| A New Home, Social Events, Unitarian End-of-Year Concert |
[22 Dec 2009|09:40am] |
Last night ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) caseopaya and I visited an estate agent and made an offer on a three-story townhouse in Willsmere, the former Kew Asylum. A few hours later we received a message from said agent that our offer had been accepted. So over the next few months we'll be making the move to our new abode, which is still being advertised on realestate.com.au.
Last week was txxxpxx's biennial Christmas party. As with previous affairs this was a huge night; about ninety people in attendence of the usual suspects. Spent most of the night chatting to our recently published fashion historian, frou_frou, and local council environmental manager recumbenteer and our favourite artist severina_242. Last Saturday had horngirl and alchemon over for dinner; afterwards we made it down to "The King of Tonga", a delightful bar on Tennyson St.
On Sunday attended the end of year concert at the local Unitarian Church. As is often the case at such events Therese Virtue's world music choir provided an exceptional contribution. Close to $1000 was raised for the Humane Society of International. As usual, I was given the task of doing a brief speech describing the organisation and the work, along with a few motivational lines; I compared mechanist approaches that considered animals as automata (Descartes, Malebranche) to utilitarian approaches (Bentham, Singer) which emphasis capacity to suffer.
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| Avatar |
[19 Dec 2009|10:23pm] |
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I saw Avatar an it was pretty awesome. The CGI is absolutely incredible. The colors and vegetation of Pandora are just gorgeous.
The story was pretty good. My only real complaint was with the main bad guy being pretty lame and one-dimensional. Other than him, though, it was all good.
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[19 Dec 2009|03:12pm] |
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I'm thinking of going to see Avatar a little later, but I haven't decided. I wish my theatre had 3D capabilities, but it doesn't and the nearest one is 20 miles away. Yeah, no. It would be awesome to see in 3D, though.
Mrr... Oh, well. It's at 5:15, so I have a couple hours to decide.
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| Family Reunion |
[18 Dec 2009|03:54pm] |
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Family reunion chat: old school HP slashers, are you on? I will set up a web-based chat (with optional audio/video for all) on a date that works for most. (Probably here) Maybe Sunday? IRC is always a good option, but nothing is easier than clicking a link, no?
(Tinychat doesn't actually require a real login, you can put in any name in the tinychat login and it will let you through. I think. Let me know if it doesn't let you in.)
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| The Oldbie Intervention |
[18 Dec 2009|11:16am] |
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So this is because of thanfiction, but it's not personal. We have no idea who thanfiction really is, we have not read his fic, we know nothing about the community he generated, but we saw the wankery and it made us homesick for ye olde fandom. So we're going to stage an intervention, veela inc. style.
We are nostalgic for fandom, plain and simple. luciusmalfoy and I have to admit, we are not JK Rowling's greatest fans. There are people who worship her work with more verve than we do. We like the idea of a world where there are hidden communities of magical people. We like the paranoid and suspicious settings of a society about to break into war, and the seeming quiet and questions that come when all the conflict is resolved. We like the basic emptiness of many of these characters, to be quite frank. They are vaguely sketched and leave lots of room for fannish decoration. We like to do that decoration, in as many ways as we can think up. So there's no reason for fandom to die out just because the books are all finished. All this these things are still open to us; the playground may be mostly deserted, but it's still a pretty good playground. We want to refurbish the place a bit.
In order to do this, we need some help. We need to get caught up on where fandom's at right now. We need to know how people have constructed these characters. We'd like to know what all the very best fics are. How about the best art? The best vids? The best of everything! Educate us and we'll create a fandom resource too. Where does fandom reside these days? Is it at dreamwidth rather than LJ? Twitter? Let us know what we've missed and what we should know.
We want to rebuild the community as we remember it at the height of our time in fandom. This does indeed mean the return of some of our old favourites: open chats (#malfoymanor) where you can drop in and talk with people, group activities for everyone to enjoy, recs, discussion, fun! We miss you guys! Why not develop a little old style community in the middle of all this new fandom stuff? Just for the fun of it. luciusmalfoy loves the drama, it's true, so we can make some up to keep her entertained, but no need for wankery. Just good times!
