Likes and dislikes
Listings of some of my favorite things, likes and dislikes (lots of these!), in alphabetical order. For some I have linked to mostly Wikipedia articles for more details.
Likes
- Aliens (attractive ones!)
- Ancient cultures: Aztec, Ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Incan, Mayan, Samurai
- Animals: Cheetah
- Anime/Manga: Neon Genesis Evangelion (mainly the EVAs, not the humans)
- Black holes
- Book genres: fantasy, science fiction (that includes aliens and spaceships)
- Climate: cold and dry
- Colors: black, blue, brown, green, grey, orange, pink, purple
- Cultures: Japan (for samurai), Russia (for spaceflight)
- Dinosaurs
- Drawing
- Fabric: silk
- Foods: bread, chocolate, coffee (especially cappuccinos!), corned beef, ice-cream, frozen yoghurt, yoghurt
- Fruits: strawberries, kiwifruit, apples, mangoes, berries (blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, etc.)
- Gemstones: amethyst, opal, topaz
- Iridescence
- Landscape: fir and birch tree forests (preferably with no other humans around!). The deciduous forests of the Northern Hemisphere
- Modesty
- Movies/films: Alien, Apocalypto, Avatar, Contact, Event Horizon, District 9, Independence Day, The Last Samurai, Lord of the Rings, Ran, Species, Stargate, Star Wars (Episodes 3, 4, 5)
- Music:
- Musicians/groups: 30 Seconds to Mars, Chicane, Deep Forest, Enigma, Enya, Evanescence, Peter Gabriel, Loreena McKennitt
- Genres: electronic – ambient, dark ambient, techno, trance
- Mythological creatures: Phoenix, Firebird, Pegasus, dragons
- Names:
- Male: Alexander/Александр, Andrei/Андрей, Darius, Jai, Jared, Jordan
- Female: Anna/Анна, Cassandra, Catherine, Jessica
- Novels: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoii; The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkein; The Faded Sun Trilogy by C.J. Cherryh; Titan by Stephen Baxter
- Peace and quiet
- Perfume: Pure Poison by Dior
- Reading
- Sea creatures: manta rays, squid
- Seasons: late autumn (May, in Melbourne); winter
- Sleeping: an escape from reality!
- Technologies: Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnology, nuclear fusion. I do not fear these; I would embrace them.
- Transhumanism
- Trees: big trees, old trees, big and old trees, conifers, birches, maples, liquidambars, Japanese maples
- Villains: Darth Vader, Sauron
- Volcanoes
- Writing
Dislikes
- Advertising
- Alcohol
- Animal cruelty
- Bad spelling and grammar
- Beauty contests
- Book genres: anything with vampires!, chick lit, crime & murder mysteries, cyberpunk, romance, urban fantasy/paranormal fiction
- Books lacking a table of contents page – a real inconvenience!
- Breast enlargements
- Bullies, vandals, drunken louts and similar annoying humans – shoot them!
- Capitalism
- Cars: 4WDs, Hummers, SUVs
- Celebrities
- Cities: cancerous blights on the landscape devouring all the green
- Climate: hot and humid
- Clothing: dresses, tight clothes, anything revealing
- Colors: red, yellow
- Corporations
- Credit cards
- Daylight Savings
- Decadence
- Door greeters
- Drivers whom I’d like to obliterate with a shoulder-launched missile weapon: boys in high-performance cars, women in 4WDs/SUVs
- Economic rationalism
- Excessive use of irony (endemic on the Internet)
- Excessive political correctness
- Fabric: wool, anything scratchy
- Fads and trends
- Fascism
- Fashion
- Flash-animated websites
- Foods: chewing gum (the latter seems to end up all over footpaths. Yuck. I wish it could be banned everywhere, not just in Singapore!), oysters (I never have tried one, but they just look disgusting!), stew
- Graffiti
- Greed
- Hedonism
- High-heeled shoes
- Hipsters (see also “Excessive use of irony”)
- Humanity in general (misanthropic)
- Identity politics
- Insects: flies, mosquitoes, slugs, spiders
- Internet memes and quizzes on blogs – a pointless waste of time!
- Kissing: the “mouth-to-mouth” version – eww!
- Light pollution
- Litter: people too lazy and/or stupid to use rubbish bins
- LOLcats: this Internet fad is not funny anymore – just tedious!
- “McMansions” (a.k.a “crimes against architecture”)
- Men who dump their wives for younger women
- Music: rap
- Nationalism
- Opportunists
- Phobias: answering the telephone, deep water, spiders, thunderstorms
- Pornography
- Popular culture
- Privatization of public utilities such as gas, water, electricity, transport – worst mistake a government can make!
- Professions: business executives, hedge fund managers, overpaid corporate CEOs, property developers, stockmarket speculators – all are parasites on society, and essentially useless (off with their heads!)
- Promiscuity
- Reality
- “Reality TV”
- The reproductive process (yuck)
- Season: summer
- Seeing trees felled
- Smoking
- Space Marines: a tedious sci-fi cliché
- Spammers
- Spitting
- “SUV strollers”
- Tardiness
- Tattoos
- Thunderstorms: they have an annoying habit of waking me up in the middle of the night with a deafening CRACK!, so I dive under my bedsheets in fright. I am sure they do it deliberately.
- Yuppies