Most complex crop circle ever discovered in British fields
The formation, measuring 150ft in diameter, is apparently a coded image representing the first 10 digits, 3.141592654, of pi. They even rounded the tenth digit up. ♥

I was browsing online catalogues in the hope of finding discounted video games (don't get me started on the mark-ups they charge over here in Australia - we pay almost twice as much for the exact same games!) - anyway, I was browsing catalogues and I found ( this ad )
I love the juxtaposition. *g*

I'm often amused by the ads gmail comes up with, but when I was clearing out my spam mail folder, I got this extra awesome one:

Vineyard Spam Salad - Combine grapes, spam, peapods and onions in large bowl

Following the link (who knows what further ads will be served up to me now!) brings up the entire recipe, which apparently takes 00.00 hours to prepare (quite a feat, since you have to saute the spam for two minutes - they must have left out step 1 of the recipe, Find Your Nearest Tardis or other Time Travel Device). The curious can read the recipe here, or ( under the cut )

There's a new Howl book by Diana Wynne Jones coming out soon!

Charmain Baker is in over her head. Looking after Great-Uncle William's tiny cottage while he's ill should have been easy. But Great-Uncle William is better known as the Royal Wizard Norland, and his house bends space and time. Its single door leads to any number of places—the bedrooms, the kitchen, the caves under the mountains, the past, and the Royal Mansion, to name just a few.

By opening that door, Charmain has become responsible for not only the house, but for an extremely magical stray dog, a muddled young apprentice wizard, and a box of the king's most treasured documents. She has encountered a terrifying beast called a lubbock, irritated a clan of small blue creatures, and wound up smack in the middle of an urgent search. The king and his daughter are desperate to find the lost, fabled Elfgift—so desperate that they've even called in an intimidating sorceress named Sophie to help. And where Sophie is, can the Wizard Howl and fire demon Calcifer be far behind?

Of course, with that magical family involved, there's bound to be chaos—and unexpected revelations.

No one will be more surprised than Charmain by what Howl and Sophie discover.

Penny Arcade at the library. This comic cracks me up.


I recently got a copy of Mass Effect at half price (score!) and now I'm happily playing it. I'm kind of crap at shooting stuff, but I'm getting better, so that's awesome. There are lots of fun sidequests, and you can do battle magic (okay, 'biotics', whatever), and I'm enjoying the storyline. I am somewhat annoyed by the fan service - it's fairly pastede on, and is aimed only at straight males, which is annoying given the multiple choice options in so much of the game. Hmmph. But it's only a tiny part of the game, so I can ignore it.

You might be interested to know that JournalFen has reopened free account creation for a limited period. I'm over there as delurker as well, now, but I don't expect to update there unless something catastrophic happens to LJ.

Yesterday, someone on my flist who I didn't know very well posted a link to a post by sazzlette about the current debate about the increased misogyny in this season of Supernatural, particularly in regards to Dean. The link didn't go into any specifics; just that the poster agreed with sazzlette.

So I clicked on the link, and I started to read, and I really and honestly thought that sazzlette must have been joking. Because the post starts off like this:

"Dear all of you whiny, self important females." [italics sic]

But no! No. I was very soon disabused of this notion, because the next paragraph goes like this:

"Please, for the love of God, shut the fuck up about Dean and his misogyny. [...] Dean Winchester is a sexist asshole. Deal with it." [bolding sic]

Wow. And then I looked at the opening of the post again, and I felt sick. "Self-important"? We're "self-important" because we complained about being insulted? Because we dared to ask to be treated as equals? Because we dared to challenge male privilege?

Here's sazzlette's take on this:

"I'm sorry if it hurts, but we live in a patriarchal society that is riddled with misogyny. No, I'm not saying it's okay. I'm saying it just IS. We've come on a long way, but we have a long way still to go."

And you know how we got this far? People complained. Women (and men!) complained and struggled and fought hard for equality and for the right to matter. And we have come a long way, and that's something to celebrate. But we're not going to get any further if we just stand back and accept male privilege, and we're not going to get any further if we tell people to stop fighting, to stop "whining", when we see sexism in action.


