‮hjap‮

The EHRC has requested that the BNP comply with the Race Relations Act. Well, I'm glad that's all been sorted out. What would we do without the EHRC to defeat fascism for us?

~

Following this moderately amusing exchange in recent Scotsman letters pages—which, for once, I had nothing to do with—comes the story of Larry W. Peterman, acquitted on pornography charges because of the records of what everyone else in the community was watching at the time. Further information in the New York Times. I love it when stuff like this happens: there are fewer dirty secrets, and the secrets that are left don't stay dirty when we know that everyone has a handful of harmless ones. The unbounded accessibility of information makes us all a bit more equal.

Related: via miss_s_b's random squeezings comes tyrell's insightful post: There is no more plausible deniability in the world. It's harrowing to hear of Neda Soltani's death, but the ray of hope is this: it can't be long before despots realise that they can't get away with this shit any more. If the state-sponsored murder of an Iranian woman doesn't hit your personal buttons, then remember Ian Tomlinson. That which affects Iran affects us all.

They've got guns and sticks, but we've got the Internet. The panopticon works both ways.

Next: find some way to empower the dissemination of information on tyranny such that that it will actually stop tyrants doing it.

~

I'm going to the Actor Expo tradeshow on Saturday. I'm not entirely sure what one's supposed to do there, but I've signed up for a couple of seminars, including How to make it big in Hollywood, from which I'm hoping that some generalized non-Hollywood-specific information can be extrapolated. If it turns out to be an hour on how to get a US visa I'm going to be disappointed.

Typically, neither my headshots nor my business cards are likely to be ready until after the expo. Oh well.

This entry was originally posted at http://gominokouhai.dreamwidth.org/191632.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I was in Macbeth with Ailidh Mackay
who was in Atonement with Keira Knightley (mmm)
who was in Love Actually with Colin Firth
who was in Where the Truth Lies with Kevin Bacon.

Anyone out there got an Erdos number, and if so, can we co-author something?

This entry was originally posted at http://gominokouhai.dreamwidth.org/191138.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Today is the anniversary of 1944. People did different things then, such as storming beaches to defend humanity from fascism so you wouldn't have to. Remember that the next time you see the BNP claiming legitimacy on a ballot paper.

Tonight I raise a glass to those 175,000 men braver than I.

~

I have decided upon my new life goal. I shall design and build miniature bridges to allow waterfowl to cross roads in safety. I shall call my invention the `duckqueduct'.

This entry was originally posted at http://gominokouhai.dreamwidth.org/190769.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Lovelace and Babbage!

Starring: Ada Lovelace!

And Charles Babbage!

This is quite possibly the best thing ever. And the artist claims that she's not doing a comic. I need all of you to email her and tell her how many copies you'd buy, and convince her otherwise.

( Quite long )

Off to the West Coast for the weekend. I need a holiday.

This entry was originally posted at http://gominokouhai.dreamwidth.org/190644.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Jason Rust, Scottish Conservative Candidate for Edinburgh South West, has sent me a nice letter indicating that he looks forward to working with me in the future. Bear in mind that the elections haven't happened yet. Say what you like about the Tories, but they're not backward about coming forward.

The letter includes a nice headshot of Jason Rust MP. Tell me: have these two men ever been seen together?

The actual exodus to Dreamwidth seems to have begun. I've had a play around on the site, and it looks pretty reasonable; it already does several things significantly better than LJ. And it could be a lot worse. It could be DreamWidth.

spudtater's post here (which is the same as spudtater's post here, I think) contains some pretty good suggestions on how to handle the transition. If I'm doing this right, you should be able to read this post on LJ, just like we all did in the old days, when the internet was built out of tin cans and string, and before LJ sold us all to the Russian Mafia, or whatever it was that they did.

Dreamwidth posts from yr. corresp. are syndicated at gominokouhai_fd for those who want to continue reading me on LJ, although I'm not sure how well that will handle friends-locking. Let's find out.

This entry was originally posted at http://gominokouhai.dreamwidth.org/189939.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I know you're going to dig this.

Happy time_t = 1234567890, everybody!

Where's my flying car?

It's snowed a bit today. Naturally the South-East has ground to a halt, the newspapers are panicking in an apocalyptic frenzy, and Sainsburys is full of people stocking up on cans and bottled water. I expect the looting to start any minute now. Hordes of bondage-gear-clad barbarians will be clubbing each other over the head to get to the last packet of organic rocket. All because it's a bit nippy today.

I came to work in my boots and changed into my shoes once I got here. That was the total inconvenience suffered today. Other than that, the world is all pretty and white.

Jesus Christ, people, put on a jacket or something. Or you could move to the south of France, where you'll never have to worry about winter weather occurring during winter, and I won't have to listen to you.

In other news: I aten't dead. How are folks?

I made mince pies for verdandiweaves' pseudo-party on Friday. Now I'm making more of them. The previous ones were just for the guinea pigs. These ones are important: they're to go to stormsearch's parents.

I made the mincemeat myself, and the pastry, and everything.

I don't own a star-shaped pastry cutter. No matter: I have a knife and an understanding of geometry. I want five-pointed stars made out of pastry: that's easy. I can make do with circles of pastry, made with a conventional pastry cutter, and a knowledge of 72° angles.

It feels faintly sacrilegious to be carving pentagrams into pastry for Christmas-themed mince pies. No matter: I know that I've got several millennia of culture that Jesus simply wasn't born early enough for.

