Terrence Marks

Yes, there really was one. 0.o I watched it this evening.

It was ... weak.

Take the plot of the early episode "Dear Sexy Knickers," throw in a little of Woody Allen's Bananas, and set it all at a Spanish hotel, and you've got the whole thing. The pacing is slow, half the jokes stop making sense out of context, and you're left at the end wondering if maybe the show wasn't quite so good as you remember it being.

Oh well! Back to Netflix it goes.

-The Gneech

So I'm making Street Fighter characters for an upcoming Convention. And I'm breaking all my personal restrictions on the Player's Guide. I.e. exhibit #1 on why you need to playtest. This uses a White Wolf system for those wondering how the game is played.

I took all the banned stuff (from my banning) and made a character. It's a one shot humorous adventure after all. And remembered why I banned it.

Cartwheel kick for one willpower lets you attack a target equal to your move stat. Your move stat +3. So Mssr. Fromage maxed out Strength and Dexterity, as well as kick technique. Then added Light feet (+1 permanent move, spend a chi for +3 temp move), took savate as his class (+1 damage for kick attacks, only school with a damage bonus), 1 pts of animal hybrd (+1 physical, -1 mental and social trait), 1 pt of cybernetics (+1 physical, -1 social).

So for one Willpower the character does:

SPD +5 (not bad, but dex is maxed out)
Damage 12 (monstrous, +5 STR, +5 Kick, +1 base, +1 Savate)
Move 10 (monstrous; +12 if you spend a point of chi)
And Maitre attacks one per point of move. So for one WP that's 10 STR12 hits. That'll KO Bison in one attack. With 10 points of damage worth of overkill.
That's why SF Player's Guide is back on my banned list.

Oh look, half of our savings just paid for last month's car maintenance and repairs.

On the other hand, that means we didn't just put a ton of car maintenance charges onto our credit cards.

Definitely a step up in our financial picture.

-The Gneech

The new trilobite pins are in, and I've listed them in the "Company Store" pages. They're a lovely brassy stamped metal, and I'm quite delighted with them.  Of course, we've also got the squeezy wrench stress balls, and the new backpacks, and are very excited about making new stuff very soon. Making new stuff is fun! The stamped metal for the pins was an experiment, and we are very happy with the results. Next up, the Jäger insignia! My new plan for the backpacks, until I can afford to make them all at once, is to wait until we run out of the trilobites, then print up Jäger packs, then Wulfenbach, then back to the trilobite. Unless I come up with another design to add to the cycle...Hmm...

Today I slept far longer than I should have, I suspect that all these nights with less than adequate sleep finally hit me. That, or I'm coming down with the same thing alicebentley has. I'm kind of sore and exhausted, for no reason. I'm drinking a lot of water, and I'll have a go on the treadmill, that sometimes helps, believe it or not! Especially since I'm currently watching The Great Race while I walk, and I'm almost to the awesome pie fight scene...

This has been the month of cool people coming to Seattle, no question. Last night we met Bill Willingham for dinner. He moved away from Seattle about a thousand years ago, and we only get to see him if we're all at the same con, which hardly ever happens. We've been applauding his success from afar, but it's nice to get together and talk in person. (I've been saying that a lot lately. I guess we HAVE been lucky this month!) Anyway, he's been doing Fables, which is very good and extremely well-loved by a heck of a lot of comics readers indeed. Hooray for success!

We've been invited to a Steampunk birthday party / picnic. It's the perfect excuse to dress the kids up. Heh heh heh. If I manage anything good, I'll post pictures.

Also, Payne has built a Flea Circus. It's...amazing.  It's full of all kinds of clever fiddly things that he's come up with, and little finds that he's altered to suit the piece. I believe the cannon started out as a book end. Now, it actually shoots streams of confetti.  Here's a better close-up of the whole thing.

Aaaand, other great stuff from the con:

An autographed copy of Jennie Breeden's The Devil's Panties!  The webcomic with the best name ever!

Because Phil knows I can't resist a gorgeously designed book: Passport : Forgotten Kingdom of Imaginary Friends by Andrew Wilson. Also signed, with a little sketch. Eeeeee!

The head of Cthulhu, stuffed and mounted. (The Kid bought this with his allowance.)

