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Showing results for tags 'It Popped Into My Head Today...'.
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"Time for the preview quiz!" "Quiz!" "So, you're a bus driver!" "Driver!" "What's the bus driver's name?" "That was too short!" "Yep! It's your name!"
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Okay, so if you're comparing two things, you have to use the comparative, e.g. "Comparing the red car and the blue car, the red car is faster," and you can't say "the red car is fastest." If you're comparing three or more things, however, you use the superlative, e.g. "Comparing the red, yellow, and blue cars, the red car is fastest," and you can't say "the red car is faster." What if, however, you've got three things, but you talk about two of them compared to the third? As in, "Comparing the red, yellow, and blue cars, the red and blue cars are [faster/fastest]." ... which would you use? I'm kinda leaning towards the comparative but I'm not sure. When I wake up tomorrow morning (or I should say today morning) the answer will probably seem obvious but oh well. What say ye!
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TAKE THE FREAKIN' BRIBE ACHILLEUS. Like seriously, what was up with those Ancient Greeks? So I'm on Book 9 of the Iliad, and I get to the part where Agamemnon spends something like fifty lines listing all the stuff he'll give Achilleus if the latter will be persuaded to rejoin the battle. And I'm like, "Holy geez, that's a lot of stuff. Like, a seriously huge amount of stuff." And obviously Achilleus refuses. WHAT THE HECK. In other news, I'm up to episode 8 of Lain. Every time I think things are starting to make sense, something else happens that just... doesn't. Also this show is extremely creepy and unnerving. Like the scene where everyone is staring at Lain.
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Is the awesomest thing ever. For those with a Nico account, it's sm7357773. Well, one version of it, at least, with a nifty accompanying video. Around 50 or 60 (probably more) Nico meme songs mashed into one crazy eleven minute dance mix. What I recognized, in order: » Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «Black Rock Shooter (supercell ftw) A Gakupo song that I’ve heard, but don’t know the name of Sand Canyon from Kirby This one is Touhou-related and sounds REALLY familiar… but I can’t place it. Rainbow Girl Saikyou Pare-Parade (Suzumiya Haruhi radio show OP) The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku Macross Frontier related (two songs in a row?). Haven't seen the show, but I believe that's Ranka Lee with the green hair and the pose. Judging by the video, this is related to Evangelion. This means I should know it, except I don’t. World is Mine (supercell again) Tettette (memeriffic!) Popipo (likewise) Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (Miyazaki Hayao. Haven’t seen it yet) Megurine Luka singing something. I’ve heard this song before, but don’t remember what it’s called. Meltdown (feat. Kagamine Rin) Super Smash Bros something or other (yeah I don’t play many video games) Uninstall (Ishikawa Chiaki, Bokurano OP) Marisa Stole the Precious Thing (IOSYS) Hare Hare Yukai (with odd male voice filter; Suzumiya Haruhi ED) Motteke! Serafuku (Lucky Star OP) Dear You (Higurashi no Naku Koro ni [Kai?], haven’t finished the series yet but this song is somewhere in it) Airman ga Taosenai Melt (more supercell) God Knows (Suzumiya Haruhi IN) Caramelldansen (naturally) Don’t Say “Lazy” (K-On! ED) Aaaand... NicoNico Douga… loves you. Not gonna cheat and grab song titles off the Nico comments. For those without a Nico account... uh, search for 七色のニコニコ動画
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Kinda occurred to me today one of the shifts in the tone of classic and modern sci fi... of course it's not a catchall rule, but the sort of "in general" feel of it... In essence, it seems to me that classic sci fi offers a more utopian view of the future, whereas more modern sci fi offers a more dystopian view of the future. Like I said, by no means completely generalizable. I mean, you've got the classics of dystopian literature in 1984 and Brave New World and whatnot. But a lot of the spirit of older sci fi was that increasing scientific and technological advancement would eventually solve all our problems, almost like magic. We'd launch ourselves to the farthest stars, war and poverty and famine would be eliminated, the countries of the world would unite, everyone would have all sorts of services at their convenience, etc. etc. Perhaps dystopian and utopian are not quite the ways to describe it. More that... in classic sci fi, technology usually does what it was made to do, and does it perfectly, be the purpose of it good or evil. Modern sci fi, however, basically creates a new setting by making use of advanced technology, but human problems are never changing and never ending, and technology is not always reliable and more often than not creates undesired consequences. Uh... gosh this is really hard to describe in clear terms... if you read a lot of sci fi like I do you might get it... but I don't know how else to put it. Just something interesting that occurred to me. Could be reflective of numerous factors: our increasing understanding of scientific principles, the advent of a more cynical generation, the realization of technological prophecies of decades past combined with the realization that these technologies haven't solved all our problems... ... so anyway I've been reading Arthur C. Clarke. Yeah, that's basically it.
