February 2012
5 posts
10 tags
Peak
I’ve been giving some thought to the idea of absolute peaks, points after which the world is never quite the same. In that vein, I’ve been reading about “peak oil.” Peak Oil has been defined (by that ever-faithful bastion of knowledge, Wikipedia) as:
“Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate...
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Alien
Me: What confuses me about Alien is, if the face hugger thing lies eggs in your belly-
Flash: Well, somewhere in the abdomen.
Me: Right! So those eggs hatch and the alien creature thing tears out of you.
Flash: Yeah...
Me: So I guess my question is, where do the original eggs come from?
Flash: From a queen.
Me: Ah, but where does the queen come from!?
Flash: Well, I guess it's a... line of succession sort of a thing.
6 tags
Movie Idea
So I’ve been thinking that there just plain aren’t enough good science fiction movies coming out. Ever since the sequel/remake of The Thing, I’ve been wondering if the time is right for us to revive other established brands and see how well they fare with the help of modern effects and enormous budgets.
The plan is for a movie (or a videogame, perhaps) in the vein of those...
January 2012
16 posts
5 tags
New Hoodie
Me: Like my new jumper?
Fudd: It looks a lot like the other one...
Me: But this one has a button-up collar!
Two tenths of a second pass
Fudd: You'll be cuttin' up, baller!
10 tags
AMY
I’ve talked about my subscription to Delphine before; they were responsible for some of the best games I played as a child. I suppose “best games” probably isn’t the right word; it might be fairer to say that they were responsible for some of the best “game experiences” I had growing up.
They had a strange way of doing things that is, I’m assured, very...
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Horrors of Reality TV
I’ve been trying to write something about reality TV for a while now, but somehow it’s never quite come together. I could almost believe that the issue is rooted in my inability to pay attention to reality TV, but the fact is that I’ve been exposed to a copious amount to it. I imagine the relationship as being analogous to not having benefited from a nuclear reactor, but still...
2 tags
“Niall: That John Lennon biography was very good, a real page turner.
Mark: I...”
– (via flashinnameonly)
9 tags
My TV Show
Me: Someone should just make The Gilmore Guys; it’s just the scripts from the Gilmore Girls, but with the genders of all the characters swapped.
Una: You need to make that, immediately. This has become required viewing for me.
Me: The fact that the main character’s name is Rory adds to the believability.
Ivan: Taking your idea & running further; Foxy Prison Break.
Alan: Desperate Houseguys would be my personal favourite.
Pop Song Digest →
So, I sort of forgot to link this here. I’ve decided that the best use of that ridiculous degree in literature I managed to pick up would be to willfully misinterpret pop music that I loathe.
It’s actually turning out to be a lot more fun than I’d expected.
4 tags
Doctors
Me: When I grow up, I want to be a doctor. I could do all that stuff, all the life and death decisions stuff.
Fudd: Really?
Me: Yeah, I'd be in the operating theatre and they'd be all, "It can't be done," and I'd be all, "I'm going to do both of these brain surgeries... at the same time."
Fudd: "You can't stop me. I own this hospital."
Long pause
Fudd: That's what I love about privatised healthcare, it presents such interesting scenarios.
5 tags
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Night
I found Fudd staring wistfully out the window
Fudd: You know what I hate about nighttime?
Me: It's deadly?
Fudd: The birds go to sleep, none at the bird feeder.
Me: You need to make a bat feeder
Fudd: We should just get a pringles can and fill it full of mice, make ourselves an owl feeder.
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The Incredible Hulk
Fudd: Y'know... would Bruce Banner not be really filthy?
Me: What? Why?
Fudd: Well, when he's the hulk, he's running around, making a big mess and getting covered in dirt and rubble. Then...
He holds his hands each a foot away from his shoulders and makes a shrinking motion
Fudd: He's still got a hulk amount of dirt on him!
3 tags
Peter The Pastel Boy
When I was five and he was six, I first met Peter the pastel boy. He would sit beside me in school and we would talk in the quit fits, punctuated with giggles, that teachers were content to let us think we’d managed to slip under the radar. His hair had been a CAPUT MORTUUM scribble, his eyebrows a squiggle of consternation as he focussed his attention on the problems put to a six year-old....
5 tags
2012
I lay in bed this morning, having expected to fall asleep the instant head met pillow. Unable to sleep, I stared at a ceiling lit by the upturned halogen floodlight of a next-door neighbour’s garden. The shaft of too bright white splashed across the room shone so strongly that, even with my eyes screwed shut, I could make out its impression in the not-quite pinks and greens of clamped...
December 2011
8 posts
3 tags
The Fear
I have a number of persistent and unaccountable fears. They’re not the sorts of wake-in-the-night-screaming terrors that might pose any real problems with my day-to-day life, just these sort of background doubts that make me think twice before I do anything. Some are fairly trivial, though they could very well become near-manic issues with enough provocation.
Having read, and likely...
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Firelight
Mornings begin with a walk in the woods, a winding search for windfall boughs, brought to earth by gales and with portions already submitting to damp and rot. Their extremities are all dried leaves and tinder, first-class kindling. Larger limbs snapped off are still too close to life to easily light, so they’re left behind, the bough slowly sinking into the sodden soil.
There is a simple...
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I am a moron
I have a dreadful habit of just allowing my mind to submit pieces of information to my mouth without having to traverse the barrier of tact. This happened during a conversation with a couple.
Me: Well, I think we're all going to meet up on Thursday, but I might have to help put the tree up, so I'll be late.
J: That's okay, I have to go to the doctor anyway.
D: I hope it's nothing serious!
J: Nah, I just have to get my cervical cancer jab; can't be getting those cancers!
