illustrent stellae viam meam

I have a few unwanted BPAL imps, free to good home. Please note that my personal notes are because of testing in my own nose and on my own skin and YMMV. ( Read more... )

Stygian says:
ok, I assume I'll not be chopping carrots til you leave work.. [i.e. continually from now til then; would = 2.5 hours of chopping]
so I'll be back when that is done.

eldritch muffin says:
heh
that'd be a lot of carrots

Stygian says:
that'd be KP!

eldritch muffin said (5:21 PM):
LOL

via coyotegoth, How to cut a bagel into two linked halves, a la Möbius strip (although the three-dimensional nature of the bagel makes me think Klein bottle, really).

Looks tricky to me, but very cool.

enotsola, playing D&D Online: This cake does 4d6 fire damage on impact.

starlightforest: Waaay too much cinnamon.

My new 22" LG monitor has a stuck pixel out of the box which has failed to respond to various pixel-fixing programs (and I am extremely leery of trying more physical techniques which might hurt something, especially if I want to try to send it for warranty replacement). It's precisely one pixel, so I won't get satisfaction from Newegg about it and have to turn to the possibility of manufacturer warranty. I sent LG's customer service an email yesterday asking whether this was enough defect to get it replaced, but haven't received a reply yet. I dread having to call them on the phone (not because of prior bad experience -- I have none at all with LG -- but because I hate that kind of thing). Waaahhhh.

Bizarre formation we found in an ice cube a few weeks ago:



And in other news:



When I saw this parked at the local Starbucks, I made some snarky comment about how the designers must have been watching too much Star Trek or something (not that I don't love me some Trek). Getting up to examine the vehicle more closely, I discovered it was in fact a Tesla Roadster, with this amusing license plate:

Can anyone translate the text on this page for me?



I assume that the text right above English "Second edition" says the same in Chinese. The most important thing I want to know is whether Martin H. Manser is being named as the author or editor of this book (and precisely which) or whether his name is appearing for some other responsibility. Knowing what the rest of it says will be helpful too because I think it may be publication info (location/press name), but I'm not sure.

This work was featured today as a Daily Deviation on deviantArt. The artist has quite a few similar highly detailed, subtle, surreal works in their gallery:


The weaver by ~Sylvanor on deviantART

Also, they do some lovely fantasy land/sky-scapes, like this:


Aedemphia by ~Sylvanor on deviantART

The Geography of a Recession

(seriously, are they still calling it that? isn't this some kind of depression by now?)

Visual/animated map of unemployment data by county from Jan 2007 to most recent available, darker colours indicating higher unemployment rates. enotsola described it as "Fade to black, much?" and he's right. Apparently your best bet right now is southwestern North Dakota, and I bet that's only because nobody lives there. ^_- Unemployment is at about 12% here in Silicon Valley last I heard. (The other 88% were at Santana Row yesterday, I swear. Yes, ALL of them. Graaah.)

Looks like this kinda stuff may be the new Googlewhack:



Autocompleteme


In other news, an off-the-cuff comment I made the other night watching The Guild was apparently so clever that @theguild saw fit to retweet it:

Porniest programming book title ever:

IronPython in Action

The Droid: smartphone, or palantir?



This silly 'shopping brought to you by inspiration from enotsola's weird brain, although in his defense he has been reading The Lord of the Rings lately.

(click for bigger if you don't see what's photoshopped about this. hint: it's not the red eye-thing; that's original.)

( Pictures, not that image heavy as they're thumbnails, but hey )


Recipes (sans their pictures, sorry):

Potato gratin
Fancy mashed sweet potatoes
Cheese autumn "wreath" (cheese slices cut in the shape of leaves and arranged on a platter)
Pumpkin carrot cake
Pumpkin and pasta soup
Sweet potato - leek soup
Savory autumn leaf hand pies
French apple tart

Poems:

Love is Like Late Autumn
Autumn Movement
Autumn in the Garden
An Autumn Evening
By an Autumn Fire
Autumnal Sonnet
Merry Autumn
Autumn

Four different links here:
Various autumn poems
Various autumn poems
Various autumn poems
Various autumn poems

Check it out, dudes:



That's my comic! In that I selected this order of the panels thrown up by a randomizer, and created a title and tooltip text for them. I actually sent in like six submissions, carefully whittled down from fifteen or so, and I was surprised when Gregor's response said he was going to use them all. I doubt it's that I'm a comedic genius, rather that he probably takes anything that's mildly funny, not a troll, and not obscene, but still, hey.

sorry I missed this last night, guys.





Autumnal by buteijn



My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

--from "After Apple-Picking" by Robert Frost




Harvest napkin ties



Apple gratin
Cinnamon-ginger pear crisp


Pumpkin Patch Party Cakes

enotsola's somewhat bizarre MSN identity pack at the moment:




I'm sure he's seeing something almost as weird, since my icon is hot cocoa and a sugar cookie, my name is "nanner-ream-o" and my tagline is "You can gerund any verb, but only after verbing the noun", but still.