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Can't link it here since it's a blog and will occasionally, casually use strong language... but I recently found something that's hilarious and relevant to my interests. I'm sure everyone here knows about Engrish. Basically, people in other countries, usually Japan and China, botch English in horrible ways. Well, one ethnically Chinese blogger decided to turn the tables on that and point out the many stupid ways Westerners use East Asian languages. The blog has actually been going since 2004 but I only recently discovered it (and it's gonna keep me up all night goshdarnit). So I'm sure you all also know about the people who get tattoos in East Asian characters, usually Chinese/Japanese (Hanzi/Kanji); I've yet to hear of a Westerner getting a tattoo in Korean, but they might be out there. Not to mention T-shirts and posters and whatnot that throw in Hanzi just to make it look "exotic." Well, a ton of those either don't make sense or mean the wrong thing, or in some hilarious cases, mean something really vulgar. My favorite is the one where a guy goes to Tokyo and gets a tattoo he thinks means "dragon." It actually says 外人 or "foreigner." There are also numerous characters that are written upside-down (including one on the cover of an alleged Chinese-English dictionary). These are the ones that I glanced at and wondered, "Wait, is that Chinese or random scribbles?" before the blogger pointed out their incorrect orientation. XD Ironically, to prevent that, some tattoo designs include a horizontal line to indicate "this side up..." so an otherwise perfect tattoo of "love" in Japanese ended up with a superfluous line. I also saw somebody who got tattooed with a single character which I did a double take at because that's my surname. Then there's the shirt with Japanese characters cascading Matrix-style that are actually copy-pasted from a Dell computer instruction manual. Then there's confusing the Chinese for doll (娃娃) with the Chinese for frog (蛙) (oddly enough my IME didn't turn up any results for "qingwa"... eh? Could I have remembered that wrong? Couldn't be...). Radicals make all the difference. And then there's the purse with a skull and crossbones on it as well as part of a Communist Party slogan (word of advice: next time get your characters from a takeout menu). I dunno, I could go on, but it's really a hilarious read. If anyone wants to know the site you can try to Google some of the examples I posted or PM me. I'll be edifying myself on my ancestral tongue and laughing.
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This is what happens when real people cover vocaloid original songs.
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How come when dust falls on things, it makes the things all whitish, but when you wipe it up, it makes the towel all black?
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lolwut
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There's something in this world that nobody has seen. It's something gentle, and very sweet.Probably, if it could be seen, everybody would want it. That's exactly why nobody has seen it.So that it could not be so easily obtained, the world hid it away. However, one day, somebody will find it.The person who should obtain it—that person alone—will be the one who can clearly see it. And that's how it goes.
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No matter how "ahead of their time" a sci-fi author was (and I'm talking from at least twenty, thirty years back, any more recent doesn't count), it would seem that everybody underestimated computers. Like I'm reading The Cat Who Walks Through Walls by Heinlein... no idea how old it is, but his main character harps on the amazing storage capacity of these data wafers that are a couple centimeters big. They can store around half a million words. Let's give a generous estimate and say each word is 10 characters or 10 bytes, right? Half a million words times 10 bytes per word is 5 million bytes or 5 thousand kilobytes... or five megabytes. There are jpg images on my computer larger than 5 megabytes. Well maybe not quite. But I could find 2 images that add up to over 5 mB. In any case... It's kind of funny how everyone expected humans to be able to construct massive space colonies before it became possible to hold a terabyte in your palm. Yet it turned out completely the other way around... and how! In other news, 52-pickup is back up to date, and chapter 15 (new) has been posted.
