not falling down

Oh that’s better.

For the first time in years, I can link people to xorph dot com–just plain Xorph Dot Com–without feeling like I’m showing off my dirty underwear.

All the nine-planet mnemonics you learned were dumb, because mnemonics are dumb, period. Purge them from your brain. Good!

My mother taught me the planets in kindergarten or something, using a song she and her friend made up on the playground when they were in elementary school. It goes like this:

“Mercury, Venus, Earth

dah-dah nanananah

Mars, Jupiter, Saturn

dah-dah nanananah

Uranus, Neptune and–

Plu-to.”

And I have never forgotten them since. The best part is that now that the list has been shortened, it’s more easily converted than your elevated mastodon who just served you divorce papers or whatever.

Uranus, Neptune and–

That’s all.”

If you make nachos with blue corn chips, salsa verde and mozzarella cheese, they will look gross but taste okay.

Not great, though.

It occurred to me last night that yes, they must be getting ready to make a The Dark is Rising movie, and sure enough. Aside from the two attached names so far, I’m concerned that Ian McKellen already appears to be doing three movies next year. That doesn’t leave a lot of spare time, and come on, can you even conceive of anyone else playing Merriman?

“I think some people are kind of Facebook sluts.”

This message brought to you by the dog, investigating my keyboard:

ikmjk k l,v .x [’

hyyg7findPosX(<%=("pageImg_"+repId)%>)+xoffset mnxzsas .002

+

;l 0

A little disturbed that she managed to hit CTRL-V at some point. Also, is that last part a winking dog smiley? Or is she calling me fat?

Three years after switching to NewsBruiser, I finally have NFD looking like I wanted it to look all this time but was too lazy to figure out the CSS. Me, not it.

I’ve been writing HTML for over ten years and CSS for over six, just because it wasn’t hard to learn and I could do fun stuff with it, and now I find myself in the position of the guy who makes a living off his hobby. Admittedly, so far this has been largely the tedious bits–like if I spent most of my day trying to shake a little broken flange out of an O-scale model train–but compared to my previous job of shaking out, say, crusty ketchup from a broken bottle, it’s aces.

On what album, if any, can you honestly say you never skip a track?

I know the intertube already saw the superballs ad months ago. But did you watch the extended version?

UJ wrote a fantastic response to my “Christ of the Barricades” challenge, and Will wrote a prequel to Beloit, saved here from the LJ feed:

Tarnished as it is, the dirty chrome armour of the Heliocrashers shines as they blast through the wall: Erythrophobia zaps at a guard, but canon says that sonoluminescence doesn’t cause bubble fusion. So she punches him through a wall.

The other ‘crashers are covering her while she sets a charge against the generator’s critical weak point when canon oozes out of a grate and tears Erythrophobia in half. The charge doesn’t detonate because canon says they use fusion to fly, not fight: instead, her top half flies into a duct and her suit’s failing containment does the job just as well.

And then there’s stuff like Sumana’s MC Masala, which… you know about MC Masala, right? And Leonard is getting the kind of rejection letters most of us would kill for, for a story you will (when you get to see it) kill to have come up with.

There’s no unifying characteristic between the amazing writers with whom I associate, no New School or Movement, even though I keep trying to assign one. I guess I’m just going to have to publish all you guys?