And if the Abrahamic religions had anything going for them, then the resultant pagan munchies wouldn't be so damn delicious, would they?

( Food porn )

Sacrilicious.

A merry Yule, or Solstice, or whatever, to you all. Goddess bless us, every one.

The Hotel usually closes for three days over Giftmas. This year we've got nobody staying on the day either side, so I'm getting a longer break than usual.

I've got very little to do, so I'm sitting here with a Festive Irn-Bru waiting for my shift to end. Then I can have five days off, and get some laundry done. I love the fact that other people's holidays mean that I get time off.

ION, a very pleasant evening was had at verdandiweaves' and draugluin's on Friday for the now-traditional reading of A Christmas Carol. I made mince pies and they apparently tasted like mince pies are supposed to taste. Then, on Saturday, the entirely non-traditional pub evening with fire_sermon, mindwanders, cairmen and xenophanean.

Exhausting. I think that's my sociability quota for the next year or so.

I will not take lectures on professionalism from a bunch of raging arseholes whose sole job is handled by an automated system, when they can't even do that right and have to get me to bail them out.

Thank Goat that libel laws don't apply to true statements.

Thanks to an impromptu meeting this morning, today's already been three hours longer than it should be, and I've spent my booze fund on taxis rushing about the place. That was before I had to deal with this defensive bitch from $AGENCY. I need a holiday.

It seems there's no escape.

The old phone died with a pathetic whimper, but the nice people at the Orange Shop told me that I was due for a free upgrade. So now I have this thing with a 3.2 megapixel camera with Zeiss lenses, radio, mp3 player, video player, and an ARM processor core driving quad-band GSM, GPRS, and UMTS. I'm told it makes phone calls too, but I've not found that function yet.

All I actually want is something that will allow me to sometimes make phone calls when I'm not near a telephone. Instead I'm lugging around a billion times the processing power of the Apollo missions on my belt, probably. Meanwhile, even as they cram unsolicited silicon into my pocket, I can't help but think about all of those proteins going unfolded.

Having said that, the radio is quite nice. I'm rapidly learning about the current standard of voiceover talent, and thus that breaking into the industry really shouldn't be very difficult. On the other hand, given the quality of the scripting, I'm not sure I want to any more.

Hello to new readers that I've picked up during my sudden, and inevitably all-too-brief, period of Internet Fame. Hello to regular readers, too, while I'm at it. Hello, regular readers! We know each other already, sometimes even in person, and that's fantastic!

Regular readers will know that I’m a big Doctor Who fan. New readers should probably learn that, pretty damn quickly. Inspired by Emo-Doctor’s amusing whingeing in this comic (and partly by the Tam of Rassilon), I wondered today: what would Time Lords eat at a Time Lord pizza party?

This is the kind of philosophical quandary that plagues me on a frequent basis. I’m deep like that.

Behold: the Pizza of Rassilon.



More information, more glorious deathless pin-sharp prose, and more pictures, at the Kamikaze Cookery site. Those of you who are on Who fora, do feel free to link, blog, whatever. Go ahead.

I feel like I've crossed a nerd threshold of some kind.

It's a brand new day, and the sun is high. (I presume—this is Scotland, and I can't see it.)

The leader of the free world seems to be a reasonable chap, for the first time in years. And I have a nephew. 12.05am this morning, so he started annoying his mother at a very young age, and 8lb 2oz, which for the benefit of future generations is 3.69kg.

I plan to be a responsible uncle. What's an appropriate age for his first drum kit?

This week on Kamikaze Cookery, I get into a fight with Jamie Oliver (figuratively speaking).

The usual deal. Go, watch, comment, tell your friends.

Normal blogging service will be resumed in my Copious Free Time. Right now, I am busy making a cookery show. And, y'know, working.

Website backed up, domain registry transferred over, new hosting arranged and paid for. Website backup turns out to be inaccessible, so will try to restore later. Lost my email for a bit, but now I seem to have got it back. Sort of.

I seem to have signed myself up for Google Apps, which seems to be like Gmail but more awesome, or at the very least more awesomely complex. Possibly it's also more Orwellian, which at least starts with the same syllable as awesome. And I have no idea what to do with it.

It would seem that I now have my pajh.org email going into this Google Apps thing, and all of the other emails from my intricate networks of forwards and filters is still going to Gmail. Now I need to decide which one of the two I actually want to use.

Any advice?

Behold, for The Perfect Steak is now available at Kamikaze Cookery dot com.

That is to say, the episode regarding the perfect steak is now available. You can't download the actual steak through the internet. I'm still working on that bit.

Go, watch, comment. Tell your friends. Subscribe to the RSS feed. And come back next week for more.

It wouldn't be a Strange Company project without a last-minute calamity, would it?

Episode One of Kamikaze Cookery will be up this afternoon. At some point. Right now, we are frantically re-rendering at Strange Company Towers.

For some obscure reason a picture of a steak had fallen out of the last render. You can't really do an episode on steak without it, so there will be a short delay.

The entire blogosphere has erupted into a frenzy of adoration for Stanislav Petrov, who stopped the nukes form flying twenty-five years ago. Had he not done as he did, I would have grown up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, eventually growing to become the leader of a mighty tribe. As it is, Western civilization was preserved, so what I get to do instead is sit around and make blog posts that nobody reads.

Oh well. Petrov never got any credit for saving the planet. I suppose I should learn when to cut my losses.