alias_sqbr

Links given to me by Stumbleupon:
Art/Science: 30%
Humour/cat pictures: 30%
Politics/religion: 20%
Cheese based recipes aimed at children: 19%
Recipes that do not contain cheese and/or are aimed at adults: 1%

This despite the fact that I am an adult with no children who is allergic to cheese.

It's my own fault of course, I'm pretty sure that to begin with I was judging them based on whether or not they'd be nice if you took the cheese out.

Speaking of which I am quite hungry. And my body has finally decided to punish me for doing so much recently. Still, no plans for the next few days.

(Note: numbers are made up off the top of my head and do not necessarily reflect actual Stumbleupon statistics)

First off: Look what havocthecat sent me!


(Me holding an awesome little blue bag and wearing a cool little pendant)
When it arrived I spent a while looking at the return address thinking "Who on earth is *insert havocthecat's real name* and why are they sending me things from the US?" :)

Why I Like Fullmetal Alchemist, by Stultiloquentia and RHB is a fun picspam explaining why you should all check out "Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood" if you haven't already.

halfamoon is being it's usual great celebrating-of-female-characters self.

white_lotus's gift exchange is producing some great Avatar the Last Airbender fanworks.

Someone set the background image of a non-Homestuck-related board they're on to the Tanglebuddies image I made.

Queue some confused and increasingly disturbed Yuki Kajiura fans. Teeheehee.

(If you haven't read Homestuck it will probably be just as confusing for you, the page on squiddles may help if you're curious)

Every time for the last few years that I've seen people talk about old computer games being rereleased I've gone "Oooh, do they have..." and they didn't. But this time they did!

So, at long last, about a decade after first hearing about it and thinking "Wow, that sound like just my sort of thing, I should play that." I can buy a copy of Planescape Torment.

I haven't done it yet since I am waaaay too sleepy today after a very tiring but awesome day hanging with friends yesterday, but I have Plans.

From the same site, there are the Gabriel Knight games. I LOVED these games when I played them back around 1999-2001. I mean loved. Interesting, well written plot and characters! Well researched fantasy/horror ideas with a solid grasp of history and mythology! Clever puzzles that made you think and read up about stuff and felt integrated into the mystery! The graphics were distractingly bad even then (as you can see from the screenshots) but I loved feeling like I was actually in a supernatural story solving a well written mystery, plus that "I am actually learning real history and using it to win at games" feeling I loved from "Where in the world is Carmen Sandiago?". I can't say how well they'd hold up today, these reviews are based on my 20-ish year old self's opinions.

Gabriel Knight 1: Mysterious deaths in New Orleans. Plus: the writer obviously loves New Orleans and there's a great sense of place and character. Minus: Goes to the same racist place as every other "Mysterious deaths in New Orleans" story, though with some attempt at nuance.

Gabriel Knight 2: Wolves, castles, and homoeroticism in Germany. Has a very effective air of melancholy and historical depth. Has a bit of a gay=doomed subtext as I recall.

Gabriel Knight 3: French churches and art history and The Secrets Of The Knights Templar. The most complex and interesting, though the graphics do take some getting used to. Plus, ah...certain aspects of the plot probably seem less original now than they did in 1999.

It turns out the ever awesome cesy has created a solution to the lack of drafts at AO3: the Unrevealed Drafts Collection.

It's a hack but one that works :)

I tried it out and I feel much better about those stories now (in this case, they're in an anonymous competition whose judge I'm like 80% sure has given up on it, and I'm waiting to get up the courage to PM her and check. But I'm sure I'll use it for other drafts too.)

You know, someone should make a lj comm for insomniacs to post at while they are awake at 4am. Not as a general insomnia support group, just a place to say "WHY AM I AWAKE? Anyway, here's some random pictures of kitties I found." etc :)

EDIT: Ha! And someone else already had this idea: fuckimawake

(Also: WHY AM I AWAKE? Alas, I have no pictures of kitties. Princess Tutu, whatever it's other brilliant aspects, actually kind of takes the fun out of kitties with it's rather creepy Mr Cat.)

Flamebyrd made a post pondering the idea of a challenge for fic where one character of the pairing has the same name as a character from the other character's fandom. I thought about this and said I thought it would be more interesting to have it not necessarily pairing based, but with characters with the same name from different fandoms.

I thought about this some more and got Inspired.

Thus:
X meets X at AO3, open to anyone to submit their own works
X meets X at DeviantArt, a collection of pictures I've found (less strictly defined since it's just whatever strikes my fancy)

And the stuff I've created:
Parker meets Parker Spiderman/Leverage
By the Rhine Gilmore Girls/German mythology

Of course this will be a challenge for the tag wranglers :)

Flamebyrd has also made a google wave for playing around with these ideas, let me know if you want an invite.

One of the main reasons I got a livejournal was to be able to get comment notifications when I replied to people. And one of the main reasons I switched over completely was that I liked the comment threading and notifications, they created a much more vibrant discussion that I ever got at my blogger blog. I used to spend a lot of time in forums etc getting frustrated at having to constantly check all the threads I was in and being forced to engage with the WHOLE discussion on a post/topic rather than just the bit I was interested in, eg any time there was a troll everyone got derailed.

Having gotten used to lj style commenting I am loathe to get involved in any online discussions that don't have comment notifications and threading. Most places have comment notification now (Thank GOD) but most blogs and mailing lists don't have threading, or not to the full extent of lj. I was surprised in a discussion about comment policies at Hoyden About Town by some people who hate threading, but I guess I can see how that would be annoying if you always DO want to hear the whole conversation at once and don't like things splitting off.

I also am lazy and can't be bothered reading stuff I can't navigate entirely by my friendlists and email, though I'm not as bad as the people who refuse to read feeds or more than one flist (I have 4, though I never check my insanejournal) Thus I can't bring myself to engage with forums, even stuff like Starship Earth or the Jane Austen forums which aren't replicated elsewhere.

I remember when I had the feed to my blog people kept commenting on the feed (which I didn't get notifications for, and which vanished within a week or two) rather than clicking to get to the blog itself. This was very annoying.

Anyway, this post was inspired by wanting to comment on an article at the F word and discovering that their comment policy is "you send us an email, and if we like it we add it to a monthly comment digest". !!!

So how do you feel about commenting? I realise it's not a very exciting topic but I felt like talking about it :)

I have a journalfen account, if any of you are over there too and want to say hi. Almost certainly only going to be used for commenting, and not that frequently at that.

As violetsquirrel reminded me, Geocities is going away!. (Anyone who was around the internet in the 90s should read that article, it's a work of art)

So, before it goes, here's my Geocities page. Fairly nondescript since I actually kept editing it until around 2001 (I got it back in my late teens. And I have to say, violetsquirrel saying "Oh no, my childhood!" makes me feel very old. We didn't have homepages when I was a child. We had to sumbit to class newspapers! Printed on dot matrix printers! In the snow!)

Anyone else got a Geocities page they want to share, revel in a bit of Gen X/Gen Y nostalgia?

I'd like to laugh at my siblings pages (they were children at the time, and very big fans of animated gifs. They've since moved on to MySpace) but alas I have lost the links. That award is from my sister, by the way, total nepotism in action.