alias_sqbr

From the regency romance I'm reading ("Almost a Gentleman" by Pam Rosenthal):

It's as though someone had made pictures of those moments&mdash not paintings, more like horribly precise engravings, drained of color, etched by a flash of light&mdash and affixed them eternally in my thoughts. Thank heaven there's no machine that can create such pictures&mdash only my accursed guilty memory.

eg "It's like black and white photos in my head. Except cameras haven't been invented yet."

And engravings don't naturally have colour anyway.

I feel a sense of unjustified pride that thanks to hlbr's brilliant beta-ing my own regency dialogue doesn't have so many anachronistic contractions. (Or American spelling for that matter)

Reading the latest round of metafandom there's some discussion of Fanlore and other fan wiki. Someone said the unrestrained squee on Fanlore makes it less useful which I was unsure about.

Looking up the cast of the awesome Leverage I couldn't find much on Aldis Hodge (playing the wonderfully geeky Hardison) except on the Leverage fan wiki. But, well, this isn't actually all that much more useful, Fanlore probably should avoid this sort of thing :)

I love the tone of this article: Chimp planned rock attacks on zoo visitors.

Aww! Look at how ingenious his plots are to kill the zoo visitors! And see the sociopathic calm with which he prepares his weapons! Isn't nature inspiring?

I also like the way chimps disprove all those fluffy ideas about animals being too simple and pure for war and cruelty. I saw a doco once where one chimp cheerfully beckoned a park keeper (with whom he had an established relationship) over while his friends snuck around the other side to bring him down (the keeper outsmarted them, but geeze)

Really it's the same sort of anthropocentrism that leads to people arguing that animals don't have love or real language or whatever: humans being a special kind of nasty is still us being special.

So Cam and I are looking into buying a house. We first met a guy from Mortgage Choice. He was kind of weird.

We then met a woman from Aussie Home Loans, who was much nicer and suggested a much better sounding loan.

Just now Mortgage Choice guy rang up and asked for Cam. The entire point of his call? To figure out how to format a broken memory card.

I'm pretty sure one of the rules of salemanship is not randomly ringing up potential customers and asking them to do you a favour.

According to Cam it's one of the hazards of telling people you're a computer programmer. Which is unfortunate, since he hates helping people(*). Luckily while having a pure maths major got me lots of random "Omigodgrouptheortyishardandmyassignmentisduetommorrow" emails at uni it's not so bad now :) (That and I learned to say "Sure I'll help you, I charge $30 an hour")

(*)Well, helping them with their computers :)