I need a Friday Question category. But! The Friday Question is:
I finally have gotten into reading web comics after many years of resisting. I read several but I’m always looking for more. What are your favorite webcomics? Give me your recommendations!
One requirement, though: the webcomic must have an RSS feed.
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
I have had an extremely bad case of total creative block for several months now. I can’t write stories, I can’t write music, I can’t do anything. It’s pretty much blown. I can’t seem to shake it, either. I know the root cause but there’s not much I can do other than become a total hermit.
I am trying to bring down my horizons a little to get back in the swing of things. I’m focusing on 500-750 word bits, just a few paragraphs, to get me from being totally blocked to being mostly blocked. If you’re interested, here’s the first little bit. I’ll post them but I’ll keep them under cuts (LJ-only) so they can be easily skipped.
( A Fairy Battle )Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
Seth Godin on blogging – Seth Godin, Blogger: An Interview.
Also, the Press This! on Wordpress has now made me a thousand times more annoying than ever before.
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
“This helps explain the broader problem with American conservatism right now. It is less a movement than an industry. From Fox News to talk radio to conservative publishing houses, it has created an alternate and lucrative media reality that is worth a fortune to those able to exploit it.”
I totally and completely agree with Andrew Sullivan:
I’m a celebrity – get me out of here..
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
Maybe someone on my friend’s list can answer this:
I have a four year old with a super active imagination, lots of dolls and stuffies. She is starting to get the hang of consistent rules and rulesets. What games — board games and rpg games — do you recommend for a little poo?
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
I heard on the Interwebs through a series of tubes that GoogleOS based on Google Chrome is coming out in 2010! It will not only cause the collapse of Microsoft, but it will solve world hunger, put a man on Mars, get everyone to dress well, fix the economy, give us all universal health care AND look good! Also, it will be awesome.
I am a happy consumer of many a Google service, especially the fine search engine. I’ve been using it since it had a Stanford URL and remember, distinctly, evangelizing it when people went “Google what?” while heading off to Altavista. I have Gmail! I use Google Reader! I sometimes use Google Docs.
But the world is littered with Microsoft Killers. Linux has been THE Microsoft Killer any day now since 1994. I am still waiting. MacOS, which I love unto death, has a tiny market share compare to Windows. Solaris is not a desktop consumer OS despite several incarnations of Solaris on the Desktop.
And lo, yesterday, the Interwebs was rife with the coming of the great Google Messiah. A little digging turns up that it’s not a new operating system at all, it’s just yet another Linux variant that uses Chrome as a window manager designed to run on netbooks because we don’t have enough Linux variants with different window managers yet. Theoretically it will have better security (it will) and privacy (yes) but this is from riding on top of Linux which is naturally more secure and private than Windows. I am positive it will be great for netbooks. (Full disclosure: I have an HP Mini that runs Ubuntu.) It will be a pretty well-designed window manager. Lots of people will love it. It may even push Windows XP out of the default install netbook space, or lower its market share. But this is not going to get “Google to beat Microsoft” and I am not convinced Microsoft even cares about the netbook space.
Reality is a harsh mistress. Android isn’t beating the iPhone or Blackberry, and GoogleOS won’t destroy Microsoft in some David vs. Goliath — or, to the point, Goliath vs. Goliath — technical showdown.
So huzzah for another Linux distro! May it be like all the rest.
There was a nice rant at Naked Capitalism that is very much worth a read.
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
I rented Square Enix’s Last Remnant from Gamefly, a service I very highly recommend, to try it out because I currently am not playing some long JRPG at the moment on the Xbox360. I feel a little dirty because of all the systems I own, I love the Xbox360 the most, but there it is and I rented Last Remnant for it.
I don’t know what Square Enix is thinking any more. This is not the first game I sent back in disgust after 10 hours in. It’s worse than a bad game — it is a wasted game. The game starts great: interesting characters, an actual interesting plot (!!!), half decent voice acting, helpful subtitles, an interesting squad-based combat system, the potential for an interesting component system for upgrading weapons. When dealing with one squad with four guys, the game plays great. No real issues. I got up to 3 squads with 9 guys total and the game manifested draw-in problems, slow downs, stutters, long load times and an annoying camera that doesn’t allow you to see the field very well. And the component system turned out to be both confusing and just a reason to make the game longer by forcing grinding. Worse, there are boring sideplots that you have to play otherwise your guys are just too weak to continue with the main plot, and you must do these side quests constantly.
It went in my book from a 9/10 to about a 4/10, and I sent it back.
This is just fingernails on a chalkboard. Square’s game quality lately has really been slipping and now they are shipping stuff that isn’t even finished. There’s no reason that combat 10 hours in the game should manifest stutters and load-time issues. That’s trivially easy to catch during play testing. This is why we rent — if I would have bought the game I would have taken it back to the store.
