mandarine

That’s it: Charlotte and healingmagichands have convinced me that I should enlist for NaBloPoMo. However, I am certain it would take too much time if I had to write a deep philosophical post every day. So I will not be doing the daily posting here on Mandarine, but on my other blog, the one with the weird inventions, with which I have had difficulties keeping up recently. In fact, absidea is not really a blog. It is more of an irregular serialized book.

Hence I am not sure which one I should really choose between NaBloPoMo or NaNoWriMo. Anyway, NaBloPoMo it will be; I will be posting the thirty ideas for absidea Season 2 over the thirty days of November.

Then the blog will hibernate until I write Season 3. Well, not entirely. As illustrations take me an awful lot of time, I will skip them for the daily November postings. Then I’ll take the next twelve months to update the articles with the illustrations, bringing each newly illustrated post to the top of the stack in turn.

There it goes. As a teaser, here are a few of the absurd ideas that you’ll be reading about over at absidea in November:

• 03 Nov Space mirrors that look into the past
• 05 Nov The cheese-jet pizza printer
• 11 Nov N-dimensional tic-tac-toe
• 12 Nov Autobuilt underwater coral cities
• 16 Nov Placebotherapy
• 19 Nov A tall fence against global warming
• 24 Nov The co-sleeping hammock

If you are not acquainted with absidea, feel free to try before November.

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I can hardly remember in which blog I found this hilarious meme first. There was at least Cam, Becky, Emily, Charlotte (there, there, over there, and out there). The rule is simple: I have to use google as a mirror, mirror on the wall, to tell me what I need, using “[my name] needs”.

Now, there is a riddle: what should I use as [my name] ? Obviously, Mandarine is not my real name, but my cat’s. Not much fun in knowing what my cat needs (sleep, disgusting paté, to shed hair on my pillow, to miaow loudly all night long because, you know, it’s that bad season for she-cats). Therefore I chose to use my real first name. However, even if I am probably the only one in France with this name, it’s already been what-I-need-memed by tons of bloggers worldwide. I thus decided to change the rules to “[my name] wants”. The results are surprising, but I know why: as I have always been blogging under a pseudonym, google does not have a clue who I am and what I want. And yet, some of the stuff is not far from the truth:

I want…

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Some of you may know my absidea blog on absurd ideas. Some may even be regular readers. Then you must have noticed it’s been a while since my last post. Do not worry: I have not lost the faith. It’s just that I have been doing the exact same work at my day job (i.e. describing inventions, hopefully not absurd — with illustrations), and so was less inclined to spend more time on the writing side. However, the idea side is still very much alive, and entries are piling up.
To avoid the guilt and stress associated with too much distance between posts, I have decided to take an official break while I brood a new batch. And it gave me an idea: this first batch of articles is to be considered as absidea Season 1.

Season 2 will start July 1st, 2007, with an intended weekly publication frequency, until the end of December. That’s a deal. And hopefully again in 2008 and so forth until I run out of ideas (or death terminates my internet connection). Meanwhile, make sure you have read all of season 1 (that is, if you like the concept).

As an appetizer for those who do not know absidea, below is a selection of Season 1’s best episodes:
Sports in weightless environments
Vacuum-filled airships
A skyscraper with only one floor
The giant space beanstalk
Floating pop-corn
Shrinking mankind

See you around on Sunday July 1st, 2007, 00:00 UTC for the first Season 2 article, entitled … can’t tell you right now, but I’m sure there will be leaks before that date.

Inspired from a comment I left at Quilhill’s: I often find myself using an intellectually sloppy yet empirically efficient technique for grammar check. Essentially, I hesitate on idiomatic expressions a lot and sometimes I cannot find a proper entry in my dictionary or any online resource I know. I want to know about usage. For instance: do people say “to take up a challenge” or “to take on a challenge?”. It may be obvious to you but not to me (check this post), and I am sure everybody hesitates on that sort of things some day.

Instead of trying every possible dictionary entry (take, up, challenge), I do google-voting: [more]

No tomatoes

The absidea blog on absurd inventions is up and running. As a matter of fact, I set my first foot in the blogging adventure for that blog, but was led astray on the fabulous path of personal blogging by Lorelle on Wordpress. Contrary to the mandarine blog, [more]