sabotabby | interests meme

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interests meme

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one_serious_cat:"Comment on this post and I will choose seven interests from your profile. You will then explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along."

art terrorism was a lot funnier before some douche from OCAD used it as an excuse to call in a bomb scare at a fundraising event for AIDS research. But I appreciate it when Banksy replaces gallery and museum pieces or viral marketing goes awry.

biotic baking brigade: I used to be really into these guys. I don't think they do much as a collective anymore, but the idea has caught on and now pompous asshats are getting pwned by pies (usually vegan) all over the world. The pie's the limit!

gwendolyn macewan is one of my favourite poets. She lived here in Toronto and wrote poetry and plays and drank herself to death. I used to live across from a park named after her. She was a depressed, broken person but utterly brilliant and prolific. Some of her poems are here but you really should check out some of her books. Also, she was a total cat person and sort of looked like me.

leftist trainspotting is a major pastime of mine. It refers specifically to the study of leftist sectarian splits. My basic worldview is similar to that of most of the people and organizations that I mock, but that doesn't matter. Most splits occur for hilarious reasons.

Here are some fine examples of leftist transpotting: U.S. | Nepal

Also check out

pemm.

nestor makhno was a Ukrainian anarchist who fought basically everyone during the Russian Revolution, on horseback, and with a wicked mustache. If the Bolsheviks are to be believed, he was an utter dick in almost every way. I find him rather interesting even though I suspect that they're probably right.

phil ochs: Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan were, respectively, the Tupac and Biggie of their day. Bob Dylan told Phil Ochs that he was a journalist, not a folksinger. I gather Phil Ochs told Bob Dylan some things that can't be repeated in polite company. Both had some self-destructive tendencies but Phil Ochs died of his, whereas Bob Dylan sold out and became a Christian. Guess which one I like better?

the coming beecopalypse (OR zombie porn): I'll talk about the beepocalypse, because it's more interesting. Bees all over the world have been dying of something called Colony Collapse Disorder. There are many theories as to what causes this, but the bottom line is that if the bee population is drastically reduced, the current food shortages we're seeing (which aren't really shortages but distribution problems but that's a whole other rant) are going to get even worse. Bees die, you die. I find the idea fascinatingly horrifying. (Also see: peak bee, peak banana.)

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Wow, it's been a while since I'd done one of these.

Hit me!

quirkyalone
stitch n bitch
vox populi vox dei
house m.d.
post-zionism

In which number system does that amount to seven?

I don't think it's a requirement for seven interests.

Maybe up to seven is Sabs' interpretation?

Maybe up to seven is Sabs' interpretation?

Bloody anarchists!

Sabs is a zombie.

I also add: catwoman, masculinity.

I've been basically braindead for the past few days owing to Serious Intense End-of-School shit. Hence, I can't count.

I did wonder whether whether making the TDSB Eligible to Hire list involved a loboyomy.

You are turning into a memewhore :D

I'm lacking in original-content-generation owing to not enough time reading the news. It's the whole school/endgame factor.

hanifah walidah
stone butches
you look better naked
blaxploitation films
neo-soul

That's five interests

You could talk about your cats. Some people are into that. And, cats are generally more interesting than memes. I know this despite the fact that half my journal entries are memes.

See above re: braindead. I haven't been able to keep my eyes open long enough to read properly; I skim.

I add: female masculinity, cannibalism.

If the Bolsheviks are to be believed, he was an utter dick in almost every way.

Nothing dickish about anyone who resisted "dictatorship by proletariat"; Makhno was a towering figure. The Butcher of Kronstadt didn't exactly cover himself in glory in his attitude toward the Makhnovshchina either.

I take it you're aware that a fictionalised Makhno also appears in Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius universe - in which he takes over part of Canada?

Edited 2008-05-29 20:12 (UTC)

Nothing dickish about anyone who resisted "dictatorship by proletariat"; Makhno was a towering figure. The Butcher of Kronstadt didn't exactly cover himself in glory in his attitude toward the Makhnovshchina either.

I think the shit about him being an anti-Semite is probably true.

I take it you're aware that a fictionalised Makhno also appears in Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius universe - in which he takes over part of Canada?

