Disqus - Latest Comments for thaumata

Re: Nigella Lawson Nails the Smug #CleanEating Trend: “People Are Using Certain Diets as a Way to Hide an Eating Disorder”

thaumata — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 17:48:41 -0000

As an American who moved to NW England seven years ago, I think this is just a cultural thing that Nigella maybe doesn't grasp entirely. In my experience, British food is a lot fresher and less processed than in the US. Americans are tired of food assembly and weird mystery food. Clean eating has become an obsession because it tastes nicer and you have fewer fears about what chemicals are in your food. I think it's far more a fear of mystery meat than it is anything else.

Re: amy, take a bow.

thaumata — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 20:44:29 -0000

Ahhhhhh... your friend Jeffrey hit the nail on the head. I wish I could give him a hug.

And one for you, too, just for being you.

Re: http://realprincess.tumblr.com/post/1147208889

thaumata — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:58:16 -0000

That's the girl from nerdpr0n.com. She's ultra hot.

Re: http://chicofgeek.com/post/1190995291

thaumata — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 10:06:03 -0000

ps - my disqus is all out of sorts with what I actually do online, but because you are probably confused - I'm the one who writes In Tea We Trust. :)

Re: http://chicofgeek.com/post/1190995291

thaumata — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 10:05:20 -0000

I was so so so homesick for america the first autumn I really lived in the UK. I cried about pumpkin pies and corn mazes and how nobody even had an oven big enough to cook a turkey even if they knew they should be. This year, I'm just making thanksgiving dinner and inviting everyone to it, instead of waiting for something awesome to happen. (Because last year, my husband tried to make it as a surprise for me and did bread pudding? and seriously, wtf.) It gets better, I promise!

Re: Score!

thaumata — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 06:43:38 -0000

I love Waiting for Guffman so much. It's one of my all time favorites.

Re: http://inteawetrust.tumblr.com/post/570832006

thaumata — Tue, 04 May 2010 13:53:45 -0000

Amazing! G makes them here sometimes when he's peckish. Tell him to make you one, haha.

Re: http://inteawetrust.tumblr.com/post/566230005

thaumata — Sun, 02 May 2010 16:37:07 -0000

I will save two: one for you and one for Aunt George, ha ha!

Re: http://inteawetrust.tumblr.com/post/564013350

thaumata — Sun, 02 May 2010 13:11:21 -0000

It was Crow's, actually. The food wasn't bad, just not what I was hoping for.

I haven't hit the point of sitting in my shed yet.... there is too much to be done on the allotment to sit still. :)

Re: http://inteawetrust.tumblr.com/post/552190962

thaumata — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 08:13:54 -0000

Good to know, and thank you. I guess what I should be doing first is combing over the difference between a resume and CV and the expectations in the hiring process, then start over.

Re: Everybody Knows Somebody Else

thaumata — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:19:50 -0000

At the risk of becoming one of those people...

UK-Yankee.com is the best resource I've found for getting real answers to immigration questions involving the US and UK. It's geared mostly for americans living in the UK, but many of them end up repatriating and bringing their british spouses with them, so there is a good deal of info in the other direction, also.

Like you said, I don't usually find other people's immigration stories to be particularly helpful (interesting, usually, but not helpful), but that site is where I always find current and USEFUL information about how backed up the embassy is, which couriers or moving services are useful and where I go to get the right form. The only downside is that (like anything online) the longer you look, the more likely you are to find some horror story that will make you nervous.

Re: More On Advertising

thaumata — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:08:38 -0000

Of course I can't think of a single example right now, but weirdly, I felt exactly the same when I moved to the UK and was surprised how openly some of the products were attacking their competitors. I'll have to watch for an example for you.

Re: Shouldn't Schools Have Embraced Second Life By Now?

thaumata — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:42:30 -0000

Here is another application:

My husband is currently under commission to build a replica of the Ben Franklin printing press. He was given copies of Ben's original sketches and specs and is re-creating it piece by piece to scale. In the end, people will be able to come see how it works and also (in a blow-out example) how it was made. You could do this in real life (and people have) with the help of a master carpenter and blacksmith, but there are still a lot of limitations on how many people could travel to see it, or how many people it could travel to see. By doing it in SL, you enable countless people to come visit the press and learn about it in their own time.

