Maru's Mun Journal

We don't have a milliquotes any more, do we? Then I have to quote Debi's Leah Ross from the Hogwarts AU here, because that was the funniest tag I got in a long while:

"Blimey, Lokes. Not all of us get our rocks off with the exam equivalent of hiding behind a door and shouting boo."

[[from here]]

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.”

Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement address delivered on June 12, 2005.

"Change yourself in the way you want everyone else to change
Love your enemies in case your friends turn out to be jerks
Avoid thinking about winning the lottery while making love
Brainwash yourself before someone nasty beats you to it
Confess big secrets to people who aren't very interested
Write a love letter to your evil twin during a lunar eclipse
Fool the tricky red beasts guarding the Wheels of Time
Locate the master codex and add erudite graffiti to it
Dream up wilder, wetter, more interesting problems
Change your name every day for a thousand days
Kill the apocalypse and annihilate Armageddon
Exaggerate your flaws till they turn into virtues
Brag about what you can't do and don't have
Get a vanity license plate that reads KZMYAZ
Bow down to the greatest mystery you know
Make fun of people who make fun of people"

[[from here]]

"This bloody octopus is ruining my life's work!"

David Spiegelhalter, statistician from Cambridge, about Paul the Psychic Octopus of Oberhausen*


*Link is in German; original Times article is behind a f*cking paywall. Thanks to the Nazgul for the quote and the link.

The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol.

-- Larry Wall

[[found here]]

To take a break from mainlining all the other books from the author of Urquhart's canon, I'm reading something intellectually interesting a non-fiction book, for a change: Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 'The Black Swan', newly published 2nd edition.

This quote made me laugh out loud in the train today:

You can afford to be compassionate, lax and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show you can walk the walk.
(Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 'The Black Swan', p. 7)

Arianna Huffington: "Self expression is the new entertainment, We never used to question why people sit on the couch for seven hours a day watching bad TV. Nobody ever asked, 'Why are they doing that for free?' We need to celebrate [this desire to contribute for free] rather than question it."

(via Seth Godin)

That's what we're doing -- as RPers and fanfic authors etc. as much as as bloggers in general. We self-express for the sake of entertainment: - our own, and that of others. In that capacity, we've co-invented online collaboration and created the demand that was at the beginning of cloud computing.

The shiny future in this is the vision of everybody working like we are playing; this is spreading under the name Results Only Work Environment (among others).

We're not freaks. We're precursors.-

You know, it's getting close to five years that I've been RPing with essayel; I think it was early December 2004 that a certain purple god first chatted to a certain faun who had baked pain au chocolat...

Her tags haven't got any less amusing, and her way of putting thing is undiminishedly priceless: just now did she make me giggle real heard.

**giggles**

nazgul_nr_5  and I just watched 'Riddick', because her father (an uber-geek like she) had recommended it.

There was talk of some prophecy, and the Nazgul took umbrage to that, being as she was reminded of 'Star Wars' too much.

Consequently, thus spake the Nazgul: "I'll prophesy something as well, now: the next prophet gets their face bashed in!"

On Tuesday, japanologist mailed me to tell me that there was a new CD by Alice Coltrane, whose "Ptah the El Daoud" is an all-time favourite, and actually introduced the harp into jazz music.

I didn't know she was still alive, even! Turns out she didn't have a new record in 26 years. Now there is one: "Translinear Light". Still her typical jazz with mystical and New Age elements, but wow does it make your mind buck and kick when that serious Indian chant suddenly gets syncopated and starts swinging. Here is one example, yousendited, so it is only good for one Roundworld week, starting, erm, now:

Satya Sai Isha

Second acquisition: "The Celebrated Discworld Almanak"

Not a Discworld Diary this time around, although it contains two calendars, one of which contains Octedays, the other no day names, but 36 days to the month. And there is the month of Ick, 16 days between December and Offle, which will be so hard to integrate into the discworld_rpg

I don't know who except us RPG muns will ever need that book(let); it contains lots of cute and weird new canon facts wonderful for integrating into RPage, but no story! Instead, lots of astrology and even the occasional bits of astronomy. Of course, what with Great A'Tuin swimming through space, stars come and go, so research astrologers are forever mapping out new constellation and then take surveys on what people born under those new signs are like. And if your sign is left behind, you can apply for a new one. tahira_saki, I fear you will have to get that book just to make Skazz spout the correct kind of jargony nonsense.

So, and third- and lastly, as I had just been mentioning Prince Felix Yusupov to supiluliumas, I'll do a mini-Ji and post an excerpt from the second part of Felix' autobiography, which was only ever published in French; I translate it, of course, because otherwise the only person on my flist truly enjoying the quotation would be Ji.

I chose a random little passage where he hardly talks about himself, but which is so wonderfully typical: gossippy, bizzare, full of weird humour, but with a sudden depth, and understanding for all the strange little oddities of humanity. Also, there is the strange poignancy of the "eccentric" cross-dressing woman in this little story - whom he accepts as one of the endless varieties that make life interesting, but who is treated with contempt by others, which in turn to him appears weird and bizarre.

( an excerpt from Felix: The Impossible Valérie )