This comes at about the time of a spate of male posters to this LJ asking for invite codes, not least the poster now known as
Time to put the interviews game back into its box for a couple of months, I think; writing 22 sets of questions (and declining a 23rd) will do that to you. Nevertheless, I always enjoy reading people's answers, even when I wasn't the question-setter, and I regard it as a kind gesture of respect that people chose to ask me for questions in preference to someone else. (Or maybe it was just because I got round to it first; I don't know. *grin*) Like as not, the chain reaction should keep trickling through for a few days, weeks or months yet. One worthwhile technique, though I've only been able to do it a few times, is to ask someone to write about something you know they've always wanted to write about but haven't yet got around to doing so. That's a good way to generate something which is likely to inspire further interesting discussion.
The other reason why I'm a little questioned out is because I've been chipping away at the other thing I was plugging last week, "The Killer Meme". At 53 questions long, I now see why it deserves its title, and declare this to be a two-parter interrupted by a night's sleep. Eyes down for a full house:
The Killer Meme
The Great and the Good stopped by slowfox's LJ to pool their collective curiosity, and here's what they want to know about you:
Me, Myself, I
The closest I get to one is "Do as you would be done by", I'm afraid.
I'd been reading people's LiveJournals for perhaps a month or so before I started my own and enjoyed the way that some of them tended to be playful, even flirty. Accordingly I thought that was an image that I wanted to play along with. If the fine phrase had been taken by someone else already then I doubt I would've joined for a while longer yet. Would


At about 10, I wanted to program arcade games. From about 14 to about 19, I wanted to work for an insurance company as an actuary. Unfortunately this is something that I never looked into particularly seriously at university and my mathematics was insufficient. For about the last six months of university and the first year afterwards, I looked into working behind the scenes on a game show - ideally as a researcher, contestant co-ordinator or similar, but it didn't happen. Current plans: uncertain-to-non-existent, which isn't good.
This wasn't scary for its content, but for its lucidity and clarity. At the age of possibly 15, I dreamt that I was a hitherto unknown member of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but extremely unconfident about my non-existant ninja skills. Was I out saving the world? No, I was getting my hair cut in the next town but one along. When I woke up, I took a considerable amount of convincing that the dream state had only been a dream. Then the family had pizza for dinner that night. I wasn't impressed. :-/
I don't think I have scars, but I have a small burn on the thumb side of my index finger on my right hand. It came from abseiling without gloves and burning my hand on the extremely hot metal carabiner.
As a child, would you have been much interested in things about your grandparents' grandparents? Would want them to know the strength of my passions, wouldn't wan't them to know the strength of my hypocrisy - which I'm not about to spell out in detail here, I'm afraid.
Haven't done it for a while, but I always used to learn techniques by practicing lots of different examples and I used to rote-learn vocabulary by simple repeated exposure.
Nothing is leaping to mind. The worst physical discomfort was at learning that I couldn't eat or drink anything but water for the coming 24 hours - and I ended up having some juice in the end by way of some token flavour.
A town of 140,000 people called Middlesbrough in the country of Great Britain.
With respect, I'm not about to tell you all that here and now. :-) The biggest one I'm prepared to admit to is eternal life coupled with eternal loneliness.
Nostalga Ain't What It Used to Be
I suspect that most of my Friends list would regard this as having attended the Scottish charity gala premiere of the Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone movie. Not the World Premiere, but only a few days after it and about a week before the mainstream preview broadcasts. I was the first previously-known fandom member to submit a review of it to The Leaky Cauldron. As for what I regard as the coolest thing? See three below.
I'd like not to have taken a year out between school and university. I suspect that I might have found the academic rigours of my course rather easier if I hadn't, and this would have been likely to have had beneficial knock-on effects for the rest of my career.
"80% of success is turning up." - Woody Allen
I'm not very happy with my answer to this question; all my candidates here seem to be related to pride, which is not tremndously healthy. There was a TV game show which made an impact on me called The Crystal Maze, and a short-lived attraction based on the gameplay of the TV show called The Cyberdrome Crystal Maze. (The latter article dates from about ten years ago.) The last time I ever got to play that, I had teamed up with two ladies who I had never met before... who turned out to be members of a near-world-record-setting team. The three of us did spectacularly well. I couldn't get over just how well we had done, or that I had had an opportunity to team up in a game I loved with two of its top practitioners, for two or three ecstatic hours afterwards.
