Tweets for Today

• 15:31 @kirabug It's pretty bad at our house, too - keeps queueing up all the time, what with five people's washing to do... #

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Interests Meme!

From padparadscha, who got it from chairman_wow, here:

Comment on this post and I will choose seven interests from your profile. You will then explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.

ambigrams - you can thank ceruleanst for this one; quoting from his excellent page of ambigrams: "An ambigram is a word or words lettered so as to be legible from more than one vantage point." One common form is rotation - for example, my userpic on this post is an ambigram of my initials (RZ) intended to be identical when turned upside-down. (It isn't, quite - I'm not a horrible artist, but I'm rather sloppy in the execution.)

Thanks (I believe) to their appearance in successful books and magazine columns - e.g. by Hofstadter and Dan Brown - the Wikipedia page on Ambigrams is fairly good. At least right now.


cognitive dissonance - now, I'm not sure I really warrant this one, but as a confirmed disbeliever and member of the Internet Infidels Discussion Board, I'm contractually obliged to include it. As far as I can recall, it has something to do with the mental gyrations one gets stuck in when a strongly-held belief or set of beliefs is patently irrational. One ends up with the most fascinating rationalizations therefrom.


interactive fiction - either more or less interesting than it sounds, this term refers to 'games' written in a form which allows the 'player' (I leave these terms in scare-quotes because IF, like comic books, has transcended its nominal genre) to alter the flow of events, often by controlling the actions of the protagonist. Zork and Advent (the Colossal Cave Adventure) are famous early examples of the genre - the latter being the source of the "maze of twisty little passages, all alike" - but avid IF designers like Emily Short abound to this day. There's an LJ comm, too - int_fiction - created four years ago this Wednesday.


linguistics - one of the many fields which, had I but world enough and time, I would devote long years to the study of. (I even used to be a member of conlangs!) Alas, I have not even spent the time to learn more than occasional words in any language but English.


scrabble - the ancient older-than-I-am game of wordy strategy by Alfred Mosher Butts and James Brunot, now owned by Hasbro; to a lover of vocabulary such as myself, a marvelous way to spend many an afternoon. I often played it with my dad (zhurnaly), with a highly-generous dictionary (you pretty much have to go to stoor to find one defined anywhere on the Net that wouldn't fly), until we lost a letter from our set.

(P.S. Book recommendation: Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis. Excellent storytelling, plus a lot of good history.)


solipsism - strangely compelling, for something as vacuous as it is. For those of you not already familiar: solipsism is the worldview in which only one person exists (the solipsist) and all other entities are figments of the solipsist's imagination. There are many arguments against it, of course, but naturally any of them may be ignored by a sufficiently determined arguer.

Of course, solipsists still look both ways before crossing the street, so I generally feel safe enough doing the same.


symmetry - is entertaining, especially when you don't expect it. See "ambigrams", above.


(Wow, I started writing this ninety minutes and two bowls of veggie chili rotini ago...)