Icon + Interest meme

[pne]

via kamara

Comment and I will give you 3 interests on your list, and 3 icons, for you to explain.

I was given: natural born speeseburger, toki pona, and ελληνικά; and , , and .

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Natural Born Speeseburger

This is a band some of my friends formed. I'm not entirely sure what the history of their name is.

Part of the joke of the last word, though, hinges on a German pun between "Cheeseburger" (cheeseburger) and "Spießbürger" (a square, someone who is very conventional -- I think).

toki pona

Toki Pona is a language created by sonjaaa (Sonja Elen Kisa).

It's got a very small vocabulary (118 words, I think), so you either have to string lots of words together or remain more ambiguous—I think the latter is part of the philosophy behind the language, namely to simplify your life. It's surely not a coincidence that "pona" means both "good" and "simple" (among other things).

ελληνικά

This says "Greek" (as in the language), in Greek.

I learned Greek, mostly during two years I spent in Greece and on Cyprus. I think this makes me one of comparatively few people with no Greek ancestry to have learned the language.

Ah :)

Back in 2002, there was this girl I sometimes saw on the bus on my way home from work, who I thought was kind of cute.

I didn't dare speak to her for quite a while, so I just called her "the bus girl" to myself.

I posted entries about my encounters with her to a special custom friends group (and, later, a dedicated shared journal: bus_girl), and used this icon when I did so.

Eventually, I talked to her. I'd still meet her occasionally for a while.

However, once I had got to know her a little, she wasn't as mysterious, so I didn't post so much about her any more. And I haven't seen her again since our office moved and I stopped taking that bus. (The last entry in bus_girl is from August 2004.)

The icon is still left over from then.

This userpic says "pne" in Braille.

I believe this is supposed to say "All your base are belong to us".

I don't remember where I got it, but I thought it funny—not least because quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur "anything said in Latin appears profound". So the combination of Engrish grammar and the gravitas of Latin tickles my funny bone.

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Comments

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'll play. :)

[pne.livejournal.com]

pocket pairs, sbcsdfwnpdvcpliotfg, avalanches.

, , (including transcription, please)

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

Pocket pairs: as you've no doubt guessed from the general tone of the majority of the entries over the last six months or so, I've become an avid player of Texas Hold'em. In that game, each player is dealt two individual cards, which no other player is allowed to see (often called the "hole" or the "pocket"), and then five cards are dealt in the middle, which all players can use. "Pocket pair" refers to being dealt a pair of identical cards (say, Ace-Ace) as one's two individual cards. Pocket pairs are generally considered good starting hands in Hold'em, especially the high pairs like Kings or Aces, with which one would expect to win the hand in about two-thirds of cases.

Sbcsdfwnpdvcpliotfg: the acronym for a kind of club my father and his friends formed when they were in the final years of high school and afterward: the "Snoozin' Boozin' Cruisin' Shaggin' Draggin' Faggin' Wagon, North Pine Dam Van Club Pty. Ltd. Inc. of the First Generation". They assigned ridiculous ministries (for instance, the Minister for Mathematics and Debate, the Minister for Cheezels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheezels), and so forth), and generally spent their time in a non-fruitful and yet fun way. The surreality of the whole thing quite appealed to me, and my father's quite happy for me to carry this on to the Second Generation.

Avalanches: The Avalanches are simply an electronic music group based in Melbourne whose music I quite enjoy.


This icon is of Sam and Max, who are characters in a series of comics by Steve Purcell. The image is from their LucasArts adventure game Sam and Max Hit the Road, which is a lot of fun; it's a similar sort of humour to that found in Monkey Island.


This one is of Pilz-E, a character in the Flash animation series Neurotically Yours, available at http://www.illwillpress.com (http://www.illwillpress.com). He's an over-medicated squirrel who has a habit of taking things far too literally. The cartoon is highly NSFW, and has begun to degenerate into nothing more than a series of rants, but some of the older episodes - particularly Amityville Toaster - are quite funny. Enter at your own risk, though.


And this one is simply another addition to the neverending O RLY? owl series (obviously). The hat he's wearing is a traditional Georgian hat, and the phrase /o mrtla/ is a shortening of Georgian /o martla/ which means "oh, really?". (Soon after I first used this icon, nazarboncuk saw it, and told me that she once knew a Tushian Georgian-speaker who mumbled all the time, and pronounced martla just as I'd written it, so I felt rather vindicated by that.)