"Actually," said Sharon, helping herself to another tortilla chip and salsa, "there's this French thing I've heard people say. "Shershay luh vim, or something like that. Supposedly it's this very clever and insightful thing to say, that makes people wink like they're on to some big secret, but I have no idea what it means."

"I think I've heard that," said Brigid. "I don't know what it means, either. Ask Greg. That's exactly the kind of pointless thing he would know. Hey Greg!"

Greg, eager to extract himself from conversation with Treville, bounded over to the table like a dog happy to see its owner. "You rang?"

"What does shershie luh fim mean?" Brigid asked.

"'Shershie luh...' Oh! You mean cherchez la femme?"

"Probably."

"It's French," said Greg.

"Thank you for that penetrating glimpse into the glaringly obvious."

Greg shrugged. "Well, it means 'look for the woman.' Sort of like our 'follow the money,' except it would be 'follow the woman.' The idea is that if two guys are having a fight or there's some other gigantic plastic hassle, it was probably stirred up by some troublemaking chick."

"Nice people, those French," said Sharon icily.

"Hey," said Greg, "I'm just telling you what it means, that doesn't mean I agree with it. I suppose you could go with Garry Trudeau's translation, which was 'Keep an eye peeled for broads.'"

"Even better," said Brigid.

"It was coined by Alexandre Dumas," said Greg, "of Three Musketeers fame. Evil women seem to be a favorite theme of his. O. Henry used it as a title for one of his stories, as well, which is probably where it came into popular parlance."

Sharon shook her head. "How do you know this stuff?" she asked.

Greg blinked. "Well, I ... uh ... you know, what's weird, I don't know how I know. I assume I must have read it somewhere."

"And yet," said Brigid, "this is a man who gets lost climbing the stairs to his own apartment."

"I didn't get lost!" Greg protested. "I just went up one flight too many."

"Case closed," said Brigid, and shooed him away.

-The Gneech

<-- previous B&G

For your present, here's today's Forgotten English (© Jeffrey Kacirk):

man-browed

Having hair growing between the eyebrows. Here it is deemed unlucky to meet a person thus marked, especially if the first one meets in the morning. Elsewhere it is a favourable omen. The term, I suppose, had been primarily applied to a woman as by this exuberance indicating something of a masculine character.

—John Jamieson's Etymological Scottish Dictionary, 1808

Egyptian Day

Among the Egyptians and our British ancestors, the 14th of May was the most unlucky day. The day of the week upon which that fell was deemed the most unfortunate, and nothing of consequence was done upon it. After the introduction of Christianity, Childermas Day took the place of the 14th of May, the superstition being transferred thither.

—Thomas Fosbroke's Encyclopedia of Antiquities, 1843

Robert Nares' Glossary of the Works of English Authors (1859) contained the curious expression, "honest as the skin between the brows," probably a reference to the above-mentioned superstition, which is found in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and elsewhere.

So, if you can change which day is unlucky simply by fiat, why not assign it to February 29th so it only shows up every four years? Or for that matter, why not set it for Octember the 300th?

-The Gneech

My cat is eating the window.

STUPID CAT.

This last weekend brought us the Emerald City Comicon, which I was unable to attend. But Phil was there, and he took the Large-size Kid with him for one day. (The Fun-size Kid stayed home with me. She is unruly and not yet fit for human company.) Aaron and Cristi Williams came to Seattle for the con and stayed with us for the weekend, which was lovely. It's always fun to see your friends at a con, but it's also nice to have some time to talk in a more relaxed setting. As Aaron put it while we were sitting around the living room: "I keep thinking someone is going to interrupt us to ask how much something costs." Look at Aaron's comics here!

Cool stuff that came home from the con:

There's a new collection of Dave Kellet's  Sheldon out: A Blizzard of Lizards. Remember: Sheldon comics heal the sick! (Well, they certainly helped ME feel better.)

The Kid came home with a great Smash Bros. BRAWL poster by Bleedman. I recognized the art right away, because I really REALLY like his Grim Tales comic, and if the official PowerPuff Girls cartoons were anything like his PowerPuff Girls Doujinshi, I'd actually watch them. Yes, it's copyright violation city, and I'm well aware that if somebody did this with our stuff, it would be a huge headache, and yet... I'd love to have this stuff in a book. I am a conflicted monkey, and make no excuses. Heh.

