A Much More Exotic

Slight return

2009-12-17T10:37:10Z

Last night I dreamt that I was summoned to watch a big dog trying to herd a baby elephant. But when I got there, it turned out that the 'elephant' was a quadruped with the upper body and arms of a woman.

Somebody got the dog under control, and I found myself walking alongside the woman. Her haunches were at about my chest height and she was wearing a specially adapted denim skirt.

"Sooo..." I asked, "are you a human with a ... condition or are you a species of animal I haven't seen before? I mean - not that humans aren't also animals!"

"Oh, I'm a human. I'm surprised you haven't seen this before! 1 in 80 people are born with this condition."

It turned out that she was a university student, and we were on her campus. She offered to show me two other students in her year (both of them women) who had this strange, four-legged condition.

When I met them I suddenly realised that this would make a great entry for this journal, what with that whole "girltaur" thing I used to jokingly pretend to be into. I asked the three lady quadrupeds if they would mind having their photo taken, and they said sure. I was trying to get the original girltaur's phone number when ophe1ia_in_red pulled me aside and told me that exploiting these women to indulge my quadropedophilia was very wrong.

I woke up before the dream had a chance to go anywhere good. :(

Give the Jew Girls Toys!

2009-12-13T13:03:02Z

Via the (recently resurrected?) Radio Clash, here's a remix of a Sarah Silverman song I hadn't heard before:

Now I feel proper Christmassy.

A fun exercise you can do at home

2009-12-13T12:39:43Z

Here is an exercise in rationality from the excellent Less Wrong: assess how likely it is that the convicted three in the 'Foxy Knoxy' case are guilty.

The post above asks you to look at the pro- and anti-Knox sites for half an hour, then estimate the likelihood of guilt of Knox, her boyfriend Rafaelle Solecito and the drifter Rudy Guede.

Once you've done that, here is the writer's 'answer' - no peeking!

What's interesting is that even in a blog dedicated to rationality, quite a lot of the comments present what seem to me to be weak and illogical arguments.

Anyway, I think the best solution to the whole situation is to keep Amanda out of the backwards Italian prison system by letting her serve the rest of her sentence under supervision in bed with me. Make no mistake, that's not a cushy option. My bed is no holiday camp.

10 year meme

2009-12-11T07:44:40Z

2000-2009: Failure, rejection, rejection, failure, failure, rejection, failure, rejection, failure, rejection, failure, failure.

I can kid myself for a while, but this is how I can tell that I'm really worthless.

Contains strong clowns right from the start

2009-12-05T06:08:59Z

Via this Mind Hacks post about using clowns to calm anxious kids, I found this video of a clown-phobic woman undergoing treatment:

Poor woman! Obviously it is a serious problem for her, but only a heart of stone could fail to to be moved to LOLs at the juxtaposition of her fear, the relentlessly upbeat attitude of her therapist, and the clown's obvious lack of enthusiasm for performing in front of an audience of psychology students and one shit-scared woman.

"I can't walk in with a clown there!"

"Stay put! I'm gonna tell - his name is Mr Giggles -"

"Whut??"

"His name is Mr Giggles... He's a clown!"

Everyone knows clowns aren't as scary as people on stilts.

Hestongate continued

2009-12-04T15:56:58Z

ITEM: this recent article from the Mirror, the writer mentions that Heston used Mother's Pride as part of his revamp of the Little Chef menu. It seems too negative to be product placement:

And the bread, when it finally arrived, appeared to be partially frozen – or at the very least deeply chilled – Mother's Pride.

Surely Heston could have got a crusty roll past Mr Pegler and the board? But no. Frozen Mother's Pride it is, with a catering pack knob of butter.

Can a random Mirror feature writer identify brands of bread by taste and appearance alone? If not, how could the bread "appear" to be Mother's Pride, as distinct from any of a dozen bland mass-market white loaves? Perhaps he's using one particular brand as a synecdoche for poor quality mass-produced bread in general. Or perhaps he saw Mother's Pride packaging in the kitchen - and if so, did Heston select it through personal taste or contractual obligation? Or did Heston's people force the mention of the brand as a condition of access?

ITEM: In The Times, November 2009:

Heston confesses that he was "a terrible picker" with a penchant for his mum's Bolognese sauce sandwiched between two slices of Mother's Pride.

Does he value the bread today because it triggers Proustian reminiscence? Or is this product placement inserted into his childhood memories, like something out of Philip K. Dick?

