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5/27/12 12:00 pm
- Sat, 13:51: Warming up for #eurovision by watching Sir Terry's 50 year retrospective.
- Sat, 13:57: At home enjoying first Eurovision beer. Excellent start — Drinking a Chocolate Marble by @marblebrewers — http://t.co/t39km9Z9
- Sat, 14:00: Da da dada da da daaaaaa da da.... #eurovision
- Sat, 14:05: Enjoyable intro. Great wire work. #eurovision
- Sat, 14:05: RT @foxxmetamatic: #eurovision Atleast if we do win, we shuold have a big empty stadium to host it in next year
- Sat, 14:10: No Graham, they arrested all those people so you *wouldn't* see any trouble! #eurovision
- Sat, 14:15: United Kingdom: the sort of ballad I mock when it's in Foreign. #thehump is in his element though. #eurovision
- Sat, 14:18: Hungary: scrub 'em up and you'll have a boy band. #eurovision
- Sat, 14:19: Hungary: singer clearly wants to be Robbie Wiiliams. #eurovision
- Sat, 14:22: Albania: Bj�rk's Albanian half-sister sings about the pain of constipation. #eurovision
( Read more... )
5/27/12 05:01 pm
(US data, via from here)
I am fairly convinced that the current flurry of anti-woman and anti-homosexual drives by the Republicans (and equivalents elsewhere) are because they have realised that they are _losing_ and this is their last ditch attempt to hold on to the America they know and love. More and more of the people that are against marriage equality are old, more and more of the people that are in favour are young, and the switchover is happening as older people die off, because their culture is just not being passed on*.
So, while the current backlash is frustrating and annoying, it doesn't worry me in the long-term**. Twenty years from now people will look at this last-ditch attempt to stop gay rights the same way as we look at the riots over integration in schools in 1960s USA**.
*The same is true in the UK - church attendance in children and teenagers is down by 90% over the last two decades.
**Which isn't to say that the anger and work that's being done isn't vitally necessary - just that the weight is now on the side of the people doing that work.
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are  comments there.
5/27/12 12:00 pm
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are  comments there.
5/27/12 09:58 am
I've just sent out the first round of the new short story sub - if anyone has signed up and NOT received it, please let me know and I will send you your fiction asap.
*
In other news, it is exceptionally hot. The Levels are lovely - covered in cow parsley and charnock, and there are cuckoos. The house is in some disarray, since Pickle the elder cat (I think) managed to kick a tin of red paint off the shelf, and Lily trod in it, with all 4 paws, then ran through the kitchen. I have just found Pickle sitting in the frying pan.
5/26/12 12:00 pm
- Fri, 13:53: Gorgeous, hoppy session ale. Cracking. — Drinking a Zymic by @StewartBrewing at @kil_der_kin — http://t.co/Je4SXe85
- Fri, 16:00: Not a Strong Mild, but a stronger than usual mild. Phew! Lovely complex malty flavour. (Gunpowder Strong Mild) http://t.co/L1S9iDZJ
- Fri, 18:54: Pale ale with Cascade hops providing more citrus than the lemon it allegedly contains. Be excellent... (Lemon Dream) http://t.co/5PR9lEPk
- Fri, 19:52: @on_lothianbuses, your new leaflets and website say the N25 goes from Waverley Steps when they actually go from George Street?
- Fri, 19:53: @on_lothianbuses - I've just had to field a phone call from a confused tourist friend because of this!
- Sat, 04:00: @UltravoxUK @midgeure1 @CCrossky It arrived :-) This is what the excessively flashy amp+speakers connected to the Mac has been waiting for!
- Sat, 05:06: "I'm here to grow your little monument"?! #Ultravox
- Sat, 05:44: It is a cat sized sunbeam and it is mine, all mine! http://t.co/yrzwFw2a
- Sat, 05:48: RT @leannich: RT @chiller: Can we stop calling feminists who are transphobic "radical feminists" and use the correct term "transphobic f ...
5/26/12 12:00 pm
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are  comments there.
5/26/12 12:15 pm
Summary: I liked it. It was exciting. I don't think it was as good as some of the reviews were making out, and I think it's lucky they got Joss Whedon in, because he papered over the cracks very well.
Basically, Marvel's head of movies (Kevin Feige) came to Joss with the structure of the movie, and Joss then worked within that*, and it really, really shows. The basic story is dull beyond belief, repeated from millions of cookie-cutter comics. "Bad guys shows up, good guys fight amongst themselves, things get bad, good guys pull together, epic fight, good guys win." A plot so tired that it can fall asleep itself, probably joined by half of the audience.
What Joss does brilliantly is give character moments through the movie. The interaction of Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, Captain America's observations, Black Widow being generally awesome, and numerous things that I shan't specifically mention, but added up to a sheen of fun and depth placed over the overall structure of nothingness.
None of which makes it a bad movie. For an action movie with a non-existent plot it's great fun, and more deserving of cash than most other examples of that type. It just felt like it could have been more, and it's a shame it wasn't.
My favourite two reviews are this one over on Angry Flower, which points out many of the good things the script does, and Abigail Nussbaum's review at Strange Horizons, which also looks at the good and bad bits of the structure.
*It started out basically with Kevin (Feige) and Jeremy telling me “We know the basic structure of how they come together, what works, what doesn’t work, and how we see the climax,” which was nice, because he gave me a basic skeleton of three acts that I knew I had to hang on and then it was just a question of “How do I get there? How do I earn that? What moments would cause these people to be in that situation?” - from here
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are  comments there.
5/26/12 12:00 pm
- Fri, 16:54: Listening to George Dyson talk about the history of computing, and all the figures that built our world. Fascinating. #FireX
- Fri, 16:56: Writing that last tweet made me realise that #FireX is like a three day episode of "In Our Time". A conversation about the future.
- Fri, 16:57: RT @marypcbuk: George Dyson: I believe technology is part of life; my dad believes life is part of technology #firex
- Fri, 17:00: George Dyson on hardware "that embodies code", "numbers that can reproduce themselves" in "A world driven by self-replicating code" #FireX
- Fri, 17:07: Dragon has docked. Congratulations to @elonmusk and SpaceX. Now do it again!
- Fri, 17:38: Next up at #FireX, @DavidBrin1 interviewing Kim Stanley Robinson about the world in 20 years time.
- Fri, 17:43: Kim Stanley Robinson discussing the importance of utopian fiction, like that of H.G. Wells in the building of our modern world. #FireX
- Fri, 17:50: "Near future science fiction, the best realism of our time" Kim Stanley Robinson on the importance of genre at #FireX
- Fri, 17:51: RT @gkd4434: Are the next 50 yrs a choke point in the history of man for the next 1000 yrs? Lots of conditions exist for system failures ...
- Fri, 17:51: RT @michaeljredding: Paraphrasing George Dyson: humans are analog but we replicate digitally (DNA) #FiReX
( Read more... )
5/26/12 11:52 am
Poll #1842741
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 42
Forming parliament by taking a completely random selection of people from the population
View Answers
| Much better than the collection of posh lawyers we mostly have right now. |
   23 (57.5%) |
| would let idiot normal people have a say in the running of the country. THE HORROR! |
| 17 (42.5%) |
Those two options being the main comments in this thread.
|
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