Archive for category The Afterlife
Comic: Da Six-Fingered Mon
Posted by Angela Brett in Culture, The Afterlife on February 20, 2011
Based on my experiences and those of many other people during the Jamaican stop of JoCo Cruise Crazy, this is what I imagine might happen if Count Rugen (the six-fingered man) from The Princess Bride were Jamaican. No offense to any people, real or fictitious, is intended.
If you’re not familiar with The Princess Bride, or you weren’t on JoCo Cruise Crazy and have never been to Ocho Rios, never fear. I’ve included a humour-crushing explanation of all the jokes and who they were stolen from below the comic.
For the bewildered:
Read the rest of this entry »
Stochastic induction of epizeuxis is my bird feeder made out of a coconut
Posted by Angela Brett in News, The Afterlife on February 13, 2011
The following video is not an example of creative output on my part, for by giving Secretary of Geek Affairs Wil Wheaton the CERN T-shirt featured, I simply did what clearly needed to be done. I am nonetheless pleased to have induced what I believe to be an example of my favourite word, ‘epizeuxis‘:
Here is a picture of the card that comes with the T-shirt, which has an explanation of the equation (click for the text of the card and a higher-resolution version of the photo):
I have written an ‘origin story’ in the style of Peter Sagal’s, explaining the improbable series of events that led to my being on a boat in a position to give Wil Wheaton a CERN T-shirt, and drawing a parallel between the above video and Peter Sagal‘s bird feeder made out of a coconut. However, it ended up somewhat long (1000 words) and show-offish, and I have been too busy watching concert videos to edit it properly (indeed, I arbitrarily stopped editing it when I noticed the word count was exactly 1000), so I’ll put it below the ‘more’ thingy for you to ignore. I’m not sure whether all of the events are in the right order, but the story is 1000 words long so it’s too late to edit them now. It looks like I’ll even have to include the superfluous second introduction, since I accidentally included that in the word count.
It’s a shame, really, because I promised somebody I’d include the word ‘shanty’, and now I can’t edit it in. But you can’t argue with integer powers of the number of digits most humans have on their hands.
Video: Return of the Pants
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on February 6, 2011
You remember those red pants I wore in the ‘A Laptop Like You‘ and ‘Love Letters‘ videos? They weren’t mine. My sister gave them to me years and years ago, and after seeing how much they improved those videos, she wanted them back. So when I went back to New Zealand in May 2010, I took the pants with me. This is how it went down:
Since then, I’ve thrown the weird underwear I’m wearing in the beginning at Paul and Storm, because that’s what I do with weird underwear.
Here are the words to the ‘poem’ part, minus the oattakes:
YouTubers, I have a confession.
Two tubes in my possession,
once used to belong to my sister.
From before she was fat,
and she’s no longer that,
so in keeping them, I think I’ve pissed her.
While I wasn’t at fault just to wear them,
when their owner was not even near them,
to not give her credit was rude.
While they’ve not made me famous,
They’ve saved me from shame, as
They certainly made me less nude.
So it’s time to put things right.
I’ve suitcase and pants and a flight,
some chocolate to sweeten the deal and,
with a smile and a wave,
if the volcano behaves, (this was just after flights resumed after the Eyjafjallajökull eruption)
I’m off to see Liz in New Zealand.
Liz: I’m sure glad she’s coming;
the lack of pants is numbing.
I had to grow pubic hair to cope. (Note: this was originally ‘leg hair’ but she only had pubic hair handy)
After many a year
in just underwear
I’d just about given up hope!
Me: Here you go, sis, have your trousers;
their stardom is greater than ours is,
so go in the bathroom and strip.
Liz: I got my big bum in,
and my gruts hold my tum in
though I can’t quite do up the zip.
The rimshot-like thing and the word ‘pants’ which you hear after that come from Christian Davis’s recording of Jonathan Coulton playing ‘Mr. Fancy Pants’ at Park West on 28 February 2009.
