point5b

...and I wish I'd never thrown an iota of support towards the Red side of the US political spectrum in my life.

But I find myself, even after contemplation and reading a surprisingly high number of supportive posts by reasonably sensible Blue-leaning people, thinking the Peace Prize win is just absurd.

Or, if that's irksome, let's call it premature. Let's make a deal - if Obama were to do at least two of these actions:

1) Withdraw from Iraq. This includes removing all troops and not constantly air-striking random people near suspected terrorists. This is not satisfied by a constantly sliding withdrawal date.
2) Withdraw from Afghanistan, same conditions.
3) Allow independent verification that prisoners of the US are being treated in accordance with Geneva convention requirements for prisoners of war. The current pinky-swearing doesn't count.
4) Achieve a diplomatic equilibrium with Iran that doesn't involve the US constantly threatening to sanction, air-strike, or possibly invade Iran because they're possibly pursuing the capability to build nuclear weapon.

...then I'll say, yeah, there's been enough of a shockingly genuine break from the policies of the past to be recognized on the level of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Fair?

(And yes, I recognize the Prize as awarded is influenced far less than by work for peace and human rights than by "making people in Europe feel hopeful" - hence folks like Kissinger, Arafat, etc. get the award when their press is good while empire-undermining folks like Gandhi get snubbed. Now, no offense folks in Europe, but you're a damn sight less likely to get blown up by a Predator drone or a MOAB than people in other parts of the world. I submit that it isn't about you guys feel.)

1) LeVar Burton has still been hosting Reading Rainbow all this time, which is awesome and impressive.

2) The last episode aired yesterday, which not at all awesome. Full story.

I'm sort of torn by these revelations. It's distinctly sad, particularly as even rerun rights are complicated by the issue of renewing broadcast rights for the books featured on the episodes. As a kid of the 80s, I adored the show, and I can't overstate the greatness of the series - an opinion I'm sure millions of people my age and younger share.

On the other hand, for all I knew, the show had died off back in the 90s - and it hadn't. It survived four presidential administrations, anti-PBS posturing by Team Red, and the other vagaries of public TV. It got to kids as early as possible to show them how fun and amazing books can be be, before the education system could try to stamp out any interest in them, and it did that for 26 years.

26 years.

It's sad to not be able to say " - and counting", but I can't let that sort of accomplishment and good work go by uncelebrated. Here's to Mr. Burton and everyone else involved in Reading Rainbow.

(Hat tip to Alexandra Erin, who wrote about this here.)

Just had one tonight (held off on the Fat Tire until afterwards, sensibly enough).

My glib impression was that someone wanted to make a much more efficient honeydew. It tastes quite similar to a honeydew, but has even easier-to-remove seeds and a very thin rind, thinner than any other melon I've eaten. Especially considering the small size, almost all of the mass is edible.

As the linked blog suggests, the flesh of the sprite melon is very sweet, as well as quite juicy. I did notice this melon echoed the one down side of honeydew, at least for me - a slight quease of the stomach after eating, like a milder version of my reaction to raw red bell peppers. If you've never had that response to honeydew, I wouldn't expect that reaction to a sprite melon.

That thin rind starts turning yellow when it's ripe, and tonight's melon was about halfway yellow. I'll let the second one I bought ripen a bit further and try that.

At some point, I lost track of almost every post from an entire week of y'all updating, over a period that ended a few days ago. I don' think I was logged out of LJ; odd. I just finished read them. I skipped most replies I might have made due to lack of timeliness and because I lack the brain at this point of tonight to add anything worth filling up a comment. So, quickies:

• Yes, all this is why I went out and bought a copy of Spirit of the Century when you announced your project, bruceb.
• Jake_Richmond, I picked the wrong month to stop sniffing glue start writing an rpg. Oy. Ah, well, I can always put it up later in the year if I don't make the deadline.

And that's about it as to reply-ish things...

Last night, I finally re-introduced my cats after almost three weeks of separation due to their weird, sudden hostility (and Snowy, the small female, taking longer than expected to recover). After some hissing and mutual tackling (and the determined efforts of Tony, the large male, to get his sister to accept his groveling submission while he still had some patience with her left), they're much of the way back to their former state of friendly coexistence.

Let's see if I can get back into something approaching a habit of posting...

So I went to visit my grandmother.

I love my grandmother.

She watches too much Fox News, however.

( Cut if you don't want to hear the 'Fair and Balanced' crazy )

"Fanwank" is a term to explain creative (and sometimes dubious) justifications or explanations fans come up with for inconsistencies in SF/F settings in the name of the beloved willing suspension of disbelief. It's not necessary to do, but it's sometimes fun.

"Antifanwank" is a term that has very few hits on Google, but has the intuitive opposite meaning - people falling over themselves to offer (sometimes dubious) arguments as to how something just can't work in a setting.

I bring this up because I liked Firefly (and Serenity more then I expected), and over on RPG.net, the matter of just how awful a single-system 'Verse with no FTL is has come up once again. While there're've been some intelligent critics of this impulse, there's still far too many flat denunciations of the concept by people with no standing to make such astronomical proclamations. Ah, well.

Personally, I find it more fun to play at making sense of something I enjoy than to fret about its impossibility. The Serenity flies at 1.0 * Speed_plot, and how they eat and breathe (and other science facts) only really matters when it does. If you don't like it, lump it. :)

Now, on the plus side, I did come across this lovely-looking "Official" map of the Verse. It's much like I reasoned after I thought about the opening Serenity monologue - it's a multi-star system. Throw in terraforming, modest constant-acceleration drives, and Bob is, indeed, your uncle who will let you run around in the Firefly setting... (OK, I just did a horrible thing to that poor metaphor.)

