Ooh, time for a real post for once. I write this sitting on one of my arm chairs, carefully sandwiched between a coffee-table and the top of a dining-room table lying on its side whilst leaning on my sofa bed. You can, more or less, step over them to move between the entry hall in the kitchen but it involves a certain degree of stretching from ( Read more... )

Oh, so many partial posts in various stages of composition. To slowly clear the backlog a bit, have some linkSpam of things which interested as amused.

The first link, and one I'd like to highlight a bit, is called Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things. It's a gentle and funny response to some of the more racist they-don't-look-like-us crap we see ( Read more... )

I have discovered a new depth of frustration and fury. Here's how you attain it. First, you realise that something someone else has made as a curiousity might be useful to you in making some other, truly bizarre and otherwise unattainable curiousity. Then you spend a month painstakingly learning to make all the required bits and pieces, ( Read more... )

Hello there, Latin speakers. Or readers. Or, you know, anyone with more experience at it than myself. I was recently asked to translate, for amusement's sake, the motto of the company Bungie: Non facete nobis calcitrare vestrum perinaeum ( Read more... )

Faretheewell, Adelaide, and hello to you, Melbourne ( Read more... )

Well, that was a more unpleasant experience than it strictly had to be. My usual nervousness over talks aside (and the traditional realisations that I’d forgotten at least one point on every slide ignored as well, of course), I still ended up horribly hoarse over the course of the talk. The silence when the floor was opened for questions was ( Read more... )

Well, I'm in Australia at long last, and thankfully so is my luggage. It's twenty past eight on Saturday evening, British Time, and ten to five in the morning on Sunday, Aussie time. I'm wide awake and have an headache. In part, this is my fault. I should have crawled out of bed after my intended short sleep on Saturday, and gone for a wander ( Read more... )

I've got a new toy. It's an HTC Desire, and I ended up with it after trying out an iPhone, returning it and telling my original service provider to go stuff themselves. Having shop-monkeys insist that the Sale of Goods Act doesn't apply to them (it does) and that there's nothing they can do (there is) is not fun. I strongly suspect that this is ( Read more... )

And now, more book reviews. Be warned, only two are positive reviews.

( The Hunger Games, a good book )

As some of you might know, I've started learning a little Latin on the side. I think that this is primarily because I'm a glutton for punishment, but I suppose that my fondness for structured communication and Ars Magica have their part to play. I've been working my way through a few beginners guides in parallel, though the one I've found most ( Read more... )