There were lots of other nifty con things, but I'll have to write about them later. I have to go out tonight so I should wrap this up.

But of course, you're all dying to know what I got for Mother's Day, right? (What? You're not? I will tell you anyway!) I got a soft, cuddly Necronomicon. My kid is a Good Boy Who Is Kind To His Mother.

From rowyn: The Difference

Am I privileged to have been encouraged to place my happiness and the people I love before my career and material wealth? Is he privileged to have been encouraged to pursue material wealth and judge his worth based on his financial success?

I don't like gender roles. I don't like one-size solutions. But I don't dislike them because they screw my gender. I dislike them because they screw people. Men and women. Anyone who doesn't fit in the right box gets shafted. Stay-at-home fathers and career women, male kindergartner teachers and female loan officers. Women who don't want children and men who cry when they're upset. Women who dress for comfort and men who want to be beautiful. It doesn't matter how you don't fit in, all that matters is you're swimming against a current of expectations. Silly expectations.

Well said. :)

-The Gneech

What we actually bought were two "Ben Ten" action figures. The receipt makes things sound so much more... interesting:




And a detail:

Most of the public entries in my journal will be workshop or motorcycle related from this point on. No worries!

Snagged from blacktigr. I absolutely loathe this song ... except ... somehow ... Shirley Bassey still manages to make it awesome.



-The Gneech

Just saw it. Loved it. Loved it. LOVED IT. LOVED IT! Absolutely five stars without reservation. They could not have made a better Speed Racer movie, or at least if it could be done, I don't know how.

And don't let the reviews fool you — this is a gutsy movie.

"Gneech," you may be saying to yourself, "what the heck do you mean 'gutsy'? Every review I've read talks about the simplistic plot and almost retro sense of do-gooderism."

That's it exactly! It's gutsy because, knowing full well they'd be sneered and spat at by the too-hip-for-the-room types — including many of their own fans — the Wachowski bros. stuck to Speed Racer. They didn't try to "make it cool," they didn't try to "reinvent it for modern audiences," heck, they didn't even get rid of the kitschy names like "Snake Oiler" and "Inspector Detector." Not only did they leave it there, they reveled in it. They made a Speed Racer movie that really looked, felt, and sounded like Speed Racer.

The wild, over-the-top effects and psychedelic colors are absolutely part of that. To see what I mean, first watch the original Speed Racer opening credits. In particular, watch the backgrounds, the distinctive art style, etc. Then watch the movie music video and compare. Yes, it's a little more frenetic and go-all-over-the-placey — but not that much. Not really. Speed Racer the movie, is a movie of what the world would be like, if Speed Racer wasn't a cartoon, you see what I mean? It's a brilliant tour-de-force.

What drives me most nuts about the negative reviews is that they keep sneering at Speed Racer for not being all these things they think it should be, as if they're deliberately ignoring both what it is, and what it's intended to be. The Speed Racer TV show was a boy's adventure tale, aimed straight at the 8-year-old heart and mind, with a few winks for any grownups (or older siblings) who might happen to be watching. That doesn't mean it's dumb, and frankly it's insulting to say so. It does mean that a direct, straight-faced approach to both narrative and characterization is what's called for, and it colors what themes your work needs to deal with.

"What's important in life?"

"How do I succeed? How do I prevail in a competitive world?"

"How do I relate to my family?"

"How do I know right from wrong?"

"How do I act on that knowledge when doing the right thing is hard or scary?"

These are important things for boys to learn, and these are the things that Speed Racer has always been about — the fast cars and explosions is just a framework, something to get the kid's blood pumping and past the "blah blah blah" reflex. (As an aside, the "blah blah blah" scene and Speed's trip into fantasy land is absolutely brilliant and absolutely spot on. I myself have woken up to a classroom staring at me because I was making my own sound effects while I drew. It happens!)

