Disordered Thoughts and Curmudgeonly Ramblings
What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.
So, it’s 20 years today since the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind.
Nirvana were a good band and all, but please try and remember that the Pixies did everything that Nirvana did first, and with lyrics about sea monkeys.
Ah….
OK, I think Servants of the Imperium has been hacked… (Not Safe For Work!)
(The hackers have been changing it up a bit, so the title of this post doesn’t make much sense anymore. Move along!)
(Much Much Later: Note for future generations and other interested parties – at the time I originally wrote this entry the Servants of the Imperium site had been replaced with a somewhat undecorous illustration of two men engaged in, shall we say, “the art of love”, with the caption This is how I play 40k with my boyfriend)
Bob Marley? Seriously?
Emotional Bag Check seems like a really cool idea, but the level of musical knowledge displayed by the top 25 list of recommended songs listed on PerthNow is just appalling!
BOB MARLEY DID NOT SING DON’T WORRY BE HAPPY YOU PHILISTINES!!!!
It’s by Bobby McFerrin and was released in 1988 – SEVEN YEARS AFTER MARLEY DIED!!!
Not every singer with a deep voice and Jamaican accent is Bob Marley, for crying out loud!!
Similarly songs number 5 (Three Little Birds) and number 23 (Everything’s Gonna Be Alright) are the same freakin’ song! Unless of course by Everything’s Gonna Be Alright they actually mean No Woman, No Cry.
I don’t own a single Bob Marley album and I know this stuff. Sheeze!
Well at least I can take comfort in the fact that a song from A Very Potter Musical makes it onto the list – although I can’t really discount the possibility that this is only because Darren Criss is on Glee now…
Max Brooks sees all
I just figured it out. REM is breaking up so Michael Stipe can get into training to kill zombies.
Casting Wild Aspersions
I called up the electricians about my invisible smoke alarm. They were nice, reasonable and apologetic about it, and are sending out a revised invoice.
Damn. I’d worked myself up to do my best Victor Meldrew impersonation…
…Well there isn’t a smoke alarm! No smoke alarm has been installed! Unless it’s cunningly concealed inside the pile of discarded wires and brick dust your workmen so thoughtfully left in my kitchen…
…No! I don’t care what ‘Barry’ says! The words ‘smoke alarm’ at no point issued forth from his lips during the entire procedure! A large number of other quite unprofessional ones did, but ‘smoke alarm’ was not amongst them!…
…Well if ‘Barry’ or one of your other trained neandertals can be bothered to come down here and show me the smoke alarm he claims to have installed, I’ll happily pay your account. But until then you’re not getting a cent out of me!
(For the record the electricians – one of whom may or may not have been named Barry – were entire professional, and didn’t leave any mess to speak of. You’ve just got to exaggerate wildly and cast random aspersions if you want to channel old Victor).
Cuscuscuscuscus
It’s a freaking Cuscus! And they call themselves zoologists?!
Deeper and Down
REM have decided to break up, my dinner last night was tube pasta seasoned with the dust from the bottom of a parmesan cheese container, and I’ve been sent a bill for hundreds of dollars worth of electrical work that I’m fairly sure doesn’t exist (unless someone broke in and installed a smoke alarm where I can’t see it).
This is probably not going to be a good day…
The new normal
Dinner last night – Gherkin Dip and Sliced Ham sandwiches.
Breakfast this morning – Gherkin Dip and Sliced Ham sandwiches.
Lunch today – Gherkin Dip and Sliced Ham sandwiches, brought from home.
Money spent so far today – $5.20 on a muffin and Red Bull, all in 50c pieces culled from my strategic silver change reserve.
Further Austerity Measures under Consideration
– Is it feasible to bake bread with a mixture of normal flour, self raising flour, milk powder and bread crumbs?
– Is raw vegetable stock a viable source of nutrients?
– Do I really need to buy deodorant?
Put the cloves and Tom Collins mix in a bowl…
I’ve been teaching myself to use a couple of open source programs lately. Hugin for image stitching, and Scribus for desktop publishing.
Scribus is a pain. This is not because it’s a bad program, it’s because Desktop Publishing is a pain. You’ve got to worry about margins and gutters and fonts and all kinds of crazy stuff that gets automatically handled in a word processor. This is the price you pay for being able to do much cooler things layout and publishing-wise.
It’s a steep learning curve, but Scribus is proving to be really flexible. Once I get the hang of it I should be able to pump out professional looking PDFs from here to the wazoo, and actually launch that games publishing empire I’ve been planning for years…
(Yeah, let’s see if that happens… :))
Hugin is a lot of fun. Take a bunch of photos, load them into Hugin, and it stitches them all together. It can do a lot more than that of course, but I’m still just learning. You can check out some resulting gigantic panoramas of the semi-demolished Entertainment Centre in my Flickr stream.
On another subject it’s good that these programs are open source – and hence free – as after a triple hit from Council Rates, Strata Fees and Water Bills my bank balance is looking really ill. I’m having to go on a crash austerity drive for the next few weeks, which will no doubt result in more meals of bread crusts, pearled barley and soy sauce. But hey, it could be worse, at least I’m not eating pie crusts, cloves and Tom Collins Mix đŸ™‚
What else is there to say?
This is an actual thing that happened.