You might have noticed I changed the theme of my blog. This was because there was at last a new variable-width theme with a customisable header, and I thought it might suit my ‘Creative Output‘ picture better. Unfortunately, the title of the blog covers most of the picture, so it didn’t really work.
E-cards of Yore
Posted by Angela Brett in Old Stuff, The Afterlife on December 16, 2010
While you’re sending electronic cards to hundreds of your barely-remembered ones with a single click this holiday season, spare a thought for your parents and grandparents, who had to walk a long way uphill (both ways) in the snow to post their e-cards. They were so lucky; I love walking in snow.
I recreated an e-card from the pre-internet age so that young whippersnappers of today could see what they’re missing out on:
Old-fashioned e-card
It’s so hard to find a good card punch these days, but people back then were resourceful, so I had to be too.
Swiss soldiers could even write e-cards to their loved ones from the front
I made this in 2007 from one of the punch cards I rescued when a man I shared my office with retired, but it only just occurred to me that it was sufficiently creative to put on my blog. I didn’t have a real blog in 2007, so it’s fair enough.
There were real Swiss stamps commemorating 50 years of CERN, but I didn’t happen to have any on the day that I decided to do this, so I printed a fake one. I wrote the card in ASCII according to this. If I did it wrong, it’s because I’m not old enough to remember those days. If you know better, please share your wisdom.
Comic: How to get help with the command line
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on December 15, 2010
The other day, I made a comment on a Spiked Math comic. I thought about modifying said comic to make one which would match my comment, but before I even had a chance to, Mike from Spiked Math had made one. Excellent, less ‘work’ for me! Here it is:
Well, I still felt like making my own comic based on the comment, so I extended this storyline to its logical conclusion:
So there you go. Don’t mess with the man.
I’d feel horribly unfunny explaining the jokes, which might not be very funny in the first place, so I’m just going to leave a few links here for those of you who are not familiar with all the subjects:
Qu’ainsi périssent les ennemis du Cenovis !
Posted by Angela Brett in Culture, The Afterlife on December 12, 2010
Note: This is now available on video
This weekend is the Fête de l’Escalade, an annual commemoration of the night in 1602 when the Genevans defeated the invading Savoyards with the help of a diligent housewife and a pot of vegetable soup. I think this should be held up as an example in Good Housekeeping.
As part of this celebration, it’s traditional to smash a marmite while saying ‘Qu’ainsi périssent les ennemis de la République !’, which means ‘Thus perish the enemies of the republic!’ I happen to have several kinds of Marmite at home, mostly purchased for the tasty yeasty taste test at a Swiss party I held in New Zealand a few years ago.
The marmite at the back of this picture is a soup pot made of chocolate, usually filled with marzipan vegetables before being smashed by the youngest and oldest people present. The one at the top is British Marmite, a by-product of beer brewing rich in vitamins B1, B2, B3 and B12. It’s usually spread on toast but sometimes used to make a thin, yeast-flavoured soup. It’s probably the saltiest of all the yeast spreads I’ve tried. As far as I can tell, it is identical to the yeast spread sold as ‘Our Mate’ in New Zealand. The one at the bottom is New Zealand Marmite. It’s also a by-product of beer brewing used to spread on toast and make soup, but it tastes different, has iron in it, and is available in larger pots. It has to compete with the Australian yeast spread Vegemite, which has no iron or vitamin B12 in it and gives the illusion of being more vegetarian than Marmite.
In Geneva, however, the word ‘marmite’ is widely used to describe an even larger pot, often made of iron but rarely made of B vitamins, such as one might use to cook soup or foil invading Savoyards. In military slang, it means a shell, such as one might use to foil invading Savoyards. So when the Swiss finally discovered that they could spread the leftovers from beer brewing on their toast, they had to call it something else. To minimise the chances of having to compete with Vegemite, they chose Cenovis — a name which is known in New Zealand and Australia as a brand of multivitamin. Cenovis spread, which is rich in vitamin B1 but not B2, B3, B12 or iron, was added to Swiss military rations, so that the soldiers would be well-nourished and better able to fire marmites at invading Savoyards. It is also available as a liquid, for adding to the marmite if the vegetable soup doesn’t have enough flavour or killing power.