ITEM: The truffle sandwich anecdote again, back in January in the Mail - product placement intact, but this time he claims he got the truffle on a truffle-hunt, not as a gift from a supplier.

I'm going to keep googling this until I get too close to the truth, and wake up in a disused warehouse in Berkshire in a stocks made from frozen loaves of Mother's Pride. Then Heston will come in and interrogate me while injecting boiling Anchor butter into my urethra.

Dat F*ck

2009-12-02T11:25:56Z

There was an absolutely amazing article in yesterday's Metro where they interviewed some chefs about festive recipes. They asked Heston Blumenthal what his "best alternative festive recipe" was and he said that he had once been given a white truffle and eaten it in a sandwich with peas and butter.

That wasn't the amazing part.

The amazing part is that he specified that, if you wanted to copy him, you should use Birds Eye frozen peas, and Anchor butter, and Mother's Pride white bread.

It wasn't marked as an "advertising feature" or anything like that.

I thought maybe I had imagined it, but here it is in an unpleasant Flash interface [registration required but you can just put in a fake email address].

And here's a screen capture:

So either:

Blumenthal has repeated this recipe over and over again, and somehow determined that those three brands are the best ones to eat with white truffles.

A series of marketers came to Blumenthal and asked him to sign deals to mention various specific brands of processed foods - I'm presuming it must have been a series of deals because those brands are all owned by different companies - and he accepted, and then decided to discharge his contractual obligations in a single sentence, perhaps making up the white truffle sandwich anecdote as a pretext, and the Metro hack decided not to edit out the risible product placement.

The Metro has signed deals involving inserting mentions of specific food brands into its editorial content, including anecdotes told by its interviewees.

What have we come to?

amuchmoreexotic @ 2009-11-27T20:48:00

2009-11-27T20:48:18Z

imomus has a great post up called The late, mannerist years of identity politics, which explains the tendency to wallow in outrage and victimhood-by-proxy which makes up so much of "the online discourse". As he puts it: "fine-slicing personal identity definitions -- and investing ever more in angry, self-righteous policing of labels and etiquettes -- is six political steps backward".

But identity politics doesn't explain why a lot of prominent feminists think it's a good idea to slag off male-to-female transsexuals.

I think this is down to the need to defend the ludicrous "blank slate" theory that gender and sexuality are completely socially determined.* A person who is exposed to the same cultural influences as the rest of us, but feels very strongly that they belong to the opposite gender, poses an obvious problem for this theory. But instead of questioning the validity of the facile cultural studies dogma, it's easier to vilify the inconvenient people as a "ghastly parody" of 'real' women.

Why is there such investment in the idea that culture must the prime driver of everything? If you had never read Feministing, you might hypothesise that the bias towards cultural explanations is down to excessive optimism - it's easier to change our culture than our biology, so (if you were prone to allow the desirability of a state of affairs to affect your assessment of its likelihood, which most people are) you might be tempted to privilege cultural factors.

But, in fact, the preference for cultural explanations is generally accompanied by high levels of outrage and a general feeling that things have never been worse. I think the appeal of this "outrage feminism", like that of identity politics, comes down to the pleasure of self-righteousness. If you believe in the primacy of the wider culture, you have many more opportunities for self-righteous anger. You don't have to limit yourself to being angry at rapists, for example; you can get self-righteous at any example of "rape culture" - an advert for a horror film, say, or even a rape prevention programme aimed at men that's been shown to be effective.

The appeal of this "outrage feminism" world view is to cast its adherent as an enlightened but embattled minority in a world gone mad. It's the same cognitive style (applied to very different content) as the right-wing authoritarians who make up Sarah Palin's fan base. Ideas are valued for their ability to act as signifiers of in-group status, not their actual relationship with truth. They aren't there to be defended - just as if you challenge a Palin supporter on why they believe what they believe, they can't tell you, any attempt at critical dialogue with outrage feminism is met with a canned response involving either accusations of "violating a safe space" (which is always safely situated on the public internet) or checking off a bingo card of imagined fallacies (The Catchy Fallacy Name Fallacy).

My problem with outrage feminism is that there are real and pressing concerns about gender in our society: a 5% conviction rate for rape, women getting paid only 7/10 of what men get for the same work, a Mayor of London who failed to deliver on his promised support for rape crisis centres. There is plenty of work to be done. The question is: what are the most effective steps for changing the situation? I would suggest that disrupting every public appearance by pro-rape politicians and anti-equality business leaders would do more good than blogging about how outraged you are by a horror film you haven't seen.