Um. No. I didn't know. I need to read that now, yes?

amon düül ii
van der graaf generator
anti id cards
not voting labour
great cheese

You'll probably enjoy the Jerry novels. Moorcock is far better in this field than grinding out sword-and-sorcery nonsense like the Elric series.

Anyway...

amon düül ii - legendary krautrock outfit from Munich, kind of indirectly responsible for Hawkwind too. You may be interested to know they originated from a commune which also had key members of the Baader-Meinhoff group amongst their number...

van der graaf generator - equally legendary British prog outfit, with Peter Hammill on overwrought vocals and infinitely better lyrics than most of the competition were knocking out at the time. Despite being prog, they were much loved by the likes of John Lydon and Mark E. Smith among others. Not to be confused with a Van De Graaff Generator, which is an extremely cool piece of kit in its own right (it appears that the band couldn't spell when they formed at the University of Manchester).

anti id cards - you may have heard of the British government's plan to issue citizens with compulsory ID cards and register all their details on a database, so they can fight terror. Or is it crime? Or immigration? Whatever the case I want no part of it; hopefully the current government may see sense, though wasn't that a Gloucester Old Spot I just saw flying past the window? More chance of the scheme being defeated by good old cost-effectiveness and batshit-insane IT policies than other methods though.

not voting labour - see above, also see under "the war against terror", the abolition of student grants, the whole murky sleaze about cash for honours, the exhortations to embrace "Britishness"; I could go on. And where this sticks in the craw is that it's being executed by a nominally "Labour" government; the mixture of social authoritarianism and bending over for big business is what I expected from the Thatcherites, and indeed some of the new laws being passed at the rate of almost one per day are far, far harsher than even the most rabid of the Thatcherites would have dreamed of implementing in the '80s. New Labour; putting the "national" back in "socialism" since 1997.

great cheese - dates back from when I used to hang around on usenet before it fell to the barbarians. A private joke in one of my home newsgroups, along with "HORSE". You had to be there I guess. Anyway... I have GREAT CHEESE!

More chance of the scheme being defeated by good old cost-effectiveness and batshit-insane IT policies than other methods though.

Another project for Fujitsu perhaps?

Hmmm... funny you should mention that! They're on the short-list of five, which has still not been whittled down further, alongside those geniuses at EDS.

Oh dear. I have had the misfortune to be employed by both IBM and EDS and my current employer was at one time part of Fujitsu.

The beecopalyse stuff upsets me.

Pick me? I'm off work today and so I spent the day beating Don at chess and chasing bubbles.

I joke about it because it scares me.

all the books
chocolate-covered lesbians from belgium
famous spammers from cystalwank
pretty princess castle
they made me king!
green slime syndrome
anti-anna laws

(Hey, I'm one of your interests! But I'm not arrogant enough to ask you to explain.)

Edited 2008-05-30 02:02 (UTC)

Nice.

Gwendolyn MacEwen -- good stuff.

I <3 her.

Okay, you only have four interests. Explain yourself!

Also the sudden absence of bees is indeed alarming. I've been following this story for months. No bees = big trouble.

OK, so need to elaborate on interests in profile. ;-)

Do me!

You get ten. :)

alan turing
complexity theory
ontario wines
invented traditions
weill
mrs ackroyd band
letterpress
boethius
lost causes
mentalites

Me!
(Although

hoyvenmayven has kept me apprised of "peak bee", I didn't know about the bee rental business until I read that wikipedia article.)

20/20 lifestyles
chip delany
hating objectivists
metamagical themas
queer mathematicians
verwandtschaftsunheimlichkeitsgefühl
計算流体力学