Anyway, I started a Fallout 3 game instead. And got wasted by Raiders last night. Sigh.
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
I have a complaint about the American Revolution! Which is a strange sort of complaint, so perhaps it is not a complaint about the Revolution itself, which sort of happened a while ago, but about the history books that have sprung from it and which I consume in overly large doses like Fritos.
My complaint today has to do with the treatment of supporting cast, or more to the point, lack thereof! Most of the book on the actual war itself are very focused on His Excellency, George Washington, and how awesome he is. He’s always played by some very important leading man, like Brad Pitt or Christian Bale or Johnny Depp. Tall and good looking, an imposing red-haired figure at 45 in his blue coat with excellent buckles, how can you miss him?
But I contend his supporting cast is more awesome and my specific complaint is the total lack of coverage of Henry Knox who, when he does get to appear on screen, is played by a comedian or some second-string sidekick who can pull off a nebbishy bookseller from Boston who whips out the super-secret winning plan at the last moment.
Like most of the supporting cast of the American Revolution, he was awesome. Hauled cannons in sleds from Upstate New York to Boston in the middle of winter! Orchestrated the Crossing of the Delaware! (Someone had to come up with that plan.) A founder of the Society of the Cinnicinati, a bona-fide somewhat Secret Society! First Secretary of War and founded the US Navy! And he was such a horrible insane tyrant in his old age up in Maine he was the model for Col. Pynchon in Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables.
Yet he is relegated to being played by a Topher Grace in the history of the Revolution when the movie is made and the book adaptation released. Compared to Washington, who has all the best lines, who cares about a crazy Bostonian with a flair for coming up with completely implausible plans that somehow work?
My problem with the American Revolution in general and the history books in particular is the same problem I have with True Blood: I get tired of the Mary Sue main characters (although in history there are rarely Vampire boyfriends) and find the secondary cast so much more interesting. The secondary cast has all the color and flair! These main guys? Sure they can stop bullets and fly, but where’s the fun in that? The secondary cast is so cool it’s difficult to believe they weren’t just made up. By me.
I shake my fist in muted history-nerd rage.
(Yes, I’ve read Angel in the Whirlwind, and it has awesome parts about the secondary cast. McCullough’s 1776 has some nice in-depth on secondary characters on both sides of the conflict.)
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
It’s funny, watching a stodgy old regime lose power. The more power they lose, the more hard-line the regime in power becomes. The further they are willing to go. The more atrocities they are willing to commit. But, like Gordon Brown said this morning in response to the Supreme Leader’s sermon blaming the Iranian problems on Britain, there won’t be another Rwanda, there won’t be another massacre hidden in the dark. You can bring out the guns. You can bring out the tanks. But the Revolution will be Twittered and everyone will know. Instantly.
Like everyone else, I have been staring at the net trying to follow the little drips and drabs of information coming out of Iran. No one knows where this is going to go, or how it is going to end up. An election was stolen in the most hamfisted, 19th century manner and who knows how many elections until now have, themselves, been rigged. No national election can ever go forward there now, not ever again, not without people knowing absolutely that the system is rigged (unlike here where everyone just thinks it.) One thinks, at least they could have looked up on Wikipedia ways to steal an election before staging one so brazenly but this is a regime who is anti-technology, anti-modernity, and is sticking its heels in the ground and refusing to move forward into the 21st century. It was a poor attempt at a coup to change a nominal republic into a military junta with the veneer of a theocracy to make the pill go down easier.
In normal times, before The Internets, the regime could make a polite fiction of the electoral system and murder anyone who disagreed. But in a society full of cellphones with cameras, no atrocity goes without showing up on YouTube. Everyone who is subscribed to the right channels knows instantly. Polite fictions become ugly truths fast.
What has entertained me, as I insert myself into the story, is the cat and mouse game between the attempts to cut off communication to the global community and the clear and obvious leaks of information getting out. The world is full of groups quietly getting around their government’s oppressive filters to get to the outside. There was an entertaining op-ed piece from Nick Kristof in the NYTimes yesterday about how the Iranians are flooding servers set up exclusively for the Falun Gong. The Chinese are trying to keep the servers up, but there is a huge difference between 12 Chinese dissidents sending a few emails and 400,000 Iranians twittering. The servers don’t have capacity.
