I can hardly resist linking to this - an online bird identification quiz. European birds, that is. It's a Norwegian site so you'll best start by selecting your preferred language unless that happens to be Norwegian, and despite the tempting lure of a mammal quiz only the bird section is active ( Read more... )

Anita Sarkeesian's first video in a series on Tropes vs Women in Video Games is now up and you can see it here. This is presumably an annoyance to those who declared she was just going to take the money and run. I recommend it - it's well made, well presented, with a very high signal-to-noise ratio, and highly watchable. Since the title is " ( Read more... )

I mentioned the other day that I've had a few near-misses on the roads in recent years, and watervole unhelpfully suggested riding well clear of the kerb. However, I'm not suggesting that this was unsound advice - quite the contrary, I gather it's very sensible practice, and the link she supplied backs that up - but it wouldn't have helped in any of the ( Read more... )

I keep meaning to post something, never quite get around to it, and the longer I leave it...

I was planning, two months ago now, to post a summary of last year's Big List, but then found I couldn't because I'd deleted it. This is what happens when you use the 2012 file as the template for the 2013 file and then select 'save' rather than 'save as ( Read more... )

I finally got to play Settlers of Catan last night. This seems to be the most frequently cited title for boardgame recommendations and I gather some on my f-list like it.

Not bad, and the commodity trading raised a few guffaws from us 40-something-going-on-14 guys. ("I'm offering Wood for Sheep." "You filthy pervert!")

But it ain't Robo-Rally.

I've been on holiday all week, and the weather's been very nice, so I should have been out a lot, birding and wildlifing and stuff. Oh, and posting to LJ, of course. Instead, I've spent most of the week stuck indoors exploring The Sims 2, which I picked up cheap a few months back. I've found it to be horribly addictive, even though my puny ( Read more... )

I seem to have vanished into the ether yet again, so just in case anyone was wondering, I am still around. Wildlifing enthusiasm got killed off by the ongoing dreadful weather, so I ended up looking for something else to do. Not sure how it happened, but I ended up on a nostalgia trip that turned into a temporary soap addiction. Which would have ( Read more... )

Sticking with the Lepidoptera for the moment, here's a question for pub quiz trivia/crapology buffs:
Which of these four British butterflies is the odd one out and why: Large White, Small White, Marbled White, and Green-veined White?


( Read more... )

The Common Swift, subject of my post a couple of days ago, was not the only moth to be attracted to DF's porch light on Saturday evening. There was another, but I had no idea what it was. Most British lepidoptera are 'micromoths', a taxonomically meaningless term. As the name suggests, they are often - though not always - smaller than ' ( Read more... )

This year's Big List reached 450 species this morning. On paper, or rather on spreadsheet, the 450th was Prickly Lettuce, though as usual I have some identifications pending, which is a fancy way of saying 'photos I've not got around to looking at yet ( Read more... )