*Obviously straw man genetic determinism is equally untrue. Gender and sexuality are probably determined by a complex interaction between experiences, genes, hormone exposure in the womb, and brain development, with many different pathways to each possible outcome. Your eventual orientation isn't purely genetic, but it is undoubtedly biological.

This is not a spoof

2009-11-13T11:50:34Z

Although it is edited from a (presumably much more boring) original.

FAO intermix

2009-11-09T13:17:58Z

Ant and culture

2009-11-08T13:46:27Z

Yesterday my_name_is_anna and I went to see an exhibition about the invention of photography. Did you know that the photographic process as we know it was initially less popular than the daguerrotype, which made a photo on a metal plate which was a mirror image of the real scene, couldn't be printed multiple times, and is hard to see unless you got exactly the right angle, but was nice and shiny? Or that mediums used to make obviously fake spirit photos, and if they didn't have a photo of your dead wife to paste in, they'd just use a publically available photo of the Empress of Austria?

Then I walked to Aldgate to see The New Royal Family play Antlib, the Adam Ant & The Other Ants convention. Their heavy monster sound blew up the PA system!

If I leave this blank my theme displays (No subject), which is fugly and pointless and I hate life

2009-11-05T10:28:38Z

Reasons to be cheerful:

I enjoyed the concept and practice of "Charioke", a 12 hour sponsored karaoke marathon, although I'm glad I was only in attendance as a "charioke admirer" so I could leave early when the heat, crowding and the two girls who screeched their way through every song started getting to me (not anyone we know, I hasten to add). I liked it when mrs_leroy_brown and demiabeille rocked out. Next time, though, the event should be a karaoke endurance test where you have to keep going for as long as you possibly can, and the last group still singing gets to keep all the money for its chosen cause. I can't think of a better way than that to decide how best to allocate scarce funds for the alleviation of human suffering.

One group who were using the karaoke pod we were in seemed to be raising funds for the Labour Party! They had a sign with some rhetoric about "singing together" and "securing Britain's economic recovery".

I think this is the clinching proof that Labour has lost its way. Shall we raise money to help Peruvian kids with AIDS eat more organic food (may not represent actual aims of a charity)? Or shall we raise money for ourselves, to spend convincing people that we are securing Britain's economic recovery (after years of running up debt from PFI and failed PPP schemes, and ignoring corporate tax loopholes, and not regulating the banks properly).

I have a free ticket to Ant Lib Weekender, a "celebration and convention" where people convene to celebrate the music of Adam Ant And His Ants. Does anyone want to be my +1? Bring a starting pistol and a car battery.

Reasons not to be cheerful:

I am still a loser.

Question:

Why is it not OK to say "I don't want to date a fat woman", but it's completely acceptable to say "I don't want to date a man who's shorter than me"? Show your working.

(Obviously I would not endorse the former statement. I like fat girls. As the old civil engineering saying goes, the bigger the hill, the tighter the tunnel.)

EDIT: Here is the article which inspired this question. In it, a woman meets a man at a party who doesn't want to date fat women (and expresses it an obnoxious way). Then, she tells her single (and apparently fat) friend about how eligible the man is, then when the friend gets excited, she then comes out with:

“I hate having to say this but I’m only saying this because I wanna be honest with you and I love you bu—”

“He doesn’t date fat girls, does he?” she answered in a dead-pan tone.

Why did the author mention this obnoxious man to her friend at all, unless she just wanted to have a nice passive-agressive jab at her fat friend's self-esteem? Oh, he was "tall, seemingly East Indian in descent, fair appearance, educated, good job and spoke three languages" - so obviously a tall, rich man is too important not to mention, even if he's an arsehole?

The main message of the article is that the thin writer likes to make her fat friend feel bad about herself. A misogynist is a man who hates women as much as etc. etc.

Zombies will never die

2009-11-01T11:38:08Z

I may be an unemployable loser, but at least I get to take part in amazing zombie games. Last night I helped out with the latest Fire Hazard extravaganza on Hampstead Heath.

Almost every player had dressed up to some extent. Since part of my job was to look out for people who'd tripped and injured themselves, the fact that everyone was covered in blood (and later on also shambling and moaning) made it a bit tricky to spot real casualties (I don't think we had any). There was a genius zombie bride (who ironically went on to have a massive row with her boyfriend because he dropped something he was supposed to be looking after for her). kevandotorg looked quite convincingly like he'd been sliced about the face. There were even a couple of guys in proper latex makeup.