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You don't want this to happen. So seeing as recently a topic for each of the library forums has popped up in GD, esp. on the subject of how little attention stories are receiving these days, that got me thinking a bit... from my own experience, I'd like to say that perhaps part of the fault lies on neither the writing nor the readers... but the formatting. Like, look here, see what I just did? I double-returned between paragraphs. Why do I do that? Well, because it keeps this blog entry-- and my posts in general-- from looking like a wall of text. No matter what the content may be, when people are confronted with a wall of text the first reaction is, "Whoa, no way I'm reading that." By wall of text I mean long, unbroken text. I see this not infrequently around the library forums. Sure, in your word processor, with indented paragraphs and justified text, it looks perfectly readable, but let me bring up a visual comparison: I took the same lorem ipsum text and stuck it in two different contexts. See the difference? In the book page, the paragraph indents and the empty space after the paragraphs provide a nice "breather" between thoughts. Not to mention fewer words are on each line. In the end, this serves to break the text up into nice, manageable-looking pieces that are more comfortable to read. On a webpage, the font is generally much smaller compared to the width of the average screen resolution, so paragraphs end up flatter, wider, with more text on each line, and a bit more daunting to read. Not to mention most forums don't give you the option of indenting the beginning of a paragraph or justifying your text, so the ends of your lines will be all over the place and it's less clear when a paragraph ends. Aside from the whole "manageable chunks" thing, you feel less... "lost," call it, when everything's broken up. For one thing it's much easier to lose your place while reading when you can't see the boundaries of a paragraph. You might end up reading the same line over and over again. You might end up reading the same line over and over again. You might end up okay I stole this joke from Lemony Snicket. That's why, among other things, double space between paragraphs! People will be less frightened to read your story, or post as the case may be. As a corollary to that, don't make your paragraphs too long! Now I'm not trying to hinder you if you want to write a long, descriptive passage-- just suggesting it's something to keep in mind. I mean, this is just mostly stuff I've noticed personally. I know when I enter a library topic and see all the paragraphs squished together, I shudder a bit at the prospect of trying to read that. Anyway yeah, just my thoughts. May be vaguely disjointed since I typed this while multitasking.
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It just occurred to me that basically, the Aeneid is Homer fanfiction. Actually this thought might have occurred to me before, except I forgot. So... it recurred to me? Anyway see my previous entry.
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... and I'm kinda bored. My Documents -> My Pictures -> Anime *screenshots* *Photoshops* Also, chapter 11 of 52-pickup.
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(click on image for higher res, if available) See previous entry. More after the jump. No Matarou, because technically she's modest but I'm not gonna push BZP's rules (at least the artist was accurate). Didn't make these; I do take issue with the Chiri one since that's impossible. No I'm not uploading all the full res individual ones. And a bunch I couldn't be bothered to resize to 600 px wide or less. http://www.majhost.com/gallery/zero0zero/S...fanart_comp.jpg http://www.majhost.com/gallery/zero0zero/S...aere_sensei.jpg http://www.majhost.com/gallery/zero0zero/S...expressions.gif http://www.majhost.com/gallery/zero0zero/S.../zsz_2_prev.jpg Yes I know using a screenshot is kinda cheap. http://www.majhost.com/gallery/zero0zero/S...referenceto.jpg It's a pretty epic crossover... but I wish I knew what it was a crossover with. Man these things take ages to upload. v_v
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I learned today that the song "Happy Birthday To You" is technically copyrighted in the United States until 2030. Which is why you never hear it on TV or in movies, only variations or songs like "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." Am I the only one who didn't know this until now? o_O
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AAAAAAARGH STOP DOING CONFUSING AND UNCONVENTIONAL STUFF THIS IS HARD ENOUGH TO LEARN ALREADY. (by the way I'm not actually watching this show; I came across the Japanese title on Wikipedia or something and wuz like, "Wait, doesn't that say "uchuu"? Not that that's a really useful or practical word to have in my kanji vocabulary... I kinda just know it. XD)
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Why?
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So that's where the budget went.
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I wonder why they're called "loanwords." It's not like the language plans to give the word back once it's done with it, is it? Blatant advertising line.