20/20 lifestyles: The weight management program I'm participating in via my work's health insurance. I lost 60 pounds. It has a website.
chip delany: Samuel R. Delany, fabulous black queer science fiction author, pornographer, and literary theorist. If any of those categories are your thing I strongly recommend you check him out -- I'm willing to provide recommendations.
hating objectivists: Randroids are among the absolute lowest worms on the face of the planet; I've hated Rand since I tried to read The Fountainhead in high school and stopped in disgust at the rape scene. For quality Ayn Rand snark, check out Becoming an Objectivist in 10 Easy Steps
metamagical themas: One of the most influential books I read before college: Metamagical Themas. It's a collection of Hofstadter's columns for Scientific American magazine. He writes about self-referential sentences, fonts, Lisp, non-sexist language (read the hilarious Person Paper on Purity in Language), nuclear annihilation, artificial intelligence, and myriad other topics. Only later did I read Chip Delany's Longer Views and realize that the 73-page appendix "Shadows" deals with 90% of the topics I found intellectually stimulating in Metamagical Themas, and handles them much more thoroughly, and was written a decade before any of the columns were published. But Delany's a black queer sci-fi author and Hofstadter's a white straight nuclear physicist; small wonder Hofstadter gets all the attention. (I heard him speak, and he's also actually something of an egotistical donkey; whereas Delany is charm itself. Go figure.)
queer mathematicians: The world needs more of us!
verwandtschaftsunheimlichkeitsgefühl: That uncanny feeling you get when you spend too much time around your creepy extended relations, e.g., during the holidays. My siblings and I coined this word during Thanksgiving 2006 (which we held on our own away from the extended family), because it needed coining.
計算流体力学: Japanese for "computational fluid dynamics". As a graduate student I loved being able to tell Japanese people "daigaku de keisanryutairikigaku wo benkyoshimasu" ("I study computational fluid dynamics in grad school"). Naturally none of them had any idea what I was talking about but they were all impressed at how fluidly "計算流体力学" rolled off my tongue.

Edited 2008-05-30 05:55 (UTC)

Great namecheck for Makhno! I wrote a long magazine article about him and the RIA of the Ukraine a while ago. Mostly military, not much political though.

Okay, hit me too, puh-leeze....

I'd be interested in reading it, if only because I blow at writing military strategy so I'm always into hearing about real life examples.

artist trading cards
asperger's syndrome
blixa bargeld
the young ones
huun-huur-tu
great proletarian cultural revolution
hectography

Send me an e-mail address and I will zap you a copy.

artist trading cards: I used to do a lot of mail art, but developed other interests. I made a lot of one-of-a-kind postcards, but the postage cost would kill me if I tried to get back into it now. Artist trading cards are small pieces of art, usually collage but cna incorporate all kind of media, the dimensions of a playing card. You send a bundle of them to someone else and get a bundle of different ones back - or you can make and trade them in person at "meets". I like working small and if you screw one up, just make another.

asperger's syndrome: I am quite sure I have this. Not because it's apparently "the" thing to have now, to explain why you are an asshole or have been in the past. When it became obvious there was something wrong with my son's linguistic and social development in K and Grade 1, the school gave us some screening tests for Asperger's and I thought, "this is me they're describing"! My son has since been diagnosed with high-functioning autism, another spectrum disorder.

I list it as an interest but soon stopped reading the LJ interest groups related to Asperger's; after a while you get tired of reading the same life stories, and I had no interest in reading people's posts about how "Aspies" are possibly the next step in human evolution. I regard it as an obstacle to living a happier, more connected life, but it's not a crippling disability and I don't feel "poor poor pitiful me" about it; it's something to be acknowledged and gotten through - it was just nice to have an explanation for why much of my life has been like wanking with sandpaper.

blixa bargeld: Leader of Einsturzende Neubauten, my favourite group. Also plays guitar with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. INtelligent and funny and creative, a good storyteller on his own.

the young ones: My favourite Britcom! Four horrible students living in an even more horrible dilapidated house in London, in the early 80s. My favourite character is Vyvyan, the punk. They made only one season (12 episodes) because they got tired of screaming at each other all the time, but they are comedy gold. Includes weird puppets and bits by some good 80s bands (apparently if they included music bits in the program, the BBC would give them a bigger budget as it was now classified as a "variety" show).

huun-huur-tu: Tuvan throat singers. I have seen them perform live several times and it's truly a thrilling experience. Tuvan Independence Day BBQ at my place, August 16 this year!