How do we, as a Free Society who wants to encourage Democracy, set up the equivalent of a Free Internet for those who need to get out? How do we ensure that people who need encrypted email and encrypted connections can get out to news and services on the outside? Information needs to get out, so how to make it happen? What to do? (If I had a server, I would have put up a proxy box by now…)
As of this morning, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s speech, which boiled down to “we hate foreigners who are doing this to us and my candidate won and if you don’t like it, my goons will beat you up,” was what was predicted he would say. In the face of cities full of protesters and rioters, and having to cling to a poor decision to save face or else admit his complacency in the coup, he could do no other. And now the protesters will be back in the streets. More twitter proxy servers than ever are out there up and humming and it will escalate. My fear is that this will all end in Tiananmen Square Redeux, that the hard-liners will have no choice but to make it clear this was a military coup and the republic part of “Islamic Republic” will be forever over, but that will be twittered and on Youtube, too, in all its glory. Where it will then be run on cable news…
And where that goes, no one knows. Welcome to the 21st century. We have beanies with propellers.
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
Hispanic!
Woman!
Poverty!
Projects!
Raised by Single Mother!
Appointed by George H.W. Bush!
Everything I have skimmed at the Usual Suspects — some which are suspiciously right-leaning even — have said conventional left-of-center judge, qualified, not too rocking of the boat, essentially a one-for-one swap.
What is fascinating me is the GOP response. They really ought to lay low, say (as John McCain did) “Elections have consequences,” and wait for the next one, since there undoubtedly will be a next one. This pick is an electoral minefield and with 59 Democrats in the Senate, she is going to get confirmed.
But will they lay low? Nah. What fun is that?
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
This weekend I got through…
- Vacuuming the house.
- Doing about seven hours of gardening. This included laying down 2 more bags of mulch, building an entire veggie garden (3×3 raised box), planting 36 vincas, 6 calibrochias, 1 overgrown lantana, 36 carrots, 3 cucumbers (which did not survive I don’t think), 2 tomatos, 2 jalapeno peppers, 2 basils, and 2 cilantro plants.
- Teaching myself enough of the basics of knitting to be truly dangerous.
- Knitting with a basic garter stitch, some boucle and some fun fur 4 feet of fuzzy, goofy scarf for Katie. I just can’t sit and watch a movie.
Meanwhile my parents came over and stripped 90% of the baby wallpaper off the walls in Katie’s room and put up chair rail in preparation of turning it from a nursery to a little girl’s room. This is sort of wimpy but the paper had to come down. Sooner or later, the bears and blocks must be upgraded to bright pink dancing fairies. (Sigh)
I am extremely sore.
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
I saw the Star Trek movie last night and it left me full of squee! I can honestly say I loved the movie.
I am really not a huge Star Wars fan, and I never got very deeply into Lord of the Rings, but Trek lives in a special place in my soul. I love Trek on a cosmic nerd level. I have the collection of technical readout books with ship schematics. I have Trek encyclopedias. I used to read terrible little Trek novels.
The new Star Trek movie reminded me strongly of Mark Millar’s run on Ultimate X-Men or Brian Michael Bendis of Ultimate Spider-Man. It’s not Star Trek, it’s Ultimate Star Trek in a Star Trek Ultimates universe where the characters are the same and the soul is the same but the characters have been updated to be more modern and drop an awful lot of accumulated baggage. It feels fresh and awesome while being the same core of Trek goodness.
Thus and therefore, the movie made me deeply happy. Specific shout-outs — I loved Karl Urban’s Leonard McCoy and Zachary Quinto’s Spock and Simon Pegg’s Scotty of which there was not screen time and John Cho’s Sulu. Like alot of people, I would happily watch the Spock and Sulu show with some added Snarky Uhura. Or watch this cast on a weekly Star Trek show. This cast? This is what I want out of a new Star Trek show.
Also, new Chekhov is adorable.
Without giving spoilers, I will say that I totally adored the movie and would love to see it again and I will watch the DVD when it comes out periodically for a Renewal of Purpose. Maybe even back to back with Wrath of Khan.
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
This is the first of my horrible robot zombie army. Don’t be taken in by the size in the picture! This guy is only about 4 inches tall. And he still needs screws in his head.
Yet still. He’ll take your face right off.
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
Yesterday, Katie stole my brand new copy of Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies and flipped through it three times! She was very interested in the pictures.
She was very happy to see the game has:
- Princesses
- Knights
- Skeletons
- Pirates! Especially pirates.
She was very concerned the game did not have:
- Goblins
She was quite adamant that the game would only work with goblins. Other than that, she declared it “interesting” and then headed off to play with other things.
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
Because I am a junky, I have been watching this “Arlen Spector Defects to the Democrats” thing. I think it’s interesting, not because I think he’ll ever vote differently than he has in the past, but because he stayed still politically but the goalposts of where the Republicans end and the Democrats begin moved.
Parties end. Parties die. The Whig party didn’t survive even though it had some pretty stalwart luminaries among its number — Daniel Webster, Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln. When the Whigs ran up against the ugly wall of slavery, many of its leaders changed parties to Republican (ie, Lincoln) or dropped out of politics entirely. The Whig party became more and more insular until it dried up and died. And it happened quickly.