Here are some more choice (hah!) quotes from sazzlette's post:

"Also, personally? The insults do not affect me. Occasionally, as mentioned, they may feel out of place, but generally I just view it as part of Dean's character. Dean's a guy. He's sexist. And he's a pottymouth. A lot of the time when Dean throws insults out there, it's not so much him wanting to actually insult someone as just the way he works."

So to summarise - Oh, well, if you're not insulted then no-one should be! And anyway, boys will be boys.

Is that right? HELL NO. Come on. Let's give men some credit here. They have agency over their actions; they are capable of determining, of choosing, what they're going to do. They're not helpless slaves to their Y chromosome.

Every time you give a guy a pass on shitty behaviour because "He's a guy"? You are condoning that behaviour. Guys aren't sexist because they're guys; they're sexist because they can get away with it.

"What makes me really angry, however, is PC [politically correct] being taken too far. Do you realize how you come across? I am not saying we should lay down and just take it; by all means, write a letter if you think it will help, but be specific about what it is you're objecting to. Please do not attack the writers for writing a typically misogynistic male character and sticking with their characterization."

I just had to include this quote because it's so breathtakingly crap. We shouldn't complain that Dean's misogynistic because he's consistently characterised that way? I'm sorry? What kind of rubbish argument is that?


So I read the post, and I started to read the comments, and every. single. one was in favour of her post. I went back and read the comments just now, and in four pages of comments, only six were disagreeing. The two best points were by light_up and onelittlesleep:

"I don't understand the knee jerk reaction people seem to always, always have in SPN fandom when somebody points out flaws in the writing. I think there are definitely issues with how they portray women, especially after that finale, and I think it's important that people are talking about it. Telling these people to shut up because you don't like what you're hearing doesn't help anybody. I wish people would just take a step back and think about it, instead of being like MISOGYNY, ON MY PRECIOUS SHOW? NEVER! It's disappointing how many people are applauding you here. We're all adults, and this should be something that can be discussed without throwing insults at the other side, but apparently not." - light_up, here

"There is a lot of "LET ME PROTECT DEAN and his GOOD OLD BOYISHNESS from your JUDGMENTS!" going around. People need to stop talking about DEAN. Fuck Dean! This is not an IMAGINARY CHARACTER'S PROBLEM. This is a TV SHOW WRITER'S ARE RETARDED ISSUE." - onelittlesleep, here.

So far, sazzlette has not responded to any of the dissenting commenters, but in a later post she writes, "I honestly don't give a shit that your opinion is different to mine, all I'm saying is stop harshing the squee for everyone else :(".
omg, you guys, won't someone think of the squee? *gags* I think it's fairly clear that their points have not got through. How depressing.

ETA: Oh look, I just noticed that one of her tags is "fuck your female emancipation". How wonderful.

Tests Confirm T. Rex Kinship With Birds. "In fact, the scientists said, T. rex shared more of its genetic makeup with ostriches and chickens than with living reptiles, like alligators."

You know what this means, guys. T-REXES TASTE LIKE CHICKEN!

This weekend I had a conversation about finding the names of songs when all you can remember is a small section of the lyrics. I put forth the position that it can be a fruitless endeavour; the other person said that she'd never had any trouble googling lyrics and that she found it odd that I had.

Possibly she can remember more song lyrics than I can, although I don't think so - I've been unable to find song lyrics even when I remember the entire chorus of a song, which you would think would be enough.

In any case, it's hard to google the lyrics to a song when all that you can remember is "Don't hold back, duh duh duh duh-duh-duh". (I should clarify: duh duh duh duh-duh-duh is not an actual lyric, but my attempt to textually render the electronic violin line. Which goes up and then down. Unsurprisingly, adding "electric violin that goes up and down" to a google search does not help.) I keep trying to find this song, but with no luck, even when I'm asking people face-to-face and can sing the violin part. Woe!

Via celli: I Love The World, a Discovery Channel promo which fills me with delight. The tagline is "The World Is Just Awesome", and the video makes a pretty convincing case for that. :) Definitely worth watching.

I have a cold and feel like a sad kitten. Woe! I feel so brain dead right now.


In other news, remixredux08 is open. I always want to write for remix, because remix stories get to have the coolest titles, but I'm fairly sure I don't qualify (not enough fic in one fandom), and I'm really not up to the commitment. (Yuletide nearly killed me, this year.)

People might also like remixthedrabble, which is also awesome and which I'll keep an eye open for next year. I couldn't quite get my head around it this year, alas.