So can you help us out with this project? If you keep recs, or want to rec, we want to hear from you. Collect art? We want to showcase your collection. Want to start writing again? Creating art?
luciusmalfoy and I are starting to plan some work together, and I have to admit to starting to work out something new I'm going to write myself. Are you with us? Who says you can't go home again?
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| Lib and I just took back veelainc! |
[17 Dec 2009|11:25pm] |
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hahahah we're on a rampage! We're coming back! These 5000 people on the mailing list don't know what's hit them!!
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| a query |
[17 Dec 2009|04:40pm] |
'Sup Internet,
I have a fairly specific question about family law (in the USA) for a story I'm writing. Does anybody out there happen to have expertise in that area? If so, and you are willing to indulge me, could you send me a PM? Or email me (telanublackbird at gmail dot com)? I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.
Edit: Specifically, Michigan law.
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| How many computers does one actually need? |
[14 Dec 2009|11:32pm] |
Lib lost the data off her computer. So that got me thinking about my own computing situation. I've had a computer of my own since 1993 (first year undergrad), got my first laptop in 1997 (first graduate degree). Since those days I've always had access to a computer of my own. Today, I have I MacBook, a high end dell laptop that work pays for, an ubuntu netbook (for on the run computing, you know, tweeting conferences, watching Bones on the train, that sort of thing), and I'm currently typing this out on an iPod touch I liberated from work. (it's been sitting on my desk since august collecting dust, so I decided to experiment with it.) I've taken to loading a nice long post with comments on it before I leave work and read it on the way home on the bus.
What I want to know is, how on earth have I managed to find unique uses for each of these computers? Possibly it's just a fact that when one is completely spoiled one imagines that it's for some real purpose. Most of my colleagues use the work-bought computer as a home computer and download crap on to it, but that strikes me as unethical. I prefer to have a computer I own completely that no one else can lay any kind of claim on. So it's not hard to justify the two laptops. One of them is not really mine!
The netbook I bought as a mobile device for travel. I didn't want my other half to lug his $2K macbook pro around Belgium. It fits in my purse and I rarely go anywhere without it.
This is so ridiculous. Can I just get some kind of surgical implant instead?
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| Watching the VB wank: fascinated |
[13 Dec 2009|05:37pm] |
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I'm hoping that once I finish my dishes and do another load of laundry, perhaps journalfen be functioning again.
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| Wha? |
[13 Dec 2009|09:46am] |
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Okay, HP fandom. You have some splainin' to do. Victoria Bitter? Really?
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| Academic and Work Pursuits, Polanski and Commie Debates |
[13 Dec 2009|03:11pm] |
Received my results for the first two units of my MBA, Financial Management and Management Perspectives; I passed both with Distinction grades. This was an enormous relief, especially for the Financial Management exam, which I thought was extremely difficult at the time. It also means that, assuming I complete Marketing and Information Systems, I will have a Graduate Certificate in Management (Technology Systems) by the end of next month. Then on to the Graduate Diploma. On a related angle, I have been given the necessary task of trying to make some sense of the internal wiki, external website and some of our marketing material. It doesn't make sense to pitch with generic marketing speak to scientists, for some well-known reasons, which have recently become evident at the Australian Synchrotron.
The events of Roman Polanksi's extradition for sexual assault have been long discussed. If you have the stomach for it, you can read the testimony of the young Samantha Geimer on the events themselves. When some members of the entertainment industry tried to defend Polanksi on the grounds of his international cultural reputation, most people responded to this with appropriate outrage. An unexpected angle however has come from the Sparticist League who have defended Polanski because Samantha was sexually experienced and had tried quaaludes previous. You can read the Sparticist League's position in the Communist Party of Great Britian newspaper in issue 794 and my response in 795.
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| Lights and kitteh |
[12 Dec 2009|06:56pm] |
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Not much to say really... so here's a couple pics of my house with Christmas lights. ^^
( Clicky click )
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[11 Dec 2009|02:07pm] |
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