And can confirm that it is indeed true that no matter the quantities of the fruit of the yeast, the hops and the H2O molecule one consumes, one will not suffer from a hangover. At least while in the Czech Republic.

To sum things up, I had fun, got drunk, got a snog, tried proper green absinthe, made a bunch of new friends, worked my arse off, bought books by Murakami Pynchon and Woody Allen, got a certificate, returned to Malta after spending a sleepless night at Vienna airport only to find that the local be-pot-bellied bus drivers had decided to go on strike, recieved my University results, bought a Smetana album, didn't find anything by Pulnoc or the PPU despite ransacking all of Brno and passed all my exams.

Not necessarily in that order.

Just to let everybody know that i'll be in Brno, Czech Republic from the 6th-16th July on an Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology Programme. My absence on the fora will be sorely missed. Won't it?

It happens to be my first visit to the nation that staged the Velvet Revolution and as such, i'm interested in sampling as much of the local pivo as possible, at least the Southern Moravian varieties. I'll also be doing my best to find some Plastic People of the Universe albums while there.

To those of you unfamiliar with slavic lingo's, pivo is a type of (generally) golden beverage of which about 90% is water. The locals seem to be rather fond of it, in fact, their fondness for it is known to be superior to the fondness of other golden-beverage-of-which-about-90%-of-which-is-water-drinking nations.

I haven't felt that good since archie gemmill scored against Holland in '78

I'm serious.

To be quite frank, i'm exasperated at the fact that the internet has become a veritable breeding ground for all sorts of inane, puerile, shrill-yammering, finger-pointing, infantile, punch-you-in-the-stomach-and-run-away-laughing type of behaviour.

Fuck it, just get your own thesaurus.

I'm tired of the fact that every forum I become a regular of and begin to make my online home is taken over by a bunch of new regulars within a short period of time who make as much sense as a cross between a gray parrot and a non-neotenous axolotl whose idea of highbrow humour is posting links to mudkips.

Then again, it always has been that way, I was merely prepared to give it a few chances. Complaining about it has as much effect as a native of Phuket throwing a grain of sand at the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, anyway and behaving in a proper, mature manner has exactly the same effect.

Thankfully i've enough to keep me occupied until the beginning of June and probably beyond that. Besides my thesis, exams and my viva's at the end of June, i'll probably be spending my summer celebrating (and throwing up) in various places, and abseiling down cliffs to study Yelkouan Shearwaters.

~ Nick

I made this post a few months ago on another games forum i'm a regular on. I'm of the opinion that it reaches an almost ^Zeruch-like eloquence at times. (and yes, I did quote him at one point, talentless hack that I am)

There's some references to forum users from there in it, so don't bother trying to understand anything other than the plain english.

Enjoy




This thread is no more than a pathetic excuse for you to spam/troll/act inanely under the (very) thin cover of a cliché'd debate question. Were my thoughts able to take physical form, you would not be surprised to find a very targeted maelstrom made of acid and black bolts careening towards you at high speed, although thanks to you, several forum users desperate for something quotable to put into their signature are about to have a field day.

Besides, if discussing the meaning of life is a subject you honestly find so engrossing, do take a look:

Here. (note: this was a link)

If you'd please grab the nearest sharp-ended implement (preferably a rusty one) and, despite your lack of any Japanese heritage whatsoever, kindly proceed to commit seppuku with it, these fora would be infinitesimally grateful. Such an event would lead to prompt merriment and festivities on a scale last seen when the Christian mob under the guidance of Pope Theophilus the wise-but-in-retrospect-the-not-so-wise-at-all, in a fit of enthusiastic and wholly unplanned pyromania burnt the entire repository of knowledge at the Library of Alexandria to the ground and danced the polka on its embers to celebrate the advent of the Dark Ages with flair and panache.

Despite the fact that hearsay accounts claim that the award should in fact go to Genghis Khan's thirteenth birthday party, the arrival of Wowbagger The Infinitely Prolonged (on a quest to insult every living being in the universe in alphabetical order) provoked him to promptly decapitate everybody at the party and proceed to burn down large segments of Asia. Since there were no survivors (except for a small and rather insignificant long-eared jerboa – but its eyewitness account was misinterpreted as being a series of manic jumps and strange ear movements), the claim remains unsubstantiated.

