The other is Mervyn Peakes "Gormenghast". I once read a review that said peake only wrote because he couldn't get it all in a picture which seemed perfect, the book is so wonderfully descriptive one can't help but feel the castle all around.

Yep. I've worked with sound mixing engineers a lot, so I know enough about good sound mixing to know what bad sound mixing is... and I've gotta say that much of the dialogue you hear on television today just isn't mixed very well. I think it's a move towards a more "artistic" or perhaps "cinematic" style, and away…

FYI Amazon can deliver you soap for maximum laziness.

So I'm black.

But trying to google search for Sad Puppies gets adorable results at least!

Every insult you'll ever need:

And I’m guessing it’s some generic fizz lager, not something artisanal from a mason jar.

The answer to Fermi's non-Paradox is the same as the answer to this question: "If I am 100 miles from the nearest cell tower, and radio waves propagate infinitely, why don't I have bars?".

I always think of The Fermi "Paradox" as, "Why aren't we detecting any civilizations that are technologically like ours but which are also doing a bunch of things we're not doing."

I saw this last week, and the whole thing just enrages me. The fact that she doesn't want to do it but expects men to eat her out (Tracy, you make hella good points about why that's okay, and I'm a lot less pissed about it now but I was seeing red last week). The fucking disgusting misogynistic responses to it, like…

Regina Mills

I was glued to an old CRT TV for most of my childhood and now in my living room there's a big 1920x1080p TV on one side, a similar monitor on the other side and a large-screen tablet on the coffee table. I sometimes have them all going at once, which may explain why I now have the attention-span of a fruitfly. It is…

I had SUCH a crush on Tom Baker, back in the day. Everybody I knew loved Shawn Cassidy or whatever, and I just wanted to have that scarf and get in the TARDIS.

which is unpleasant but bearable

"Though a direct causal mechanism could not be established, long-term use of Reddit was strongly correlated (R² = 0.91) with a decline in multiple parameters of cognitive function."

I was a Pharmacy student back in '66, and everyone I knew, as well as myself, thought the drug was Valium ( diazepam ), for a couple of reasons

Perhaps they were time-traveling Cardinals from the 15th Century who were hungry after having excommunicated Copernicus for his anti-Ptolemaic notions of a heliocentric solar system.

The thing is, even people who totally reject Freud are in fact working within a framework that is in many ways dictated by Freud. Most of his individual claims were wrong, certainly. But nobody did more to define the field of psychology, and in fact the very ideas of the subconscious or unconscious owe a tremendous…

First off I forgot my "Kerwin White" user password and logged out one day on accident and couldn't get back in so here I am, son of Kerwin.

OK. Disclosure of Interest: I'm a survivor, so far, of the mental health system, crippling anxiety and depression, and frequent impulses to make it all stop. I don't want to pretend it's all better and I'm over it, and no longer face the threat of enforced incarceration, or even simply acting on those impulses,…