linkery, wabbage

[freckles_and_doubt]

I should be marking third-year essays on vampires. Instead, I'm cruising the internet looking for distraction, a technique doomed to success. This follows an entire weekend spent reading highly eroticised Spike/Buffy fanfic. I plead extenuating circumstances. Term has just ended, and I have a cold.

Iain Banks talks about his new Culture novel. Also about his hatred for Bush, Blair, and the Iraq war. Lovely quote from his new mainstream novel: "The USA is a great country full of great people. It's just their propensity as a whole for electing idiots and then conducting a foreign policy of the utmost depravity that I object to." Oh, yeah.

I always found Geoffrey Chaucer's Blog a bit, I dunno, twee? Then they published LOLPilgrims.


This one, in particular (it's the Pardoner) is such a complex piece of cultural layering, and speaks with such horrible truth to the academic experience, that I laughed until I choked. On quick review I'm not sure anyone else who reads this blog will necessarily appreciate all the layers, which are very English-geek heavy, but allow me my moment of isolate glee.

A World Without Oil. This is a newish acronym to me, an ARG - Alternate Reality Game. It's a strange, bizarre, fascinating concept.

On the wabbage front, non-befriended readers may have noticed the random blog redesign. Judgements welcome, I'm not sure I'm happy with it, and have every intention of frittering away a goodly part of the afternoon with more fiddling.

Comments

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

Eh. Preferred the old look.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

but I'm bored with the old look! I like aspects of this, but it's too cluttered, and I have not much room to fiddle with this template. Meh.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh I'm liking it now. Alas, I can't for the life of me come up with anything more specific and constructive than that, but... yeah, pretty. And tidy. And nice and wide again, yay!

scroob

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

Nice!

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

Ok, it's changed *again*. Blue is good too. Liked the red brocadey stuff more, I think. Really like the different sized tags :)

Hmm

[first-fallen.livejournal.com]

Erm, I like the wide angle. Not so easy to read, though. Maybe I'm just used to where everything was on the old page. Also, links don't show up. Really dark maroon/brown is not very different from black. Also also, grey/white on black not very eye-friendly. Also also also, the squares seems somewhat adrift on the background, they don't seem to form a coherent wholeness. It's a bit, you know, _modern_.

Re: Hmm

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

aargh! the colour is not really dark maroon brown on my home monitor, it's a sort of rich purple. Which looks, I admit, like a really dark brown on this monitor on campus. It also looks crap. Will sort when I get home, this computer is refusing to let me fiddle with the LJ colour settings. Am I frustrated? oh, yes.

Um, where's the grey/white on black? There should be white on dark blue and white on purple in the header and the comment footers, but not anywhere else, I agree that it's not eye-friendly for large blocks of text.

Re: Hmm

[first-fallen.livejournal.com]

Blue? Purple? I'm getting a marooney stripe on the top, the rest of the background is black. Maybe my screen is a goth-screen. Well, it _is_ a Philips :P. Phleep mentioned the velvety-red brocade stuff. Pity I missed it.

[schedule5.livejournal.com]

The crushed-velvet looking background I like a lot. Mmmmm

The Chaucer is so far over my head - even if I grow like Topsy, I'm not going to get it....

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Glad you like the velvet, I do too, although it's not very good on this monitor... sigh.

The Chaucer is not about Chaucer so much, it's about Judith Butler, who's currently an incredibly fashionable feminist theorist who deals with gender and performativity (gender roles are self-consciously performed constructs rather than innate qualities). I've just spent a month wrestling her into my Carter chapter; she's applied to the Pardoner's Tale particularly because it's highly susceptible to a queer theory reading. The essay block quote bit is beautifully dual, being about both the fashionability and density of Butler, and about student essay writing short cuts.