A meme

hatesink: (noun) A person or persons who act as a focus for all of someones resentment, regardless of whether or not the hatesink is in any way the cause. e.g. "Sophie was always calm and happy unless she was talking about her ex, who acted as a hatesink."

As coined by Chas with regards the example mentioned :) Like any good larval achedemic, I'll reference him this once then act like I invented it from now on.

Also, I was thinking...why do fruit bruise (sometimes really quickly), yet you can grate/juice/chop them and they don't go all icky and bruisy? Speaking of Important Science, Schlock Mercenary is clearly written by a man who knows what makes science tick.

A lively and varied journal post

First I said I'd never get a blog. Then I got one, but I promised myself I'd never post a meme. Or whine lengthily about my day. And I would never, ever get a livejournal.

Well....I lied. Deal with it :)

My main reasons were: notifications of replies to comments, the crochet community (No, really. Oh shut up :P), friends locked posts, and being able to post in tormsons lj so I could get "Declare" back. (Damn "No anonymous comments" people) The friends list has turned out to be pretty cool too.

Speaking of which, who has my copy of "Brothers in arms" by Lois McMaster Bujold? I want it back, then I'll have the complete set! Well, 'cept I'm lending Oliver "Mirrordance".
*spoilers this paragraph for Angel/Brothers in Arms*
Rereading it I suddenly realised that the character Connor reminded me of is Mark, only the paths they took diverged quite a bit from the initial "Angsty clone/son created for evil purposes and trained to kill his father but now deeply conflicted and questioning the very meaning of his existence" stage :) (Theres a bunch of other similarities but that'll do)

Finally: Since I got Rae to do a rant about Stargate I suppose I owe a Meme. But because I'm a freespirited creative genius who refuses to be bound by rules and conventions, I'll change it slightly- give me any topic and I will write a short, very bad, poem about it. I feel like writing some short, very bad poetry :)

Unaustralian of the year

I didn't eat red meat, get drunk, or even get round to watching the fireworks, choosing intsead to watch LOTR special features and eat fruit. But I am unrepentant, for I finally have Mirrordance! Yay! Reread it today (I was feeling too dizzy to get much work done. Possibly the result of too much fruit) so Oliver can borrow it. All hail singaporean bookshops! My total haul from Phlebus, her dad and Enforced Equanamity also included a funky Berkley Maths t-shirt and two spindles of anime cds. All hail singaporeans! She even liked the the comic, her exact words being "Yeah, its quite..OH MY GOD THATS ME" (Well..something like that)

I've noticed that recently I've become relatively grumpy and irrational and, well, stupid, I think as a result of a combination of stress re The Dreaded Thesis and whatever is making me so light-headed and wierd about food. I'm not saying this to angst, just to apologise in advance (or retrospect) for any wierd or annoying behaviour, such as... say... getting narky at someone for delaying lunch while they find out about their grandads cancer. (Some people can be so selfish. Not like she ever did anything for me)

Anyway, in case anyone wants to borrow it, I'm quite happy to share my good fortune. No, you can't have the Berkley shirt, but the anime I have is:

• Arjuna
• Vampire Princess Miyu
• Somedays Dreamers
• Blue Gender
• Gravion
• Infinite Ryvius
• Please Teacher
• Voices of a Distant Star
• Kai Doh Maru (?)
• Burn Up Excess Sequel to W.
• Burn Up W
• Armitage 4 It turns out there is no Armitage 4 (nor 1 or 2 afaik), just various Armitage 3 things. God knows what I have :)
• Full Metal Panic
• Noir
• Chobits
• Rahxephon
• FLCL
• S Cry Ed
• Steel angel Kurumi

No making assumptions about quality, completeness, or what kind of person would watch all these titles, since as far as I can tell its just VCDs of whatever looked interesting at the video store.

