I don't know ow many of you have already seen this, but I thought I should share when I saw it on Neil Gaiman's blog: nice to think there is something more we can do to help out Pratchett's cause (and they are pretty too!).

Black Phoenix Trading Post

Salt Lake City troopers?

I'll be there this weekend probably, since there's not much else to do now that school is done. I gotta wait for my brother to finish his finals though, so I'll have plenty of time to hang out. Might there be a meet or something? Anyone know if Howard will be out somewhere drawing where I can watch/stalk?

"About A Girl"
Nirvana

I need an easy friend
I do, With an ear to lend
I do, Think you fit this shoe
I do, But DO you have a clue?

I'll take advantage while
You hang me out to dry
But I can't see you every night. Free
...I do

I'm standing in your line
I do, Hope you have the time
I do, Pick up number two
I do, Keep a date with you

I take advantage while
You hang me out to dry
But I can't see you every night. Free


I need an easy friend
I do, With a ear to lend
I do, Think you fit this shoe
I do, But DO you have a clue?

I'll take advantage while
You hang me out to dry
But I can't see you every night,
no I can't see you every night...
free

I do...

It's 8 right now, forecast low of 2 (yes those are Fahrenheit temperatures). We also got some snow last night and some rain, which is all frozen now. Yup, winter is here.

So, you might as well snuggle up and tune into my radio show, tonight, 9 central, 10 eastern, 7 pacific. It runs for a solid three hours, and sometimes 4 or 5.

I think a teenager kinda sorta flirted with me in Wal-Mart today. If he was a day over 18, I'll eat my hat.

The really sad part is I saw him later with his mother, and then I realized why he looked so damn familiar. I know his older brother from high school, and I even went to his house once. His older brother was two years younger than me.

I feel like a dirty old woman. Seriously, wtf?

Still in a bad mood. Figure I'll probably have an outburst tonight or possibly tomorrow. I decided, however, that I'm going to enjoy the fact that the kiddo's speech and occupational therapy sessions were canceled today. It means we won't be out until after 4:30, which also means I won't be stressed to squeeze in dinner and homework (which includes reviewing for his sight word test) in a short span of time.

Things are tense right now, and I fear they're going to get worse, but there's little I can do about it at the moment.

The weather here has been really wonky. Yesterday it got up into the high 70s during the day, but today it's only gotten up into the mid-50s, and the lows tonight are predicted to go down into the mid-20s. It'd be nice of Nature would make up her mind, you know, with it being December and all.

I'm still working on that thing. Planning to add more words tonight if I can get in the proper mindset, though that's hard right now for reasons hinted at above.

I purchased a live Christmas tree the other day. Once I get it decorated, I'll take pictures and post them.

Ah, not much else to really discuss right now. I'll probably continue to make use of the emo filter just because I need to.

Researchers discover that classic authors have a "linguistic fingerprint"

How long until SpecOps-27, I wonder? :D

So outside my apartment is a twisted woody hillside of doom. A storm a year or three ago broke some branches, and one really cool covered in twisty awesome vines has been danging since then. We weakened it, killed the vines holding it up, and today, cut that thing down. I feel manly. I beat the freaking tree. *flex*

It's taken me a pretty good chunk of the last 24 hours to get things fixed on my computer. But finally I've gotten my color issues fixed. And my framerate death issues fixed.

The newest drivers totally borked CoH on my machine. I can't run in full screen if I want to alt-tab out. And I constantly alt-tab out of CoH. So I had to run in windowed mode, but from previous experience that killed my framerate. After giving up on rolling back to working drivers (which didn't work when I rolled bck to them), I tried windowed mode in the newest ones. It's a little weird losing that screenspace to the taskbar, but I'll live. Framerate is about the same as full screen.

The color thing was perplexing. Because it didn't appear until I rolled back to drivers from May, which worked before. The newest drivers have a setting to change the saturation that actually works: this setting didn't do jack squat in the previous version.

So I dunno what's up, but at least things are sorta working now.

I think "The troops are less likely to kill somebody accidentally if I get 'em ready to kill somebody on purpose" scans better.

Then again, I do know that anal-retentive has a hyphen...

No.

I think that about covers it.