great proletarian cultural revolution: One of the bug-nuttiest times of modern history, it started as an intra-Party power struggle and ended as a massive lesson in The Madness of Crowds. The commie-kitsch art and images that came out of this are something else.

hectography: One of the lowest-tech and earliest ways of making copies, even predating the Gestetner chunkety-chunk machine. Science fiction fans reproduced their zines using these in the 30s-50s, resistance groups printed news sheets using this process during the war. You write, draw or type on a piece of paper using "hectograph ink" and lay the sheet ink-side-down on a pan of moistened gelatin. Wait a few minutes and remove the sheet. Now lay a moistened sheet of blank paper onto the gelatin and remove it. The ink has transferred itself from the gelatin onto the paper! Called "hecto"graph because it was supposed to be good for 100 copies, might be good for half that. Ink can be made in several colours, so you can have very pale full-colour copies made all in one go. (I like learning about low-tech printing methods.)

littlemissnegativity at yahoo dot com. Though I probably won't get to it right away. Thanks!

Yes, me, please!

I love your interests; it's hard to pick just seven.

beards of bees
avante-retard music
our glorious leader
pancake deprivation fetishes
whupping illustrator's ass
kick a hipster day
hating helvetica

Phil Ochs: "Outside of a Small Circle of Friends" is my favorite song of his.

the coming beecopalypse: That is alarming.

Oddly enough, that's one of the few songs of his that I actually don't like. It's too cheery for what it is.

BEES DIE YOU DIE! I have to refasten that button to something to raise awareness.

If I only had a brain, I'd write a beecopalypse lyric to the tune of Ochs' song about middle-class liberal hypocrisy and explain that the apparent incongruence was "Brechtian".

Oh, no, I totally get what he was doing. It just doesn't work for me.

I know. I was just trying to bring the two interests together.

Memememememememe!!!

being called sir by strangers
against bourgeois-feminism
ultrabrutalist modern architecture
failed subcultures
red star nutritional yeast
responsible anarchists
jack layton's moustache

I haven't looked at my interests for a long time, so this could be embarassing, but I'll give it a shot.

If nothing else, this meme reminded me that my interests are due for an overhaul.

bezbozhnik
white rose movement
bérurier noir
bolchoi
aylmer
a-political
philip pullman

Re Nestor Makhno: I copyedited a novel set in the Mennonite community in the Ukraine during 1919, and the village is destroyed by Makhno and his men. I have a viscerally bad reaction to his name after reading it, as the novel was (apparently) based on the experiences of the author's family. Here is only the second time I've ever heard him referenced.

That's the sort of thing I mean when I say he was a dick. It's difficult to tell, given the existing historical record, what he did or didn't do, but I wouldn't imagine that his hands were in anyway clean.

embroidery
martial arts
alternate history
dorothy dunnett
manga
editing
terry pratchett

That chart of the Nepalese "communist" parties is amazing. A while ago I spent a night reading on wikipedia about Nepal, and probably the most confusing aspect was the multitude of similarly-named Maoist parties.

Also, if you want to read some top-notch leftist trainspotting-cum-american history, check out Thedore Draper's Roots of American Communism. Interesting fact I learned in it: the tendencies that would later develop into Council Communism had a much greater influence in the U.S. before 1917 than Lenin did (who was virtually unheard of). Unfortunately, it seems that the the movement here was so immature that the first hint of success in Russia sent everyone flocking to the Leninist camp.

Anyhow! It's good. If you ever have the time and inclination, it's a fine book.

I think Maoist parties in Nepal follow the same splitting/naming policy as they do in India (though I may be wrong about this). If you and I were in a Maoist group called Communist Party of Livejournal, and you followed an incorrect line, split, and formed your own splinter group, it would be called Community Party of Livejournal (R_T). The way Maoists split, it gets to be a tangle of initials really damned quickly.

That book sounds good.

If you're up for it:

against-biases-against-the-midwest
socialism=lemonade ocean
uncle wiggly
my cub's smile
minnesota nationalism
s:aab
snapping torah pointers

I hadn't even thought to do this, but ok!

I always thought it was "bionic baking brigade".

I always thought it was "bionic baking brigade".

