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Below are the most recent 16 friends' journal entries.
| Thursday, December 17th, 2009 |
childe
|
12:19p |
The Simpsons Movie
 When I was a kid, I had quite a selection of Simpsons t-shirts. Bartman, Don't have a cow, and a couple of others. This series has been around since Detroit's channel 50 joined the then-fledgeling Fox network. I remember sitting down and watching the first episode in my parents' family room. Circa In Living Color, if I'm not mistaken. That said, even I can have my Simpsons tank fill up. The movie was pretty much a Simpsons episode, but longer and being given full reign on screwing with the setting. It was entertaining, and for that I give it three stars. Current Music: Dido - Who Makes You Feel - Life for Rent |
childe
|
12:10p |
28 Weeks Later
 What? Dr. Rush from Stargate: Universe? What're you doing here? *shakes head* Getting chased by rage zombies, it looks like. This one seemed like a sequel for sequel's sake, nothing more. It was entertaining, the acting was good, and there were two shiny ideas thrown in for good measure - carriers (infected, but no symptoms) and parental instincts vs. TEH RAGEZ0RZ. All the characters that I wanted to see survive didn't, and then they go to France. Three stars. Current Music: REM - Endgame [Instrumental] - Out of Time |
| Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 |
atdt1991
|
2:50p |
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| Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 |
childe
|
9:50p |
Horoscopes
9 December 2009 TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The evidence is incontrovertible: You have definitely acquired more power in 2009. Whether that means you are now sitting in a corner office bossing around a gaggle of subordinates, I don't know. What I do know is that you are in greater charge of your own destiny. You know yourself much better, and are smarter about providing yourself with what you need, when you need it. You have gained access to enormous new reserves of willpower, in part by harnessing the energy of your obsessive tendencies. Blind fate just doesn't have the same control over your life as it used to. More than ever before, you're making decisions based on what's really good for you rather than on your unconscious compulsions. -- 16 December 2009 TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Scientists say that pretty much everywhere you go on this planet, you are always within three feet of a spider. That will be an especially useful and colorful truth for you to keep in mind during 2010. Hopefully it'll inspire you to take maximum advantage of your own spider-like potentials. It's going to be web-spinning time, Taurus: an excellent phase in your long-term life cycle to weave an extended network -- with you at the hub -- that will help you catch an abundance of the resources you need. |
| Monday, December 14th, 2009 |
atdt1991
|
12:36p |
Nice Guys redux
After a friend posted on FB about "nice guys", I was going to write a post about what a misnomer it was, and how being self-absorbed, sycophantic and unable to empathize doesn't make you nice, it makes you an asshole on par with the bad attitude boys... even if you open doors. However, then I read a link to a "Nice Guys" post, and I wanted to put down my feelings about that. It starts out really well, pointing out the differences between men who are, in her estimation, genuinely nice and "Nice Guys" as a category - people who use being nice, in their terms, as a badge of entrance to a woman's naughty bits, and are outraged that someone could use any other factor for dating. I am totally behind her on the idea that "Nice Guys" like these define their rejection by the "object" of their desire in terms of how messed up the girl/guy is, how they prefer a bad boy who will beat or abuse them vs their "Nice Guy" selves. Missing the point that disrespecting a person's right to choose their partner is the opposite of nice. However, it quickly devolves into a rambling 3-page diatribe that I'm pretty uncomfortable with. She uses three pages to lay out the "Nice Guy" in general, with lots of "they tend to not clean themselves, because they think being nice should over-ride being clean" (a very unlikely reason for a person's hygiene issues). As she delves into the nitty-gritty of sarcastic responses, inability to pick up socks, and the need for a "sympathy fuck", I can't help but think that she's basing her definition on one person who was particularly terrible to her. And he was clearly a total tool, but I think she's conflating a few different types of people that (surprise) sometimes Venn diagram together. Not every "Nice Guy" can't dress themselves or bathe, and they don't all use the same tactics. Not every "Nice Guy" is directionless. All that said, I did enjoy her list of suggestions for people who think they might fall into that "Nice Guy" category. Most of them boil down to this: Stop assuming another person doesn't have a perfectly valid and just right to their own opinions. This was particularly good: "Don't for the love of pete be Mr. Bad Touch. If she just squirmed over a few inches, it's not because she wants you to close the distance.
