This is a slightly cleaned-up version of the notes I made for myself while going through the 2015 Hugo Awards voter's pack, set down here in case anyone's interested, what with the awards happening today and everything.

For every category not listed here, I either ran out of time and didn't vote, or my though process wasn't in-depth enough to ( Read more... )

(French lesson, 1993 or thereabouts)

Teacher: What is a return ticket in French, Paul?
Paul: Aller et retour, Miss.
Teacher: What is a single, Chris?
Chris: Er, just to there, Miss.

This entry was originally posted at http://pfy.dreamwidth.org/4958.html. You can comment there under your LiveJournal name by using OpenID (
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I think we need to talk about Pigeon Street. For anyone who wasn't a small child in early-80s Britain, Pigeon Street was an animated series about the various residents of the titular city street. It had a colourful cast of characters, such as Clara the truck driver, Mr. Jupiter the astronomer, William the window cleaner, Mr. Baskerville the ( Read more... )

I am definitely going to have to move out in a few weeks, as the landlady has decided she doesn't have time to deal with letting individual rooms in the house, and wants to get a letting agent to manage it for her. I don't want to rent a whole house or deal with some greasy wazzock in a shiny suit, so it's time to find somewhere else. Bother.

The ( Read more... )

I 'm clearing out as much stuff as possible, because it looks like I'll need to move house soon. This means the following workstations and PC bits are all free to a good home:

• Asus A7A133 motherboard with 1GHz Duron processor (with heatsink and fan). I can also give you a couple of PC133 memory sticks for this if you like.
• 1.7GHz Celeron processor ( Read more... )

Notes on TRON: Legacy

• It doesn't suck. It's not an all-time classic, but it's shiny and decently enjoyable. It's always a relief to get a sequel that is not facepalmingly poor.
• Lots of references to the first film, some rather subtle (such as the hoarding above Flynn's arcade). I'm sure I missed some, not having seen the original for years.
• Shiny.
• Some ( Read more... )

( Curiously-named groceries... )

A leaflet got delivered to my house today. It was from the local council, announcing a public consultation about what services they should cut in order to fix an estimated shortfall of £65 million over the next four years. It looks like this:


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The BBC article "The Science of Optical Illusions" has a comments section at the bottom with the warning:
At no time should you endanger yourself or others, take any unnecessary risks or infringe any laws.
This comes the day after they reported the death of Benoit Mandelbrot, pioneer of fractal geometry ( Read more... )

Thanks to the estimable
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