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Non-native English celebration fest?

As long as this doesn't happen while I'm still buried under my dissertation, I am definitely up for it. I've already been looking for excuses to write in German occasionally, despite the fact that maybe two of my friends would be able to understand it.

And then we all get to find out how shamefully rusty my written German has become. But I'll probably enjoy it, anyway.

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12. 8. 2011 4:41 pm | Personal, Syndicated | Tags: , , | Comment

Film, TV, and theatre: collect them all!

First of all, there are some extremely important orders of business to discuss:

Look a this!
Ouran is getting a live-action drama! I am pretty excited about this. They could keep making adaptations of Ouran forever and I'd be happy.

Also this!
You really need to watch this one in HD, trust me. That hair. I am definitely seeing Brave in the cinema when it comes out.

And now for something that's already happened: some friends of mine and I went to see Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus" at the Globe last week. I highly recommend going to see it if you get the chance! The acting was great, especially the two main characters (played by Paul Hilton and Arthur Darvill), and the sets, costumes, props etc were all just right for the atmosphere. (Hurray for eerie hell-creatures!) I was a bit... not wary exactly, but unsure going in, because although I knew the basic story I had no idea if I'd let myself in for a comedy, a tragedy, or a heavy philosophical treatise. In the end, though, it turned out to be the prefect balance of (generally slapstick) humour and dark creepiness and dread.

And walking out of the theatre we all agreed we wanted a BBC TV series of Faustus and Mephistopheles's wacky adventures.

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28. 6. 2011 1:40 pm | Personal, Syndicated | Tags: , , , , | Comment

Seeing other blogs

I keep forgetting to tell you Dreamwidth/LJ/blog guys that I have been cheating on you with other blogs. It's ok, though, I'm sure if we all try hard we can become one big happy blog family.

1. Art blog: Zombie Contingency Plans.
I've had that URL hanging around for ages and I finally did something with it! I'm trying to make and post something there at least once a month. I dunno if I'm going to cross-post art over here too or what, but I'll try to remember to let you guys know when I post there.

I haven't done anything for this month yet, actually... I have a bunch of stuff I want to do fanart for, though.

2. YouTube
I'm trying to start doing videoblogs! I didn't post the first one here because it was kind of ridiculous, and then it took me forever to get a second one up because I got a cold etc etc. Anyway, the reason I'm doing it is explained in this video:


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15. 6. 2011 2:47 pm | Personal, Syndicated | Tags: , , | Comment

Link post of free stuff.

I've come across some neat things on the internet in the last couple of days, and since you guys are my favourites I thought I would share them with you.

I found this album via Kinokofry (an excellent collection of webcomics, by the way), and I strongly advise you to download it, as well!


Sound Club Sweet by Patrick Alexander （パッチ）

Cute and cheerful chiptunes-esque music. I listened to it all day yesterday and it filled my heart with nothing but peace and joy.*

On that note.

(NSFW!)

While the Pope is in the country, you can download Tim Minchin's Pope Song free from his website. (Tim Minchin's website, not the Pope's.) (Obviously.) It pretty much expresses my opinions on this topic.

Also, audiobooks! Audible is giving away free books in the Guardian, which is crazy cool, and people have posted all of the links in this forum. (If you go through the pages, there's direct links to Audible, as well, instead of through the Guardian website). I think it's a one-week only thing, so the earlier ones may not work anymore, but at least some of them should.

I've been listening to Down and Out in Paris and London on my way to and from the library (while getting ground into dust over and over again by Karen from the Elite Four). I'd never heard of it before so I had no real expectations, but it's really interesting so far. Also the reader does brilliant voices and accents verging on the silly, which makes it twice as good.

*So much so that I decided to show my appreciation via the medium of PayPal. Which you should totally do to, if you want and can! Paying people for rad stuff they make is the way to go.
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16. 9. 2010 9:04 am | Personal, Syndicated | Tags: , | Comment

Anime, I have issues with you.