Flirting without expecting a return on investment is ok. Active seduction when there are clear signs that it is welcome is ok. Trying to constantly slip in "innocent" gropes, innuendo, kisses, or anything else when she's not interested is the adult equivalent of "are we there yet? are we there yet? how about now? how about now?"" When she said "You might think she was oversensitive, but you have no idea what it is like to be a woman in a world where we have to deal with unwelcome aggressive attention all the time" I wanted to say back, "That's totally true, but even moreso, you just plain don't know what it is like to be that person. Even if you somehow grok the former, a person's life is way complicated - don't assume you know how they should react to you." The most useful part of her post for all people, Nice Guy or not, was this: Bring something to the table besides basic human decency. I'm not talking about money. Be responsible for yourself, your life, and your happiness. Have good things in your life that you want to share with a wonderful woman, rather than expecting her to fill the holes in your life. EDIT: Pleased to see that in her redux (seriously, is the word that common?) she said exactly that, that it was a rant that came from a particularly bad experience. It's better for that context. |
| Friday, December 11th, 2009 |
atdt1991
|
1:08p |
How do you feel about privacy?
For one, do you take measures to protect it?Some people I know ask people not to use their last name online. Other people guard their web servers from being trolled or scanned. Some people use different names at all of their social media sites. Personally, I turned off search engine access to my LJ and I don't usually post my full name and my most common user ID together. Otherwise, I do nothing. Second, how effective do you think you are at maintaining the privacy online that you are comfortable with?As a favor to my more private friends, even though my picasa gallery conveniently recognizes the faces of the hundreds of people in my gallery, I do not allow it to make that public. I do not expect other people to do the same for me. Partly, I am protected by my rather common name. When you go to IMDB, you have to hit the sixth or seventh iteration before you find me, and that's just my field. Now that the Ved Bok film company site doesn't exist online (which I worked so hard to make popular on google), you can't find me in google, under my name, for multiple pages, which I think is sufficient. Frankly, I think what privacy I have is solely related to my irrelevancy for most people. I'm not particularly worried about it. I treasure the ability (such as we have) to make some things private if I want, but I also enjoy not needing it. I am resting on the comfort of who I am. As a reasonably liberal-minded person in a creative industry, I have some flexibility. I don't make public incriminating photos (except in the embarrassingly geeky way), and my online persona, in my belief, is identical to who I am in real life. Perhaps slightly more pedantic. I'm a white male nigh-married professional with no major disabilities, unsurprising hobbies and political beliefs for my career - I have the luxury of being myself and not worrying too much about what a future employer might find. Of course I'm also idealistic enough to believe that ANY job in which I have to completely bury who I am in an utter falseness will A) totally suck, and B) never work out. I don't need to chat about who I am to the people I work for, but I don't hide it, either, and I'm not very good at lying anymore. Ultimately, I think that everything is available to anyone willing to search long enough or pay enough for it. I think any actual privacy we have is the illusion afforded to us by our irrelevancy to the vast majority of the population, which is why we know every tiny little detail about famous people. They've lost the only real protection we have. How is it with you? |
childe
|
12:43p |
Fresh off the presses
 It's been three and a half years since I put anything to print. Too long. A couple of months ago, I decided to change that. I gathered together the Dr. Celestine's Carnival of Souls posts that I'd written about Todd. I went over them again, editing out typos and considering whether I should keep or omit the song lyrics. I contacted Gil to pitch my idea to him. No profit coming to me, novella will be at cost, POD through Lulu.com, and your copyright and credit will be there for the setting and the Carnival's characters. He was so geeked about it, he put together an incredible cover. I refined the document in OpenOffice to include a gutter in the margins, slogged through the cover creation process (three different editing applets to get what I want!), and created a wonderfully melodramatic blurb for the item listing page. And then I published it. It's available now. Right here. Sixty-five pages of dark modern fantasy novella goodness. So, I come to you guys with a conundrum. Sure, I'll be bringing copies to Penguicon to sell and to sign. I'll sign any that people bring to me, too. Since it's material that's been available on the internet for a while, and it's non-profit, I'm thinking that a release signing might not be the way to go. Should I just say order your copy now and bring it to me at Penguicon? Should I chuck caution to the wind and hold a release signing? Or should I get my pen back in contact with the page writing the sequel? If it tickles your fancy, go and buy one! At under US$6.00, you can't beat it. If you want to read it first, all of the posts are linked to in order here. Current Mood: accomplishedCurrent Music: Burnt Flowers Fallen - Type O Negative - October Rust |
atdt1991
|
10:17a |
Re: an email this morning:
Who in the world is taking their kid to Buffalo Wild Wings to see santa? "If you're a good girl, I'll leave drumsticks in your stocking!" (Don't make that weird. ...weirder.) |
| Thursday, December 10th, 2009 |
atdt1991
|
11:11a |
|
atdt1991
|
10:59a |
Okay, it's no surprise that I've drunk the Google kool-aid.
