Below are the most recent 4 friends' journal entries.

Sunday, December 20th, 2009
sternenstaub	11:33a	WINTERVALFESTIMAS :D :D Tomorrow is Winter Solstice/Yule. Friday was Islamic New Year. We've just had Hannukah. Christmas is next week. It's all go on the winter festival front, probably because it is the end of December. This pleases me well, because I love this time of year. It is my favourite weather, too: SNOW!! I love snow. I spurn everyone who isn't, because it's amazing. I could wank on and on about snow forever. There's pictures of the snow tank I made on my Flickr. But I digress. This post is to share with you a little bit of festive music! And a non-festive music, too, but I've been listening to it a lot, so you get it in the mix, because I am a generous god. Have you heard of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society? Among lots of other cool things, they make music! Lovecraftian filk, to be precise. I get out the Scary Solstice CDs every year, and this year, I actually bought copies, as opposed to listening to lolpiracy, and I got SONGBOOKS and a TENTACLE STOCKING. How cool is that? Anyway, here's two tracks from them: Death To The World Death May Die They have sillier things, but these ones make me grin like a fool, so you get those. This next thing is my absolute 100% top favourite Christmas song ever. It's a version of O Holy Night that simply should not be. The story goes that it's a legitimate audition tape from a guy who wanted to do Christian music fo' srs. It's absolutely terrible. It's one of those amazing things that, just when you think it can't get worse, IT DOES. By a lot. I love it. Every time I listen to it, I practically cough up my lungs laughing. It never fails to get me proper Christmassy in double-quick time. :D O Holy Shit Night Now, the next thing isn't to do with Christmas or Winter at all. It's a parody of Lady Gaga's Pokerface, but about a typeface called Neutra. It has a video here, featuring some very attractive bearded nerdy boys with a passion for graphic design. For bonus awesome, check out the other things they do! They're very talented. :) So here it is, then: Neutraface That's it from me. Art continues apace, as always; loads of projects still chugging along because I never stop, and if you've participated in Project Motherfucking Christmas Card Marathon on Twitter/flocked IJ, please let me know if/when you get your card! NOW GO AND ENJOY THE FUCKING SNOW. PS. Where The Wild Things Are is amazing. I'm going to see Avatar tomorrow. I expect that'll make me cry, too. Monsterrrrssss<3 Current Mood: excited (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 13th, 2009
navigatorsghost	3:21p	Six things post! Because I feel like it. Six things that have made me happy today! 1. Superdrug's Moroccan shower gel. It actually smells of desert sand and warm stone and sweet spices, and if I close my eyes and sniff I am instantly mentally teleported to somewhere that's all red and golden and sunlight and silk and sand, and it is absolutely delicious. I need to go and find out what else they do in the same range. 2. Koi is currently playing W.A.S.P.'s The Headless Children album, which I haven't heard in some time and had forgotten how much I unreservedly love. It was the first W.A.S.P. album I ever bought, on battered vinyl fished out of a discount box in one of teenage!Rath's local record stores; I had no idea what to expect from it, but I was grabbed by the sinister barbed wire and flame-wreathed skull on the cover, so. Turned out to be one of the best purchases I ever made, and pretty much set my taste in W.A.S.P. albums for the rest of time. I'll always love them best when they sound like they did here, perfectly balanced between feral rock'n'roll and a viciously sharp awareness of the world around them, dripping blood and spitting fire to disguse the lifetime's worth of pain and hunger that you can hear lurking somewhere just beneath the surface of those shredding jet-black riffs and screaming leads. I know the world of metal will be arguing about the respective merits of W.A.S.P.'s different aspects until the end of all things, but for me, they were fucking perfect right here. ♥ 3. I have an epic heap of spiritual-creative inspiration, thanks to Koi telling me stuff about the Slaaneshi cult that lives on one of its headworlds. I now want to do vast amounts of embroidery. And I will, as well, if Koi draws me the pictures I need so I can turn them into patterns... 4. I am also struggling to stop giggling, on account of said headworld also containing a lot of folk tales that Koi has been telling me. Some of them filthier than others: "I'll cut off your head!" "I haven't got a head!" "Then I'll cut off your arms!" "I haven't got any arms!" "Then what have you got?" "KNOBS!" ...you want an explanation? You'll have to wait till I stop laughing. ^_^ 5. These little guys, who have taken over my life since I got them on account of being so cute I literally can hardly bring myself to put them down. I am wrapped around their little furry fingers, seriously, I tell you. ♥ And we have all kinds of plans up our sleeves... well, my sleeves, anyway, since, y'know, neither of them have any... 6. I have pink rhinestones on my trousers. No, really, I ACTUALLY DO. Okay, okay, that's enough. Time to work... *scrams* Love, Rath Current Mood: happy Current Music: W.A.S.P., Lake of Fools (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 12th, 2009
sternenstaub	1:50p	OH OH WOULD YOU JUST LOOK A NEW ARTPOST ON THE SKETCHJOURNAL HOW ON EARTH DID THAT GET THERE (Comment on this)
Monday, December 7th, 2009
shortcipher	5:35p	Moving this journal soon, for the last time, to my own domain The tl;dr important bits If you're reading this on insanejournal.com, I'll soon stop posting here. You can friend chris_boyle, which will have the new posts when I move. If you're already reading this on a feed (e.g. shortcipher_ij) or on Facebook, you won't need to do anything. I'll still read and comment on both LiveJournal and InsaneJournal, as shortcipher. I will still not be making friends-locked posts, so there's nothing to miss by using a feed. Dear InsaneJournal: “it's not you, it's me” IJ hasn't done anything wrong (and won't lose a subscription from this move; I have a permanent account), but the content and format of what I post has become less suitable for this place. When I started my first attempt at blogging, it was very much a personal journal, whereas if you look at my recent posts, there's some of that, but it's mainly technical discussion, which is what I'm most interested in writing, and probably of more interest to more people than the minutiae of my daily life, even among my friends (although if there are specific things you'd like me to write more about, speak up). The subject matter doesn't make IJ any worse as a host than any other blog site, but I may sometimes want to do things that no free host will adequately support, such as unusual markup/embedding, AJAX, and analytics. I also want full control of things like comment moderation policy, for example: if you've logged in using an account I've friended on LJ, IJ or Facebook (or Twitter?), or you're on an additional list, then your comments won't be screened. I want the ability to tweak the site style, and integrate with the rest of my website, without faffing about with a baroque LJ-engine-specific language. I hope InsaneJournal survives for a long time yet, but I don't want to depend on their servers or on their ability to provide useful support responses. Most of all, I really don't want the user experience hijacked for enticements to create a local account instead of OpenID, or for enticements to return to the site instead of using feeds, or for advertisements of any kind. What I'm doing about all this is setting up a blog on my own domain, where I can tweak the implementation and change hosting provider at will without any further disruption for readers. This is what I should have done when I lost patience with LiveJournal, but I didn't have the time. I've yet to determine exactly how I'm doing this; the closest existing software I've found is Zine (and I also like parts of PyBlosxom), but it will be part of my website at chris.boyle.name, it will be written in Python (I will not run PHP) and it will have at least: full-entry feed does anyone want an additional feed with just first paragraphs? log in (to comment) with OpenID or Facebook does anyone want a Twitter option? threaded commenting optional email notifications of replies to your comments a method for me to easily write posts and moderate comments from Android: I might implement the Wordpress API, as Zine has done Current Mood: geeky Current Music: Stray - Something for your mind (Comment on this)