Folk clubs down my way (long way from Yorkshire) always sing 'While Shepards Watched' to the tune of Ilkley Moor - it's not unusual. The guy who wrote this clearly didn't visit enough folk clubs... It's a lovely tune and really lends itself to harmony.

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Tags: fail, gender, livejournal, wtf!
Current Mood: sick

Getting Charlie to pose for his Christmas picture last year was easy - just lay him in the crib in his holiday onesie, tickle his feet, and snap pictures. This year getting him to stay in one place for any length of time has been nearly impossible! Also difficult: separating him from his pacifier, and getting him to interact with red and green props on cue (Yes, I am a cheeseball). But the results have been entertaining. The one formal-looking pose was achieved by spinning him in the spinny chair and quickly stopping it and snapping the picture. More than once. He was kind of dizzy by the time we were done, but I explained to him that we must suffer for art.


( Many more pics behind the cut. )

Tags: charlie, holidays

I am here. I would heartily appreciate some internet love.

If you're name's on there, send me a link and I'll send the love right back!

( Tweets enclosed )

Tags: twitter

Considering the sentence below, and its multiple negatives:

In various cases, the Courts have declined to rule that a planning obligation is not immaterial merely because it fails to follow the guidance [of the Secretary of State in circulars and Planning Policy Guidance Notes on the use of planning obligations.]

Reading this - what do *you* think the position of the Courts is?


Ouch.

Tags: *that* was the bad thing!, pointy head, study
Current Mood: frustrated
Current Music: Christina Aguilera - "Dirrty"

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I have two awesome ideas for gay t-shirts.

One is not my idea, its one I saw and wished I'd got.

'Yes we are , no you can't watch'

and my own, as cunning argument for the religious right.

'Thou shalt not lie with a man as thy would a woman' - 'ok then'!

http://tamarindandthyme.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/pappardelle-bolognese-in-a-day/

Good things:
paper in, I might be due to get some money.

Bad things:
lots of african countires walked out of session today rather then be rail roaded. Not a bad thing they walked out, bad thing they were trying to rail road them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCFCeJTEzNU

Silent monks singing the Hallelujah chorus. Courtesy xanna's mum and her nutty friends. BEST THING EVAR!!

Tags: monks, singing, web

"It is not often that large-scale crises are due to intellectual error, but a single erroneous belief runs through all of the successive delusions of the past decade. With few exceptions, both left and right seem to think that history is a directional process whose end point - after many unfortunate detours - will be the worldwide duplication of people very like themselves." John Gray, "The End of a Dream," New Statesman, December 10, 2009. (h/t nytimes.com: "Idea of the Day: A Decade of Big Bad Ideas," 12/14/09)

Tags: philosophy
Current Mood: okay

sitting on the train listening to Smalltown Boy. Window seat :)

Post from mobile portal m.livejournal.com

Something that struck me whilst playing Shadow of the Colossus: A COLOSSUS'S FIST if you call Agro whilst fighting a Colossus, Wander's cry is much more urgent than it is when you call her in a Colossusless situation. It's a tiny detail, but a rather nice one.

Also, if you're not holding a weapon and press Circle whilst riding Agro, Wander will pat her neck. It is sort of adorable.


The eleventh Colossus is so tiny I am not sure it really counts as a Colossus! Many months ago, I dreamt that I was fighting a 'Colossus' of about the size of a cow and was amused when I woke up by how thoroughly my subconscious had missed the point of a 'Colossus'; I hadn't realised it was foreshadowing.

Then I fell off a waterfall twice on my journey to the twelfth. It was embarrassing and rather horrible. Struggling helplessly against the current! I'm sorry, Wander.


After defeating the twelfth Colossus, I managed to swing the camera at such an angle that it gave me a close-up of Wander, and then paused, puzzled, when I noticed that he appeared to have black veins on his face. Had those always been there? He seemed quite young; it struck me as an unusual character feature.

Then I read up to where I was in twilit_wanderer's gamelogs and realised that she'd been commenting on the weirdness of Wander's appearance for some time; I'd kept thinking, 'hmmm, I didn't notice anything, but I'll check that out the next time I play,' and then completely forgetting.

So I reloaded the game, steered Wander into a corner so the camera could have a good look at him, looked up an image from the opening for comparison, and, no, I'm not imagining things. His hands and face and neck are veiny; his clothes are dirty and tattered; his hair is matted and almost black (it was red when the game began). With every colossus Wander kills, his appearance deteriorates just a little more. His girlfriend, meanwhile, is looking far more vibrant than she used to.

I think this is basically the awesomest thing in the world. It's horribly unsettling, of course, but it's such detail in such a minimalist game. I'm trying to think of another character whose appearance gradually evolves over the course of the game, and the closest I can come up with is Seifer's trenchcoat becoming tattered in Final Fantasy VIII.

(I was terrified that one of the effects of Wander's slow transformation was that he NO LONGER AFFECTIONATELY PATTED AGRO WHEN HE DIDN'T HAVE A WEAPON EQUIPPED, OH NO, but then I realised he just didn't pat her when she was actually moving. Thank goodness. Wander's love for Agro is so true, and I would be immensely distressed were he to stop caring about her.)


