So, I think this is exactly the same as a parka I bought a couple of months ago in navy blue (because everyone seems to own khaki now and getting a new khaki parka seemed like an insult to my old, beloved, knackered one)... Only it's got peacocks on it?

http://tinyurl.com/ce82atk

(Bearing in mind that the reviews are silly and I thought I didn't like my blue parka because it was unlined and a bit basic, but now spend most of my time walking around in it looking in shop window reflections and thinking how well it goes with skinny jeans and DMs.)

(Really, I think I want it. I just feel poor because I finally got around to dumping most of my savings in an ISA rather than having them floating around my current account. You like it too, right?)

ETA: Wellll... I hope I don't regret that in the morning. To be fair, I haven't been drinking recently. So that makes it OK.

Once upon a time a read a lecture summary or something on the Cambridge website about what would happen if humans upped and vanished one day from a large city (such as Cambridge)... I've never been able to find it again, but it stuck with me and was one of the main inspirations behind abridgement. And these images from Pripyat in the Chernobyl exclusion zone remind me of that too:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-22246328

Can't get over that second image with the forest re-emerging between the buildings.

^ BBC headline right now. About pregnant!Kate pics.

... Er, gang, we're still in 2013, right? Watching Supersizers Eat The Fifties didn't actually send me back in time, did it? o.O

(Also watched the Supersizers do the Eighties. When did I start being charmed so much by the 80s? Why won't it stop?)

(I really, really don't want to go back to the library tomorrow. Even though I have Responsibilities To Undergrads I Have Been Shirking. My mum was right. I've hit the wall of my particular PhD marathon. In sport/bizarre craft projects this is usually where I give up. And my head is tender still. :( )

So, I am on my new computer! The shiny, it is beautiful. Windows 8 is weird and a bit cumbersome, but I think I can see myself enjoying it when I get to grips with it. Office 2013 seems fine, but I do NOT like the DESIGN CHOICE that MENU HEADINGS should be in CAPITALS. Ugly and hard to read at a glance. :( But I'm sure I'll get used to it.

The real sea change, though, is my monitor. Ever since I saw bogwitch's old HP laptop (even with its heating issues...), I have coveted an HP screen and the same depth of colour intensity. At last the dream has been realised in 23 inches of glory! (Because there were bigger screens on the market, I, er, thought it was going to be smaller than it was...) Watching HD on it earlier just makes me want to watch things all the time. And design things. And watch more things. Even if I'll probably stick to fic for the moment (and trying to remember how things used to be on my old Firefox).

New sitcom on BBC2: The Perkins! Joanna Scanlan doing some sort of wacky Fry/Laurie character! Excellent.

Did think there was something off about the production design, though. Couldn't work out whether it was the lighting, camera angles or music, but I think it needed a bit more so as not to look like you'd just tuned into a standard Perkins documentary. Hmm...

Well, the Pope's resigning. I don't have much to say about that, though I like the idea forwarded on the telly this morning that the new Pope might be from somewhere other than Europe. I think that would be nice for a lot of Catholics around the world.

In other news, though, I can't get over what has become known as the 'horsemeat scandal'! For those who haven't seen this particular bit of British/European news, they recently found that some (value) beef ready meals/things have contained horsemeat rather than proper beef and, the more they dig into it, the more there seems to have been some serious organised fraud happening in a pan-European supply chain - the latest victim is Tesco's spag bol.

I just can't help but feel like this is one of the definitive stories of our times. There's so much bound up in it - how expensive meat is (becoming again? has always been?) that fraud is worthwhile, how cheap we want/need our food, how meat-heavy we want our diets to be (despite all that), and yet how picky we are about what animals+cuts we eat - even when they're processed beyond our ability to discern any difference. Because, presumably, if we just ate horses our pockets would be the ones benefitting, rather than the fraudsters... But we never will.

Basically, I feel like beef is the new bread when you come to food history; it's the site of all our anxieties. Which amuses me.

I'm very, very worried I'm going to start watching EastEnders again. It's been over ten years, but for some reason I seem to be still invested in Kat and Alfie. And Nina Wadia is very compelling to watch.

*hides from own shame*

Crystal Castles had a new album out recently, it seemed worth mentioning that this song is a triumph beyond triumphs. It's all about the slow, smooth baseline and the echo chamber of everything else.



(The image of the video doesn't change, by the way; it's an unbleached version of the photo from the album cover.)

I can't really name any other standout songs from the album, but that's fairly par for the course with CC, it seems (and I definitely rate the album). I wish they'd set their vision a bit bigger than individual songs, because I would be in love with a proper twenty minute EP or some such. They're clearly developing (and I love the fact, just discovered, that (III) was made without computers), but the songs are still very much one idea played with for a few minutes, when they could easily carry a bit more narrative.

ION I slightly hate last.fm. I had to remove the updated app they had me download, because it kept trying to interfere with iTunes in a way that Windows decided was too virus-like. So currently I have no record of listening habits. Ah well. No one really needs to know that I sat in the library with Simple Minds on repeat for four hours.

Confessions of a Shopaholic's on iPlayer at the moment, so I watched it, for dubious reasons known to no one. I can't say it was very good, but it got surprisingly close to actually dealing with addiction (actually) at a few points. There were a few beats when it really could have broken into some sort of Trainspotting-esque reality and you realised that the shopping had been a metaphor all along and the frivolous world of New York magazine journalism was in fact the imaginings of someone in a hovel somehow managing to catch repeats of Ugly Betty...

But, anyway, it made me miss the early days of Being Human, when it was all just a heroin addict, a domestic abuse escapee and an HIV-positive randomer trying to make a go of it in Bristol. I don't know why they never realised that the world they'd created wasn't epic fantasy so much as something very, very small. :(

Another year, another meme! Here's last year's, and so it comes around again.

( Hmm, the amount of things written is slightly easier to deal with when they aren't all tiny... )

( I did some other stuff too..! )

( Oh, heck, there's a meme as well. Well, I suppose it's traditional. )

Generally, I think my problem is that I don't have that much fun writing fun fics! Typical.