Drinks will be had, people will be made fools of, games of very questionable legality will be played, virginities will be lost and live music will be blared at volumes that will make the plutonium rock band Disaster Area feel uncomfortable. Some members of the band will play in 3/4ths time, some in 4/4ths, some in 13/8ths and others in a kind of pie-eyed πr2, each according to the amount of sleep he'd managed to grab recently. Merlyn and Dr Frodo will happily consume a volume of vodka equivalent to the GDP of a small African dictatorship while the Van Steenberge, De Dolle and Bosteels breweries will claim a lack of stock for a period of three months (double that if Enimie decides to drop by for a drink or three-hundred*).

Kinjion will sit in a corner proselytising about the prodigious waste of our God-given hepatic tissue, practising his sophistry (at the bar, presumably) and evangelising to the unlucky soul who just happened to feel the need to empty the contents of his stomach in that general area.

But you shouldn't believe anything you hear at parties, and particularly nothing you hear about this one.

I ramble.

Now, in response to the title of the thread. Please open your dictionary. If you cannot find a dictionary at your place of abode, fear not, for there exists a type of outlet that deals exclusively with the problem of supply and demand in the affairs of the literati. It tends to be filled with papery things, of variable thickness - which may or may not contain illustrations - called books. Books deal with a wide variety of affairs such as poly-ticks, travel, self-help, DIY, the doings of hobbits and manically depressed robots, biographies, scientific things, not-so scientific things, not scientific things at all, anti-scientific things, and, religion.

Such shops are known to the commonfolk/layman/laywoman/layperson/peasant as, wait for it, bookshops. Find one, enter, and enrich yourself by the purchase of a dictionary – preferably an English one, but ultimately any language you’re particularly fluent in will do.

If no such shop exists in the near vicinity, or, you are unable to secure yourself a means of transport for your comfortable perambulation thereto due to lack of license, injury (sporting or otherwise), disability (mental, physical or both), or common sense, please, don't panic. Seeing as you have a connection to a worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using a standard protocol known colloquially as the internet, i'm sure you'll be able to avail yourself to the search engine of your choice and find yourself a dedicated online dictionary.

Google is your friend. Or, at the very least, a reluctant acquaintance.

Assuming you have secured said dictionary, are reasonably literate and have learnt your alphabet, proceed to the "L" section and look for the word "Life". Please read the definition.

My very own dictionary, a Collins pocket of which I am very fond says the following:

Life: noun, active principle of existence in animals and plants, animate existence; time of its lasting; history of such existence; way of living; vigour, vivacity. (plural lives)

There it is in all its glory, animate existence, the meaning of life.






*”This is madness!” “No, this is Dark Throne!”

Or, more specifically I have decided to write three books. Whether or not the trilogy expands to become one of five (or more) rather than three remains to be seen - too many pan galactic gargle blasters can impair ones ability for numeracy.

But there, by the grace of the Abrahamic deity, I go.

I expect you want me to tell you what they're about, now? While i'm not sure how many of you have read any Huxley, Asimov or P.K. Dick, the topic and style will be familiar to any of those who have.

In much the same way as Asimov dealt with the topic of robotics, i'm hoping that my hat-trick of books can deal with the topic of humanity.

The first book would be set in the not too distant future and will focus on the issues that crop-up after the successful cloning of several interbreeding members of human-chimpanzee intermediates. (George, don't get any ideas now, eh )

For those of you who don't spend their free time reading evolutionary biology or genetics, this would imply that we would then be forced to come up with a clear definition of "human" that we've so far taken for granted - "accidents" of evolution should not be treated as though they were set in stone.

The second book would occur several centuries in the future at the point of a human speciation event. It will obviously contain thematic similarities to the first book. No it isn't a re-hash of GATTACA or Citizen Cyborg.

The third one, and probably the most over-the-top, deals with the question; "What would we do if we were to encounter an extraterrestrial race so far advanced that they considered us to be beyond contempt and we weren't being directed by Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich?" Since it isn't being written by the two gentlemen mentioned in the previous sentence, it probably won't contain the explosions that fans of the it's-a-bloody-alien-invasion-run-away-from-the-little-green-men
-with-disintegrator-blasters-aaaargh!-I-melt!! genre have come to expect.

I'll probably begin writing them sometime during my gap year.