…and back another day, to a very very pleasant Friday – the usual goths in the evening, but also a reunion/wander round Cambridge with uisgebeatha (doesn’t meeting somebody you knew four years ago give you an immense sense of getting older?). Her friend in Corpus has the most stunningly beautiful room, which makes me pine for those bits of stereotypical Cambridgeness – and it was quite enjoyable trying to keep up with her geek-talk (much easier than mjg59‘s!).

Between those two, went to a talk on climate change, organised by the

Cambridge eEarth First Campaign

, who despite their name are a CUSU campaign rather than a network of hairy vegan green anarchists. This was unexpectedly good: the room was so full we had to move out and sit on a lawn in Kings (yay!), and all three speakers were good (double-yay!). In particular David Howarth was there, and he’s come on impressively as a public speaker since I last saw him talk over a year ago. Clearly being an MP gives you the arrogance you need to talk in public.

Oh, and Thursday night before that was an excellent get-together of inactive activists with food and grass and political ramblings. What’s not to like?

Surreally hilarious. Stalin vs. Hitler, superhero style. Somebody has also created an English translation (although the original does have English below the cartoons).

It’s another “too lazy to write properly, but don’t want to forget what I’ve been doing” update.

Yesterday was writinghawk‘s barbeque, in which I learnt to play Go very very badly, discovered yet again that mjg59‘s geek-talk is stunningly incomprehensible, met claerwen, remet James (not something I had expected to ever happen), whinged at far too many people, and was unnecessarily nasty to at least one (sorry!). This may have some connection to me going home afterwards and deciding to create an angst filter. Beforehand, I spent the afternoon having one of those incredible dreams that makes you reconsider great swathes of your life. I may write a separate post about it if I can do it justice.

The previous day was the great atreic/emperor wedding ceilidh. Not having been to a ceilidh [

1

], I had the usual feeling of “How have I been alive 22 years and not got involved in this?”. All that was interspersed with simont-like musings about the social-engineering aspects of organised dance. writinghawk: your rant about music makes a lot more sense when transposed to be about dancing, no?

This is getting long – I want to write about Friday and Thursday too, and about that dream, but I’ll leave it at this for now

1: well, I think I remember one barndance, but that was almost a decade ago and I wasn’t paying attention

I’ll be in London this weekend, probably from Saturday until Tuesday. Saturday is full of a picnic followed by warming the_alchemist‘s house, and I have possible plans for Sunday afternoon. Anybody want to meet up the rest of the time, or point me at things I’d enjoy doing? _proserpina_?

Following a conversation with lavendersparkle yesterday, I’ve decided to start using more filters.

I don’t currently use many filters at all. There are a couple for semi-confidential work-related things, and one to separate the Russian livejournals from the ones belonging to people I actually know. I also have a filter for frivolous memes, which consists of friends who post that kind of thing themselves.

I’m mainly adding an angst-filter so that I can post grumpy things without worrying about looking like I’m angling for hugs, and to prod me into moving more things across from my private diary.

So, there will be an angst filter. Who wants in?

Also, has anybody come up with a way to make posts public, without having them appear on my friends’ friendspages? It seems silly to inflict things like Cambridge event announcements on friends in America, but at the same time there are lj-less friends who I’d like to be able to see them.

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Great few days – as I keep saying, they always come in clumps. Lots of things I’d like to write about properly, but I know I never will. So I’ll jot them down here, and if you’re (un)lucky I might come back to some of them later…

Wild Thyme Cafe

was excellent, mainly becuase it was full of people I haven’t talked to nearly enough. Most of them don’t have livejournals, so I can’t point and giggle. The usual Cambridge small-worldness culminated in me being asked if I knew mjg59‘s girlfriend. There was also the joy of seeing lavendersparkle for the first time in 9 months or so; I just hope it wasn’t too unpleasant being the civil servant in a roomful of anarchists

Then I went off with writinghawk and Francis and emerged four hours later with a lot to think about. In brief, so I don’t forget:

• Why so many geeks are big on civil liberties
• Faith schools + ‘
  
  modular religion
  
  ‘ –> state-funded Summerhill
• A bizarre horizontal tetris variant that I have no hope of ever describing
• Links between Intentional Communities and Social Software
• The Wireworld computer, a cellular automaton that must have taken a great deal of time for somebody to dream up. [
  
  Edit
  
  : As Gareth points out below, the people behind this were David Moore, Mark Owen, and friends]
• Collective fanboying of Chris Lightfoot, who is like Freakonomics only better, and should really be given a column somewhere
• Why web services are bad news for open-source software

Before that,

Slimelight

was also very good fun; elixir-zero has already written about it. I’m getting to understand why some people don’t like it: the druggies, the over-pushy people, the falling-apart building, the 6am exhaustion. But none of those are really downsides for me personally – ymmv.

…or at least, it is in Russia. So says Alexa.

Edit: that link doesn’t work, and I can’t figure out how to find a better one. Sorry, you’ll just need to go on blind faith!

Haven’t seen this one being propagated for a while, so I figured it was my turn to give it a little poke:

This is a picnic meme. There will be an LJ picnic on Jesus Green, Cambridge, UK on Sunday the 14th of May, from around 2pm. We’ll meet toward the town end of Jesus Green, by Lower Park Street. Nobody is organising this; it’ll just happen. Please turn up, be sensible, bring food and drink, meet new people, have fun.

Unfortunately I’m not sure I can make it – but it’ll be good despite that terrible, terrible shortcoming!