It's getting to be that wonderful, terrible time of year. An early happy Christmas, Hanukkah, or plain old solstice to everyone. After all, who knows when the next time I update will be. *laughs*

I've been thinking about my journal a lot lately...thinking about it but never posting in it. Strange how that works. I have been trying (and mostly failing XDD) to get myself motivated to do more things in real life, so that's part of it. I guess I've also started to grow beyond the point that it's helpful for me to journal about stuff to make sense of it or decide what to do. My own thoughts are a bit more organized and I'm less inclined to panic...about some things anyway. ^_^;; So yeah. That's a good thing. But I should still check in more often than I do because you folks are awesome.

Thanksgiving was awesome this year. Especially the potatoes. And the pumpkin cookies. In general, my family rocks. =^.^= Oh, and Jim has gotten better and better at playing guitar. It's always fun to listen to him playing when we all get together. 'Tis prettyful.

So...what else is new? Jim and I watched season one of Leverage together, that's a good show. And it has Christian Kane, the guy who played Lindsey from Angel. He's fun. ^^

You know, I keep wondering if some day I should take some massage therapy classes. I seem to have something of a talent for it...I just had to figure out how to stop myself from aching quite so much constantly and it turns out it works for others too...but maybe it's only people in my family. I mean, it'd make sense we'd tend to have the same problems. Hmm.

Well...I'm here pretending everything is all right (which is pretty close to true, really), because it's more fun than thinking in circles about things I can't change. And eventually the pretending becomes the reality, because I'm learning more and more how to bounce back from things. Random drama like this is quick to pass if you don't indulge it. And I have no doubt at all that I made the right decision. The only problem with all that is I'm still going to miss my friends from the site where it all went down...but hopefully I'll be able to keep in touch with at least one of them. *crosses fingers* At any rate, being something of a mix but way more introverted than extroverted means I was becoming a very depressing person to be around, and I sure wasn't having any fun anymore.

Introverts, to over-simplify it, are not anti-social, but people who find other people tiring. I can't handle people wanting to interact with me and not giving me any time to recover. If someone forces me into that situation (thank goodness so few do) it always deteriorates until the only thing for me to do is leave and break all ties. *shakes head*

Am I the only one around here that feels that way? Just how much of an anomaly is this?

[ROBOKiTTY]RavenMagus: Your Mental Blast rips the mind of Drone for 28.66 points of psionic damage
[ROBOKiTTY]Rabid Metroid: [Shu Sefu] What, you think the Drones don't have minds of a sort?
[ROBOKiTTY]RavenMagus: Yes, I do think that
[ROBOKiTTY]Reisma: Beep
[ROBOKiTTY]RavenMagus: Them being drones and all
[ROBOKiTTY]Rabid Metroid: [Shu Sefu] Drones from a race that uses Psi-interactive tech.
[ROBOKiTTY]RavenMagus: ....Ur fase!
[ROBOKiTTY]Violent Green: [Tennyson Saber, 11] tHEY DO?
[ROBOKiTTY]Violent Green: [Tennyson Saber, 11] eek ...caps
[ROBOKiTTY]Rabid Metroid: [Shu Sefu] Also, remember how the Arachnos drones are based off of the Rikti drones? And Marshal Brass pretty much tells you that the Arachnos drones are controled by putting severed heads/brains in 'em.
[ROBOKiTTY]Reisma: Soylent Drones are Rikti
[ROBOKiTTY]Reisma: ... I wanna go fight Rikti
[ROBOKiTTY]Silverado: [L50 Dominator]: and I want a ponytail
[ROBOKiTTY]RavenMagus: I have a ponytail and I'm fighting Rikti
[ROBOKiTTY]Silverado: [L50 Dominator]: but we can't always get what we want
[ROBOKiTTY]RavenMagus: I must be in heaven?
[ROBOKiTTY]Atlantis1982: Argh! Finally got something I am content with for my scrapper on Freedom >.<
[ROBOKiTTY]Silverado: [L50 Dominator]: you must be
[ROBOKiTTY]Soul of Purity: \o/
[ROBOKiTTY]Atlantis1982: After 3-4 rerolls
[ROBOKiTTY]Violent Green: [Tennyson Saber, 11] ....*shuns Atlantis*
[ROBOKiTTY]Reisma: *cuts the tail off of Tark's donkey and gives it to Silver
[ROBOKiTTY]Silverado: [L50 Dominator]: :O
[ROBOKiTTY]Reisma: It's from, uh, a pony! Yeah
[ROBOKiTTY]Violent Green: [Tennyson Saber, 11] Pony tail, not donkey tail.
[ROBOKiTTY]Silverado: [L50 Dominator]: brb Bio break
[ROBOKiTTY]Silverado: [L50 Dominator]: that is, a break to write my toon's Bio
[ROBOKiTTY]Silverado: [L50 Dominator]: ^_^
[ROBOKiTTY]Reisma: Either way Green, it came off an ass
[ROBOKiTTY]Reisma: *puts on sunglasses*
[ROBOKiTTY]Silverado: [L50 Dominator]: wow, very cool!
[ROBOKiTTY]Soul of Purity: Smooth.
[ROBOKiTTY]Reisma: *music starts* YEAAAAHHHH
[ROBOKiTTY]Soul of Purity: *dies laughing*
[ROBOKiTTY]Violent Green: [Tennyson Saber, 11] Oo
[ROBOKiTTY]Silverado: [L50 Dominator]: hahahahaah
[ROBOKiTTY]Silverado: [L50 Dominator]: CSI
[ROBOKiTTY]Silverado: [L50 Dominator]: those are creative

