ascorbic's New Writeups

pea soup (recipe)

2007-11-27T08:50:07Z

Frozen peas, stock, heat, blend.

This is so easy it's a bit silly. It takes barely longer than heating up some tinned soup, but it's made from scratch so it tastes better and you can feel slightly smug. Only slightly, as it's laughably easy.

Ingredients

Frozen peas.
Stock or water.

and, optionally...

I won't give you quantities â "some" will have to do.

Chop your onion. If you're cool like me, you can do this really quickly. If not, chop it roughly as we'll be blending this. Slice up the bacon. Don't use too much - it's just to get a little extra flavour. Fry the bacon and onion over a gentle heat in the oil til the onion is soft. Don't let the bacon get crispy. While you're doing this, boil a kettle of water, unless you're American and…

Athens (thing)

2007-05-26T08:42:31Z

The rise and fall of single sign-on

Back in the heady days of the turn of the millenium, our friends at Microsoft launched Passport, which was to be their Next Big Thing™. The big idea was to let everyone replace all of their user accounts, passwords and so forth with a single account managed by the Redmond beast. Single sign-on was the wave of the future, and would finally mean you didn't need to remember dozens of different login details for all the sites you visited. Initially it was used for all of Microsoft's MSN services, such as Messenger and Hotmail, but it was designed to be rolled-out to third party sites as well. Quite a few did implement it – see the writeup for a list as of 2001.

Of course, this was an idiotic idea. Who wanted to trust Microsoft with all of their personal information? Passport flopped, and was eventually changed to "Windows Live ID", focussed only on Microsoft…

Russell Brand (thing)

2007-02-15T11:25:41Z

"Russell Brand...what a cunt"
Saint Bob Geldof (also a cunt, so he knows about them)

TV "bad boy" Russell Brand is in many ways similar to music "bad boy" Pete Doherty. Firstly, he's a cunt. Secondly, he's a cunt. He also has a "bad boy" image based in large part on his heroin abuse, and he's a self-promoting twat.

However, there is one thing that makes him worse than Doherty (I never thought I'd ever say that): he talks. Fuck, does he talk. At length, usually about himself. Wikipedia informs me that he's a comedian, which is testament to the accuracy of that site. His actual job is a TV presenter and cunt, and he presides over such eye-gouging shows as one of those Big Brother spin-offs on More4 or some other cable channel.

Russell 'cunt' Brand was born a cunt on the 4th June 1975. That means that as of the date of this writeup, he's been a cunt for over 31 years. That means he's amassed four more…

July 1, 2006 (idea)

2006-07-01T12:58:31Z

I don't daylog but I'm daylogging

If you're going to post a thinly-veiled attack like this, at least have the courage to name names. It's quite transparent to everyone anyway. As far as I can see I'm the only noder who expresses an encouragement apropos the eating of ice cream and somersaulting in sand. I object to the assumption that this means I prefer them to fellatio.

Censorship

I'm not saying that my comments on frozen desserts and silicon-based aerobics are even my own opinion, nor my favoured pastime. In fact they are quoting others, but that's beside the point. I agree that oral sex has lesser chance of conception than other forms of intercourse, but WHO statistics indicate that consumption of emulsified fat and sugar confections below 0°C have even lower incidence of procreational outcomes. And STDs are even fewer.

E2 is dying

Compared with 2002, incidents of oral sex in the catbox have declined 12.7%. Need I say more.

I've been here for

…

The Road to Hell (thing)

2006-05-31T14:54:23Z

Michael Maren (1997) The Road To Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity. New York: The Free Press

In July 1985, 1.5 billion people worldwide tuned in to watch an event that arguably marked the peak of visibility for the business of aid and development in East Africa. While the cameras focussed on the rock singers and telegenic malnourished babies in Ethiopia, Michael Maren was an aid worker employed by Save The Children in neighbouring Somalia. In his book, Maren has written a devastating critique of the business of aid and humanitarian relief, and the NGOs that deliver this aid under contract from northern governments.

At the time of publication of this book, Michael Maren was a twenty year veteran of aid work in East Africa, working first as a Peace Corps volunteer and subsequently as an employee of several high profile NGOs. His experiences with…

April 14, 2006 (thing)

2006-04-14T14:09:58Z

A little over four years ago, on April 1, 2002, I started the E2 Chatterbox Archive. Since then, over 1.9 million messages have been stored in its database. To belatedly mark its birthday, I thought I'd write a few things about it and the catbox in general.

Happy birthday catbox archive!

I had joined the site a little over a year before this, and a little after that wonko had the idea to archive the chat. His archive only stored the previous week's chat, in order to avoid the strain on the database. A few months before I started mine, wonko had decided that he could no longer continue hosting the archive, and had offered his code to anyone who wished to maintain it. I, for some reason, agreed, and messed a little with the code to see if I could get it working. His original code included a popup chat window that allowed users to chat directly from his site. I removed this, as well as the one week limit on storage.

Although very little of…