On the subject of awesome details in videogames: I've never played Left 4 Dead, a zombie apocalypse first-person shooter, but I've looked at screencaps, and this made me laugh really hard. Even in a world of immense danger and no Internet, you can't escape anonymous trolling.

(image source: cowgirlmaxwell's comment in zarla's L4D picspam (fascinating, but beware of many, many, many large images).)

Tags: final fantasy, final fantasy viii, games i've never played, lol internets, shadow of the colossus

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My workplace has been attacked by Christmas elves!!!

Seriously, over the weekend someone (the weekend staff, we're assuming) just attacked the area with decorations. A small tree is presiding in the corner. Tinsel and garlands hanging from shelves, the desk, wrapped around book trolleys and computers, circling the windows, draped on the desk. Homemade snowflakes are pasted against the faulty two-way mirror. And there are tiny decorations and knick-knacks--bells, holly, Santas, stars, everything--hidden all over the place! We keep finding them in odd places, tucked away on a shelf in the back, tacked to the message boards, on all sorts of places.

I really don't have words to express my delight. =) It's too bad I have a rehearsal tonight or else I'd go bake something AMAZING. I still will but alas the Monday/Tuesday guys won't get to partake, since I can't do it tonight. Maybe I'll just get a huge thing of chocolate instead. We've never really done this sort of thing at my workplace before--Fran and I did some things, when she worked here, but since she left...well, I would've liked to, but thought I was all alone in desiring it.

It's all so awesome. And it's the sort of thing I would have done if I'd thought of it/thought it would be appreciated, so I'm particularly grateful and delighted. I really want to thank whoever did this. There's little surprises everywhere! It's such a joy to me. And I'm awed by how much thought and work was put into it, truly awed.

Yay beyond yay.

It is an end-of-decade meme! I was 13-23 this decade, so it included most of my FORMATIVE TEEN YEARS.

( Decade in review )

It was pretty good, but I think the 2010s are going to be even better.

Tags: coursing myself

43. Rich Benjamin, Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America

A pop non-fiction book about what the author calls "whitopias": fast-growing, often exurban or rural, conservative, majority white (usually over 90%) communities. Such whitopias are becoming more common, he argues, and many of them are some of the fastest growing areas in the country. Against this backdrop, Rich Benjamin (a black guy) decided to try living in three such communities (St. George, Utah; Coeur d'Alene, Idaho; and Forsyth County, Georgia) and researching many more (including Carnegie Hill, in Manhattan and only a short walk from my own apartment, though that's a walk that covers a lot of change) to see what they're like, and what kind of people choose to live in them. These aren't sundown towns- obviously, since Benjamin managed to find places to rent in them- but are more like an extreme example of white flight. I picked this book up because I've been reading a lot of books about PoC communities, and I thought it would be interesting to get a black perspective on white communities.

I really enjoyed this book, perhaps because I'd read James Loewen's Sundown Towns over the summer, and Searching for Whitopia is the perfect follow-up to that (Sundown Towns is an absolutely amazing book, and I encourage everyone to read it. It is very worth its enormous length and many footnotes, though, the author being white, it will not count as one of your 50books_poc books). And Searching for Whitopia really is an update; it manages to include research from 2009 and I always think it's very impressive when someone can manage to get a book from the writing-stage to the in-bookstores-stage that quickly. And that recent information is particularly impressive because Benjamin covers a lot of topics, from Latino/a immigration, to the history of the conservative movement in American politics, to the New Urbanism city planning philosophy. Benjamin approaches his topics with a light touch, in particular giving way more of the benefit of the doubt to the people he interviews from whitopias than I would have. He even gives several pages to defining the difference between interpersonal racism and structural racism, a distinction which most people reading this community probably don't need help with. Because of that, though, I think this book would make an awesome gift to someone who's not that knowledgable about these issues; Benjamin is very careful to not offend, and there's things to interest people who wouldn't normally pick up this sort of book, including an entire chapter on golf.

So, a book which doesn't have much in-depth information, but has good, up-to-date information on a variety of topics, which is fun and easy to read: overall, pretty nice!

Tags: african-american, black writers, cultural studies, non-fiction, racism, united states
Current Mood: cheerful

Oh look it's that time again:

The How's My Driving? Meme

This one's a bit special, since I just dropped the lot of them from public play. *BUT*, if you have opinions on my RP, or past objections, or anything I've done in the past has made you wonder WTF I was thinking, I really want to know. I might be putting an app together somewhere else eventually, and I'd like to know if there's anything I should change.

It's open to general theory crit too, if any of the stuff I tweet about Light has made you headdesk - it all ends up in the same pot, after all. If anyone has a contribution, I'd really appreciate the help. Um.

Tags: rp

We came back from a weekend away (C. in Preston, I in London, Oxford, and Preston), parking along the street as usual.

I looked at the house on the left. I looked at the house on the right. "Why do so many people have fully-lit menorahs when we're only a couple of days into Hannukah?" I idly mused to C.

He thought they weren't menorahs at all, not in the usual sense, but rather an extrapolation: menorahs are sold this time of year, therefore they must be a Christmas decoration. Therefore there are lots of fully lit ones in windows around the neighborhood. It's rather surreal.

Speaking of which, ( Decorating with holiday cards... )

Tags: holidays