The Bucket O' Nothing

Read a Rolling Stone article about the sheer volume of actual fucking fraud that is involved in many of the current US banks foreclosing on homes. Not homeowners committing fraud, the banks, and it goes all the way down (of course it's related to the pit of lies and bullshit that was the subprime mortgage market, it's just horrifying to realise quite how much lying was going on).

And in an effort to try to do something with the money that I have that isn't "spend it on stuff I don't need" and that is "help the world be better", I've signed up on Kiva, a microfinance site, and have made a loan (just one so far, but I intend to do this regularly). Check the site out if this interests you.

crap.

turns out that a new Assassin's Creed game makes me forget I need sleep.

this post brought to you by roughly seven hours running around virtual Constantinople / Istanbul - I only turned the 360 off because (a) one of my Assassins was killed in a fight and I hoped that it hadn't saved after that, and (b) it's quarter to six in the morning what the hell.

I'd been meaning to look at this for a while and have finally got round to it.

The Rule7 forums run on forum software that doesn't have any sort of ignore list for posts. (It has one for PMs, but that's all.) Being able to ignore a particular user's posts is something I find really useful for maintaining sanity while browsing a forum.

So here is a Greasemonkey script that I threw together today to do this for me. There's a line at the start of the script where you list the usernames you want to ignore, and on any thread that you load it'll replace the text of their posts with "(You are ignoring this user.)". If you're logged in and quote their post you can see what they wrote, and you can of course disable the script - it's just to avoid initial flares of anger rather than prevent one from reading it entirely.

I've tested this on Firefox 3.6.21 with the Greasemonkey extension; I know there's one property in it that doesn't work in IE before version 9 but should on earlier ones, and will try to get that working next.

If you try it and find any bugs, please find your browser's Javascript error console (this StackOverflow.com question gives a summary of how for several browsers) and let me know the error message you're getting.

This evening, at the suggestion of theblunderbuss, four of us sat down to play a game of Fiasco. It's a GMless game that involves making your characters together by figuring out how they're related, giving them motivations, and then setting them off with an idea of their aims and seeing how badly wrong things can go. The style it's aiming for is the idea of a caper movie, and I think we got that, although possibly at a slightly odd angle.

Explaining this may be a little tricky, so let's start off with a crude ASCII diagram of what the relations between characters were...

( Seriously, if there is one thing you read this review for, let it be the crude ASCII diagram. )

I have only just discovered that along with the many other science and mathematical Olympiads, there is an International Linguistics Olympiad. The sample questions are amazing.

Unlike another Olympiad I never heard of at school (the International Olympiad in Informatics - we knew about the Chemistry, Physics and Maths ones, and I assumed there was a Biology one as well), the Linguistics Olympiad started two years after I left school, and the UK one has only been going since 2009.

But having looked at the sample questions, I am so enthused about it that I am likely to have a look at some of them in more detail this evening. :D

Wanted to share a pair of well-presented and phrased (optional) gender and sexuality survey questions I've seen recently. These are from a survey from Allout.org, a project campaigning for the lives and freedoms of LGBT people.

( Image under the cut. )

Note: this is your last chance to claim any of the books in http://bouteillebleu.livejournal.com/187771.html - I am going to take the unclaimed ones to charity shops this weekend.

But I do have some more books. As before, these are yours if you're interested - come June they will be going to charity shops.

Books are £1 each unless there's another price, all paperback unless otherwise mentioned. Can do delivery within Cambridge or to Maelstrom event 4; Odyssey event 3 might be possible via someone else but would have to arrange. Anything else, let me know and I'll see what we can work out.

( Read more... )

Following a conversation with a housemate in which he asked what the proper linguistic term for things like "saxamaphone" and "tramapoline" was, I share with you the following article: Reduplication in English Homeric Infixation.

(Yes, that Homer. Yes, it has some phonology in there; the Wikipedia page on Optimality Theory might be interesting, or you could just skip most of the phonology and read the examples. :)

Spinemeet on Sunday was good - I'd forgotten how much fun it is to get together with the other people in the group and just chat, either about things in general or about Maelstrom. (Hazard of going to player events on my own.) Looking forward to event 1.

Got more sleep over the weekend, so am feeling better about work and have clearer ideas about what I'm doing.

Sonata Arctica gig on Friday was good as well. Musician's earplugs continue to hold up well (they're these ones - cheap, reusable, and even work with my ears that can't cope with in-ear headphones, so I'd recommend them to anyone looking for something better than disposible ones).

I, er, spent most of the opening acts reading a book I'd started on the train into London, as the O2 Academy Islington has sofas on its mezzanine level and they were quite comfortable. Found a spot half-behind one of the ceiling pipes that gave me a view of the stage when Sonata started playing, which had the bonus feature that I couldn't see the strobe light directly. Then listened and sang along to my heart's content - the music is singable and the band make their concerts fun.

Set list was as follows:

( Sonata Arctica set list, 25/3/11, O2 Islington )