First off: Yay for 2am posting!I figure I should now explain what happened tonight, after my lab practical (identifying amino acids on a dipeptide, for those who care) I was chatting to woman A (not sure if I should be sharing names) while waiting for the slower students to finish in the lab. She invited me to her friends house watch some films perfectly normal one would think, however then the sly woman asked about if anyone had a better laptop or a TV as her's is awful.
I appear to be the only student in my uni who has brought her own TV, thus I am now responsible for hosting cinematic experiences, some of which may include film collectives...
Perhaps I should explain the lesbian film collective bit, but it would just be easier to link to youtube (link isn't work safe, unless your work wants you watching comedies with some adult themes). Now woman A had managed to be inviting her friends around my room, rather than me around theirs, which isn't really a problem, but she also decided to mention that her friends were lesbians. Not that I have a problem with lesbians, if I was any more open minded I'd have a sunroof, but I've never really been part of a group which is half-formed by gay people. You see despite being technically part of that whole "LGBT" thing I don't really surround myself with gay people, or Trans people for that matter.
Anyway they were lovely, perhaps a little erratic in the fashion department, and one was so shy she made me look extroverted but we did watch "naked gun 33 1/3" and that makes any evening wonderful! We also watched "Wallace and Gromit, a matter of loaf and death", and "The grudge" which could have been scarier, but was pretty much an excuse to cuddle up under the bedsheets and make the one guy we'd invited feel extremely left out!
One final thing I'd like to mention since its 2:30 am and that's the perfect time for ranting about bullshit that floats into my brain. I am a fan of comedies, particularly romantic comedies, but any will do. I have a request to any filmmakers reading this (be they part of a lesbian film collective or not) but can you please, please, please stop taking such cheap shots at trans people! "Oh ha ha that woman has a penis and it disgusts the male lead in a humorous way, lets all giggle at this". I can take a joke, but when a good 50% of films I've watched lately have taken on this "joke" in one way or another it does start to get tedious, especially when 99% of people at uni don't know about my background so I can't explain why I'm not laughing my head of.
Seriously its an epidemic, American pie (sigma house?), Naked gun 33 1/3, Shallow Hal, 50 first dates (though a transguy in this case, and its much more tasteful), dude wheres my car. That's just the list off the top of my head. What I don't get is how there is an annoyingly huge porn industry around transwomen (yay more negative stereotyping for us) and yet its ok to joke about how men find us disgusting. Something doesn't add up here and it all leads to the inevitable body image problem I have which leaves me as my own worst critic, causing negative behaviour where I assume no men are interested in me, and those that are interested are naturally porn-watching serious masturbating perverts who only want me for the bits of me I don't want.
Maybe I should consider joining a film collective...
Tonight apparently I am hosting in my room some kind of lesbian film collective...I don't think anything I say to explain this will really help so I'll leave it as thatOh and if anyone got the reference in this post, you get 50p towards a dinghy of your choice for being awesome!
Is it me or are vampires rather... less scary theses days? Why hello Twilight, no I'm not talking about you... well not explicitly anyway, though I have to question the logic involved when you decided that vampires should sparkle! Seriously look at this picture and tell me where the scary monster who would suckle on your neck like a baby to teat!
Zombies remain flesh/brain eating mindless monsters who attack in hordes and spread their curse, if anything they are now scarier as some filmmakers decided that maybe zombies should be able to run!
Mummies are still half-preserved liches of ancient rulers wrapped in rotten (and easily flammable) bandages.
Werewolves still go around biting and killing the people who were closest to them in their former lives...
But vampires... vampires go around drinking the blood of animals and being far to romantic for someone who isn't about to do nasty things to you in an alleyway... vampires are becoming innocent!Yesterday I had a Halloween night in, Jess and Erica came round and we watched a couple of movies and ate KFC, a solid plan. The first movie was hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, a movie which loses much of its charm due to the fact that everyone in England has already read the books/watched the tv series/listened to the radio plays/played the text game... However in its own right if you didn't have such expectations it is a funny movie, capturing much of the book's charm, this effect would be amplified if you had never read the books/watched the tv series/listened to the radio plays/played the text game. Kind of like Erica and Jess, both of Chinese origin they had never encountered the guide before, they both fell in love with Marvin, so I'd say that was a success if nothing else!Our second film as interview with the vampire, not a bad film, curiously large amount of homo-eroticism for a film which seemed to never show men wearing any less than a full (period varying) suit and yet had no qualms about having a woman stripped completely naked and killed on a stage... I have to say the most interesting part of the film was seeing Tom Cruise (trying very hard to not slip into a Scientology rant here) actually suckling on a teat, having lured a couple of whores and brought them back to his home that is apparently where he got confused.
Now I know I'm a biologist so maybe I take this for granted and such knowledge is not commonly known, but allow me to explain... The neck is above the breast, its that thin bit after the shoulders but just before that bony bit where the teeth and such reside. I can only hope that in future Tom cruise doesn't make this elementary mistake, I know the science of Scientology is rather lacking (I couldn't resist), but I would have thought enough rudimentary biology to know how to drink from the jugular would be taught to all their vampire members!
However the point that came up in our collective minds was that this vampire would starve to death in modern day America, after luring a local whore and trying to drink her blood he'd end with only a mouthful of silicon, hardy the appetising life-blood he needs to survive. And with his apparent trachelphobia there is no other choice for poor, deprived Tom Cruise!