... I mean, I definitely see the flaws in some of the sparse code and in keeping all my data in one place... but generally speaking, I don't care. It's too useful for me to care. Having data that cross-relates is too cool for me to worry about my privacy, which I think is an illusion anyway. I have to laugh at my reactions when I ask someone for their email address and they give me a different web-based email. My first reaction is to think, "Haven't they used gmail? Clearly they've just been holding onto this yahoo account for years." *laugh* It honestly doesn't occur to me (at first) that they might have partaken from the google spread, found it wanting, and returned to something they like better. Mmmm, delicious kool-aid. |
| Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 |
childe
|
8:28p |
Thoughts From the Day Job
Holy wow, someone gets it. Horoscope for 2 Dec 2009:
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): "Dear Rob: Last night my son and I were star- gazing. When we focused on the constellation Cassiopeia, an owl started hooting. Then a brilliant shooting star zipped by as a huge bat flew right over our heads. Was this a bad omen? Bats are creepy -- associated with vampires. And in Greek mythology Cassiopeia got divine punishment because she bragged that she and her daughter were more beautiful than the sea god's daughters. But I don't know, maybe this blast of odd events was a good omen. Owls are symbols of wisdom and shooting stars are lucky, right? What do you think? Are we blessed or cursed? -Spooked Taurus." Dear Spooked: The question of whether it's good or bad luck is irrelevant. Here's what's important: You Tauruses are in a phase when the hidden workings of things will be shown to you -- the mysterious magic that's always bubbling below the surface but that is usually not visible.
First revision of the cover for the Todd stories is AWESOME. I shall nibble on my fingernails during its resizing. Current Mood: crazy |
droewyn
|
6:44a |
Shopping
I'm jumping on the e-reader bandwagon, sort of reluctantly. I love dead-tree books. I love the way they feel in your hands. I love the way they smell. I love the small differences in font between publishers. I love occasionally glancing at the cover art, or re-reading the summary on the back for the umpteenth time. I just love the whole book-reading experience. Having my collection take up significant portions of three rooms in a not-small house, on the other hand, or being on an eternal quest to find stronger and more efficient shelves? Not so much. There's something incredibly seductive about the idea of having my entire library in my purse. Not to mention my basic geek love of new devices. I haven't purchased music on a physical medium in years; isn't it time to join the Century of the Anchovy? So, yeah. Now the question becomes, which e-reader to get? Sony: I glanced at the specs, but this unit really isn't in the running at all. Sony has a long history of both using exclusive proprietary formats, and dropping support for such when the gizmo in question doesn't sell because nobody wants to be stuck using one brand's exclusive proprietary format (I'm looking at you, mini-discs and UMDs...). Neither Amazon nor Barnes and Noble are going anywhere, but Sony is not a bookseller. Next! Dozen or so off-brand e-readers from companies I've never heard of: Didn't even bother glancing at the specs. Same arguments as Sony, only more so. Next! Really, it comes down to the Kindle vs. the Nook. I've had the opportunity to physically handle both of them, and I've gone over the spec sheets minutely. And it's close. I like Kindle's physical keyboard vs. touch-screen. Nook's color screen lets me look at the cover art. Kindle has a web browser and text-to-speech. Nook has forward and back buttons on both sides of the unit. Kindle lets you assign multiple units to the same account. Nook has the lending feature. Kindle's battery lasts longer. Nook recognizes more file formats, and has expandable space via the SD slot. Kindle's books are cheaper. If it weren't for the expandability, I think I'd go with the Kindle. But when it comes to storage More is more, and I want to buy an e-reader now, not when Amazon catches up with the competition. That SD slot gives me a maximum of 16 additional GB, so as long as I don't drop the unit in the bathtub or anything, I won't need to upgrade the reader for a loooong time. Nook it is. |
| Monday, December 7th, 2009 |
childe
|
10:11p |
Thoughts From the Day Job
This is what a Systems Administrator is. This is what a Web Designer is. Just sayin'. Already excited about this year's PenguiCon. It probably doesn't hurt that Nikki's presenting at Convocation this year. I'm getting a contact convention buzz! |
atdt1991
|
3:31p |
|
droewyn
|
6:15a |
Dear 2009, Please go die in a fire. With utmost sincerity, Me Current Mood:  out of cope |
| Friday, December 4th, 2009 |
childe
|
11:17p |
Thoughts From the Day Job
Entry-by-entry data verification and updating on a 4,000+ entry MySQL table appeals to my anal retentive nature. phpmyadmin's search feature, coupled with its ability to edit multiple rows at once, has sped up my task incredibly. Lunchtime at McD's in Potterville shows a horrifying number of High School Students. Why aren't they at the diner downtown? Oregon, why do your town names make me fear you? |
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