It almost went horribly wrong because our usual play area had been taken over by some kind of goddamn Hallowe'en "walk". What's scary about a walk? Who goes on a walk when they could be fighting for their very survival?

Luckily we managed to pull off an emergency relocation to a back-up site. We were all on a comms net of cheap but effective walky-talkies, otherwise the whole thing would have been a disaster.

The first game is called Nightwatch and it involves the players sneaking past guards who have torches (who in the zombie apocalypse fiction are enforcing a quarantine zone). I am a guard for this, which is very enjoyable as I get to berate the players, threaten them with execution, sneak up on them with the torch off and then suddenly dazzle them, scare players who are hiding by getting really close to them and acting like a videogame guard ("What was that? Hmmm, probably nothing"), and generally be mean to people and have them love every minute of it. You know, like sex.

This time round I had a toy gun with a laser "sight" attached to it, as well as the torch. So when players were reluctant to obey orders (they often freeze when caught and hope that you're talking about someone else), I could say "Yes you! You with the blue top and the red dot on your chest". Some of them even put their hands up! What was nice in game design terms is that when I was pulling my usual dick move of turning off the torch and waiting for people to start moving, they could still use the dot of the laser to see roughly where I was and where I was looking.

Next time: night vision goggles.

Later on in the pub I spoke to two girls who had leopard-crawled for ages across the open ground to my right to reach safety. I could see that there were people out there, but every time I played my lights over them, they froze, so I thought I would let them pass.

The actual zombie apocalypse bit also went well. I was a safety steward for this bit. My favourite part was when two human survivors, who'd spent most of the game hiding out of bounds, refusing to believe my advice to head back to the start point and help assemble the "zombie cure", because they thought I was a zombie trying to trick them!

The humans started off more heavily armed (with Nerf guns) than in previous runs, but as a bit of clever balancing, we forgot to put out most of the ammo, so pretty soon the humans were nearly defenceless and there was a nice exponential growth until the zombies were in the majority.

Everyone seemed to enjoy it, apart from the bride and her groom, and another couple who had failed to read the emails or apply any kind of common sense so the woman had turned up in pointy boots which hurt her feet.

Most disturbing feedback from the feedback forms was "Nice game. Nice girls". What would have made the game better, disturbing man? "If we could have had sex with the girls". Thanks, we will be sure to arrange that as a bonus round next time.

(Actually, the girls were pretty nice. I was disturbed by how sexy I find low-budget zombie make-up, the type with black smudges around the eyes and white skin, so you look like a goth who's overdone it a bit. I guess that just means that I find goths sexy, which is no surprise to anyone. Still, had better make sure I don't turn into this guy - I already look like him.)

There was a reviewer from Time Out there, apparently. I am keen to see if he enjoyed it as much as most of the players did. This time next year, we'll all be zombillionaires!

amuchmoreexotic @ 2009-10-30T15:15:00

2009-10-30T15:35:14Z

So, let's just clarify here:

It's wrong to kill an animal - except if you are planning to eat part of it later, which makes it OK.

BUT if you kill a baby, and eat part of it later, that makes things worse?

How to be a tool

2009-10-29T15:36:22Z

Out of sheer fucking boredom I just went and bought a tiny "artisan" sandwich from Pert Minger. There was a man in there who was acting like a wide-boy tool to a ridiculously parodic degree. It was if he had taken on the assignment of packing in as much cuntery into a two-minute sandwich shop visit as humanly possible.

Let's see if I can remember all his various cunteries:

Tool (sees salt beef and gherkin "New Yorker" sandwich) A Noo Yoiker! I'll be having that. The Noo Yoiker. Noo Yoiker!

Tool (sees "Classic Bloomer" sandwich) And the classic bloomer!! Classic!

Tool (wears sunglasses indoors in winter)

Tool (to his female companion) Do I need all this? Will there be a dinner? There'll be a dinner, right?

Tool (at the till, he hands over his sandwich, then reaches back to take his companion's tiny artisan sandwich) And this little number, please! (pats companion's shoulder) It's on me, mate.

