helen-louise's journal

Have some links:

Slate.com: The Snarky, Clever Comments Hidden in the "Acknowledgments" of Academic Papers. A few days later, this article appeared in The Times, hardly edited at all. Hrm.

Twitter picture: Just wrapped the other half's Xmas present. I should have kept it in the box. May be NSFW?

Fungal Christmas tree. Yeah, I should have posted this link about a month ago.

Short story: The Racist Tree by Alexander Blechman.


Webcomics:
BBC News: Amiir and Family: Somalis in Norway. Rather moving webcomic in the style of Persepolis and Maus.

The Dwarf Bride by Sammy Montoya. Awesome 8 page comic with queer theme.


Random Tumblr stuff:
Real bear with a teddy bear.

Fifty Shades of Grey as read aloud by a Kindle.

Books I Like by Katie Viggers. Children's picture books reviewed.

My web browser is lagged to hell and back, so it's once again time to clear out the links that are cluttering up my tabs.

Warning: Do not click while eating. THIS is literally just round the corner from where I live. It explains A LOT about why there are suddenly humungous traffic jams in Kingston. It's because there's a "bus-sized" "fatberg" blocking the drains, and Thames Water is doing emergency engineering work to try to get it out. EWWWW.

xoJane: My Starbucks name is Rebecca. As someone who has a deep-seated phobia of telling strangers her name, I really empathise with this article. And the comments. Oh my.

Worst Album Covers of All Time. Okay, one of these is clearly female body-hair shaming, and one of the others is non-conventionally attractive woman shaming, but most of the rest? WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

Having said that, there's nothing wrong with that Orleans album cover apart from the fact that one of the men does not have a beard, and one of the others has a hairless chest.

BBC Nature News: Wolf howl identification technology excites experts. ARROOOO!

Pervocracy: I just figured out why I get patted down every time I fly! Anger-making, but also funny: like all the best rants.

More about how I am some other time.

I haven't written anything here in ages, which means I probably should, simply to let people know I'm still alive. Unfortunately I have absolutely no spoons whatsoever today, so I'm just going to drop off a few links and run.

My Blind Date... With Science! Very funny, if not hugely accurate :D

Psychatric Meds Helped Me Become A Better Person. I'm not saying this is universally true, and I certainly lost enough time to the wrong psych meds - but holy crap, is it true for me on the right meds.

From Scientific American: Chocolate consumption and Nobel Prizes: A bizarre juxtaposition if there ever was one. I presume this is a new take on the famous Pastafarian graph plotting global warming against the number of pirates, i.e. showing that correlation is not causation. Except these people seem worryingly serious. Hrm.

The Geology of Skyrim. Oh, what incredibly hot dorkery. I love this woman.

I really must find the spoons to do the Wednesday Reading Meme tomorrow. I've been telling myself I would for the last three Wednesdays in a row...

Still don't have any spare brain to write commentary, and in fact today I hurt so much that even typing is an effort. So here are some links presented without comment:

Me And The Abstracted Persona of the Anti-Ism Community At Large. A couple of years old, and triggery for me by halfway through.

Certain Propositions Concerning Callout Culture, Part Three. Parts One and Two are good too, but they mostly say things that we already know. Whereas this points out a few home truths that people May Not Like.

The battle against 'sexist' sci-fi and fantasy book covers. I'm fairly sure I've linked to Jim C. Hines' website before, but it's awesome to see a big organisation like the BBC report on it.

Studies Raise Questions About Safety Of Personal Lubricants. I take it that everyone reading this already knows that nonoxynol-9 Is Evil, but there are a few alarming surprises in the article.

Five organisms with real super powers that rival their comic book counterparts.

Crime Against Nature: an inclusive children's book. Digital version available free.

Live American black bears with PLUSHIE American black bears! Very, very cute. Click on the pictures to make them bigger.

Ubisoft ports its games to the Post-It note platform (Kotaku article from last year) and updated gallery.

Webcomic that will cause earworms for anyone who's ever played the game: Katamari. Official licensed webcomic. Very funny and sweet - and yes, it made me want to go and boot up the game again.

An earworm to get rid of the last one: "Pop Star" by Eureka Machines. A very good pop/punk band indeed, and this video is hilarious and worth watching even if you're not a fan of the music.


I am waiting impatiently for my next Alix & Martin picture. This one has them topless :) I've been sent the pencil sketch but now it needs inking and colouring... Feeling sufficiently depressed that only pretty boys loving each other will help.

Pink Science, '50s-Style. Interesting comparison of a "Lab Technician Set For Girls" to the hideously gendered "Chemistry" kits of today.

What Milgram’s Shock Experiments Really Mean: Replicating Milgram's shock experiments reveals not blind obedience but deep moral conflict, from Scientific American.

Maps of the 2012 US presidential election results, organised in a number of ways. Interesting but slightly freaky.

Positive pregnancy test diagnoses man's cancer. From Reddit, apparently.

BEST VIDEO OF THE ENTIRE YEAR!!! Two very good dogs teach you chemistry. This is beyond amazing. If you have ANY interest in chemistry or dogs, or even if you don't but you don't actively dislike dogs, WATCH THIS VIDEO.

I am stressed and headachy. If anyone else is also feeling this way, please enjoy this photo of a bear falling from a tree onto a mattress, with accompanying story.