(Trigger warning.)

ginmar has some very powerful commentary on rape and rape culture:

We're so completely incapable of respecting women that we don't realize the heroic odds against which women labor to lead full lives. And, God, I'm so damned sick of idiots who whine, "But don't you believe women should take basic precautions?! All it is is locking a door....or wearing pants....or not drinking....or not having a life......:" There's a sadism to the ever-increasing list of restrictions under which women must labor, and you can just bet if a woman dared to have some fun, and a man raped her, she'd get blamed---not the predator who's the boy next door, or the guy next cubicle, or the neighbor across the street.

And what simple precautions are those? The Army likes to cite a figure of----OMG! 52% of all rapes involve alcohol! But...what about the 48% that don't? Those are sober men raping sober women, but once that 52% shows up, nobody wants to hear about anything else. Women shouldn't have any fun at all, and if they do, they'll get punished. And everybody will gloat, because let's face it, that's what it is.

Here's the precautions that people think women should take: don't wear mini skirts, high heels, walk at night, keep your keys poked out between your fingers, don't park in ramps, don't wear overalls, long hair, ponytails, drink with guys, go to parties, and in short, don't have fun. Live in fear, ladies, is the message, and then people will gloat because, hey, somebody's got to suffer, and isn't that women are supposed to do? If you avoid getting raped, your life will be so miserable that you might as well be in purdah. But we're so much better than the Taliban, mind you!

And it's true. Whenever I travel anywhere, I'm paranoid I'll be approached by a stranger, nevermind I know that statistically I'm three times more likely to be raped by someone I know. However, even my mother and other female relatives will often remark that they worry when I travel to Atlanta, or when I go to one of the "big cities" alone. Never once have I heard my male friends warned to look over their shoulder, to walk with their keys ready to fend off an attacker, to keep an eye on a drink at a party lest someone slip something into it, etc. Nor do I hear them being told "Hey, by the way, don't rape women/let your friends rape women," but of course the consensus is that's just a silly notion because every man I know would never rape...except when they have. One of the "incidents" (I still won't call it rape) in my life happened because even though two people could see I was really unsure about what was going on, and that I was too shy and scared to tell the man no, they left me alone with him because they were getting uncomfortable. That's part of what is meant by turning the attention off what women can do to prevent rape and placing it on men and their friends.

Continuing with this theme, lupabitch linked to one post in a series of posts about rape by Fugitivus:

Women who are taught not to speak up too loudly or too forcefully or too adamantly or too demandingly are not going to shout “NO” at the top of their goddamn lungs just because some guy is getting uncomfortably close.

Women who are taught not to keep arguing are not going to keep saying “NO.”

Women who are taught that their needs and desires are not to be trusted, are fickle and wrong and are not to be interpreted by the woman herself, are not going to know how to argue with “but you liked kissing, I just thought…”

Women who are taught that physical confrontations make them look crazy will not start hitting, kicking, and screaming until it’s too late, if they do at all.

Women who are taught that a display of their emotional state will have them labeled hysterical and crazy (which is how their perception of events will be discounted) will not be willing to run from a room disheveled and screaming and crying.

And she goes on, and explains rape culture with very clear examples of precisely why it is women can never end rape by ourselves, and why there's more to ending rape than just telling us to say no or take self-defense classes. It requires social change, ones I'm saddened to say probably will never happen in my lifetime.

Just some food for thought.

