The handful of people who follow this LJ know that I don't normally do videos. But this one was so staggering that I felt the urge to link: a time-lapse video of the city of Singapore, taken over a period of three years starting in 2013 ( Read more... )

A psychologist has devised 36 questions for a pair of total strangers to ask each other, to be followed by four minutes of uninterrupted gazing into each other's eyes. After which the couple will fall in love. The questions are listed below, together with the article from which they are taken ( Read more... )

I looked it up (on Wikipaedia, so possibly my understanding is incomplete). It does not seem to me something that I have come across in any of my friends, colleagues or minions, though since it should rightly be something that any sensible person would keep to themselves (advertising personal vulnerability is never a good idea) I might be wrong ( Read more... )

For books written in the 1930s, Marjorie Hillis's books of advice, two of which have been re-issued ("Live Alone And Like It" and "Orchids On YOur Budget") remain eminently useful, amusing, accurate and apt.

On economising generally:

Women who talk poverty and complain about the tings they can't have are invariably tiresome, and women who can ( Read more... )

For all nervous and insecure creators (emphases within the text are mine):

...(c) About the work itself, to its intended audience, say merely, "Here it is: I hope you like it." And nothing else. It is neither your job to praise your own work in its presentation or to run it down when initially presenting it. Quiet self-confidence is the tone to ( Read more... )

does not mean support, approval, encouragement, sympathy, liking or any kind of positive (or negative) response whatsoever. Understanding is comprehension and knowledge sufficient to allow a calibrated response that is intended to produce certain results that one desires. Whether or not it really produces that result is a test of one's ( Read more... )

if you choose the right princess. Those of us fortunate enough to have had Wu Zetian as our princess (well, imperial concubine, at that point) role model mostly grew up with no worse mental or social problems than vague regret that we had somehow never quite managed to acquire a personal corps of loyal and heavily-armed eunuch-assassins.