My book came from eBay on Wednesday, which makes me happy. It's in perfect condition, too. :D I've ordered the first in the series (is it a series if there are only two books?) from AbeBooks, so that should come in a few weeks. *crosses fingers*

Which Imaginary Animals Are Kosher? This is brilliant and hilarious.

svmadelyn's running her annual Kink/Cliché Multi-Fandom Challenge, which is a lot of fun. You choose three prompts from the list of kinks and clichés linked to in her post, and then you're assigned one to write by the 26th of May. It's a challenge, not an exchange, so if you flake out it doesn't matter (although you should still consider whether or not you'll actually do it before you sign up).

Basically it's a nice fun challenge for fic, art, manips, and vids.


(Meanwhile, this has reminded me that I'm still stalled on my wing!fic fic. Woe. But I can't get the serious structural bits to work. :( On the other hand, I do love the funny bits, so I don't want to give up completely. *pokes at file gingerly* I should never look at WIPs when I'm feeling anxious about stuff.*)

*Job hunting stuff, which is exciting and awesome and anxiety-inducing, argh.

Dong Bang Shin Ki is a popular South Korean boy band who I know almost nothing about, but I was quite fascinated by this video they made in which they more or less film their own slash fanfic: while out on a photo shoot, the band has to stay overnight in a shack in the woods so they can finish the shoot tomorrow, and one of the band members finds one of the other band members reading slash fic, asks him what he's doing, and is given the fic to read. (And rather than just doing a voice-over, the show then has them act one of the scenes out.) The band guy then can't get the thought of the fic out of his head. Meanwhile, in the action/adventure plot, someone appears to be stalking the band.

Seriously, I've read this fic a thousand times. :)


I was talking to dzurlady about it, and I was trying to explain what the video was about:

delurker: They're a boyband, right - it's a constructed group which they auditioned to get into - but they have this incredible level of fanservice. Kind of like if The Monkees had done a slash episode on their show.
dzurlady: Hm. All I can remember of that show is that they had that large bed.*
delurker and dzurlady: *think about this*
delurker: Okay, maybe it is just like the Monkees.


For those of you who haven't seen the show, here are the opening titles on YouTube. The bed appears around 10 seconds into the clip as they wheel it down the road. Also I see that 30 seconds into it, they're wheeling around one of them while he's having a bath. ...yeah.

Ooh! They're making Garth Nix's book Sabriel into a movie!

My SGA DVDs came yesterday! Weeks and weeks before I was expecting them. (They said they'd come on the 5th of May, hee.) Sadly, I don't think my Assassin's Creed art book will come nearly as fast.

I was amused by the back of the box, though. Whoever wrote the blurb for the box set was seriously phoning it in that day. Check it out: ( Do I still need to cut for spoilers? I guess I will anyway. ) For the lose, copywriter! No cookie for you.

omg, Elizabeth Peters has written a new Vicky Bliss book! It's called Laughter of Dead Kings and it's coming out on the 19th of August in the US and the 25th of September in the UK. Amazon.uk has a picture of the cover and a blurb, so yay.

Yesterday was Dad's deathversary; it's been a year and a day since he died. I've adjusted to the loss, but I still miss him. I love you, Dad.

I was amused by the Amazon "Better Together" suggestion for this cupcake pendant: apparently it's better with BioShock, a somewhat violent RPG video game.

(I mean, I wouldn't disagree, but it's a touch random.)

Does your userinfo need more cowbell? I like this vgift! It's fun.

I have all this stuff I want to post about, but I keep starting entries and then deleting them. Woe.

sartorias made a rather interesting point about why books work for some readers and not for others:

Our expectations of books can diverge so widely it can be difficult to find common ground. But here are a couple of observations: many readers fall out of a book when the arguments overcome the emotional content of the story. And conversely, many fall out of a story when the emotional content overcomes the arguments, or the sense.

Her entire post is an enjoyable and interesting read. Worth a look.


Also, a rec! (Yay!)
anna_luna created the most beautiful piece of fan-art out of paper.
It's for Stargate: Atlantis, it's gen Rodney backstory, and it's absolutely gorgeous. It's paper cut delicately into a stencil and it must have taken hours of work but it was worth it. Go check it out.