Cenovis multivitamin contains all the B vitamins and iron, along with plenty of other vitamins that you’d be better off getting from a pot of vegetable soup. It probably doesn’t taste very good on toast.
Get your own Mac to sing Still Alive
Posted by Angela Brett in News, The Afterlife on August 24, 2010
Somebody on Twitter mentioned he’d like the file I used to get my Mac to sing Still Alive, so here it is. If you have a Mac, you just need to open this in any application which can view text (TextEdit, for example) go to the Edit menu, Speech submenu, and select ‘Start Speaking’. You can try different voices by changing the system voice in the Speech pane in the System Preferences. For best results, use a high quality voice such as Vicki or Victoria. Alex is supposed to be the highest-quality, but it’s a male voice, and I don’t think I’ve tried it. Voices that already have their own built-in tunes (such as Good News and Bad News) won’t work. You could also create a sound file of it using the ‘Text to Audio File’ Automator action.
It won’t sound exactly like the recording in the video I made, because I edited the resulting sound file in GarageBand to get the timing to match up with the original song. If you want to shortcut all that, or if you don’t use a Mac, you can get your computer to sing (or lip-synch?) Still Alive by downloading this mp3.
This file is released under a PleaseDon’tSueMeValve-Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which is explained in detail in the file itself.
What I like about Internet Explorer
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on August 23, 2010
An oddly powerful number of people liked this when I posted it on facebook, so I may as well put it here as well.
I have a few other things I will put on this blog once I get time, including the source file for the MacinTalk Still Alive, since somebody asked for it, but this will do for now. I’m also testing out the link between Twitter and WordPress, because I got tired of only twittering about goats.
Poem: Soardough
Posted by Angela Brett in Old Stuff, The Afterlife, Writing Cards and Letters on July 11, 2010
By request, here is the pantoum that restarted it all. I wrote it in 15 minutes during a workshop on pantoums at the Geneva Writers’ Conference in 2006 after a long time without writing, and the positive reception it received convinced me that I could still write if I tried. Two barren years later, it inspired me to embark on the Writing Cards and Letters project to so that I’d try more often. I still haven’t come up with a good name for it.
I dreamed I was flying around on a biscuit
raised by the bakers of the bread of life,
their hands cleansed by hand, and not sterile.
Many hands make gloves expensive.
Raised by the bakers of the bread of life,
I put bread in the shivering hands of the poor.
Many hands make gloves expensive.
I wish I could have done more.
I put bread in the shivering hands of the poor.
They ate, and wept in gratitude, and came back hungry.
I wish I could have done more.
By serving their need I prolonged it.
They ate, and wept in gratitude, and came back hungry.
They could not bake their own bread without flour.
By serving their need, I prolonged it,
I added dark minutes to their darkest hour.
They could not bake their own bread without flour.
I have flour, sugar, chocolate chips.
I added minutes to their darkest hour.
I dreamed. I was flying around on a biscuit.
Video: Chemistry
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on July 4, 2010
Well, my last six months are over, without the rules really having been adhered to, and I’m still alive. On the subject of Still Alive, Steam is now available on the Mac so I finally played all the way through Portal on the very Mac that sang Still Alive for my last video (the older Mac only lip-synched, although it was perfectly capable of singing.) And on the subject of my last video, that wasn’t my last video after all, because here’s a new one. It’s a ‘performance‘ of the scientific love poem Chemistry, which I wrote during Writing Cards and Letters and revised for a challenge on Fictionaut.
It’s one of those things that was meant to be simple but resulted in my buying lipstick, cotton swabs, a T-shirt, nerd specs and two fake moustaches, and breaking a wine glass which I never used anyway. I bought the moustaches in New Zealand because I couldn’t find any here. While I was there I recorded another video, which is not quite finished yet, so watch this space.
To save you a click, here are the words and study guide, mostly cut and pasted from other posts but with some irrelevant bits taken out and other bits added:
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