... recovering from the Hen party to end all hen parties. Recovery involved much lying down in dark room and being "nursed" by Mister Mat and watching copious amounts of telly because reading would have been too difficult.
... watching Old Who with my lovely fiancé - who enjoyed Arc of Infinity very much, and was amused by Colin's Five-Nippled Breastplate.
... watching Crotchw00t (the most recent episode with all the origins stories) and trying to work out exactly what it is about Chris Chibnall's writing that winds me up so much. Possibly it's something to do with the way characters behave under his pen. There's just no emotional truth to his stories whatsoever, and even characters I like, I find irritatng in his hands. I really, honestly, think he has some serious IRL issues, because the way he makes people behave is just... Not right.
... reading the next chapter of George to my little one and talking about Jupiter. I love that she geeks so much about astronomy stuff.

Am currently watching The Dalek Invasion of Earth with Mat, mostly because a bit of One will scrub the horrible Chibnallness from my brain, and being very amused by One threatening Susan with a smacked bottom. I've already had one of those today. Because my brain is still a bit fuzzy, I'm going to just drop in some links to stuff that's come to my attention for various reasons today:

- Sophie Lancaster's mum is taken advantage of in her grief by the Daily Hate. Yes, it's all the fault of video games and nasty films and not that these children (and many others) are never taught by their parents or anyone else that they're not the centre of the universe and their actions have consequences. My little one is FOUR and she knows the difference between fantasy and reality. FFS. The comments are especially terrifying. Yes, it's all the fault of lefty liberal dogooders, and not anybody who actually had any influence on these boys at all. *headdesk*

- Amusing billboard shocks oversensitive religious types. Maybe it hit a nerve because it's true.

- Another amusing entry from Amused Cynicism. Really, if you're not reading him yet, you should. He's cabalamat2.

- Imaginary Al Quaeda recruitment meetings. Very very very funny.

So, a guy I know appeared in the pub the other day wearing a T-shirt with a very well done parody of a Dali painting (I can't remember which one, but not Persistence of Memory), with a dalek holding a paintbrush and with a melty bottom, captioned "Salvador Dalek". He couldn't remember where he got it from, so I have been hunting online for it. I haven't found it.

I have found this, though. Which I am trying really really hard to talk myself out of buying. wedding to save for, wedding to save for, wedding to save for.

Also, this made me pee myself laughing. I may email the guy who made it and ask if he'd mind me doing a tarted up version. I could do with a graphics project to play with, and it's not like he hasn't done his own version of Salvador Dalek...

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In other news, Dog Soldiers is absolute pants, isn't it? We're watching it in bed now (yes, I know, I should have seen it before). I'm not sure if it's awful enough to be great, though... Sean Pertwee's comedy guts are amusing me, though. Oh, this is a very silly film. I'm leaning towards liking it, apart from the needless cruelty to cute doggies.

I want this. Also, this would be cool. That is all.

So, yes, Mister Mat has been asked for his thoughts on (with a view to contributing to) Liberal Conspiracy because he are a famouse Liberal blogger (not as famous as Millennium Elephant, but just about as cuddly). I did some half-hearted whinging about this last night when we were talking, along the lines of "how come it's always you that gets picked up for these things and not me when I get twice as many readers as you?" I do as much political blogging as Mat does, if in a slightly more disorganised way, I have a much bigger readership (on the personal blog at least), I am passionately Liberal in a classic Millian millieu... But because Mat gets linked to by "prominent bloggers"^# he gets picked up and I don't.

His suggestion is that it's because I blog on LJ, and nobody else in the blogosphere pays much attention to LJ because it's bad for technorati links etc. This annoys me. Partially for selfish reasons - "why doesn't anyone pay attention to ME?!" - but also for Angry Feminist Reasons. "Prominent Bloggers" are almost always male. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that men seem to be better at the whole having separate blogs for separate things deal. This means that political blogs which only have fifty or sixty readers are counted as prominent blogs because they are just political blogs, and journalists don't have to wade through huggins of personal stuff to get to the political meat they are after. But I think it might also be because of the blog platforms we women choose. LJ is roughly 70% female.

I like LJ for two reasons. One is the friends list, which lets me read all the things I want to read in one place. The other is threaded comments, which mean you can actually have a conversation with your commenters in a way that you can't on most blog platforms. It leads to debate. It leads to interesting information being exchanged. Threaded commenting is a good thing. Most blog platforms don't have threaded commenting. The quality of discussion you get on the comments pages suffers for this. I have tried other blog platforms, and I always come back to LJ; and given the above statistic that LJ is 70% female, it seems I'm not alone among members of my gender. Annoyingly, it seems this may be a bad move.

Hey ho. It's not conscious sexism, so that makes it all right, I suppose. We do have a couple of prominent bloggers (male ones, natch), on LJ now, in the form of matgb and nwhyte, so who know, the worm may turn.

In slightly less dispiriting news, tinuvielberen has found a fantastic SteamPunk Dalek:



And it's ihavecake's birthday. Happy birthday, Good Twin. Your Evil Twin wishes you much serene sitting on clouds and strumming of harps while I sit here in the flames poking at prominent bloggers with my pitchfork ;)
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^# You know, the sort of people who win awards at the Lib Dem conference for having about a quarter the readers that Mat does, which is apparently a HUGE readership... bitter, me? Never!