Stuff and things

Slow and Steady

Your friends see you as painstaking and fussy. They see you as very cautious, extremely careful, a slow and steady plodder. It'd really surprise them if you ever did something impulsively or on the spur of the moment. They expect you to examine everything carefully from every angle and then usually decide against it.

How Do People See You?

the Wit (52% dark, 30% spontaneous, 22% vulgar)

your humor style: CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you're probably an intellectual, but don't take that to mean you're pretentious. You realize 'dumb' can be witty--after all isn't that the Simpsons' philosophy?--but rudeness for its own sake, 'gross-out' humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat. I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer. Your sense of humor takes the most effort to appreciate, but it's also the best, in my opinion. PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart - Woody Allen - Ricky Gervais

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 40% on dark You scored higher than 7% on spontaneous You scored higher than 20% on vulgar

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid

Start ya off with a couple nice quiz results. Now that I've got y'all warmed up...

TIME has just created a worthwhile list of the fifty coolest websites. I was quite pleased to discover that I already knew about most of the interesting ones.

A man in Spain is building his own cathedral. It's pretty impressive-looking. Sadly, he's having trouble finding people to support him, and the unapproved building will likely be torn down after his death.




In other singlehanded-monument-construction news, a retired carpenter who believes he knows the secret to Stonehenge is raising his own Stonehenge in his backyard using only rudimentary tools and the power of his own body to move stone blocks weighing tons. (I read a news story about this somewhere, which had a video of the guy in action showing how it worked, but now I can only find his own website, which is much less interesting. Damn. Sorry.)




Giant "Bra Fence" Sparks Controversy: Official Says Fence Offends Asian Cultures, South Africans. For years, women returning from a pub in the nearby town of Wanaka have stopped at the fence and removed their bras...




The New York Times article Bad to the Last Drop explains why tap water is better than bottled.

There is apparently an update of the EPIC 2014 media-documentary-from-the-future video (I originally linked to it here): EPIC 2015.

I've just stumbled across somebody's blog called Bluetealeaf. I know it's impossible to be truly original in this world, but I'm always a little unsettled when I come across other people with identities I feel are unique and original to me. No sign of what inspired his name; I promise to tell the story of mine someday soon if anyone's interested.

The Brick Testament: the Bible in Legos! It's a Christian site, naturally, and while I am generally repulsed by things evangelicals do to make religion hip and appealing to kids (like Revolve, that New Testament packaged as a teen fashion magazine, and Refuel, its masculine counterpart, for example; or that game King's Call, which I'm still sore over), I like this particular project a lot. It's not cleaned-up at all, either -- a helpful little code warns about episodes containing nudity, sex, violence, and cursing, of which there are many. I never expected to see so many naked little Lego people knowing each other Biblically, so to speak. The segments are very short, and sometimes quite surreal and strangely humorous -- a lot of which comes from the source material, I suppose. The many panels which read simply "And then he died," with a little croaked-over figure, are wonderful. Ever read the Bible? There's some weird stuff in there. There's essentially no effort made to interpret or reconcile the bizarreness of some of the stories -- they're just there, built brick-by-brick as faithfully as possible. The Brick Testament is really a very impressive artistic endeavor, and a lovely rendering in Lego of a great work of literature.




UPDATE: I was not entirely right about what The Brick Testament is all about.

Jeff Russell's Starship Dimensions is a pretty cool site for science-fiction fans comparing images of spacecraft, bases, and other objects from numerous examples of the genre to show relative size. It also makes a nice visual compendium of sci-fi vessels. Very comprehensive.
Via Bibi's box.




reading: Charles de Lint, The Newford Stories; A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (re-reading -- I love that book); Kenneth Morris, The Dragon Path; J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye; Lois Gould, Subject to Change
saw: Firefly; Beverly Hills Cop 2

music: The Blue Room on BBC Radio 1
beverage: Twinings Darjeeling tea