Dream A Little Quiz With Me

Things are usually dire on any blog which has to substitute quizzes for content, but bear with me for now. Lots is planned, I just have to find 24 extra hours in the week to write it down properly.

Which Endless Are You? is totally predictable for anyone who’s read a decent amount of Sandman, so you can easily figure out the result even before you click the button to find out. But I swear I didn’t tailor my answers, I really just am that compatible with the sexiest two-dimensional being ever.

Dream, the third of The Endless, you are in charge of the Dreaming, all imagination and creativity, everyone knows your beautiful realm, but none truly understand it. You are dark and%2
Dream, the third of The Endless, you are in charge
of the Dreaming, all imagination and
creativity, everyone knows your beautiful
realm, but none truly understand it. You are
dark and brooding, creative, and spend a lot of
time by yourself, just thinking. You are almost
as serious as Destiny, but not quite. Everyone
is enchanted by you, but you keep them all at a
distance, even when you shouldn’t.

Which Endless are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Jibba-Jabba

Mr T Vs Everything is a repository of links to fictional fights between Mr T and, you guessed it, anything and everything. The complete shittiness of the Photoshopping involved in finding and altering pictures to storyboard the fight is part of the charm, as is the repetitive use of key elements such as youth centres, his helluva fast van, milk, and how far he can throw someone. There are too many fights to browse through, and most are really mediocre, but I think Mr T Vs Hitler, Mr T Vs Shakespeare, and intriguingly, Mr T Vs His Own Abstract Thoughts were a little above the morass.

Pint-Sized

If only I’d had a pint glass close at hand when Casey was still kitten-sized.

Chicago Bean, File Magazine

Shit.

It would be easy to sit back and laugh at America, to say they’ve made their bed and now they must lie in it, except for the small fact that the rest of us in this world are also uneasy and involuntary bedfellows with that retard and his appetite for destruction. Also, all the American bloggers I read happen to be Democrats (pure coincidence, since all I ever look for in a blog is intelligent and interesting writing, not political affiliation. Go figure) and the genuine anguish I am reading all down my bookmark list makes my heart go out to them.

But enough of ugliness and depression for now. No doubt there will be much more of that to come in the four years ahead. Here are some happy pictures instead:

Chicago was never particularly high on the list of cities I’d like to go to in America some day (let’s make that some day more than four years from now), until I found out about Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate sculpture, also known as the Chicago Bean. And fell completely in love.

FILE Magazine publishes “images that treat subjects in unexpected ways.” I read a lot of online photography zines, and this is the one I keep coming back to. There are so many photographs I love at this site that it would really be pointless to list them all, but here is a shortlist of five:

As If Ke Xi Chuan Didn’t Sound Dumb Enough

Get A Chinese Name is a fun thirty-second diversion from my more demanding task of WeBoggle. I provided the required information, chose “Mind and Intelligence” as the “desired essence” I wanted my Chinese name to embody, and apparently my Chinese name is:

kong3meng4shou3

(For those of you who don’t read Chinese, that’s Kong Meng Shou, which not only sounds extremely unfeminine, but also just sounds…bizarre and mismatched. Like naming your kid Engelberta Moesha Gutierrez.)

Shout Outs

For almost all my blogging life (nearly four years now) my blog has been rather like an ostrich with its head in the sand. Until now, it has refused to acknowledge, at least on its front page, that other sites exist on the Web.

Linking to other sites is the palm grease of the blog world. At best, they notice you in their referrer logs, click on your URL and go whoo, here’s a new blog I haven’t read before, my god! it’s fascinating, I must add it to my sidebar too! At worst, they ignore your attempt at emotional blackmail because they refuse to mislead their public by linking to a site they don’t actually like enough to read much, and you languish in obscurity forever – being enough of an exhibitionist to have started a blog in the first place, this is obviously not what you want.

I, of course, have remained above all this, not out of any nobility of character, but out of sheer laziness. But no more. Tonight, sheer boredom took on sheer laziness and finally won. If your site is there but you’d rather I removed it, please let me know.

Three Reasons Why I Rock

(Bearing in mind, of course, that after reading them it is rather unlikely that you will share my view.)

1. I decided that enough was finally enough, and sorted out the multiple electrical devices that had been uglifying my desk all these months. I unplugged, untangled, rearranged, cleaned and dusted, and at the end of a sweaty hour or two, modem, router, printer, speakers, laptop, phone, desk lighting, broadband cable and ALL THEIR BLOODY ASSORTED PLUGS AND WIRES were living in harmony and beauty while taking up very little space. I now have more space on my desk, the massive multiplug has been artfully concealed, and the wires are no longer a gnarled mess. I can now abandon all the DIY solutions I had been considering before, which would have involved drilling. I rock.

2. (WARNING: geeky.) Since the site conversion to PHP seems to have gone fine, I decided to plunge right into implementing the features which had motivated the conversion. After squinting at code for a couple of hours, I now have:

  • Category archives which automatically paginate themselves, courtesy of the Paginate plugin for Movable Type. Particularly useful for my ever-expanding Music Geekery category (currently 80 posts and counting).
  • A right side menu coded as a separate MT template and pulled into the page using PHP Include. It won’t look any different to you, but it’ll save me updating time and server load.
  • Gzip-optimized pages, which will hopefully load faster for you guys.
  • A drop-down box menu to replace the long list of monthly archives previously on the sidebar.

I knew almost nothing about any of the above possibilities before today. More changes are on the way. Google rocks. I rock.

3. On Singapore’s Brainiest Kids, one question was “What is the name of the first book in the Famous Five series by Enid Blyton?” and I knew the answer in a split-second. Later, the question was something to the effect of “In Calvin and Hobbes, how many babysitters did Calvin’s parents ask to babysit Calvin, out of which only Rosalyn agreed?” I yelled “EIGHT!” triumphantly and my mum reeled back in shock. I astound myself with my memory for useless childhood trivia. I rock.