Three true vignettes

2009-10-27T08:41:31Z

1. On my road, at night:

Man: Can you please help me? I haven't eaten for two days! (lights cigarette)
(I walk past ignoring him)
Man: Pleeeeeeeaaaaaaaase? Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease? (he watches as I go into my house)

2. Back streets near my house, months ago:

(There's a bright flash from around the corner. It turns out to be two girls with a camera).
Me: Oh wow, I thought a Terminator had arrived!
Girl 1: (scared, in thick Spanish accent) We are just going home please.

3. In Embankment tube:

Middle Eastern man: (he holds a map and catches my eye; I hesitate for a second)
Middle Eastern man: (says nothing but grabs my left forearm firmly, while maintaining eye contact)
Me: (shocked) Let go of me! For fuck's sake! Twat! (storms off)

The world is a wonderful place.

Fauxtrage news

2009-10-23T09:22:34Z

My favourite bit in Newsnight was the woman who said she was "cringing"
because Jack Straw said "Afro-Caribbean" instead of "African-Caribbean".
Yeah, never mind the actual fascist leader sitting right there, focus on the
important issues!
Presumably "African-Caribbean" is the successor to "Black and minority
ethnic", where the game is to make out that an existing, widely-accepted
term has suddenly become incredibly offensive. That way, you have so many
more opportunities to enjoy some delicious, huffy victimhood even if you
don't encounter any actual racism.

What can we call these newly-coined terms which are entirely made up for the
purpose of scoring points off people?

Owl Country Surf Squad

2009-10-22T09:07:28Z

I need to buy a Hawaiian shirt for Friday evening... Where's a good place to
shop for that kind of thing in the Oxford Street area?

And a naan

2009-10-21T11:55:53Z

You know the little cardboard sleeve you get to protect your fingers when you waste money on a burnt double shot latte from Perter Minger to try and feel like there's some point to the morning?

What is the technical name for those? Can we all start calling it a "coffeelactic"?

Sarah Silverman is my friend on YouTube

2009-10-20T13:02:02Z

So, last night I ran my duelling/aristocracy based game Like A Velvet Glove...
Thanks to all the grievance-contributors.
It was a bit meh - I think the rules and setup process are overcomplicated.
The first session was a bit stilted and the second session, with drunker
players, a bit chaotic.

I am pissed off that my broadband isn't fixed yet. In what sane universe
does changing the person who pays the phone bill mean changing the landline
number, losing broadband service for 2 weeks, then sending an engineer round
unannounced to remove a digital-to-analogue converter which will apparently
stop me switching to another ISP (despite the fact that a non-BT ISP worked
fine before), then leaving a "while-you-were-out" note to a completely
imaginary person? I hate the BT private monopoly - it should be nationalised
and the executives hanged with telephone cables.

I want to be able to play Operation Flashpoint and Borderlands
online. You are all going to get those games and play them with me, right?

I won

2009-10-19T22:05:11Z

How appropriate, you fight like a cow

2009-10-19T13:12:37Z

Can you think of some reasons why an 18th-century gentleman would need to fight a duel to defend his honour? Preferably "funny" reasons, written in the first person?

For example:

spreading rumours that I indulge in vingt quatre

posing with a theodolite

contractum trinius

gross and repeated villandry

leaving my sister in an interesting condition in Ostend

waltzing counterclockwise

Lord Coryat's muff

introducing the use of the fork to Wales

teaching my niece to play "Ruff and Trump"

my love for the late Emperor

Why not add them as comments to this post? By 5pm? You will get a credit on a prestigious pervasive game design website? Thanks.

Anyone who points out that all this sounds suspiciously like outtakes from the Baron Munchausen RPG is instantly banned for violating my safe space.

Kramer vs Kramer vs Predator

2009-10-13T13:57:13Z

ITEM: I have a spare ticket to see Going Postal, a film about US workplace massacres, this Friday at 7pm. Anyone fancy it?

ITEM: You know that ridiculous "Prestige Edition" of an upcoming videogame which includes working nightvision goggles? I just preordered it! I reckon I can justify it by using the goggles for some kind of game, or, failing that, stealth dogging.

ITEM: Don't forget there's the Hide & Seek Sandpit at BAC pervasive games night on this Monday (19th October) at 6:30-10:30 in Battersea Arts Centre!

David & Katy

2009-10-12T14:36:57Z

David & Katy
Originally uploaded by amuchmoreexotic.

Congratulations!

Diagnosis plz

2009-10-09T12:27:38Z

My chest feels tight, and almost like there is something in there just below
my ribcage. I think it is probably one of those fast-growing tumours caused
by the HPV vaccine, or stomach cancer. Oh well.