Chairman Wow: what are you up to?
Cubed2D: watching an anime
Cubed2D: confusingly called 'i my me strawberry eggs'
Chairman Wow: ...
Chairman Wow: sounds good
Chairman Wow: XD
Cubed2D: about a guy who tries to get a job as a sports teacher at a high school, but the head teacher is sexist and will only employ females because males are all savages with no love in their hearts etc etc
Cubed2D: so he dresses as a lady to get the job
Chairman Wow: awesome
Cubed2D: the rules: all female characters cannot trust males. all males are perverts and cannot be trusted. all male character have to be perverts. main character is the only sensible person in the entire world (disregarding the whole I should dress as a lady to get this job bit, rather than you know... finding another job)
Chairman Wow: yep, sounds definitely like reality
Chairman Wow: what was that about sexism hurting men, too....? :P
Cubed2D: heh

Yep.

A propos, I keep meaning to link to this article, but, you know, no internet: 5 Stupid, Unfair and Sexist Things Expected of Men. Very interesting stuff.

While I'm linking, I found a much better website for my math studying than the one I was using previously: Paul's Online Math Notes. The one before was kind of wishy-washy about the right terms and notation, which bothers me. >_> This one is looking much more useful.


I'm home for a day or two, mainly to watch Sherlock, and True Blood with my mum. XD (It's kind of cool watching a show with my mum. We were looking at the True Blood merchandise on the Forbidden Planet website earlier. Maybe I should find her some fanfic to read...)

Second episode of Sherlock was kind of disappointing. Not as much fun banter, and Chinese circus smuggler gangsters? Idk, guys, idk. Quite Holmes-style in a way, but I kept waiting for the opium den to show up. :|


I'm gonna be home again next Monday, because my family and I are going to Vienna for a week from Tuesday, so I may prepare a bit of a picspam entry to post then.
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4. 8. 2010 8:05 pm | Personal, Syndicated | Tags: , , , , , | Comment

Wait, what? 11pm?

I was planning on doing something else this evening, but then I got stuck in front of the TV after dinner watching Role Models. Which did end in an epic LARP showdown, so I guess it was worth staying for all of it.

So instead of whatever else I was going to do, here's some cool links I urge you to check out:


• "Mario's Three Lives". Possibly the finest piece of fanfiction on the internet today.

• Spera. I meant to link this earlier, but I don't think I ever did. It's an excellent comic about adventures and things, and I don't know why I only discovered it recently.

• BAÏDIR trailer. I need this in my life.

• Really early Pokemon concept art. Eeee.

• Filthy Figments. Comic porn by ladies! I've never subscribed to a comic site before, but I think I might for this one. :3

• And I'm pretty sure everyone's heard this already, but: The Pope Song, by Tim Minchin. NSFW. But brilliant.


Good night.
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19. 5. 2010 11:07 pm | Personal, Syndicated | Tags: | Comment

Rapidly approaching academia.

It's suddenly only a small number of months until I start at UCL! And just when I've just about figured out how not to let myself drown in a sea of ennui and depression when I have nothing to do. What a waste.

I got an email from the Institute of Archaeology (IoA?) this week asking me to tell them what options I'd like to do with my MA, so they can gauge interest. Unfortunately these two, which I really wanted to take, aren't running next year, so I spent forever deciding which of the alternatives to pick. I ended up with these:

• The Near East from Later Prehistory to the End of the Iron Age
• The Archaeology of Early Egypt and Sudan, c.10,000 to 2500 BC
• Archaeology of Late Pleistocene and Holocene Hunter-Gatherers

And as second choices in case any of those are cancelled, The Mediterranean world in the Iron Age, Anthropological and Archaeological Genetics, and The Aegean from first farmers to Minoan states.

I wasn't sure whether I should put one of the Mediterranean ones in my preferred options list instead of the hunter-gatherers one, but in the end I went with hunter-gatherers because the professor co-ordinating it has the more interesting research interests. I think that's a legit reason.

Ffff guys, I am so excited.

Speaking of Archaeology, I've been reading about the MASS Project today. I heard about it vaguely just before I left Durham, but then I completely forgot about it until recently. It's a super-badass project that involves modelling prehistoric settlements to see how they interact with, affect, and react to their environments. I've not finished reading all the stuff on the website yet, but like I said, it sounds super badass.


In other news, my parents and I went to see Robin Hood yesterday, and it was... really, really lame.

