I Am The Smile Ninja
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Fiasco Hillguardio's LiveJournal:
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| Monday, November 9th, 2009 | | 9:11 pm |
Is anyone else watching The Execution of Gary Glitter? Edit: Don't. It's horrible! | | Saturday, October 31st, 2009 | | 10:18 pm |
What's your favourite animal, and why? | | Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 | | 6:36 pm |
After following the instructions on a quite terrifying letter I received today, I'm relieved to discover my laptop battery is totally not going to catch fire and kill us as we sleep. | | Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 | | 2:50 pm |
Poll #1461511
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 19 I am... This is because... | | Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 | | 1:44 pm |
Poll #1457825
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 12 Is "bear" a valid vocational choice for an adult? What sort of magazines would you actually like to see in waiting rooms? The Monty Python/Eric Idle song I Like Chinese is... Are there any core skills you think should be a prerequisite for becoming an elected representative? Is there anything you'd like delivered to your phone on a daily basis? Do you have any ideas which are utterly brilliant, but which you lack the skills, knowledge or resources to implement? What Would Jesus Do? | | Thursday, September 10th, 2009 | | 2:35 pm |
Do you reckon the Japanese spambots assemble to form one gigantic spambot? | | Monday, September 7th, 2009 | | 4:00 pm |
Poll #1454366
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 25 Do you mostly read fiction or non-fiction? How many empty cans of Pepsi Max do you think I have on my desk? What do you think my ideal job would be? Who's going to die first? Are you friendly with your neighbours? Have you noticed a resurgence in 80s fashion lately? Is there a celebrity you know you really shouldn't fancy but nonetheless do? EDIT: I should point out that I don't have the surviving Beatles in my custody, and your answers will not determine the order in which they die. Go about your business. | | Saturday, September 5th, 2009 | | 10:42 pm |
I am watching...
Catwoman the movie, in which Halle Berry gains the ability to turn into an inhuman-looking badly-rendered CGI version of herself and jump around like Spiderman. | | Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 | | 8:27 pm |
Poll #1451884
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 23 Do you have any tattoos? Do you ever use products explicitly made for the opposite sex? If so, what? If you had your own Knight Rider-esque talking car, who would you like to provide the voice? Which do you think is the most evocative and aesthetic stellar constellation? Name something in your life which you think is particularly well designed. | | Thursday, August 20th, 2009 | | 4:52 pm |
Poll #1446374
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 12 Which is the funniest animal? Suggest something which you think a (possibly hypothetical super futuristic) computer fundamentally can't do. What's your take on extraterrestrial life? What do you think is the most impressive ability of humans? Name a playing card. Do you believe in the theoretical possibility of time travel? | | Friday, August 14th, 2009 | | 1:17 pm |
17 Again
It will not be long until my OU course starts, and having mooched around for the sundry benefits, I will soon be in possession of an NUS card. This puts me in an interesting position. When I last had access to the benefits of being a student I was living on borrowed money, eating bowls of gravy and sharing a shower with twenty other people. These days I have the purchasing power of a skilled white collar professional, so all those five, ten and fifteen percents go a lot further. The only course I've signed up for to date cost me £360, and represents about half of the total study I'd consider undertaking in a year. The card also cost £10 for a year. By my reckoning, if I can make £365 of savings with this card over the space of six months, I'll have made the study pay for itself. Given that in the next six months I plan to buy at the very least one new suit and a couple of shirts (Moss and Topshop, 15% and 10% respectively), partake of about half a dozen meals from Pizza Hut (20%), purchase around 15 books (Amazon 5% and Borders 20% [!] on certain days of the year) and get a new ink cartridge for the printer (Comet, 25%), I'm probably about half way there already. We're planning on buying a house within the next twelve months. I wonder if I could get five or ten percent off a mortgage. | | Monday, August 10th, 2009 | | 10:06 pm |
There's a Kellogg's advert on TV at the moment featuring a stop-animation W.K. Kellogg, and a voice-over elaborating on his standards and beliefs. The belief I'm most aware of W.K. Kellogg holding is that masturbation caused madness and death. A little bit of esoteric knowledge is a dangerous thing. Enjoy your corn flakes. | | Thursday, August 6th, 2009 | | 1:15 pm |
Poll #1440450 1985
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 12 Which is more scary? What do you think have been the most important technological developments in the last 24 years? You're not allowed to say "the internet", or any variation thereof. What do you think will be the most important technological developments in the foreseeable future? | | Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 | | 3:24 pm |
Ideas are amazing and terrifying things, aren't they?