I don't particularly pay much attention to shoes, so this will be a struggle. I do remember that a large number of pairs of shoes I had tended to split between the sole and the main body of the shoe, not least because I would tend to inadvertently occasionally point my feet downwards during walking. I guess therefore the best pair of shoes I ever had would be the first ones I bought with a deliberately thin sole, which stopped me from destroying them in the same way as the others.
If I Ruled the World
London, I suspect. It's rather easier to move from London to elsewhere in the country than to London from elsewhere.
Benjamin Franklin supposedly said "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." I suspect I agree with him less than most Americans. I probably would exchange them for "sufficient security", however that's defined.
I suspect the practical, but not-so-much-fun, choice would be to obtain an illegally powerful firearm by way of self-defence.
It would be to do with the health and comfort of a family member. No specifics.
Life would be a lot easier with just, say, the next three sets of Lotto numbers... Can't really see past time of death for this one.
Throwing a party for the world, including a rather more private event for my friends, then tell the people I liked just how much (and why) I liked them. One would hope there would be some sex involved.
You know, I have a mental image of the biggest and most persistent thorn in my side from secondary school and can't remember his given name. That's got to be a good thing, hasn't it? Anyway, I imagine a good tree-falling-over/cartoon-style-pancake-f
Got to go with my gut reaction here: HELL YES. I would feel very guilty about it for a long time, but would hope that the utilitarian in me would be able to forgive me once I felt I had personally been responsible for saving a hundred/thousand/million lives which wouldn't otherwise have been saved.
Superheroic quality telekinesis in a sneaker from flight and instantaneous teleportation.
Half-tempted to suggest that Adam deserves a good smiting, but there is insufficient evidence to suggest he really exists. Can't see past old Adolf for this one.
The life of someone with a very clear degree of vision as to what they want to do and the determination, mental strength and physical prowess to succeed in their chosen field. To name one name, while by no means do I regard him as the pinnacle of human evolution, it'd be a lot of fun to be ring announcer Michael Buffer.
Chernobyl, 1986. The station technicians would have tested the reactor strictly by the book - no taking half-measures with the emergency cooling system and the control rods.
Hmm - not sure where this is coming from. Great Britain seems to be the obvious choice from considerations of ease and convenience, though not from beauty.
So many ways to answer this one. By way of local flavour, I shall declare the perpetrator to be the person responsible for the plan to dig up and steal three miles of the Leamside railway line. Theoretically, the 313 tonnes of scrap iron he got from it would be worth thousands or tens of thousands of pounds; practically, this mass act of vandalism would cost about two million pounds to undo. What sort of torture? Whatever he - for it was a he - liked the least. (Because it needn't be a single person for the whole day - need it? - then if I could have half an hour of that day devoted to letting British TV host/producer Chris Evans know that he's made slightly too many ill-spirited decisions in the name of entertainment for my liking, that would make a good day even better.)
Perfect happiness half: half a day for each of my parents. If this is a cop-out, err on the side of mother rather than father. Unfortunately I have very little concept of what a day of perfect happiness for either of them would constitute. I'm not even sure they do... :-/
Media and Culture
A radio personality and disk jockey from London called Danny Baker, who the non-Brits aren't expected to have heard of. He has a distinctive, reverent style of writing and talks in very much the same way. His passion for football is an excellent start, though I'd hope that his passion for music could become a his-as-me passion for games. His sense of humour is distinctive - he only lasted a couple of seasons hosting Win, Lose or Draw and Pets Win Prizes before he was replaced by someone more, ahem, conventional in each case, just because he ad-libbed the hell out of things - though he's not scared of making serious points when he wants to. Lastly, there's a tiny bit of a facial resemblance, isn't there?
OK, I'm stopping here. I really intended to stop one question beforehand, but thought it was a bit of a maudlin place to stop. This is much more fun!
*snip*
You can gack the meme questions, with all the prettifying code, from here (so please include this line when pasting your answers into LJ, right to the end of the cut tag).