The moving finger rants

Pub Wednesday night? And does anyone have a couch going spare?ETA: couch not required, gotta hotel.

I have a day off so I am taking a brief, hopefully sanity-restoring trip to the motherland. The train fare cost a hair over £50, so you'll be buying the drinks. However I can guarantee witty appreciative conversation.

Reliable sources tell me that the Hoose sucks now. Is the regular meeting still there, or would Dagda or the 9A be a better bet?

Oh folks, hello folks. I am summoned unto Edinburgh this Friday to run a whisky tasting session for the Russians. After that (and, presumably, enough time on Saturday morning to recover), I'm in town until the following Thursday.

Obviously I want to see as many of you as possible, and I'll be in the pub on the Wednesday.

Anyone up for a trip out to North Berwick or something, on Saturday or Sunday?

Oh folks, hello folks. RSNO plays Prokoviev's Romeo and Juliet at the Usher Hall next Friday, the 17th. Tickets a tenner. Who's coming?

(In Soviet Russia, Juliet and RomeYOU!)

It's a brand new year and the sun is high, so in the spirit of shameless self-promotion, I shall herein list the various cyberlocations at which I am active online.

• Blog: hie ye to Dreamwidth, where I am gominokouhai. Those of you without a Dreamwidth account can log in with any OpenID (including an LJ login). If, for reasons I cannot fathom, you still prefer Livejournal, everything that does not directly involve stuff I don't want the Russian Mafia to read is cross-posted to LJ, where I am also gominokouhai. If you don't have either, the blog has a handy RSS feed which you may plug into your favourite reader.

  Blogging has been light in 2011 because I've had a shitty year. I hope for this to improve and for my output to return to something like normal. Expect a mix of personal stuff (with any luck, only the vaguely interesting bits), spittle-flecked political ranting, and occasionally creative sentence constructions. And probably a lot about Doctor Who.

• Twitter: For somewhat pithier commentary in much the same vein, microbloggery takes place here, where I am also gominokouhai.

• Photography: I am on Flickr. I'm a talented amateur at best, but there is occasionally a good one. Mostly I do landscapes. Photos have their own RSS feed.

• Google Plus: I'm on it, but I haven't worked out yet what I'm going to use it for.

• The Facebook: I am on it, but I never use it. I hate the bloody thing with the passion of a thousand suns, and so should you. The vast majority of notification emails from Facebook go into my spamtrap. If you're trying to invite me to something, I won't see it: have the courtesy to email.

• Professionally: this is what Linkedin is for.

• Delicious or Del.icio.us or whateverthefuck it's called now: I post links here. If all goes according to plan, they shall be daily autoblogged to DW, courtesy of andrewducker's remarkable Feedthistothat.

• Erm: That's it.

I would love to know more cool people on any of the above sites (excepting the Facebook), so get in touch. Those of you in my DW circle can find the more mundane, meatspace coordinates here.

While we're on the subject, people have been asking what gomi no kouhai means. In response I shall give you this excerpt from William Gibson's short The Winter Market:

Rubin, in some way that no one quite understands, is a master, a teacher, what the Japanese call a sensei. What he's the master of, really, is garbage, kipple, refuse, the sea of cast-off goods our century floats upon. Gomi no sensei. Master of junk.

The opposite of a sensei is a kouhai, a student. I love cyberpunk; I wish there had been more of it. I still find it mildly amusing that I have a username which I selected back when Japanese stuff was cool and which is now, I hope, charmingly retro. Let it be known that I'm only being a weeaboo ironically.