Re: Shouldn't Schools Have Embraced Second Life By Now?

thaumata — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:34:16 -0000

Interesting article, though I'd quibble with the title, as schools are one of the groups who really HAVE embraced SL the most. Educators are voraciously seeking ways to apply SL to the learning process.

I came from a community management background for sites like Splice and Aviary, but found the community culture in SL to be more interesting and left to do full time sim building for educators there. My husband is a university level art lecturer in the UK and his uni has embraced SL as a classroom. It makes a lot of sense with art students, and they're having some success with philosophy students, too, as they seem to enjoy discussing the nature of reality while ensconced in digital surroundings.

A great example of the potential for SL teaching over video conference is this: Imagine you're a history teacher doing a unit on Shakespeare. In SL, you could actually replicate the globe theater and dress your students as characters in the play. Clicking things in the surroundings could cause them to 'talk' and explain their historical value, etc. You can't do this on Skype.

HOWEVER, the trouble is that schools nearly always underestimate what it takes to BUILD such an immersive environment. It could take weeks to set up a scene like that - building objects, texturing them, scripting them. And what schools do to teachers is to expect them to be builders, too, which is just ridiculous. It'd be like telling them they can teach a unit on England in the dark ages but first must write their own textbook on the subject. For every subject. Or like telling them to set up a wordpress blog with beautiful CSS and SEO but without help from anyone in the IT department. I'm sure some of them can do it, but that's not what they were hired for, right? They should use their time for working directly with students, not with 3D objects.

I think there's a market for a major textbook manufacturer to set up a sim with scenarios to go along with units in their books. I'd love to see how that played out.

Also, people need to remember that SL is like a mini-internet. You do get all kinds, and if you are a good administrator of your digital space there, you can keep the nasties away rather easily. People being griefed by flying penises shows nothing but a lack of care on the part of the person being griefed. It's entirely possible to protect a learning environment there with the built in tools. In fact, most of my work on the grid can't even been seen by anyone outside of my clients because they are locked away from the public for the safety of students and educators.

Re: I am beginning to wonder what is wrong with me.

thaumata — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:36:01 -0000

I can't be bothered with it. I actually had a girl at a makeup counter once DROP (literally, DROP!) her brush onto the floor at Macy's when I said I don't even bother with moisturizer. She acted like I was a pedophile. Whatever, man. I like wrinkles.

Re: Should Flickr Do More to Promote Creative Commons?

thaumata — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 07:21:53 -0000

I think that's a reasonable answer, and a lot of thought SHOULD go into deciding a license for your original content. I imagine that if you set your writing to anything that allowed commercial use, it'd immediately end up on stock writing sites, covered in ads, which might be undesirable to you.

I think there are a lot of pro bloggers out there who would say that because their blog hasn't got ads on it, it's not commercial in nature. The reality of it is that many people who write a serious blog do so to gain popularity in niche communities so that they can make business contacts, which eventually parlay into money somewhere down the line. In my eyes, that's commercial use, and I should be paid for my contribution to that blog. It's not the same as when your Aunt Martha needs a picture of two different cats to explain their differences to her Livejournal friends.

I don't think there's much anyone can do about that except stop frequenting sites that promote that kind of behavior and encourage others to do the same. I doubt it's something you can fix with a button on Flickr, unless that button (or watermark?) was included in the image embeds. "This image is not licensed for commercial use. If you see it being used commercially, please report it to xyz." Or perhaps they could incorporate some kind of reverse image search to alert you when your photos are being posted around the web. I know they do stats but it's not always that helpful and it's simple to rip a photo and re-upload it, as we all know.

Re: Should Flickr Do More to Promote Creative Commons?

thaumata — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:28:26 -0000

I'm with Todd. Where's the license on this page? :)

When I had my photos set to CC licenses on Flickr, the people who wanted to use them were invariably businesses who were frankly being too cheap to buy stock photos. That is, they don't do it out of goodwill for the community or a wish to promote good images or me as a photographer - it's merely a way to save a buck. This is when I turned them back to All Rights Reserved and left a note on my page to people to ask if they wanted them, so I could see where they were going and approve on a case-by-case basis.

