Things are looking up. For the first time in months I was able to look at my work list this morning without a sense of impending doom.
I should probably enjoy it while I can ;D
Astonishing
Pushing work off to other people is really useful
Author: Purple Wyrm
Castling
Another damn series for me to obsess over…
I admit it. Despite the excellent reviews and general buzz I’ve been avoiding watching Castle. My reasons for doing so are threefold…
1) I watch far too much TV as is
2) They always put it on stupidly late
3) Watching Nathan Fillion playing anyone apart from Mal feels like some kind of betrayal (not to mention the fact that it’s a reminder that there’s no more Firefly – *sob*)
Despite this, last night I stumbled into the first 10 minutes of an episode – the first time I’ve seen any of the show at all.
Which episode you ask? The Halloween one which opens with Nathan dressing up in a “space cowboy” costume suspiciously identical to Mal’s 😀
What I saw of the rest of the episode was pretty damn good too – I suspect I’ll have to get the series on DVD now…
Victory!
Huzzah!
Good news on the electoral system front!
GetUp! wins High Court challenge to electoral roll cut-off
The quick summary. It used to be that when an election was called you had seven days to get yourself on the electoral roll. Back in 2006 the Howard government changed the law so that you only had until 8:00pm of the day the election was called to get on the roll – a move many (including myself) saw as a way of disenfranchising voters who’d turned 18 since the last election and not got around to enrolling (young people being well known for voting against conservatives like Howard).
Now a High Court challenge has overturned the change and restored the seven day rule. Huzzah!
Also, the opposition has come out and announced they will not support the government’s mandatory internet filter. This pretty much kills it dead, regardless of who wins the upcoming election. Again, Huzzah!
Good times…
Denys can’t code
Denys can’t sing, Denys can’t sing, Denys cannot sing…
Denys can’t code,
Denys can’t code,
Denys cannot code,
He only reads books and he cannot code,
even when he’s reading a how to code book…
Just spent the better part of ninety minutes trying to figure out why a counter wasn’t incrementing only to discover I was initialising it inside the loop.
Boy is my face red.
Psychology Today
Roll out the barrel…
You know, it can be very interesting to take a step back now and then and cast an impartial eye over the workings of your own brain.
The phenomena of Stress Goggles for instance. Often, one of the first things that alerts me to the fact that I’m feeling particularly stressed is that the attractiveness of every woman I see jumps up by several notches. The train on the way to work for instance is suddenly full of girls who could pursue quite successful careers in modelling, and every woman on TV appears to have undergone a makeover.
(On this note Claire Hooper on Good News Week has actually changed her hair style recently. I’m unable to tell if this actually makes her look fantastic, or if it’s just the stress talking.)
(Oh did I mention that a mate of mine went to primary school with Claire Hooper? This is my latest pathetic attempt to claim some vague reflection of celebrity.)
Conversely I can usually tell that my stress levels have dropped down to a more reasonable level when random women start looking normal again.
The reason I mention this is because I’m under a lot of pressure at the office at the moment, and the phenomena is in full swing. I suppose it does offer some kind of compensation but given the choice between a world full of beautiful women and a job where I can sleep at night, I think I’d take the sleep.
Chiddy Bang eat your heart out
I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I incessantly come up with this kind of crap…
Popped into my head today fully formed…
‘Cause the real world’s just like Sea World, where I’m just a walrus and you all are tourists,
I’m not sure what this says about my brain – apart from “nothing good” of course.
Crying out for a Mashup
Also kind of like the bridge from Van Halen’s Jump…
Please consider…
The bridge from the classic theme from the recently cancelled The Bill
Your honour, I rest my case.
Drives Spinning Up
Recovery is a slow process…
I have recovered enough from my devil-cold (which was almost certainly a case of the flu) to return to work, although I’m still not at 100%. My ears are still blocked and my sinuses are making an entertaining array of whistling, knocking and ticking sounds every time I blow my nose.
As well as going through six boxes of tissues in as many days my enforced break allowed me to devote some time to the FreakWiki. I’m slowly getting all the missing pages up and expanding the biography pages, which are the hardest of all to do (Miki has now been detailed). I also now have in my possession hard copies of all the published material, which helps.
I also finally braced myself to create the much needed page for Internet Jesus/Space Daddy himself. You can see how I chickened out here.
That is all.
PLAGUE!!
I’ll be a good boy, just please make me well…
Have been laid up in bed since Wednesday with the devil-cold from hell. I’ve had tremendous trouble staying awake for more than two hours at a time, and my sinuses appear to have been stuffed with mustard when I wasn’t looking.
Needless to say this has put a crimp in all and any plans I had for my week.
*sigh*
New Words
Making up words is fun!
Back in the 1940’s a Greek city planner by the name of Constantinos Doxiadis came up with some very useful words for science fiction writers. He wasn’t actually trying to help out the sci-fi field, it just happened that his terms to describe cities larger than any ever seen on Earth are exactly the kind of thing you need to spice up your space-opera epic. The words in question are “Eperopolis” and “Ecumenopolis”, meaning respectively a city that takes up an entire continent (think perhaps of Mega City One from Judge Dredd) and a city that takes up an entire planet (such as Trantor from Asimov’s Foundation series, Coruscant from Star Wars or Holy Terra from Warhammer 40k).
Now that’s well and good, but what if your city takes up more than a single planet?
At this point I’m sure everyone’s going “Well how does that work? How can a city be larger than the planet it’s on?” and that’s a fair question. A single city spanning more than one planet just isn’t possible. Unless the civilisation that built it has technology allowing cheap, reliable, instantaneous interplanetary travel. Think about it. You wake up in your apartment in Earth City, get ready for work, walk down the street to the local Portal, and step through to Mars City, where you catch a hover bus to your office. If travel between the two ecumenopoli is so quick and easy they’d function as a single entity.
So what to call such an interplanetary urban conglomeration?
I suggest an Iliopolis, from rather dodgy Greek for “Sun City” – that is a city on multiple planets orbiting the same star.
Well, that’s fine, but what if the technology can stretch to cities across multiple star systems? Well then let’s call it an Asteriopolis (Star City). A city spread across multiple planets in multiple star systems.
Beyond that it’s asteriopoli all the way down (or up). You could probably come up with a term for galaxy spanning cities, but since we don’t even have a single eperopolis yet I think the problem can wait a while. Fans of scale may want to talk about Megasteropoli for cities that span a hundred or more star systems, but that’s as far as I’m prepared to go.
Iliopolis and Asteriopolis. Use them today!