I suppose the moral of the story today is that breast implants are killing Tom Cruise... Now if you excuse me I think I need to go and get some surgery done, before the world is overrun by the followers of L. Ron Hubbard! May he rest in piece knowing that delusioned celebrities still follow his maddened drug-addled rantings...
"If variety is the spice of life, then the Internet is a vindaloo made with a slightly suspicious meat"
What is it with humans and our incredible desire to consume things that are toxic to us? We abuse our sense of taste's ability to taste toxic materials and then go out of our way to consume them. Humans destroy the evolutionary theory, not because we can't find a line of evolution, but because we completely defy the notion of "survival of the fittest", apparently its now survival of the thickest!An obvious example would be the phenomenon of alcohol, whats so appealing about the waste products of single celled fungi that isn't also fascinating about the waste products of any other organism. There is a reason why fecal matter isn't considered a delicacy, so why is alcohol?
Speaking of delicacies, I'm sure you've all see this fella before:
The pufferfish, very, very toxic and yet its a Japanese Delicacy, the meat is supposed to have a slight spicy taste, which is actually the taste of its poison. Even when properly prepared so the poison glands are removed, the meat of the puffer fish contains traces of poison, and its this that gives it the unique taste, oh and also it blocks your sodium channels causing havoc with your nervous system, but hey that's all part of the fun right? Nothing like a dose of neurotoxin to start the day!
Spicy huh? Yes that brings us on to peppers... Why? Just why? Peppers, garlic, onions, mustard and countless other plants have developed chemicals to prevent animals form being foolish enough to eat them, chemicals designed to mess with their minds, cause neurons to fire telling the brain that its receiving heat, damaging their eyes... The list goes on. But now we, as humans, have unanimously decided that we want to eat these things exactly for the taste of their defence mechanisms!
But at least these things are all natural, after all its not as if we've gone out of our way to produce drinking acid or anything right?
What is wrong with our species?
I know I've been rather neglectful on the blog lately, Uni does make me a bit busier than I'm used to and its only likely to get worse. I'll try to keep posting here though because I do feel bad if I don't post every few days.
So today I've changed the header of my blog, I figure I'm far enough through my LP of psychonauts that it deserved the new title screen on my blog, I'll admit that the picture is actually about 3 videos ahead of whats on youtube, but if you can't handle it then too late you've already seen it!
Uni-wise I'm quite surprised with how I understand things, considering my access course doesn't go as far as a full A-level goes I thought I'd be in major catch-up mode right now, but it turns out that I seem to be understanding things while other students aren't! Right now were dealing with neuroscience in physiology (the electrical movement along the axon of nerve cells is ingenious, nature comes up with some crazy stuff!), in biomolecular science were looking at DNA (big surprise), Chemistry we've been looking at electron movement, half reactions and Gibbs free energy, and then in bioanalysis were looking at the effect of boredom on ~ 300 people...
I watched Angels and demons last night with Amy (not myself, apparently other people have that name), I have this to say... "LOL darkmatter the church!" Seriously... how did the scientist woman know all those convenient catholic facts, even if she was a practicing catholic then she wouldn't know that stuff, the catholic priesthood doesn't know that stuff, so why does she?
Tonight I'll be going to our unis computer game society (one of the few societies that does more than just get drunk repeatedly), I've actually found a Chinese girl (called Jess, not the Jess in my hall another Jess, names are in short supply at uni we can't afford to have unique ones (Actually her names not Jess, but she's chosen that to save explaining how to pronounce her name to people)) in my biology classes who also likes games so I'm dragging her along too, maybe the turnout will be better since its not pouring with rain today.
I'm pretty sure that Avril doesn't read this blog, but I still want to say in writing, congratulations on coming out, wish you all the best!
Okay so we have 14 replies to my little experiment, the results were better than I expected, I had feared that everyone would give the American answer...
You see in American English, going from a million to a billion adds 3 zeros, then to go to a trillion is another 3 zeros, quadrillion is 3 more zeros than a trillion and so on... So for all of you who answered that your from USA and you said 1,000,000,000,000, I'd say have a cookie, but your language is mathematically bizarre and so you don't deserve one even though you are correct!
Canadians are in the same boat, they use the American system so you Canadian folk can have a cookie (go on, you deserve it)
Now I would like to congratulate the anonymous people! Not only is anonymous legion, but anonymous is also correct! an English (and much of Europe) trillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. Yes that's a big number! In English numbers Million is 1,000,000, then billion adds six zeroes, 1,000,000,000,000. A trillion adds on another 6 zeroes, a quadrillion is another 6 and so on...
Now as for the English reply I acquired... shame on you! You have joined the mass media of today and started using the Americanised numbers! Britain's media almost exclusively use the American numeral system, and even England's government uses them interchangeably depending on department.
This might not seem like a big issue, but how many times do you see titles like "The government is £40 billion in debt"? You see 40,000,000,000 is a big number for sure, that's a lot of debt, and its what is usually meant, but if the truth was that its an English billion then the government would be in a thousand times more debt! This is a distinction that needs to be clarified before you throw around words like billion!
An important example occurs in biology which is why I brought this up, one of my text books claims there are between 10-50 billion cells in the human body depending on size and health, if you look online quickly you'll probably find a site saying the same in trillions. If you don't know whats going on your estimated number of cells in the body can vary from:10,000,000,000 - 50,000,000,000,000,000,000Next time your local news says billion or trillion, make sure you know whats going on, the media does enjoy making things sound different than the truth, keep a sceptical eye open and you'll be that step close to knowing whats going on in the world!Now don't get me started on googlplexplex...
First off: Yay for 2am posting!
