Posted on November 7, 2009 by aethelreadtheunread
Ok, so I’m trying to tidy up my draft posts, and this is a film review I wrote a few weeks ago. It was going to be part of a longer post (basically saying how much I had enjoyed my first alcoholic Saturday night in years, even though it had involved watching a crappy pre-teen musical), but the second part didn’t flow, and I abandoned it. Still, the review works on its own, I think:
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Filed under: About me, Stuff I've watched | 7 Comments »
Posted on November 3, 2009 by aethelreadtheunread
I’ve been doing some reading about personality disorders, and I came across the contribution of one Harry Guntrip to definitions of the schizoid personality type. There are nine alleged characteristics of this personality type which Guntrip pulled out of his arse described, one of which is withdrawnness:
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Filed under: Psychiatry, Psychology, Stuff I've read | 26 Comments »
Posted on October 31, 2009 by aethelreadtheunread
I don’t really like writing about things that affect my real life on this blog, as you will have gathered. I would like to give the impression that I am a disembodied intellect drifting high above the surface of the planet, occasionally focussing on some aspect of the scene below, but I am not, and real things keep happening.
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Filed under: About me, General mental weirdness, Self-loathing | 8 Comments »
Posted on October 22, 2009 by aethelreadtheunread
Picture the scene. It was early evening, and I was, as is my wont, footling around on my computer. I decided I would like to download and install some new software that would allow me to bulk-grab images from websites. Er… that’s websites with addresses like lookattheprettyrainbows.com, obviously. What sort of a pervert do you take me for? Oh, yeah, right…
So anyway, I had a quick google to see if such software existed, and it did. I found one particular package that mentioned the word ‘free’ in practically every sentence: ‘free download’; ‘free to use’; ‘no usage restrictions’; and so on. I downloaded it in preference to other alternatives, mainly because it made a point of being able to grab images from ImageBam galleries, which I knew, from reading a couple of forum posts that cropped up on my google search, not all bulk-image grabbers can handle. (ImageBam is a free image-hosting service, and it’s very popular with people who run blogs that gather together pictures of…er – what was I pretending I was looking at again? oh, yeah – rainbows.)
I downloaded the software. It was free, as promised. I installed the software. It was free, as promised. I launched the software and pointed it at a gallery. It told me it could see the pictures, and it even automatically spotted the difference between the thumbnails (which I wouldn’t have wanted to download – you can’t see the…er…colour gradations properly on a small picture) and the full-size linked images. I clicked on download. It asked me to specify a folder to download the images into. It asked me if I wanted to re-name the images as they were downloaded, or if I just wanted to add some particular characters at the start of the filename. This was a very useful feature, I thought. The gallery had lots of pictures of the same attractive 22-year-old…uh…rainbow, and I was quite taken with the idea of being able to have all the images delivered into a specified folder and renamed so that instead of just being labelled ‘001, 002, 003, etc’, as they were on the site, they would be labelled ‘Eric 001, etc’. (What, you don’t give pet names to your favourite rainbows? You’re weird.)
I clicked ok, and momentarily thought everything was going swimmingly. Then a dialog box happened:
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Filed under: About me | 9 Comments »
Posted on October 15, 2009 by aethelreadtheunread
…that’s nearly enough for a fence!
Yes, loyal blog-readers, this is my 200th post. I know, it feels like I’ve been wittering on for longer than that to me as well. I don’t want to say a huge amount about this – these kinds of posts can end up being very narcissistic, I think – but these are a few of my thoughts on the subject, some of which may actually make sense.
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Filed under: About me, Pointless navel-gazing | 15 Comments »
Posted on October 13, 2009 by aethelreadtheunread
Well, I haven’t done a meme for a while, so I thought I’d give it a go. Eroswings (from whose blog, Eros Den, I’ve stolen this idea) answers this much better than me, so be sure to go and check it out. The basic idea of this meme is that there is a sequence of 41 beginnings of sentences, which you then have to complete in any way you want. If you fancy having a crack at it, you should feel free. (Oh, and the bits of the sentences in red come with the meme, while the bits in black are my completions – but I would guess you could have worked that out for yourselves.)
Ok, let’s go.
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Filed under: About me, Stuff I've read | 2 Comments »
Not a good time to be a gay American
On Monday, residents in the state of Maine were voting on a referendum motion to overturn a law that had extended marriage rights to same-sex couples. The motion carried – I haven’t been able to find the full results, but to be fair, I didn’t look very hard once I discovered that the ‘No on 1’ campaign (i.e. the people supporting gay marriage) had conceded. This is, clearly, depressing. So far, referenda to outlaw same-sex marriage have been held in 31 states, and every time the supporters of gay marriage have lost. Last November, California – one of the most liberal states in the Union – voted to overturn gay marriage. This November, Maine – in liberal New England – has voted to do the same. The unpopularity of gay marriage in ‘red-neck’ states isn’t surprising, but the unpopularity in liberal heartlands is truly bizarre.
It hurts, as well, that in both California and Maine, the referendum was not a pre-emptive strike to prevent gay marriage being enacted, but a decision to overturn a law that was already in place. People have got married, residents of California and Maine had seen the joy and happiness when people like Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were finally able to marry after 55 years together – and have then gone out and voted to take that opportunity away. This isn’t just bigotry, it’s spite.
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Filed under: Political commentary, Religion, Sexuality, Stuff I've read | 3 Comments »