I'm writing a (lengthy) essay for my literature class and I desperately need a Vetinari quote from Making Money, the one where Vetinari explains how he controls Ankh-Morpork. Something about what the people really want is for tomorrow to be a lot like today. I don't know the exact wording, and I only have the book in audio form, so I don't know the page number. Can anybody help me? I know I can get the rest of the stuff I need for the cite from amazon or something, I just need the exact quote an the page number.

Thanks!

I shed a manly tear when the Koenig Monster did its thing.

So why care for these petty obsessions
Your designer heart still beats with common blood
And what if you could have genetic perfection?
Would you change who you are if you could

Writing something for Pasha and Jodan (I'm at 4,010 words and nowhere near finished). Eventually I hope to fit it into the book I still dream of writing. Anyway, for some reason I'm finding Apocalyptica's music good for writing, and this song just happens to be very pretty, and it fits Pasha's voice quite well (especially with the way I've planned out their eventual story).

"Faraway Vol. 2 (Extended Version)
Apocalyptica feat. Linda Sundblad

There is something in the way
You're always somewhere else
Feelings have deserted me
To a point of no return
I don't believe in God
but I pray for you

Don't you slip away from me
It's you I live for
Don't you leave
Don't you slip away from me
I'm vulnerable to your love

Don't let them get you
Stay away from the sun
It's too bright for you
Your eyes getting blurry
Stay, I'm crying your name
I don't believe in God
But I pray for you

Don't you slip away from me
It's you I live for
Don't you leave no
Don't you slip away from me
I'm vulnerable to your love

There is something in the way
You're always somewhere else
Feelings have deserted me
To a point of no return
So the light fades out
And you're so close to losing

Don't you slip away from me
It's you I live for
Don't you leave no
Don't you slip away from me
I'm vulnerable to your love

Don't you slip away from me
It's you I live my life for
No, don't leave
Don't you slip away from me
I'm vulnerable to your love

Don't you slip away

http://limyaael.insanejournal.com/546512.html

More books I finished recently, this time reading for my dissertation.



George Meredith, One of Our Conquerors

A Victorian novel by one of the authors I’m studying, which I’d read before, but found much more satisfying this time. It’s the story of Victor Radnor, the “conqueror” who has made his fortune in business and now thinks he’s going to enter on a scene of social triumph by establishing himself in a new home, Lakelands, and running for Parliament. He’s tried to establish himself twice before, but each time his neighbors discovered he is not actually married to the woman, Nataly, who passes for his wife—Victor’s legal wife, Mrs. Burman, whom he abandoned, is still alive—and ran them out of the neighborhood. Victor is pushing for Lakelands despite Nataly’s fear that the same thing will happen again. He’s also trying to contract a prestigious marriage for their illegitimate daughter, Nesta (who doesn’t know she’s illegitimate), though Nataly also opposes this.

This is an incredibly subtle and cruel novel when it comes to the psychology of the characters. As Victor sees it, Nataly is hounded by the persecution of a world that can’t recognize true love when it sees it and by Mrs. Burman, but he’s the main aggressor. He tortures her to death, never realizing what’s happening. Nataly, who has gone along with his plans for years, cannot bring herself to make more than token protests. The silence stifles her, and so does her fear of what Nesta will say when she finds out the truth about her birth. When Nesta befriends a “fallen” woman named Judith Marsett, things become even worse for Nataly. She doesn’t want her daughter to suffer the same things she did, and her love for Nesta turns into an obsessive concern about Nesta’s “purity.”

As usual, Meredith spares none of his characters, except maybe Nesta, who is stronger and braver than her parents, and Dartrey Fenellan, Nesta’s love interest. (One of the interesting things about Meredith’s later novels is that he reverses the usual gender dynamic and turns the admirable men into love interests and rewards for his heroines, who he is really more interested in). Nesta’s growth toward truth and love and a feeling of kinship with the women her mother has tried to keep her away from is about the only beam of sunlight in a novel that’s otherwise absolutely radiant with despair; you watch the inevitable happening and you can’t do anything to stop it. There is a reason—besides his continual deep flaws of style and structure—that Meredith was considered in the 1890s, when this novel was published, a great but not a popular writer.





Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place

These are biographies of Charles Darwin—massive biographies of Darwin. They clock in at around 500 pages each. This is partially because Browne’s interested in establishing the historical and scientific context of Darwin’s work along with the facts about his life, and in analyzing his books, and in analyzing the books of other scientists, like T. H. Huxley and Charles Lyell, who supported Darwin, influenced him, and wrote in response to him. They take an awful lot of time to read, but they’re worth it. The first one covers his life up to about 1858, the year before the publication of The Origin of Species, and the second part is, of course, dominated by his publishing.

Browne makes a major point about Darwin’s correspondence and how his thousands upon thousands of letters helped him pull in information, assemble it, and recruit helpers who could pass along animal skins, feathers, observations, live animals, and books that further added to his pile of facts. She describes Darwin as a spider in the center of a web, and the metaphor is accurate. There is no way that Darwin could have gotten all of his observations by himself—especially since a large part of his life was spent in poor health and he couldn’t have traveled around the world to all the places he needed to see—but he could get, and use, them second-hand.

Browne also scatters the books with plenty of the fascinating little facts that help make biographies amusing. Darwin once stayed very still so that he could watch a wasp that was drinking out of his eye; he wrote indignantly as early as 1838 about how stupid people were to judge all animals by their own standards and how a bee would undoubtedly view humans as hopelessly backward in the instinct department; he liked trashy romance books that had pretty girls and happy endings; he was passionately interested in earthworms, molluscs, ants, beetles, and all sorts of “lesser creatures” that many people think of as neither interesting or likely to be so. He also got along well with his devout wife, Emma, and shared a full and busy life with her even though she knew full well that he couldn’t accept the existence of a benevolent God.

Incredibly rich books that depict an incredibly rich personality.





Anna K. Nardo, George Eliot’s Dialogue With John Milton

Nardo’s book, which was published in 2003, takes issue with one of the foundational ideas of feminist criticism about George Eliot: that she was dominated by her response to John Milton and never broke free of him. Instead, according to Nardo, Eliot did feel free to argue with Milton, to transform aspects of Paradise Lost into scenes in her own novels—scenes sometimes played straight and sometimes subverted—and to mock various legends that circulated about him.

The first chapter of this book is a long recapitulation of stories circulated about Milton in the 1700s and 1800s, stories that would have been familiar to Eliot’s audience and are almost lost to us now. The first was a story about Milton falling in love, either with an Italian singer or with a woman (probably Italian) who fell in love with him after seeing him asleep and whose face, barely seeing it, he mistook for an angel’s. (In some versions these are the same person; he supposedly met his admirer in Italy later and recognized her as the model of his “angel”). However, when he returned to England, he nobly gave up love in pursuit of the national ideal that led him to write Paradise Lost. The only trace of his lost love, according to this legend, is found in his version of Eve. The second story deals with Milton’s daughters, whom—depending on which author you read—either betrayed him by selling his books and tormenting him after he went blind, or who were “serviceable” to him and his art by recording his poetry and reading books in other languages, mainly Latin and Greek, that he taught them to scan but not comprehend. This story can be twisted to give different perspectives on female service to male creativity and female rebellion.

I’d known about a few of these resonances before, since I’ve been reading Eliot novels and criticism about Eliot for the past three years. But I hadn’t realized it went further than just the gentle mockery of Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch when she wishes that she could marry a Milton figure because she would know how to value him and appreciate his learning, unlike his daughters, whom she thinks were awful. I find criticism fascinating that digs up a whole perspective I didn’t realize was there and explains it clearly enough that I can understand it.

I learned today that Vor is making a comeback. As I've said to other people today, I need to finish painting my Neo-Soviet Empire troops so I can justify buying the new Neo-Sov models when they come out (or getting old ones from Ironwind Metals).

Heads-up, in case it wasn't already obvious: I am in the throes of paper-writing and finals prep, and I will be rather scarce. I was letting Sunday updates slide in November, and for a little while longer at least they'll have to keep sliding.

I should be back in action after the 16th or so, though. I have one post in the queue about despair, which I've been brooding over for weeks. Also I should probably get caught up on comment and things.

Oh, before I go, djinni uploaded tons of awesome icon requests! There's a Ritchie in there, eeeee.

And now, I really have to stitch up the disparate parts of this shortish paper. It's only due... tomorrow? Yeah. Yeah I'm smart like that.

Stay awesome, my friends.

I was looking to see what was new in the updates since I last grabbed MegaMek.

+ Bug 2881408: Bot trying DFA attacks with infantry units

XD

How does Lota afford Lota's rock'n'roll lifestyle?