This took me a bit longer than 15 minutes, but screw your arbitrary rules, right in their internet-based ear. Fifteen books that have had an impact on me. 1) World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War - Max Brooks 2) The Undercover Economist - Tim Harford 3) The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger 4) Nation - Terry Pratchett 5) The Giant Book of Questions and Answers - Diane Clouting 6) Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers/Better Than Life - Rob Grant & Doug Naylor 7) American Gods - Neil Gaiman 8) High Fidelity - Nick Hornby 9) The Meme Machine - Susan Blackmore 10) The Way Things Work - David Macaulay 11) The Guinness Book of Answers - Clive Carpenter 12) Tricks of the Mind - Derren Brown 13) The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell 14) Mind Hacks - Tom Stafford & Matt Webb. 15) Juggling for the Complete Klutz - John Cassidy, B.C. Rimbeaux and Diane Waller I haven't realised until now just how much fondness I have for my childhood encyclopedias. Knowledge, beautifully assembled and sorted by subject, for the convenience of the inquisitive mind. There's something quite beautiful about it | | Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 | | 2:19 pm |
Another day off in lieu. I have filled five garden refuse bags with hedge trimmings and grass, and the actual garden looks no different. | | Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 | | 7:12 pm |
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
[a 'Do You Want To Be On My Filter' post] People who've paid this journal more than the most cursory amount of attention will have probably noticed that I start an awful lot of things which don't get finished. Unless I have a very clear and direct incentive to see something through, most of my projects and ideas tend to get abandoned half-completed. Some of you may also have noticed I've recently started taking my personal development a bit more seriously than normal. I've enroled on the first of what will hopefully be a fruitful series of OU courses, and until that starts I've been building myself a syllabus of other educational resources to work through. I feel much happier when I'm learning something, but like any project it can get disrupted, and I'll fall out of the habit. With that in mind, I'm planning on maintaining a learning journal, where I document any formal effort to learn things, go over what they're about and how it fits in to broader fields of knowledge, and maybe ask for advice about what to pursue next. This should hopefully keep me focused on my activities, as well as allowing me to consolidate what I've learned and give it broader context. I'll be doing it on a dedicated LJ filter (sadly meaning all my anonymous Japanese respondents won't be able to participate), and wondered if anyone wanted to be in on it. Don't think of it as too great a commitment; given my track record I'll probably forget about it in a couple of months time and start drawing robots instead. | | Sunday, July 5th, 2009 | | 8:48 pm |
Offensive Materials
This weekend ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) purpleheather and I were down at her parents. A common activity on such weekends is going to a car boot sale. Now, I'm not big on stuff. Material goods are just units of space-wasting to me, and most of my hobbies and interests tend to involve specialist or high-quality paraphernalia, so the basic set-up of a car boot sale doesn't hold much interest to me. This doesn't mean I can't enjoy myself. Far from it. Some of the spectacular tat to be found at car boot sales can be hugely entertaining all by itself, and you can make your own hilarious games out of looking through what's on display. One particular game is to look for hugely offensive items that you simply wouldn't find these days with any mainstream availability. Today, I think I found a winner, and took a photo so I could share it with the rest of the world. ( One ash tray, in the shape of two thick-lipped caricature Jamaican women, fondling each other, naked, sitting on what appears to be a toilet, one astride the other; cannabis motif. Decide for yourself whether it's safe for work or not. )So, who can do any better? | | Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | | 12:07 pm |
Expensive Clowns Yield Mutually Beneficial Equilibria
Over the past few weeks I've been trying something out. Rather than making any effort to watch The Mentalist, Lie To Me or Dollhouse, I've been working my way through a course on game theory at Academic Earth. Essentially, it's a first year undergraduate class requiring a small amount of economic theory and a smattering of maths. It's not exactly easygoing, but it's much more rewarding than either Tim Roth or Eliza Dushku. Along with the lectures themselves, they publish the course materials online, including the exams. Having just finished the first twelve lectures I'm having a crack at the midterm, and came across ( this absolute gem of a question... ) | | Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | | 9:02 pm |
Political Correctness Gone Mad
You know those thoughts you get? The ones that start with a seemingly harmless and unquestioned premise in a work of fiction, and spiral into an incontrovertible chain of internally-consistent but absurd logic? Those thoughts? Well I've just had one. UK employment law stipulates that employers aren't allowed to discriminate against job applicants on the basis of gender, age, sexuality, race or religion. This means that it's entirely legitimate for The Fat Controller in Thomas the Tank Engine to have "fat" listed as a requirement in his job description. However, it turns out that the position of Fat Controller is a title passed down from father to son, and whilst not strictly hereditary, the son of the present Fat Controller (still a child) "is tipped to be the next Fat Controller and on [the current Fat Controller]'s death will inherit the family's Baronetcy and the title 'Sir Topham Hatt'". Stipulating obesity as a job requirement is one thing, but grooming a child for such a position from an early age is in a terrifying league all of its own. | | Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 | | 11:25 pm |
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