2012 End-Of-Year Count: Books

What I gone done read this year.

Another Bloomin’ Christmas

Harry Crossmoose!

Well, it’s over now, but I hope everybody had a lovely time. I always love Christmas. This year, birds got fed.

In a general sense I hope that you have a merry new year too, but I don’t really care about all that so much.

Some links, why not:

~ The Worst Things For Sale. There should be a ‘via’ but I’ve forgotten.

~ “My Aretha” – I think I like the stuff he doesn’t like more than he likes it (or doesn’t), but the more general gist is interesting. And yes-yes-yes to that first “never”.

~ A bit by Tom Ewing about trolls that I’d agree with 100%, particularly the fact that “a word which spans ‘teasing a pop forum about its music tastes’ and ‘sending death threats by email to someone about their kids’ is not a sustainable word”. As an aside, that was my main problem with that “Thank You Hater!” song that everyone seemed to inexplicably love. I know that generally (not always, but generally) you already know that you’re in the midst of some complete drivel as soon as you hear the word ‘hater’ and as such I shouldn’t be surprised, but that thing appeared to view saying “You’re not funny and you never will be” (and similar) as somehow being the same thing as a threat of rape. Worried me a touch, so it did. Anyway, here ends the digression from what was only going to be a link in the first place.

~ A great piece about architecture and town planning in Brum, via Twitter.com/DuncAutumnStore. N.B. Of course we all know that henceforth anything even remotely connected to civic planning in Birmz must be followed by a “see also P’Ashton’s lovely piece”.

~ The physics of space battles – via Kottke, years ago.

~ “The Joking Computer, a kiosk-based installation running software made by artificial intelligence researchers at the University of Aberdeen. The software uses phonetic information about English words and semantic information from WordNet to generate pun-based riddles” – via Waxy, years ago.

~ I Write Like…

Coming to terms with the inevitable

Done it again. Supersonic happened (hooray~!), and I actually managed to write most of my post about it. I genuinely did. I just didn’t finish that last little bit, and didn’t get as far as a post about anything I’ve done since either – nine gigs, four operas, a fillum showing with an organ being played behind it, a Christmas question-answerin’ trail, ice skating, a pub quiz, one world fair, a picnic and a rodeo.

We will draw a line here. A line of non-bloggery. I will finish the Supersonic one and there still are going to be digest posts for all of my operations from this year. I know my precise plans are of even less interest than the posts will be, but I do feel like I’ve removed a weight from my shoulders by making a decision to just leave the rest and so I’m going to indulge myself by writing some crap about the crap I didn’t write.

Some links:

~ It seems that there are plans for a Mo Yan theme park, now that he’s Nobel literature laureate. That’s brilliant and a thing that should be done with more of the winners. Can you imagine a Harold Pinter theme park?

“Two day tickets, please.”
*REALLY LONG PAUSE*
“That’ll be £20.”

~ Point! (It doesn’t work in IE. Via SWSL).

~ The mouse that stole a leopard’s food – apologies for the Daily Mail link, but I do love the photographs (via Cute Overload, years ago).

~ Matoi Yamamoto’s salt labyrinths (via Kottke,years ago).

~ Hard Truths From Soft Cats.

~ I know that “I am an introvert” is the currently one of the Infosuperbahn’s most fashionable things, but this thing here really, really is the most perfect guide to talking to/dealing with me that anyone could ever have written (via Skepchick).

Placeholder concerning place

In the absence of any proper posts (I was doing well for a little while there, wasn’t I?) I was going to point out that this term ‘B-Town’ is in no way a new one, as people around the internets seem to be suggesting. I had thought that Juice Aleem used it in his 2009 song Birmingham 6, but after actually listening to it for the first time in ages I realise that he says “It’s Birmingham, it’s Brum-Town/come down and spend pounds” rather than “B-Town” as I’d thought I’d recalled.

I’d been remembering that line as saying “B-Town” for years. Does that mean I was the first to think the phrase and as such responsible for all this nonsense on a psychic level? Dang.

I still haven’t gotten around to listening to most of those bands. It is a shame in circumstances like this when you end up finding music irritating before you’ve even heard it. Troumaca are ace, of course, I’ll vouch for them.

(EDIT: In fact, it looks like I did actually use the term myself on the 20th of August this year. Hmmmm…)

(EDIT EDIT: A cursory little search of this here blog shows that I have in fact been using it for a couple of years. Dang, son).