Arachne Kallisti

1. amy_wolf pointed me at this fic by annlarimer. It is babyfic. Sherlock babyfic. And it is BRILLIANT and HILARIOUS and WRONG.

2. Hungover Owls. Ignore the captions, the pictures speak for themselves.

3. Anton Vowl of Enemies of Reason continues to post occasional bits of fluff in between taking down tabloid!FAIL. My favourite is probably his definitive list of animals beginning with O (although if you ask me ocelots beat EVERYTHING) and his work towards a biscuit hierarchy.

4. An answer to the question "do tigers like catnip?" Contains much footage of large vicious predators being adorable. Also, ocelots.

5. The Improbable Island. It's a text adventure MMORPG. I have only played it for about ten minutes, but it has me horribly fascinated already. I think I shall finish it post-thesis.

I am in the middle of thesis crunch time. It would be easy to despair. Fortunately, I have been pointed at things that made me laugh and thus prevented me from giving up hope. These things include:

1. Anton Vowl from Enemies of Reason on "Why do I love my ironing board?. I sympathise. I am also strangely fond of my ironing board. I can make cloth flatter with it. This makes me feel In Control.

2. Jane Austen's Fight Club is hilarious and awesome. And features Lizzie Bennett and Fanny Price fighting in their underwear.

3. A cautionary tale from fanficrants about the importance of good proofreading. It is very plausible that Sirius Black's middle name might be Orion - it's his father's name, it fits with the whole star name thing. The only problem is that it then takes one typo to plunge us into the alternative universe in which the Blacks saddled their son with the middle name Onion. As, presumably, some kind of Slytherin version of the Boy Named Sue.

I kind of want this to be canon now.

ETA: Also, a fox just wandered into my back garden, prowled around for a bit, came right up to the French windows and gave me a Look, then cleared off. And that was quite cool.

So, the nights are drawing in, the weather is getting cold and nasty, and I'm going into misanthropy mode again. Here are some of thing I found to make myself feel better:

1. Map of the C++ Lands . I think I'm in the bit marked "programmers eat each other here" right now.
2. Sex tips from D&D players. You can tell they aren't Living Greyhawk players since single transferable vote doesn't get mentioned once.
3. Atomic theory explained with golden retrievers. I couldn't hate the species that got its quasi-symbiotic servitor race to do that and look so damned cute whilst doing it.

It's a pity that I didn't have this paper handy to wave at the Survey Twits. It displays a series of fMRI scans purporting to show how different areas of the brain light up when the owner of said brain is shown pictures of scenes of human interaction with different emotional content.

Thing is? The owner of the brain was a salmon, and was not alive at the time. The active voxels were due to random noise in the fMRI time series.

It's a valuable cautionary tale as regards false positives. Before you publish your fMRI data, ask yourself if you could have got the same results from a dead fish.

Anyway, things that make me happy:
1. I now have a large stack of vintage back issues of 2000AD dating from 1979-1985, which turned up in someone's attic and were given to me for free. They include such highlights as the Apocalypse War, the Judge Death Arc, and the issue in wich Johnny Alpha finally moved in with Wulf Sternhammer. Squee!

2. As recommended by huggyrei: sleeping kittens. Making little high-pitched kitteny noises. I am dead of cute now.

3. scans_daily is gone but not forgotten. Other communities have stepped into the breach, and there are archives available, as is explained here.

4. Cory Doctorow's short stories and novels are available online, since he's putting his money where his mouth is on Creative Commons. He's got a nice line in really rather well-thought-out near futures, and can do great world-building by paying attention to the little details of what people eat, how they get to work and so on. He's also got a rather touching appreciation for the aesthetics of junk.

Fandoms are kind of like relationships, really. You get about three to six months of new'n'shiny, then you have to decide whether this one's actually offering enough for you to stick with it. There's some you drift away from, some you never get sick of, and some you keep on coming back to EVEN THOUGH THEY KEEP ON BREAKING YOUR HEART (o hai, Whoniverse).

Anyway, still waiting to see when the new'n'shiny wears off with Cable and Deadpool. I'm currently going through the evangelistic READ THIS IT'S MADE OF CRACK phase with this fandom, slightly hindered by the fact that this means I have to try to explain Cable's backplot. Anyway, this ship manifesto and this essay take you through the set-up and dynamics rather better than I can, and without going off on the rant about how bad Rob Liefeld's art is*. There's some more edited highlights from Deadpool's career here.

Anyway, fic (mostly NSFW):
1. Shut Up! PWP told entirely in dialogue. Very funny, very wrong. Exactly what you might expect shagging Deadpool to be like.
2. Physical Impossibility Wolverine:Origins movieverse. A really quite unsettling character study with some fairly understated slashy subtext (yes, this one is SFW).
3.Selfless Slash cliche time! In which Cable manages to use his vast and ill-defined mutant powers to split off his evil side, and Deadpool finds himself at the mercy of evil!mind-controlling!cult-leader!Cable. Contains psychic coercion, a bit on the disturbing side.
4.One Of The Beautiful People More slash cliches! Bodyswap this time.
5.Suing Through The Fourth Wall Crossover with She-Hulk, for added meta win. Deadpool wishes to sue his fanfiction writers (also SFW).

*( The rant's here if you're remotely interested in it. )

I am having the sort of day that makes people decide to become supervillains.

Please find things that will convince me not to hate humanity any more, flist. Otherwise it's orbital lasers time.

Just finished watching Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra. It sheds light on many secrets of the musical world: that whole bassoonist-Bee Gees connection, the impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall on the Emmerdale titles, how to play the tuned Alpine cowbells and how to musically portray jellyfish using a theremin. It also included EastEnders with full orchestral backing (as opposed to a soundtrack like tipping a wheelbarrow full of cold porridge into a skip), News Themes Through The Ages the art of the 70s cop show soundtrack, and a full orchestral version of "Insect Nation".

It's on iPlayer till Saturday. Go on, you know you want to.

I am tired, depressed and misanthropic right now, so of course I have a terrible urge to read hurt/comfort fic and drink large amounts of red wine. Any recommendations?

My preferred fandoms right now would probably be Heroes, Torchwood, Doctor Who, Due South, Blake's 7 and Top Gear. If you can turn up any 2000AD slashfic, I will be a) absolutely astonished and b) eternally grateful. Wine recommendations also appreciated.

I have had a crap couple of weeks, but this went a long way towards cheering me up. Life imitates bad fanfic.

Also, thanks to prochytes for reminding me of the joy that is Torchwood Babiez.