlebombed by an anti-Semitic group which wants its definition of "Jew" to be the first that shows up on a websearch. If you would like to combat the hate, please link to the Wikipedia definition of "Jew". Your link tag needs to include the word "Jew" in order for it to work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew
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Mind you, I think that probably Google itself will soon intervene to remove the antisemites' page from its listings, but until that time no reason not to do our best.