either spontaneous human combustion or a pocket nuclear bomb

[freckles_and_doubt]

Gah. Actual sleep patterns appear to be a luxury in which I am not permitted to indulge. Monday night's drunken movie-watching¹ had its inevitable effect, viz. waking up abruptly at about 2.30am when I actually sobered up, and being unable to recapture sleep beyond a fretful doze, punctuated by affection assaults from the hobbit and concomitant cat-wars on the end of my bed. I was a shambling zomboid thing throughout yesterday - I still don't know how I managed to coherently and (apparently) inspirationally address the faculty scholarship cocktail party at short notice after two glasses of wine - and crashed at 8.45 sharp. Then I woke up at 5.30 this morning and was on campus an hour later, radiating virtue. Today is already feeling very, very long. However! I bugger off early to get my hair cut, followed by a four-day weekend rife with weddings, movies, mad socialising and visits from Mich the No-Longer-Flaxen-Haired-Menace, so it can't be all bad.

Wednesday random linkery is random and Wednesdayish.

• You have to ignore the fact that this is a twinky religious site, because I want to be your personal penguin. Cute. Also, random elderly Monkee.
• Wondermark has an Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator, which some nutter fan immediately programmed. Steampunky. Talking fish, shape-shifting female assassins, condescending tone.
• Just for the demented interests of smoczek, who wants to return to university to study applied statistics and computer graphic design, Information Is Beautiful. And, frequently, rather terrifying.

Middlemania Continues! Episode 4 is somewhat low in Goofy Middlemisms, but I am happy to record "Darn tootin'!", "Lord love a duck!", "Whoa there, Cochise!" and "Great hearts of palm!". Rococo Acronym Proliferation gives us the BTRS scanner and HEYDAR to add to O2STK, and Happy Geek Noises for the Great Steam Laser of 1917 and zombie dialogue in Italian ("Cervelli, cervelli! Devono mangiare cervelli!"). Bonus points for incredibly silly bad-plastic-surgery jokes and the cover story that insists that the villain was "trampled and subsequently eaten by a rhino during a hunting trip". I still love this show.

---

¹ Still miffed that "films containing RDJ" is not considered a suitably coherent theme. Just for that, next time it'll be "incredibly silly films about fish." Fish Called Wanda and Life Acquatic. Hah.

Comments

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

"Your title is: “The Cybertrons”

In an ancient one-way spaceflight, a young journeyman inventor stumbles across a magic diadem which spurs him into conflict with murderous robots, with the help of a girl who's always loved him and her cleavage, culminating in eternal love professed without irony."

I think I actually read that one years ago. By Andre Norton.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Absolutely not. Andre Norton never writes about cleavage. Ancient, spaceflight, diadem and love without irony spot-on, though.

[mac1235.livejournal.com]

Jo Clayton, Diadem series.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Pick two films containing RDJ. Find a common theme.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

RDJ.

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

Ha! You're insisting on RDJ on principle, aren't you? If you just wanted to see RDJ you'd have taken strawberryfrog's pragmatic suggestion. Busted ;-)

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

That's a fascinating case of dual-level reading, actually: I thought Frog was pointing out, slightly snidely, that RDJ's movies are all over the place and don't offer any reasonably coherent theme, which is actually a fair comment. I also think it's a fair comment to insist that RDJ is himself a theme, even if it's a "chameleon actors" theme.

Fair cop, though, I was also definitely pushing the RDJ thing on general principles, because it's amusing my tiny, stress-addled brain to make a completely nonsensical issue of it.

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

Dual-level reading: twice the fun!

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

I thought Frog was pointing out, slightly snidely, that RDJ's movies are all over the place and don't offer any reasonably coherent theme

Well no. Given any two movies, it's quite likely that you can find some feature that they have in common. Movies have lots of details, just find a detail present in both. For bonus, it will probably end up frivolous.

For instance Tropic Thunder and A Scanner Darkly, to pick two that I know anything about much at random, both have a common theme of meta-stories, realities nested in other realities.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

You did read the bit about the themes being preferably frivolous, didn't you?

[stringgeek.livejournal.com]

Information is Beautiful! I especially like the OkCupid! graph of how to get replies for online dating.

Also, Twitter stats--the reasons I'm not on Twitter!

Of course, you can use facts to prove anything. :-)

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Particularly if you're trying to prove that facts are beautiful :>.

I love the billion-dollar block one. It demonstrates in simple graphical format that human society is fundamentally insane.

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

Ignore the Twitter stats. General stats may be meaningful for large groups but not for small, unusual populations - such as your friends. Twitter is exactly what you make it, which in your case I hope would be, and in our case I hope is, highly worthwhile. Try it out for a month, see if you like it :-)

[mwotn.livejournal.com]

I find the one on the Afghan war particularly interesting - proves the virtue of guerrilla tactics, doesn'e?

This is also highly amusing, as well as pretty:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/timelines/

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

It is indeed beautiful, although I'm slightly miffed that there are no Doctor/Tardis threads. On the other hand the Doctor's peregrinations would snarl the beautiful curves up something 'orrible.

[mwotn.livejournal.com]

Given the amount he gets about, too, I think we'd need a bigger bit of paper....

Now, if I had a suitably big bit of paper and enough time (and access to the requisite videos), this would be a superb excuse to watch the entire Dr Who back catalogue in the name of science...