Machine pareidolia - exploring the tendency for humans to see faces in inanimate objects. (I'm curious - do people with faceblindness also recognise faces in inanimate objects?). Very nerdy. If you prefer the art version to the computer science version, please enjoy the Hello Little Fella! pool on Flickr. My favourite so far is this (though this, er, human brain has to be a close second).

I have a particular reason, even beyond loving Portal 2, for approving of the Perpetual Testing Initiative video. And yes, it HAS SUBTITLES.

I also have lots of political-type links that are anger-making, but my head hurts too much to want to inflict those on anyone else just now.

Yesterday my Mac suddenly lost the ability to connect to the internet. I thought this meant that our ADSL was down, or the router had crashed (we've been having fairly lousy connectivity the past few days), but rebooting the router didn't help. It later transpired that I had perfectly fine connectivity from the eeePC. After trying various sensible things myself, I waited for Richard to get home - and it turned out the Mac's keychain had randomly corrupted itself. People who know about Macs say this is a Bad Thing.

The thing is, I'm sure that usually when users go to tech support people and say "I haven't done anything to the computer, it just stopped working", usually they have changed something and forgotten about it. In this case, I hadn't done anything at all. Half an hour previously, it worked. Then suddenly, it didn't. Huh.

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I really need to clear out some of the tabs that are sitting around in my browser waiting for me to write about them. But I still don't have a lot of energy, so anything I say will be brief.

Videos:
Topless Robot: I Would Not Like to Fight 300 Naked Orcs, Personally. A load of level 1 characters in World of Warcraft teamed up to attack one of the toughest bosses in the game. The video is hilarious even if you don't know anything about WoW (as long as you're vaguely aware of video games in general, I suppose).

Sparkfun: Yarn Monster. Richard found this on Sparkfun's site and told me I should link it for all my knitting friends. It's a robot that turns messy yarn into neat balls. Awesome!

Storycorps: Q & A. Animation drawn over a real-life soundtrack of a 12 year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome interviewing his mother. May require tissues, may be triggery (e.g. if you are on the autistic spectrum and do not have such a loving, accepting parent).

Top Five Panda Cheese commercials. Very odd TV adverts for an Egyptian cheese, featuring an utterly adorable panda. Or is he?

Articles:
Fire and Ice on a Platter. I can't remember quite how I found this, but it's an article about the science behind the dessert Baked Alaska. It's very interesting for cooks and science-types alike.

Autism's First Child. Article about/interview with the first person ever to be diagnosed as autistic.

BBC News: A Real Good Samaritan and Your Good Samaritan stories. It made me cry.

Bad Science: Putting a number in its context. The rebuttal to the rather scary recent news story that 600 women had become pregnant despite the contraceptive implant. On a similar note, A new and interesting form of wrong. What's wrong with the recent Stonewall report that “the average coming out age has fallen by over 20 years”.

Silliness:
WALRUS ALLERGIES ARE A SERIOUS ISSUE. From sherlockbbc_fic.

I'm reading bad fanfic. Currently laughing my arse off at the following phrase that appears in each of the first 8 chapters...

THIS IS A YAIO which means… BOY/BOY. May also have girl/girl buy most likely not.

A YAIO!

I know some people have spelling difficulties and/or typing difficulties for whatever reason - but surely, surely you'd use a spellchecker and/or get a friend to read over a story before posting it to a fanfiction site? Wouldn't you? Especially the most important words, like characters' names and Japanese terminology... I can only assume she was writing the story on a Sony Vaio and got confused.

Mind you, it's not as bad as the story I read a few minutes ago that was written by someone who has "a BS in English, with minors in Professional Writing and Art", who didn't know the difference between accept & except, insure & ensure, and other such primary school howlers...

Any minute now I'm going to stop this and do something more useful (like feed myself or clean the kitchen), but the horror is too compelling.

Here is some deliberate horror, from weepingcock. Of course, not even vaguely safe for work.

I also recommend the past week or so's Questionable Content (read from 1786 to 1793), and then read Marigold's horrible fanfic for yourselves. Argh! (Though I genuinely approve of "Let's get married, because wizards believe in Equal Rights and anybody can marry anybody else").

I have reached a stage of ARGH with my work, so I'm going to post all of the links I have cluttering up my "working" Firefox profile :)

From epi_lj: Hollywood's Racism Exposed ... by Lego. Interesting.

From skibbley: New bisexual IKEA ad airs in Austria. It's amusing... apart from continuing to propagate the "bisexuals are cheaters"/"can't be monogamous" stereotype. Or does it? Maybe the boyfriend simply doesn't like to be in the flat when his partner is having sex with his girlfriend!

From Shana Logic: IKEA Let Loose a Herd of 100 Cats Into Store to 'See What Happens'. If you're really interested, the ad was shot in the branch of IKEA we used to go to when I was a kid (Wembley). We don't go there any more because there's one much closer to us now (Croydon).

From Beetlebau on #soc.bi: Night of the Living Trekkies (book trailer). Books have trailers now?

Finally, in case you haven't seen this anywhere else, and care: the Complete Pokedex for Pokemon Black & White.

*hits Refresh a few more times to see if anyone's replied to my message asking for help yet*