You should see the barrage of stupid questions

Anyone who has ever worked as a store attendant/video rental jockey/nameless peon of some sort will appreciate the Acts of Gord. For example,

"I said it was stolen. I don't owe you anything! My mom said that when a game is stolen that I don't have to pay for it."

This actually happens, those of who who've never been clerks. Swear to Gord. Oh, and sheer perfectitude:

The Gord often wonders why people threaten to never come back after they've been told never to return.

Nods knowingly, and wonders why more employers don't do this:

"I'd like to drop off a resume."

"Sure."

"What are you doing?"

"I'm marking it."

He failed.

Book alerts

Month after month of looking for a copy of Atrocity Archives, and now I discover it was republished back at the beginning of the month! Needless to say, I bought me one, and pre-ordered The Jennifer Morgue while I was at it. Also, to my great delight, the final book in the Watches Trilogy caught my eye while I was comparing high street prices at Waterstones, so it will be mine also. Be advised, fellow readers.

The intrinsic problem with web apps

Is it just me, or is Facebook completely down at the moment? And there I was, wanting to share this with the Facebook community (because the irony is just too delectable) and learning an important lesson instead. I wanted to mock, not to learn! The unjustity of it all!

(3 minutes of angst and irritation later, and it's back. Another lesson learned.)

Two rights can make a wrong

It's funny how, sometimes, you can be completely right about something, and completely wrong at the same time. Take, for example, a heated discussion about the age of sexual maturity. It's a rather tricky topic, since different cultures have markedly different opinions on the matter. The one unassailable fact, though, would seem to be - for women at least - that menarche signifies the body's readiness to bear children. It would seem to follow, then, that any postponement of sexual congress is a consequence of societal constraints and very little else. After all, girls were married off at a terribly young age in most Western cultures as recently as a century ago (and still are in some African and Eastern cultures) and that seems to have done no real harm, right?

Well, as I realised on doing some further reading, that argument doesn't hold much water, for the simple reason that the age of menarche back then was substantially later than it is now; a relatively mature 17 instead of the almost juvenile 13 of today's youngsters. So arranging the marriage of your pubescent daughter didn't mean the same thing that it does now, and explains why - in spite of physical indications to the contrary - that the contemporary legal age of consent (and quite coscionably the social age of sexual maturity) is kept artificially high. How high is still a matter of open debate, but the argument for keeping it above the current physical age of puberty is sitting a little easier with me.

Spoiled for choice

Maybe all that hentai has shifted my arousal instincts, because I found this (NSFW!) appealing on every level, with not the slightest tinge of horror or disgust.

Scamming a scammer

A little project has been the source of much mirth, merriment and mockery for the last week. I'm almost sad to see it come to an end.

Japanex

A fairly small expo by any standards, Japanex was nonetheless interesting enough to keep us amused from our arrival just after 9 right through to the end of the cosplay (costume play) competition at 4.30. There was just enough of a spread of retail therapy - food, toys, clothes, manga and anime - to part even hardened shoppers from their cash, and a few grace notes of culture - kendo and taiko drumming exhibitions, origami and go stands - to enhance the illusion that it was anything other than an anime convention. But the flood of fanchildren in their lolita outfits and character costumes quickly dispelled any doubt, and provided the main focus of the day. As hard as Japanese culture afficionados may try, it's still the export of their popular culture that's dominant in the West.

I was most impressed by two things. The kendo exhibitions took me by surprise, as I hadn't realised just how much of a mental discipline it is until I watched how micro-movements are used to unsettle your opponent and camouflage your true strike. Also, the quality of some of the cosplay outfits was unbelievable. To compete in cosplay, the outfit has to be made by hand, not bought, but many of the outfits truly appeared to have been assembled by talented seamstresses and modellers. The only disappointment of the day had nothing to do with the expo; I had relied on my phone camera for snaps of the show, and the quality completely let me down. Not going to make that mistake again. I seem to have rescued a few of the better snaps, so:


A really decent Bomberman outfit, winner of the "Cutest Costume" award. Would also have won "Hottest Internal Temperature" award, as well as "Most Dangerous to Wear", as it had no eye- or breathing-holes in the head. Made from chicken wire, foam and material.