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Anyone ever see that cell phone commercial? Sprint, I think. You know, the whole "Haha our competitors don't have as wide a range of coverage as us, haha" gig. Where there's this guy at a construction site thing, right? And then his lolbluescreenclone comes on and he's like, "Hi, this is Generic Name Joe's phone here! Since he's not on Sprint, he didn't get the call to say that the safety zone has been moved from [arbitrary length] to [arbitrary, much longer length]. Blah blah blah, insert supposed-to-be-witty remark about how they won't be there soon once they begin the demolition." If you stop to think about it, do you realize how stupid that is? For one thing, it's got to be against safety regulations to increase the size of the danger zone during a demolition and not do a manual sweep of the area to make sure nobody's in it. And even if it isn't, what was the guy on the other end of the phone thinking? "Huh, it looks like Generic isn't picking up. Rather than take this as a sign that he hasn't gotten the message, I'm just going to assume he's already safe and not go get him in person." I mean, people are dumb, but that's taking it to a whole new level there. And that other commercial, with the Dunkin' Donuts vs. Starbucks coffee. Maybe it's because I'm taking Statistics this year, so it's sort of like that quote unquote "Dan Brown'd" effect where, to the layman, reading it is like, "Wow, this guy sure knows what he's talking about concerning these obscure technical topics about which I know next to nothing!" but then you come to this one thing and it's like, "Wait a minute... this is an area in which I actually do have expertise... and he's actually doing it all wrong!" Well in this case, the commercial depicting that woman going around taking a poll of DD vs. Starbucks coffee? IT'S ALL WRONG! The pollster KNOWS which cup, A or B, contains which brand of coffee! It's written in HUGE font on her clipboard! No no no no NO! Do they know what blinding is for? And which brand A and B correspond to STAYS THE SAME, instead of being randomized like they should! What if the pollster always gives cup A first, then cup B, and as a result people prefer B because it was the last thing they tasted? Introduces so many confounding factors! I mean, maybe other people don't care, but to anyone who's taken Statistics, this commercial would decrease your belief that DD has better coffee, since it's obvious there are so many biases in their study, even if it's just a fake acted commercial study. I mean, that's the point of commercials isn't it? None of it's real. The Big Mac doesn't actually look that good in real life. It's all driving at your emotions, and to me the emotion that that commercial would evoke would be "Wrong, wrong, WRONG!" Gosh. Advertising. This is why I don't watch TV much anymore. Eh, while we're at it, have some blatant advertising of my own. Go give 52-pickup some love. =D
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Thank you. You are very nice people. =D
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I wonder if some of those ancient authors and poets thought to themselves, "What I'm writing will probably one day be considered a great work of classical literature. Why don't I invent my own word and use it exactly once in an ambiguous context, just to annoy the linguists once my language is dead?" And if you're a mathematician, if you ever notice some interesting anomaly of numbers that seems to hold true for every set of arguments you test it on, don't bother proving it, especially if you're old or ailing and think you will die soon. Instead, scrawl your theorem in a margin of one of your books and say, "I've got a really elegant proof of this, unfortunately it doesn't fit in here." Mathematicians of the future will either prove it for you, or go crazy trying! How about painters, eh? If you feel it's high time you created your masterpiece, make sure to throw in lots of intriguing and puzzling coincidences and subtle unconventional nuances, just enough to be obviously not unintentional to any intelligent person (or any intelligent conspiracy theorist, which some will tell you is an oxymoron). However, make sure that the mysterious code the clues in your painting seem to hint at doesn't actually exist, nor actually mean anything. Just to mess with the minds of centuries of art historians. See, it's high time we got ready to do some of this sort of stuff. The future is full of minds what needs screwing with. The computer chip art is a start, but we need something more. Government memos should all contain a random nonsensical word or phrase encoded into them. I'm talking, some archaeologist three thousand years from now discovers a note to the President suggesting a declaration of war, and if he turns it upside down it says, "Three and a cup of mint." All you software engineers! Start putting mysterious warnings in the comments of your code! Employee emp = EmployeeList.get(x); //But does Employee x know that he won't have his job much longer? If you think of something else, go for it! We've got to get cracking, people! We may not be around to see the results, but won't you die happier knowing that you're going to cause a scholar in the future hours of frustration?
