I’ve gone full nerd.

I’ve got a bunch of domains that are slightly irrelevant. Who needs timfletcher.de?

I think this qualifies as an e/n site.

I don’t think anyone uses the term anymore, but I recently heard it again, and I think it is. My old favourite was imovaherenow.com. I think it was run by  guy called Adam Cernese, who I just tried to look up, to no avail. Anyway, he was fantastic.

 

He just linked to cool stuff he found on the internet, and it didn’t matter what it was, pornographic, insensitive, or otherwise. Back in those days, boy I sound old. Back in those days we all used online aliases, hence Funkmon. I’m still regularly reluctant to use my actual name online. But because of that, we didn’t have to worry about what was posted, and our jobs would never found out. The only way I found out Adam’s name was looking up the whois details provided, by the way, by networksolutions.

 

Anyway, an e/n site was a site that meant everything to the poster, nothing to the reader. A lot of it was ranting, a lot of it was dumb links, and a lot of the sites turned exclusively into pornography. Eugh. But still, there was good content there, and they were fun to read. This was before the term blog entered popular usage to describe the sites, iirc, though blogger was around. Many of us called them ezines or e/n sites. Blogs were more personal.

Now, the internet is trying very hard to be professional, with real journalism and whatnot, and e/n sites and personal blogs aren’t around much anymore. Even when people try to talk about subjects like terrorism, racism, and stuff like that on their blogs, they lexigraphically put on their asbestos underwear. Screw that, just talk about it, guys.

 

But, anyway, I think my blog, consisting entirely of stuff that nobody cares about but me, qualifies.

Chemistry

The mechanisms behind chemistry are physics. Whether it’s Schroedinger equations or more classical stuff (rare), it’s all physics. However, the way chemistry is taught, it’s all magic.

It’s like knowing how to use Windows but having no way of knowing how it interfaces with the hardware, but being able to program. It’s terrible. How does a hydrogen bond work? Why is an octet in the outer shell stable? All of these answers are basically “magic” in chemistry.

Sitting alone listening to love songs.

It’s what I do. Paramore don’t get much crap from people for some reason. They hit it big with Misery Business, Decode and The Only Exception, and they’re not getting the kind of bullshit that Avril Lavigne gets. Whenever Avril gets brought up, people say “I liked her early stuff, but she sucks now. She sold out.” Bull. Avril writes every bit as well as she always has, and her last record, Goodbye Lullaby, was an exercise in not selling out. Whatever. I just hate the double standard. Hayley sings worse than Avril, and writes music that’s no better than Avril’s, and her band is objectively less talented than Avril’s. I think the only difference is that Avril writes conventional songs, you know, like, with chords and normal progressions, whereas Hayley writes weird ass songs in drop C# that will stick out like a sore thumb as being very 2010 in about 10 years. That being said, I love Paramore, and I have a large print of a photo I took of Hayley Williams on my wall as we speak, which was a hit on Reddit, back when Reddit had only been uncool for about a year. 3200 views y’all.

Anyway, the love song. It’s probably the best rocking love song I’ve heard, and would appreciate any suggestions to the contrary. Still Into You.

Note to angry Paramore fans:

I know Paramore is a “band” and I try to keep that in my head, sometimes, except Hayley is the one signed to the contract, and she pays her bandmates from that. She also writes the songs, though Taylor has been helping her since Riot!, with help from Josh Farro for their first three records, and I think Jeremy has a credit on one of the new songs. We must note also that due to Paramore keeping a cohesive style in all four of their records and inter record singles despite the addition of York on Riot! and the departure of Josh Farro on the singles club, there is only one constant in the band’s writing and production process, and it must be significant to have kept all the other variables at a minimum. And, as Jeremy left the band just before AWKIF, Taylor joined just before BNE, and the Farros left before Singles, there is only one band member who has been there the whole time. And we know who that is. Hayley Williams. “Paramore is a band,” she says, but that’s only because she says so. The rest of us know what it really is. Hayley Williams.

The street of two Luxembourgs.

This is the terminus of Rue Des Deux Luxembourg in Athus. It goes on, obviously, into Rodange, but Google Street View hasn’t published its Luxembourg data. The two Luxembourgs are Luxembourg, the grand duchy, and Luxembourg, the province in Wallonia. The two were once one, but were separated in 1839 with the Third Partition of Luxembourg, Luxembourg’s largest loss of land in a long history of losses of land.

This region of Belgium has been particularly fond of Luxembourgish, or as we normal people call it “weird ass German” but since world war two, the fondness for the German dialect has dropped sharply. I wonder why. Regardless, in Pays d’Arlon, basically the area around the Arlon arrondissement, though I would also put Virton and Bastogne in here, Luxembourgish is still used commonly, and some street signs are even bilingual! This in itself is another challenge since Luxembourgish has no standard written form, and tends to just be spelled phonetically.

The official flag of the province is also based in the neighbouring country, with the same colours in the same position, though this is rarely used. I wonder if it’s not used for the same reason that Luxembourgish is falling out of favour. National pride, perhaps? Here’s the one I’ve seen.

Interesting, no? I do wonder where this comes from, as it’s also on Esch sur Alzette’s coat of arms.

The one on the Luxembourg coat of arms is actually pretty different. I’ll look more into this. And by the way, look at that coat of arms of Esch sur Alzette. How literal can you get?  There is this tower that Esch sur Alzette represents itself with, which, by the way, I’ve never seen, and I’ve looked, and it’s on top of water, presumably the Alzette. If you didn’t know, you could assume as much from the big Luxembourg things to either side of the tower. There wouldn’t be a tower like that on the Moselle or the Petrusse…though, admittedly, it could be on the Sure, which, coincidentally has a massive castle in a city called Esch sur Sure. The coat of arms of that city includes a pig hiding underneath a dildo tree. Not a joke.

I don’t even know what I wanted to point out here anymore.

You know, one day I’ll tell the exceptionally boring story of how I came to be such a big fan of Luxembourg. Here’s me and my dad in the capital like a billion years ago. I’m really attractive.