They just kept piling on more and more story elements none of which congealed into any proper kind of plot. An element was introduced (all the prepubescent children have run off to live in the woods!) and then eventually "resolved" (crossdressing Cate Blanchett leads them into battle) with nothing in the middle to lead from one to the other. The story with the orphans the most extreme, but all of the plots were similarly half-arsed. Nothing flowed properly. It felt a bit like scenes from three different films cut together into one. And the action scenes were pretty uninspiring, too, unfortunately. I wouldn't recommend it.

It doesn't feel right somehow to make a post without a single picture or drawing in it, so here's an animated gif of a cat that I found on the internets:


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14. 5. 2010 6:12 pm | Personal, Syndicated | Tags: , , , , , | Comment

Back from Eastercon!

Good day, LJ. I kept meaning to make a post-by-email post at some time during the weekend, but I was constantly busy with cool stuff or sleeping. At least I remembered to feed myself properly on all but one day.

I'm probably going to write about it more later — [info]lullula asked me to scan my notes, so I'll post those at some point — but for now I just wanted to post this:

I met some really cool people Saturday night (untied by destiny rage at the terrible terrible slash panel). I then managed to not meet any of them again for the rest of the con except in inconvenient situations, but that's what the internet is for. Here's everyone's usernames and self-descriptions, as promised.

Girl with rainbow socks: [info]cu_sith
Girl with pink/purple/brown hair: [info]lullula
Loud girl in black blazer & rainbow bracelet: [info]lokifan
Boobalicious: [info]pola_bear
Boy with stripy top: [info]son_of_darkness
Token black girl: [info]hedonisticated
Cute shoes: [info]mokatiki
The one with the giant boots: [info]clockworkwasp

As for me, I was the one with the colourful sweater-vest. I'm probably more active on Twitter than on here most of the time (@ChairmanWow), I've got a website (which is really due for an update quite soon), and the rest you can probably find out from my userinfo.
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6. 4. 2010 3:22 pm | Personal, Syndicated | Tags: , | Comment

New resolution: post more than once every 10 days. ¬_¬

I went to my UCL interview on Monday, and it went well! I was incredibly nervous and ineloquent, but I got an email the next day saying they've recommended me for an offer, so I must have made a fairly good impression. Haven't got the official letter from the college yet, but it looks like I'm going! :D :D

Ummm, what else. I went to see the Staffordshire Hoard after the interview. It was pretty cool. Sparkly, shiny things. I'll blog about it properly later, right now I've got a cold and my head is a bit foggy.


Some links:

• The Desert Peach - I rediscovered this the other day. The greatest piece of historical fiction set in World War 2 that exists, in my opinion.

• Choice of the Dragon - A very well written multiple choice text game. In which you play as a dragon:


What more could you want, right? It's got a great attitude on gender & sexuality. I noticed it when I was playing, and then I checked their blog and read the most recent post at the time, which confirmed how much thought they'd put in it. It's so refreshing not to have presumptions shoved down your throat: you can chose the gender of the dragon, and the dragon you futilely attempt to mate with (I will get the right combination of stats/actions one day), and it doesn't go "'knight' obviously = 'he'", either.

Their quest to introduce meaningful choices into games pleases me, too. It makes the whole thing instantly many times more engaging and entertaining. My only criticism is it wasn't long enough. :P

• One of my favourite fiction series, "Union Dues" by Jeffrey R. DeRego (as seen on Escape Pod and Clone Pod) is apparently being pitched as a TV series. I think that's brilliant. I'm not of the opinion that everything that's good should eventually be made into a film and/or TV show — TV is not the end-all of storytelling media — but I also don't have a problem with different versions of stories and things jumping form medium to medium and taking on new forms (I mean, look at Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). In fact, I encourage it. If I find a fictional world I love, I want to experience it through as many different lenses as I can, to see all of it's permutations and facets and flavours.

Also TV probably has a larger audience than podcasts, and I think something of quality deserves to be seen by as many people as possible. (Or maybe rather: Everyone deserves to be exposed to quality entertainment.) I've never been into superheroes much, and I love "Union Dues". It's definitely worth it.

• I also have a key for the Star Trek Online beta! It's currently downloading. Very slowly.


Pff, I started this entry thinking I'd only list a handful of links, since my head hurt, and I ended up rambling all over the place anyway.
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15. 1. 2010 7:38 pm | Personal, Syndicated | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments