interests meme

[sabotabby]

Via 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.)

Comments

[joxn.livejournal.com]

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.)

[sabotabby]

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

[joxn.livejournal.com]

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.