And of course if I really like any of them, I'll buy them. (I'm seriously considering buying FLCL) EDIT: added links (just the top google hit, mostly) so that when I feel like watching anime I can remind myself what they all are. Thus possibly no links for the ones I've seen. I don't care if thats not what blogs are for :P

Thoughts on waking into a post apocalyptic world

I'm with Rae. Ominous.

I am not unique! Argh!

That's right, there is another sqbr (Go to the bottom of the page) Damn Norwegians.

I found this link as part of going through my "links to deal with later" bookmarks folder. Also updated my full links page as a result.

And now, some wacky links I collected in my "unsorted" folder before I had a blog to scatter them to.

• Antarctica journal of Mathematics As I recall, I was sent a link to this via my maths email account from some wacky maths guy. Maybe we should submit our(*) paper to this guy!
• Maths in futurama
• What claims to be a picture of Greg Egan!

Wasn't that exciting?

(*)Oh, yeah..I have a paper that is this close to being submitted! Yay!

Captain Vegetable strikes again!

This comic popped pretty much fully formed into my head while I was cooking lunch. Originally the tall put apon vegetarian was Tommo (since he did ask to be in a comic) but I couldn't draw him right so decided to just do a random guy, ending up with a suprisingly close resemblance to Stephen from the maths department (also vegetarian) who wore precisely that expression when I told him gelatine was made from bones :)

Of course the only person who'll actually find this amusing is me. Then again, Jocelyn has seen Pav and Phlebus's reactions when I insist on bringing vegetables to things, remembers Sesame Street, knows Lisa (Whose hair really is that long now. And can't you just see her as a superhero?), and has the happy trait of laughing at my jokes. Not sure she reads this blog though :)

Perhaps I should be more worried that one of them will take offense at being a part of such a shonky comic....(I mean no disrespect to anyone but myself!)

I was very happy to discover someone else had done the hard work of finding the words and costume of the original Captain Vegetable. And thats real Brazillian my friends. Note how I chose pretty much the only non-obscene phrase.

Is it just me or has doing a Phd made be a little overzealous with the references? The reason I have time to do this, by the way, is an accidental excess of caffiene. I already got a whole heap of (real) work done which is good cos tommorrow I'll be a big pile of sleepy ooze...

General Pants

This is the picture I got in my head every time I passed General Pants in Melbourne. I had everything else (stance etc) in my head but did a google for uniforms and the first decent picture I found was the second one on this page. Its like I've tapped into some archetype! Just look at Zapp Brannigan... It's not plagiarism if you call it an archetype, right?

heehee. pants.

To answer Penny's question

This is the next thing I'm going to have made. Wait...have now will have been going to make? Anyway. It's pretty, though gee the camera catches all those imperfections when you zoom in doesn't it? (Just look at the pretty beads)

My excuse for beading and not working is a headache. Which'll just get worse if I stay online, so off I go!

Fettered Genius

Well, the holiday is over. Back to the grindstone :(

Back when I was a free spirit unburdened by the weight of the world, I got given some of those strips of paper you make stars out of(*), and was so inspired by the end result I made a necklace:

It never occured to me to make beads out of origami before.

This in turn made me go out shopping for supplies to make the necklace better (it was originally on fishing wire and held together with knots) at which I point I discovered that rather than paying $4 for 3m of "tiger tail" plain nylon coated wire from a craft shop, I could pay $3.50 for 10m of black nylon coated wire plus several crimping beads (To hold stuff in place) from the fishing section of K-mart. Then I got all inspired and went to my local bead shop ("Benjamins beads" in Mt Lawley. They rock) where I bought a clasp and a box to sort all the beads I've accumalted over the past fifteen years as someone who loves beads but didn't know what to do with them, and finally had a go at wire crochet:

And now I am happy :) Though I feel like going to the bead shop and making more necklaces and I really don't have time :(. Oh well. I might later anyway, but only crochet at night after a long day working. Like I am with this blog!

(*)By Wanda, the penfriend who also got me an artists model thing and for whom I made the Klein-bottle hat. She's cool :) I also gave her the first necklace as a thankyou for being so inspiring. And as an easy birthday present...