I don't know what exactly the other reviewers were wanting from it, other than a handy scratching post. The general attitude seems to be, "It could have been a good movie if it wasn't Speed Racer." Well, to them I cordially say, "Bite me, it's fun." If you're given something with as strong an identity as Speed Racer, dammit, you GO with it! (So to speak.) You put in corny gangsters, and Spridle and Chim-Chim doing candy raids and stowing away in the trunk, and Racer X being badass and smirking the whole time. Because to do anything else would be to get it totally wrong.

I'm so very, very glad to say, the Wachowskis got it totally right.

Thanks, guys. :) I've been waiting 35 years for this movie, and you didn't disappoint me. :)

-The Gneech

PS: Spridle and Chim-Chim are totally likeable. That is an impressive feat.

...thank goodness i've stumbled across you guys.  two weeks till graduation for this girl.... two weeks until i can sit for the NCLEX and get my lpn.

mind if i vent? 

no?

good.

i did my final clinical rotation at a ltcf, precepting under the most amazing rn i've run across in my career.  i was a nurses aide for a few years before taking the lpn plunge, i was.

alright, so here is my beef...

dr S, when you make it a point to come in a see a patient, thank you.  taking time out of your busy day to see someone really demonstrates that you care about the quality of life for your patients. 

however...

when you tell a patient that you are going to give them an injection of solu-medrol, then decide against it, please do not just waltz out of the facility without telling anyone!  that leaves us with a patient that is still in pain, full of questions, and angry that "that doctor said he would help me!".  this means that we have to call you _again_ to get an order for more pain medication _again_, and the patient's relief is delayed.  it would have only taken a moment to let us know that you had changed your mind, then scribbled an order for an alternative treatment.

and don't act all upset because we called!  you left a patient in distress!  what did you expect?!

~sighs~

okay, while it might seem petty compared to some of the horror stories i've read from you guys, there it is.  i'm looking forward to being out there for real, because, warts and all, i love the field.

thanks for listening.

Got Charles back. Tricked him into watching Alice in Wonderland.

This version.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074113/

Every year Houston celebrates general silliness with the artcar parade. People turn cars into works of art they have a big parade. This year featured cars turned into phones, clown shoes, pirate ships, lips, books, and other general nonsense. It's a happy time, it's a fun time. Something you bring the family to and laugh. The last parade was Saturday and there was much merry making.

Yesterday a drunk driver killed the organizer of the art car parade. Pinned him and a friend against the wall. Another friend was knocked clear of the accident. This probably won't affect next year's parade, but there's a guy sitting in jail right now with a city of 4 million people looking to kick his ass.

Squeezy Wrenches, they are here! Tra-la-la-la! (That's WRENCHES, you naughty people.) These cute little "stress balls" from Transylvania Polygnostic are a huge hit with my kids--they're great for bonking each other over the head.

The trilobite pins shipped today, so we expect to have them here and for sale by the end of the week.

I plan to spend the rest of the day re-designing the heart-shaped gear and Jager symbol so we can do patches and pins. There are 10,000 other things I should be doing, but... I'm tired. I didn't get much sleep this weekend, we had some friends staying with us, and we don't get to see them very often, so we ended up staying up late talking a lot.

To Work, and Beyond!

From goodluckfox: Jonathan Zittrain: The Future of the Internet — and How To Stop It


WARNING: Over an hour. But very interesting, particularly if you're an internet professional (like me).

From Arts & Letters Daily:

Newsweek: Faulty Powers

Despite the fact that humans have been known to be eaten by bears, sharks and assorted other carnivores, we love to place ourselves at the top of the food chain. And, despite our unwavering conviction that we are smarter than the computers we invented, members of our species still rob banks with their faces wrapped in duct tape and leave copies of their resumes at the scene of the crime. Six percent of sky-diving fatalities occur due to a failure to remember to pull the ripcord, hundreds of millions of dollars are sent abroad in response to shockingly unbelievable e-mails from displaced African royalty and nobody knows what Eliot Spitzer was thinking.

Are these simply examples of a few subpar minds amongst our general brilliance? Or do all human minds work not so much like computers but as Rube Goldberg machines capable of both brilliance and unbelievable stupidity? In his new book, "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind," New York University professor Gary Marcus uses evolutionary psychology to explore the development of that "clumsy, cobbled-together contraption" we call a brain and to answer such puzzling questions as, "Why do half of all Americans believe in ghosts?" and "How can 4 million people believe they were once abducted by aliens?"

