Scenes of devastating beauty views from inside a packed communter train Into Hell.

[reddragdiva]

• I'm trying to make Rocknerd look a little less like a ghost site. Any of you who write about music or related popular culture are heartily invited to contribute.

• A Firefox extension to download videos from YouTube. The resulting .flv files play very nicely in VLC.

• You liked the Complaints Choir of Helsinki? Now hear the Complaints Choir of Birmingham. (High-quality videos at the site.)

• Liz is currently bittorrenting this. OH NOES. ("For research," she says. INTO THINGS HUMAN BRANE WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW!)

• Cycle path of the week.

Is there anything happening Friday night? I feel an overwhelming urge to go out. Saturday, redcountess and I are seeing Mötörhëäd again and Sunday gothgeekgirl is in town \o/ so we'll be hitting Camden.

The cold continues. The landlord's chosen gas fitter has ordered the relevant flue part and it should arrive Saturday or Monday, and he said he'll be over to fit it ASAP. The landlord has offered us the use of another of his houses, if he finds the CORGI cert for that one ... ahem. I need to stick here for work, but the girls may consider it when the CORGI cert is produced.

We have decided to work around the shower problem by visiting Leyton Leisure Lagoon tomorrow. They will have showers there ... I will be wearing my twenty-year-old Speedos, which will be most perturbing.

Work is thankfully very dull indeed. By far the most annoying thing about this week is all the still-packed boxes of Ikea that I wanted to get set up so (a) the house would be cosier (b) we could get arkady's stuff and my rekerds out of that bloody storage locker. Gah.

A glass raised to Tal and Sava last night.

Comments

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

Apparently NOTHING AT ALL is happening on Friday. Perhaps a pub of some description might provide suitable entertainment for an evening?

[rosefox]

For a moment I got gothgeekgirl mixed up with britgeekgrrl and animegothgrrl (now julezerator, apparently), and was very confused. Then I looked at her userinfo. When she gets there, please tell her "Nathan says hi" from me. *)

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Tell her that if she's Bittorrenting that piece of swill, my respect for her will have diminished to the point where I won't mail off that huge package of Halloween stuff to her next week. Just as with Paul T. Riddell columns, we all should make exceptional efforts to prevent our friends for facing that sort of horror, even if we have to destroy the friend in order to save her. (And yes, I'm still sending that package anyway: what sort of inhuman bastard do you think I am?)

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

It's not that bad.





It's worse.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Don't get me going: I actually saw it during its one and only US showing, and I'm still licking Grand Central Station toilets clean to get the taste out of my mouth. The thought of watching it again sets off the same exact spasms that usually accompany the phrases "Time for your sigmoidoscopy," "Your ex-wife is in town, and she needs a place to stay," and "Did you know that Bruce Sterling is doing a reading just down the street?"

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Likewise. I've seen it precisely once. That was one times too many.

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

My trusty minion obtained a bootleg copy that we all watched over the holidays two years ago. He's bringing it over again for this weekend, in the thought that we might be drunk enough to go again.

Ha.

[reddragdiva]

So how is it on the Battlefield Earth scale? Is it in fact possible to drink enough to watch it without passing out?

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

It required rather more booze than Battlefield Earth. We pointed and giggled and howled and puked most of the way through BE, but by the animation part of the Holiday Special we were jamming fondue forks into each other's eyes to survive.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

Oh, come on. The Holiday Special wasn't that bad back when I saw it at Oberlin... well, okay, it was horrifyingly bad of course, but the not unenjoyable kind of bad. (Contrast with Armageddon, the showing of which I'm sure is an internationally recognized human rights abuse.) And I was entirely sober at the time, too. (Also, to my eternal regret, for Armageddon.)

But while we're here, I have to say I totally didn't notice the intergalactic buttplug or the glowing pink dildo-microphone or any of the other stuff (well, not the hallicinated-floozie-sex-chair; that's pretty damn hard to miss) until it was pointed out just now.

[redcountess]

It's for research, honest!

[reddragdiva]

You know how it is. You can tell people FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T CLICK JESUS CHRIST IT'S A LION GET IN THE CAR! but they just eat the covers.

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

As in that barely-recognisable video you linked in some Other Place recently? *shudders*

[shamus9999.livejournal.com]

You remind me of me. I just gave my friend her birthday present last month. Her birthday was in May. I should have just held out for Yule, I suppose, but too late now.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Ah, that holiday special. It is, indeed, truly awful.

(We no longer have it, having finally junked the recorded-off-Swedish-TV-tape that has been around here since forever.)

There's even a website(tm) about it: http://www.starwarsholidayspecial.com/

[shamus9999.livejournal.com]

The Star Wars Holiday Special? Great Cthulhu!

[sister-stella.livejournal.com]

Snap! I had just downloaded the video downloader and the Torrent Searchbar for Firefox about five minutes before reading this.

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

*reads* *shudders* Holy skullfuckers, Batman!

[redcountess]

It's research!!!

[shamus9999.livejournal.com]

...but not as we know it.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

*falls about laughing*
I LOVE that icon!

Rocknerd

[sister-stella.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately my brain is all academically configured at the moment or I'd offer to write something for you. The problem is that as soon as I even think about writing without a bibliography and references all I can hear is the wind between my ears.

But can I offer my 2 cents? RSS feeds are turning up on every bloody site I visit these days, not just LJs and blogs. I take it that RSS and other feeds are getting more and more popular possibly because there are these "personalised start pages" like Pageflakes and netvibes, MyYahoo! (which sucks though) and Google, popping up to help people consolidate their interests into a few pages. If you offer RSS feeds then perhaps more people will be likely to at least scan the headlines of your features and/or journals through newsreaders or startpages. It's easier for them to keep up to date with what's happening on the site with minimal effort.

Re: Rocknerd

[redcountess]

It has an RSS feed.

Re: Rocknerd

[reddragdiva]

There's links for RSS feed and rocknerd_org right there on the front page! I suppose I should use a little orange-radiation RSS icon ...

Re: Rocknerd

[sister-stella.livejournal.com]

Sorry. Now I feel like a dick but my "Add to Netvibes" button didn't register it and since the little radiation image wasn't there I didn't see the link either.

Re: Rocknerd

[reddragdiva]

You do need to be looking for them ... way down the page in the "quick links" box. We should add a radiation symbol I suppose.

The feed URL is http://rocknerd.org/rdf - is Netvibes looking for a name ending "rss"?

Re: Rocknerd

[sister-stella.livejournal.com]

I don't know what file they're looking for but I'll ask them. :)

Seriously though, a little radiation graphic would stand out very well with all that black and white, and with web stuff being seen on a light medium, people don't like to read much if they can help it. It hurts their eyes. That's one of the reasons why gui goes down so well with the average computer user.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

The Helsinki complaints choir is great. The Birmingham complaints choir only complain about things they could fix if they weren't so stupid!

[shamus9999.livejournal.com]

"The Birmingham complaints choir only complain about things they could fix if they weren't so stupid!"

Isn't that kind of a given?

/me runs

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

You could be all Murikan about it on Friday and go BUY LOTS OF THINGS!!!

Cycle path: that's so clearly for parking.