Me: Oh, I thought you could only get that if you weren't sexually active...
Stony silence.
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DreamHack Ogham
While I was in Sweden, I saw a number of things that were so fundamentally foreign I couldn’t really fix them in my mind. These things were so outside my experience that I have difficulty managing to explain or describe them now. As I try to wrap my mind around those strangenesses, I find myself guessing at details that should be certainties; I am one of those explorers who, having visited a...
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WaxAngel on Romance
Waxangel: So they can have unresolved tension for a few seasons
SirJolt: Unresolved tension is lame
Kiante: I can't remember
Waxangel: but it's nearly limitless plot energy
Kiante: She might have slept with him... I don't know though
Waxangel: It's the uranium of plot devices. Highly efficient, super long lasting, also toxic after long term exposure.
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The SirJolt Internship Program
One of the things I’ve found in my job-hunt is that there seem to be a tremendous variety of unpaid internships available under the government’s internship programs (whereby you’re “unpaid” by the business employing you, but continue to receive an allowance from the state). As an unemployed man, I found myself drawn to the idea of the internship scheme, fixated on it....
November 2011
1 post
3 tags
"Historical Fiction"
At the behest of a bookseller in whom I have a great deal of trust, I’m reading Umberto Eco’s Baudolino. So far, it’s an awful lot of fun, but I’ve been warned that it might not be my thing because I’m not normally into historical fiction.
I guess it’d be fairer to say that I’m not really into history more than historical fiction; it’s not that...
October 2011
7 posts
4 tags
Oh snap
Me: Woah, is that Chris Rock?
Gaelle: Yeah... [deadpan]
Me: Wow, I can't believe I got that.
Gaelle: Yeah, well how many black men are there at the start of a Michael Jackson song- oh.
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My friend lives in Florida
Eric: Most europeans love the idea of the everglades, they're just like big, damp, swampy outdoor-
Me: But they have alligators!
Eric: EVERYWHERE has alligators. We have more alligators than people!
Me: Really!?
Eric: Well, no, I'm very tired...
8 tags
Accurate Prediction
Flash: This is going to sound like a strange sentence, but the cult I used to live in had a theme park in Kyushu that was one of the only places on earth that had the right to reproduce full-size replicas of the Easter Island head statues...
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This is my Future
I’m in a Google Doc that Wax is editing, watching a cursor scroll and hop as he writes, seeing how he constructs sentences and reconstructs his thoughts, structuring things… all in real time.
It feels somehow invasive, but not for any reason I can understand. There was a time when I was embarrassed by the idea of people watching me writing as I went, but I think Google Wave forced me...
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McDonald's
Me: I am unspeakably disappointed that the free wireless in McDonald's is not called "Wi-Fry"
Eoin: Still, it's a good McAdress
Ciaran: I believe it's called Freedom-Fi
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Mollusk Romance
Me: Any plans for tomorrow?
Gaelle: Let's cuddlefish
Me: Cuttlefish are my favourite invertebrates, but if you lost your spine in a horrible accident, you might be instead
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Am I so transparent?
WaxAngel: Lame
WaxAngel: You write with too much love.
WaxAngel: I bet you pick jedi
WaxAngel: not sith
WaxAngel: In all the Star Wars games
SirJolt: Yeah :(
September 2011
11 posts
7 tags
Last of the Summer Sun
Spent a chunk of today dealing with paperwork. Remedied by sitting in the sun, reading some Wyndham and throwing down some bits and pieces:
I read my book at the bottom of the broad rut, with its copse of trees, redolent with the raw tang of raked and fertile earth, pollen and the leaves turning on the trees, not quite ready to fall on their own. There is a bruise, broad and brown by my elbow,...
7 tags
Habit
Whenever things get to be a little too much, I make the tea. It’s been the definite article tea since my brother and I first saw a sketch show as kids that, for reasons I no longer remember, featured two brothers who would constantly as one another, “Are y’makin’ the tea?”
Once the tea has brewed, I sit the mug on the white of countertop and give it a brisk stir, so that the tea laps up along...
7 tags
Sherlock
Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes in the BBC series, plucking at his violin and ignoring his brother.
I’m developing a nasty habit of just making GIFs of any shot I like in anything I’m watching. Might go an enforced GIF break for the next week or so.
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GMGOYW
That time of the week again… Gratuitously Masturbatory Gif of Yourself Wednesday
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Teen Wolf
Last weekend, I watched Teen Wolf and couldn’t help myself but crack out photoshop and have a go at making a gif for the first time. It took a while, but I was happy with it.
The hardest part was the reflection, but I love Michael J Fox enough for it to have been worth it.
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Lithography
I grew up in a house ringed by woods, tall old trees that are, even now, stretching twisted branches closer to the house with each passing summer, leaves eclipsing evening sun earlier each year than the last. The border between the woods and the houses is marked by a broad ditch (which we call “the dike”) and at its bottom lies a moat of brackish slime. The trees have jumped the gap though, so the...
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Grass
The feel of grass is where it starts. I know the feel of the meshed green blades yielding under bare foot, the tickle of stray strands across an ankle, and the soft squeaking sound as a sole stretches to step. A curled toe meets earth for just a second, and I realise that I’m somehow mesmerised by the texture of it.
Something about the feel of the grass against my feet, the licking of the...
7 tags
Cold Iron & the Síofra
I hadn’t seen my godfather in some years, he refers to his having gone missing as having “taken my turn” or “a bad turn” but the long and short of it is that I hadn’t seen him in a very long time. In the last three months or so, we’ve attended the same book club, and it’s been good to get to know him again.
Around midnight, John and I stood in the kitchen while I made the tea, and he asked some...
August 2011
6 posts
6 tags
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