(If this seems familiar, I linked to an essay by the author of Kluge last week, in which he talked about the basic premise of the book.)

The New Republic: The Stupidity of Dignity — Conservative Bioethics' Latest, Most Dangerous Ploy

Kass has a problem not just with longevity and health but with the modern conception of freedom. There is a "mortal danger," he writes, in the notion "that a person has a right over his body, a right that allows him to do whatever he wants to do with it." He is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties. Sometimes his fixation on dignity takes him right off the deep end:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

And, in 2001, this man, whose pro-death, anti-freedom views put him well outside the American mainstream, became the President's adviser on bioethics--a position from which he convinced the president to outlaw federally funded research that used new stem-cell lines. In his speech announcing the stem-cell policy, Bush invited Kass to form the Council. Kass packed it with conservative scholars and pundits, advocates of religious (particularly Catholic) principles in the public sphere, and writers with a paper trail of skittishness toward biomedical advances, together with a smattering of scientists (mostly with a reputation for being religious or politically conservative). After several members opposed Kass on embryonic stem-cell research, on therapeutic cloning (which Kass was in favor of criminalizing), and on the distortions of science that kept finding their way into Council reports, Kass fired two of them (biologist Elizabeth Blackburn and philosopher William May) and replaced them with Christian-affiliated scholars.

-The Gneech

Happy birthday to nicodemusrat! And happy belated birthday (yesterday) to russ_arulo!

Today's Forgotten English is kinda boring, so instead have today's Sinfest!



-The Gneech

Spent this weekend with lythandra's family, wishing mom-in-law happy Mother's Day and generally being good relations. Alas, that means that we didn't get to see Speed Racer or Forbidden Kingdom, making the possibility of seeing the latter while it's still in the theaters very shaky. But I'd still like to if we can arrange it.

I'll rant about summer movies sometime. In a nutshell, they always show up in a six-week period during which I'm usually way too busy to see them! And they're usually the ones I most want to see, too, the bastards. STAY IN THE THEATERS FOR HALF A MINUTE, DAMN YOU!

*ahem* Sorry about that. Anyway, moving on.

One thing we did see was Mister Bean's Holiday, which I quite enjoyed. :) Mister Bean can be an iffy thing for me, sometimes wading too far into gross-out or mean-spiritedness, but fortunately this particular outing was mostly free of both. It really felt like simply a longer, bigger-budgeted version of one of the good episodes from the TV series, which I mean in the best way possible. Prior Mister Bean experience is not necessary, although it might make some of the gags a shade deeper. It was definitely better than Bean, which I found very disappointing. Still not as good as Black Adder, but you can't have everything.

And, speaking of Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis, on a recent Barnes & Noble binge I picked up the screenplay of Four Weddings and a Funeral, which I've been reading over the past week and finished on the trip. Reading screenplays is not usually worth the effort per se -- after all they tend to be very short and be almost nothing but lines + minimal stage direction. But for films I really like, I enjoy reading them for the occasional bits of insight I can glean from the character descriptions and/or character dialog that I just can't make out from the soundtrack, as well as any writers' commentary that may be added to thicken the book up. In this particular case there is an intro by Richard Curtis in which he talks about the screenwriting process, as well as an appendix containing scenes that got cut before filming, trailers that were written but never produced, and a discussion of changes title went through and alternate "less-sweary, more acceptable to the American television audience" versions of various scenes. (FWIW, I've never seen these alternate scenes, but then I only ever watched the movie on "Bugger! Bugger! Bugger!"-filled DVD.)

We also listened to an audiobook version of Jeeves and the Tie That Binds, narrated by a nasty, supercilious-sounding reader whose name escapes me but who made just about everybody sound like Igor from Count Duckula in his sneerier moments. Ugh. Good book, bad reader. Alas!

When we got home, we chilled out with grilled cheese sandwiches and Zatoichi vs. Yojimbo, which was very interesting, if a bit hard to follow, but had Toshiro Mifune who is always worth the price of admission.

So, in all, not a bad weekend. But now I've got a lot of work ahead of me in the week to come! So goodnight, everyone, and have an awesome tomorrow.

-The Gneech