Welcome to Otterday! Today’s open thread is hosted by two otters via The Daily Otter and Otterhaus. This little otter is looking for someone to share her play-fort.
And these otters look plumb tuckered out.
Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
Categories: Life
Soggy here, innit? 
In memoriam: Diana Rigg 
Getting out the ‘yes’ 
100 books by women in 2016 
Hoyden About Town 
I deliberately stayed away from media last night (I don’t count FB as I wouldn’t expect to see it there) because the mare Black Caviar was running again and I feel so gloomy and doomy when she does. I hate to see the weight of expectations loaded on this creature. I’m terrified to see her break down. When she had her Ascot win I heard some of the commentary on the car radio and I thought she had lost, such was the doomy-gloomy snark about her poor performance. It turns out she’d actually won, just not with a half twist and double pike as expected. THEN it turns out she was running in pain, injured. F**k racing, really.
The lovely bluemilk is in THE GUARDIAN!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/22/julia-gillard-adoption-apology
How awesome is that?
Let me second that!
in other, less awesome news, Agony Arndt has joined twitter (collective groan) and has announced her intention to give this guy more prominence.
Reference to red pills and blue pills, alpha, beta – sound familiar? We can expect more MRA/PUA nonsense to leak into the media opinion sites this year.
My god, he even has a page defining poor old “Nice Guys” and is serious about it. That must be where they get it from. I can’t read any more. “It’s easier to lead [a younger wife]”. UGH.
That guy really should ask mr tog about just how “easy” it is to “lead” a younger wife.
Mind you, I was already over the hill for PUA-land (26) when we got married, so maybe that means I wasn’t younger enough.
I can’t find anything on Arndt’s Twitter feed – it says she hasn’t tweeted yet?
Currently staying in a Netflix-enabled household, I’m catching up with a few things I’ve missed or which haven’t yet made it to Oz. The US reworking of House of Cards is quite fascinating – the dialogue is not as crisp as the original UK version, but then again that version was deliberately riding the back of the popularity of Yes, Minister and the audience’s familiarity with those exceptionally sharp scripts. The US version is painted on a much larger canvas and is somewhat sprawling as a result, and also substantially grittier.
Kevin Spacey is having way too much fun as FU, too.
Agony’s twitter handle is @thebettinaarndt.
Her latest tweet would make it look like a spoof account if I wasn’t reasonably certain it is her:
“Typical. The SMH ran a piece praising Gillard for the Apology instead of my Age article suggesting it was feel-good politics.
Yet only a few days ago she claimed that politics wasn’t an interest for her:
Yes, Minister and the audience’s familiarity with those exceptionally sharp scripts.
There’s a (UK) remake of this. It’s ghastly.
A remake of Yes, Minister?
NOOOOOOOOOOO! Some classics need to be left alone for at least 50 years before somebody else takes a crack at them, particularly those which rely so heavily on the wit of their dialogue. I shudder to think what might be done with a remake right now of Fawlty Towers, for instance.
Speaking of sharp wits, I wish somebody would draft Stewart Lee* to come up with plots/scripts for a political satire. They’d need some rounding out by an editorial team to work well as TV rather than his usual stand-up, but I think he’d come up with some top-drawer craic.
*eta for the non-UK types – he’s a UK comic of a super-leftist social justice persuasion, which is of course why we don’t see that much of him on Aussie TV – he’s not mainstream enough. Google ‘Stewart Lee Top Gear’ for an epic rant of the glib superficiality of popular culture and the hyprocrisy of some of its talking heads.
I know there are other hoydenizens reading XKCD, does anyone know much about the current one, Time? I have got one change by leaving the window open (forgetting about it) but I’m not sure how many changes there are, or how best to get them – is it just a daily update?
Doesn’t Randall do blog posts for each comic, where that sort of question gets teased out in comments? On phone right now otherwise I’d check.
He hasn’t updated the Blag since September 29, and the recent comments on the last post are mainly that he needs to post again. I’ve now seen four updates to “Time”, so the algorithm is reasonably frequent or to do with how often you go to look again.
There is a huge discussion of ‘Time’, with progressive animated gifs and such, at the xkcd forums. [registration required, I think]
http://forums3.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=101043
That’s exactly what I was looking for, Lauredhel. Thank you.