These two had made their Chobits costumes from scratch, and they were simply amazing; good enough, in fact, to net them Runner Up place in the Cosplay competition. Chii (on the left) had to lead Freya (on the right) along the ramp for the parade, as she was without her glasses to complete the look, but was clearly blind as a mole.


Bleach seemed to be the anime du jour with practically an entire cast's worth of cosplayers apperaing in full costume for Japanex. It was astounding that not only did they not know each other but that they had somehow managed not to duplicate a single character.


This Kurosaki Ichigo cosplayer stole the limelight from his fellow Bleach'ers. Pictures just don't do justice to the size of these swords, or the weight!


Based in Greenwich (hence the 'Meantime' moniker) these drummers were quite astoundingly LOUD. Good, too. They have occasional free perfomances, and I'm sorely tempted to catch one of their lunchtime shows at the Euston Tower, to see how they compare outdoors.


Kevin was practically drooling over this display of restored Japanese swords. They were incredibly beautiful, in his defence.


The Kendo exhibition did steal the show, for me, and not because of some supposed manly aspect of martial arts but simply because it was the most polished and impressive performance on the day. Strictly speaking, this is a picture of an Iaido kata, since it involves drawing and striking with a naked sword.


Kendo proper. You can clearly see the full suit worn to provide targets for striking - head, wrists, torso and throat. The speed of the strikes completely flummoxed my poor E70. In fact, most of the time, the human eye couldn't follow the strikes easily.

We also caught a rare appearance of a trained furisode-san (sponsored geisha) outside of Japan. Here is Hisami performing a Nihonbuyo dance¹. She took pains to make it clear that, out of respect for the actual geisha tradition, the dance that the furisode-san do is deliberately altered from the original.

¹Hisami has asked me to remove this video, as she thought her dancing was awful and doesn't want it to be representative of her normal performance.

The biter bit

So the University of Oxford decided to discipline students for breaches of its code of conduct based on evidence obtained from a student's Facebook profile that had inadvertantly been left in the public domain. Not surprising, really; it wouldn't be the first instance of an organisation hiding behind the small print to justify a common-sense trangression of generally held principles. What would be fun, though, is if I can get the same community that made the charge possible at all to band together to settle any fines levied, in the name of solidarity in the face of invasion of privacy. Watch this space...

Tongue-in-cheek or travesty?

Looks like we either visited Cerne Abbas just in time, or just too soon, depending on your take of current events.

You've got to take your hat off to whoever actually did the dirty. If you've been on the walk around that hill, you'll know that it's a horribly steep climb from the foot of the giant to its head, and the hill is by no means a straight climb, as it curves away to a flat mount, making the field a bulge to work on. You can't even properly see the giant unless you're in the air above it, so getting Homer so clearly and proportionately drawn under those conditions is quite the feat.

Blog activity

Livejournalage
Originally uploaded by sinplicity.

It occurred to me that it's been a while since I last had anything of interest - mine, that is - to write here, and that there might just be a pattern in the level of blogging I do throughout the year. So, I set out my entries on a monthly basis, and converted them into an activity list by representing them as a fraction of the overall activity for the year, in order to compare the monthly figures, et voila! I've use a 6th order polynomial - the highest Excel will go - to smooth out the plots, and hopefully produce some corresponding peaks and troughs.

The only thing that stands out for me is the high activity at the beginning of each year; clearly New Year's Remorse at work there. But there are also little blips just after Easter and again after the summer holidays which correspond nicely with my regular pattern of vacationing, in that the blogging surges just after my holidays, when I am nice and rested and have energy to spare for essentially pointless activity.