You wouldn't believe how often I see people creating derivative work and crediting their source as "Deviant Art" or "google" or "Flickr," instead of a person. Having worked for not one but two different startups in the past who really depend on CC licenses and derivative works as a core value, I am passionate about the subject and do see potential for it. However, if any criticism should be made, it's that there isn't enough being done to educate people on how to USE and ATTRIBUTE images with a CC license.

If you really want to get a good look at how little people get about licensing and attribution, take a gander through Tumblr some day. (This isn't a dig at Tumblr, by the way, just the folks using it.) It's a constant stream of re-posts from around the web, many of which are NOT licensed to be used elsewhere, and you're lucky if people even put a click-through back to the original.

We all need to wake up and do better.

Re: The Big Kindle Revealed (Liveblog)

thaumata — Fri, 29 May 2009 09:19:31 -0000

I'm actually pretty excited about Kindle being bigger. As a musician, I've spent years looking for a way to digitize my sheet music collection to .pdf and house it all in a single device, indexed.

They really should consider that as a market. We can go 1-device with things like books, movies, CDs... sheet music is one of the only things that doesn't have a paperless solution, and there are thousands of musicians in the world.

Re: one sharp broad • 6 Fantastic Former Prisons Turned Luxury Hotels |...

thaumata — Thu, 14 May 2009 12:34:46 -0000

The castle up the road from my house now functions as a working prison. Does that kind of count? It's like this, in reverse. Haha

Re: A Second Life success story: NCI

thaumata — Wed, 13 May 2009 10:05:26 -0000

NCI Is truly one of the best organizations on the grid, and I wish other websites would learn from them as far as encouraging the community to help itself. As a 3.5 year resident, I've taken many of their classes and recommended them to countless others. I feel confident that sending a new person to NCI means they'll learn their way around. Hats off to these guys, seriously. They make SL a phenomenally better place.

Re: The Doctor | Mommy, whats in your tummy?

thaumata — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 21:30:42 -0000

My 2 year old niece was obsessed with boobies for a while. Whenever she'd come see you, she'd sit on your lap and go, "you got boobies? mommy got boobies. you got boobies, too?" and then she'd proceed to pull at your shirt, or sometimes try to take her own shirt off to show you her boobies.

For months.

Re: Too Much Nick

thaumata — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 14:33:58 -0000

The only time I've ever been laid off, my boss chose to do it via email on a Sunday night when we were both logged into Skype already anyway. This made me realize he was quite possibly a tremendous wuss and immediately, I was glad to be rid of him.

Re: Too Much Nick

thaumata — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 14:06:38 -0000

I had to catalog everything I owned and its value when I moved overseas earlier this year. The only thing it really helped me with was realizing that the small amount of stuff I had whittled down to was still worth over 20,000 USD and that maybe it really was better to hang onto it than to throw it out. I think we forget what we've invested in even simple things like a drawer full of t-shirts.

FWIW I was never a fan of bento, though it would do the job.

Re: I want some big massive headphones and I want skullcandy ones 'cause they're really pretty. But are they all style no substance? Advice, pleeeease! Ta.

thaumata — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:46:34 -0000

I wear headphones a lot and can be kind of picky about them. I used to have this pair of really nice $130 noise canceling earbuds from Sony that were great for overseas flying. Then, I picked up some Skull Candy ear buds on a clearance rack somewhere and fell right in love with them. They don't do the noise canceling stuff but they fit my ears SO much better, are way more comfortable, the cord tangles much less and I feel like the person next to me can't hear the sound leaking out so much. I will probably never wear my Sonys ever again. I would replace my big DJ headset with Skull Candy in a minute except that I need the microphone my logitech ones have.

Re: A rant of sorts

thaumata — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:03:57 -0000

I've been blogging old skooooool on Livejournal for uh.. I dunno. Close to a decade now. I've always loved them because people generally don't do that there. Tumblr is just kind of... proud and bossy and somewhat shouty. The culture is completely different, and not always for the better.

When people tell me how to keep my blog anywhere, I just quietly unfollow them. Time is the one thing I can't get more of and it's just not worth wasting on stuff like that.