Anyone happen to have that map and have an opinion on how nice a poster it is? I might just pick that up...

I'm still recovering from a bad chest cold I got last week. I feel mostly OK now, aside from the interminable coughing; at least my chest and throat are no longer sore from coughing.

In sad (but not unexpected) news, my mother had to put her very elderly dog Muffin to sleep. We'd had Muffin, a schnauzer-terrier mix, in the family since before I went to college. In one of my happiest memories of the time, I woke up from a nap on the couch to find a little puppy deposited on my chest.

16 years later, she was still astonishingly active, but she'd gotten cancer that hadn't responded to treatment. Mom and her boyfriend had gotten her one surgery, but it was horribly rough on her. So, when it came back, they let her be comfortable until she wasn't, anymore. So, it was something we were all waiting for

I'd always sort of imagined that Muffin would die suddenly during the paroxysms of yipping joy she gave when someone she knew came to the door. She'd actually calmed down in the last few years, though, I could still tell she was happy to see me when I saw her last, the weekend before last. I'm glad I got to see her, then.

Here's what she looked from a handy snap-shot from a few Septembers back:



And taken at the same time, here her was more flash-adverse companion, a largish Yorkie named Gizmo. I'm afraid that I didn't mention his passing some months time back. His personality sadly changed when he got very old and his senses failed, but for most of his life, he was an equally sweet, friendly, and playful dog:



This would be a less warm post, but even when I first got the news about Muffin, I knew she'd lived a long and happy life. Both of them were good and well-loved dogs.

While looking for an old graphic posted in an issue of Wired in the mid-90s, I stumbled upon this page. I invite you to look and to gander, blink, and marvel. Then look at something current on it, say, this.

On one hand, the first is horrible. It's the sort of eye-straining design that's bad in print and worse on the web...but that horrible mash of colors triggers a surge of nostalgia and memory and thoughts. I refuse to call that good design or art, but damn, it had personality, and it surely left a mark in my brain.

On the other hand, the second is dull and over-cluttered...but almost cool, creamy balm after looking at the other too long (ie, any duration). But it's pedestrian. Corporate. Dry. Right, inner frosh geek of the past?

Oh, huh. My inner 18-year-old took a moment to oooh at the design and ask when Wired stopped hurting peoples' eyes. Now he's going on about a Newton that plays music and asking about whether it's using DAT tapes or some high-capacity mini-CD format. What is Twitter, who is JJ Abrams and why it's worth mentioning that he's guest-editor for an issue? What's a blog? iPhone? Netbook? ...Oh, crud, he's figured out how to open tabs. And now he's giddy about my DSL speed.

...Yeah, he's gonna be there awhile.

OK, I guess the future remains cool. Moving on!

Man, as I said in a thread on RPGnet, I do lurk far more than I post in most venues - even my own.

( But when I post, it turns out to have a paragraph-long footnote, so here's a cut. )

A coworker of my aunt has some kittens needing adoption, so I'm going to pick up one later this week, when I can arrange it around the major days, nights, and weekends craziness that's been work the last week and a half.

It's been a very long week, and I'm still in the office. So, some unrelated pokes at the world.

1) MoCo Loco, show me a home design that isn't meant to fit within in a packing container, be (supposedly) terribly eco-friendly and use few resources in construction, and yet somehow cost four times the price of my own home.

2) William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, please follow the example of Def Jam's farewell to "def" and give a long-overdue public funeral to the suffix "-punk". (No offense, Doc Blue. ;) )

3) Search Engine Optimization, pare yourself down to the 2-3% useful information you contain and shed the idiocy and outdated lore than convinces gullible people that if they engage in enough page-design voodoo, their tiny company's site can be the #1 Google result for every common English noun related to their business.

4) United States Postal Service, I know junk mail is the thing keeping you afloat (even more so than the first class mail monopoly), but when I got my mail yesterday...damn. Damn!

5) Blue laws - just die. (They're hardly a major strike against liberty, but it's annoying when you're not working exactly 9-to-5 and go to pick up some beer...and because it's 20 minutes past midnight, they can't legally sell you any, lest you go on a Fat Tire-fueled rampage on the two-block drive home.)

I don't drink much. I've liked some dessert wines, Irish creams, ouzo, ciders, and kinda liked a few no-name beers I've tried.

I am interested in expanding my palate, though; any recommendations, if you please? :)

Oof. I'd been fighting off a sore throat for the last couple of days, then started coughing my head off this evening. Being easy on the cough drops, since it's not a dry cough.

It's that time of year; I knew something had to get me.

Made me think of



Just less orange and more pingu.

But when they're lovingly crafted, custom-rendered bits of machinima using World of Warcraft models to make an action-packed story, I kinda have to share:


The Craft of War: BLIND from percula on Vimeo.


(I recommend clicking through to the Vimeo page to see it in full HD; it's worth it.)

...Or continued Hanukkah, or Solstice, Saturnalia, or Yule. :)

I've had a nasty few days leading up to today, but this afternoon and evening with family has made up for a lot of it.

I read Slashfood, which has a lot of ads aimed towards and comments from the crazier ends of food ideology. I don't bother reading the comments, and ignore most of the ads.

However, I struck by one that started "Control Diabetes the Natural Way..."

Isn't the natural way to handle that known as, er, dying?