Obviously a better mental image.

inversion/subversion
regimes of truth
ontology of participation
postmodern christianity
revolutionary orthodoxy
cowboy mouth
capitalistic iconoclasm

he became a jew again! :)
i like the artist better, personally. love is also important, not just politics. or something.

i wanted to comment on the cake picture and the birthday clothes picture. they were very cute.

lisa

I love select periods of Dylan and loathe others. Phil Ochs, I love across the board, but of course he died young. His best song is a love song.

The cake was so awesome it was unbelievable.

do me! do me! if you like.

I know a friendly chap who draws splitter graphs like that for British leftist parties. They look awfully similar.

cerdd dafod
silly noodles
contagious interest list memes
far-left woowoo progressives
greenend
cynghanedd
not being a goth

cerdd dafod is Welsh strict-form poetry. It means tongue-song, in modern Welsh, but in older Welsh it means tongue-craft. Supposedly there are 24 strict metres, but I forget most of them (one day... one day....) Welsh people, as a culture, are crazy about poetry. Imagine if rock music stayed as popular as it has ever been and continued to get more popular for about a thousand years. There is a page about it in Welsh on Wikipedia but nobody has bothered to write one in English. However, the awesome bard Twm Morys has written a very readable introduction here (PDF, sorry).

silly noodles: When

riordon was a toddler she had a habit of calling everything she was endeared to "silly ____", with noodles being the most common case. Silly ketchup was quite common too. "Silly noodles" were also, at the time, for us, those long thin cylindrical coloured pieces of foam that you can play-fight with. I think it stayed in there since.

contagious interest list memes: back in the early days quite a few people I knew had similar interest lists to me, and I hoped dropping that one in would cause it to become one. It didn't take off :(

far-left woowoo progressives: someone said they didn't want to talk to me or Fin about something because we were these, and so it went in the interest list. I forget the details. I'll ask Fin.

greenend: Green End Road is a street in Cambridge. There was once a geek commune there called the Sinister Green End Organisation (usually "SGO"), where people sat around all day arguing about cryptography and good beer, but it has long since been disbanded, more's the pity. The most public face of it now is probably chiark.greenend.org.uk. I never lived there myself but I was friends with a fairly large number of greenend people, hence the interest. (I was invited to join the SGO group on Facebook by one of the SGO people and I said "I'm not sure I'm entitled to call myself an SGO person because I never lived there" and he said "no no, you're an SGO person all right", so I joined.)

Continued...

cynghanedd is another thing about Welsh poetry: it's the patterns of sound, a bit like rhyming or alliteration only about a dozen times more complicated and beautiful. This time I get to point you at Wikipedia only because I actually wrote that article, which means I got to pick the example; I rather gleefully chose the wonderful "Cywydd y Cedor" by Gwerful Mechain, arguably the greatest female Welsh bard in history, which is full of her explanations (in strict metre and perfect cynghanedd) of how much she loves women's genitalia.

not being a goth: After I dropped out of grad school, lost contact with the uninterested friend whom I'd fallen in love with, and my undiagnosed depression started getting worse, I started wearing black clothing as a way of mourning all of this, and thinking about how sad and pointless the world was and how it was all going to end soon anyway. And my friends started taking me to goth clubs and things. And I realised that rather than deciding I was a goth and then looking up what to do, I had surprisingly ended up in goth territory without knowing it, which seemed backwards; I ended up repeating a good deal what another SGO-ish person,

simont, also says on his home page: I'm not a goth. Many goths say this, but I'm really not one. Well, OK, I wear black. And I like goth music. And regularly go to goth clubs. Argh, and I've been known to wear silly goth outfits when I go. But I'm still not a goth. In addition, there's a prevalent idea among goths that to claim that you're a goth is a sign that you're not one, so "not being a goth" is... oh, you get the idea. But mostly it's the ending up there without realising it.

Questions on this or anything are welcome...

I'm late to the game, but if you feel like it - me?

nom_de_grr's mother
autoethnographies
mothwentbad
charlie chaplin
harpo marxism
having authority
post-christianity

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interests meme

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Good thing you're not a math teacher :p

Re: Good thing you're not a math teacher :p

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meep

Re: meep