The moving finger rants

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.

Those of you not on my Dreamwidth access list are missing some fairly important personal stuff. I'm not crossposting everything to LJ at the moment.

If you're on my LJ friends list, or think you should be, then you might want to have a look at my DW account if you have a login over there. If anyone wants a Dreamwidth account of their own, I have a stack of invite codes going spare.

Apocalypse Laboratories is moving! Updated contact details will be on the cunningly-named contact details post in due course. (Livejournal people: friends-only LJ version here).

Now, perhaps, is a good time to answer that oft^[0]-asked question: why do you call it Apocalypse Laboratories, pajh?. People ask me this all the time. Usually right after what are you wearing?

The story begins, as so many stories do, at school. We were tasked to write a letter of complaint about a disappointing holiday. We're supposed to say that the beds were dirty and breakfast was undercooked and stuff like that. I'm fourteen years old and this is bor-ring. Fortunately, there are always ways to spice up school projects. As best as I recall, my letter went thusly:

Dear Sirs

I write to express concern about the treatment I received at your property, Seaside Cottages, on Friday the 24th last.

My first indication that something was amiss occurred upon first approaching the property, when I noticed that the traditional epithet WELCOME on the doormat had been replaced with the more ominous ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER. Indeed, as I stepped onto this doormat I was surprised when it gave way beneath my feet, and I found myself shooting down a tunnel with smooth metal walls. As I emerged at the bottom of the shaft in a hellish cavern, I found myself confronted by my nemesis, Dr. E. Ville of Apocalypse Laboratories, who

At this point I got bored again and, conveniently, my English teacher got tired of having to deal with me. I was allowed to move on to the next assignment. (I believe we read a Steinbeck novel. It was terrible, but when they made us watch the film version and things went awry, it served as the inspiration for my next epic story, Quest for the Mystic Lost Videotape of DEATH; or, Of Teachers And Devil Worshippers.)

Anyway, the name Apocalypse Laboratories appealed to me. I kept it.

Speaking of moving flat, which I sort of was, some time ago now, I've been helping to rearrange the new flat so that it is worthy to assume the title of Apocalypse Laboratories when I move in. Yesterday, this involved dismantling a bed, lugging it through to another room, and reassembling it, better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster, but more importantly, less wobbly. My superior grip strength^[1] allows me to screw things together in such a way that they remain screwed.

( TMI )

I AM MAN.

Next: I make up a chest of drawers. Rawr.

The actual exodus to Dreamwidth seems to have begun. I've had a play around on the site, and it looks pretty reasonable; it already does several things significantly better than LJ. And it could be a lot worse. It could be DreamWidth.

spudtater's post here (which is the same as spudtater's post here, I think) contains some pretty good suggestions on how to handle the transition. If I'm doing this right, you should be able to read this post on LJ, just like we all did in the old days, when the internet was built out of tin cans and string, and before LJ sold us all to the Russian Mafia, or whatever it was that they did.

Dreamwidth posts from yr. corresp. are syndicated at gominokouhai_fd for those who want to continue reading me on LJ, although I'm not sure how well that will handle friends-locking. Let's find out.

Behold, for The Perfect Steak is now available at Kamikaze Cookery dot com.

That is to say, the episode regarding the perfect steak is now available. You can't download the actual steak through the internet. I'm still working on that bit.

Go, watch, comment. Tell your friends. Subscribe to the RSS feed. And come back next week for more.

I lied earlier. Haunted Scotland is on the 23rd November. This Monday is the sassenach version, which I'm not in.

It is the policy of gominokouhai dot livejournal dot come to correct errors as soon as is practicable, unless doing so would be really, really embarrassing, in which case the policy is to claim that the fault lies with reality's noncompliance with the facts as stated herein.

Today is 24th April, 2007.

Bloodspell, episode the last. Shocking revelations! Tear-jerking drama! Epic fight scenes! Me, actually acting!

Next, Hugh plays World of Warcraft for six weeks or so and then we make the feature-length version. I shall be called back at some stage to do a director's cut, special edition, extended version of the Creepy Opening Monologue.

And now, off to the wrap party.

I want to thank my agent, and my makeup artist, and my hairdresser....

Discovered this collection of 80s music videos. My research indicates that most are fairly poor-quality flash files, but the music is there. Enjoy.

Possibly interesting how anachronism seems to be a running theme....

(mmm, Susanna Hoffs.)