Sometimes I feel like the credit crisis is taking our modern GOP with it. As several core views have been repudiated — removing regulation of the markets, starving the Government while forcing unfunded mandates, trying to fuse religion with state issues, etc. — the inner core has become more insular and less interested in reality. It feels like the GOP was heavily in debt and over-leveraged in all their policy-based investments and they, too, have discovered that too much debt is not, at the end of the day, a good thing and all their risk models were wrong. But the old model worked in the past, so much like the banks, they are clinging to them for all their worth and not realizing that they are totally insolvent. “Cut taxes!” doesn’t do you any good when people aren’t working and not paying taxes. Cut what taxes?
It becomes this inward deflationary political cycle. People flee and they join this weird new faction called the “Conservative Democrat” or cling to their Independent registrations. Primaries in most States are closed so the GOP is forced to put up crazier and crazier candidates to get that hard right cranky white guy core to vote just so the candidate can get trounced by those new Is and Conservative Ds in the general. I can’t see this getting better. Only 20% of registered voters now identify as a Republican. I’m pretty sure they all live in Utah.
The GOP is trotting out a “rebranding” effort. I want to shake them and scream, “It’s not about branding.”
This sort of brings it around to Arlen Spector who was, no doubt, told by the GOP kneebreakers to get in line or leave. He took a good hard look at this totally wackjob Club for Growth guy and the GOP kneebreakers and the slow dissolution of his Party and he did what the Whigs did in 1856-1860 — took a good, hard look at what was going on and said, “Nah, that’s okay. You can keep your wackjob, GOP. I’m good. Thanks.”
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
Eric is trying to persuade me that the Amazon Kindle is not the end of the Codex as we know it or the end of human civilization. He bought me a book to read, a collection of highly goofy essays called “Things I Learned from Women who Dumped Me,” and conned me into reading it. I’m 70% done with the book, but I figured I could post a little commentary now.
- Reading off the Kindle does not give me headaches. If I try to read a long piece on a computer screen, I get throbbing headaches, but I did not have this issue with the Kindle.
- It is light and easy to hold and easy to flip pages. Eventually hitting the next page button doesn’t feel any different than turning a page.
- The raft of buttons at the bottom means I can prop it up on my chest and see it clearly. This is, oddly, a major plus.
- Clicking it on and being at the page I left off is really nice — no lost bookmarks or fumbling around with pages or having to skim pages to figure out where I left off.
- The controls aren’t bad. Takes a bit to get used to it, but not bad.
- Nice and light. Weighs much less than a paperback.
However, not knowing what page I am on in relation to the book is a bit weird. I finally realized the bottom bar is the chapter marks. I also find going to the Table of Contents to be really kludgy.
My verdict on it is that reading a book off the Kindle feels very much like listening to an audio book off Audible, except reading it instead of listening to it. It will not work for dense histories or reference books or art books or anything that really requires tons of focus. It’s pretty much great for the newest Christopher Moore novel or an Elmore Leonard novel or a history book by Sarah Vowell but I shy away from anything serious, dense, or requiring an index or lists of citations.
In my mind, I’d treat the Kindle more like an Audible subscription. These are books you don’t really need to keep but they’re nice to sort of breeze through with 1/2 of the attention and half the brain. It’s great for read once, toss away paperbacks. I like it in an it’s okay to read outside sort of thing, but it’s not going to be parting me from my books or book collections any time soon.
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
Two completed projects:
1. A terrifying baby dragon! He’s terrifying. And made of yarn. He also sat for a side view to show off his awesome back spines, wings and tail! He was made of many individually crocheted pieces but he is very cute. I will do more dragons in the future! He is looking at me RIGHT NOW.
2. This fat-bottomed bag is made out of 2 skeins of green and brown Noro all the way from Japan and stuffed in luggage! The first picture does not do it justice so here it is, filled with bunnies. It is a bunny-bag ratio! This bag is basically exactly 2 skeins of Noro — no more, no less. I was convinced I was going to run out for a while. I could snazz up the bag with some ribbon and a pin, I think.
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
It’s been so long since the Conservatives in this country have really gotten up a good protest that they’ve gotten out of practice. I want to be 100% clear:
* You named your protest Tea Bagging without putting it into, say, google, just to check.
* Your protested what you felt was about wasteful spending by buying one million teabags. Did you plan on drinking one million cups of tea? At $4.97 for 100 Lipton tea bags, that’s $50K on not even consumed tea.
* You protested the government running up debt and selling it to China by buying tea bags made from tea (dust)… from China.
* When you went to actually protest by dumping 1,000,000 tea bags in DC it turned out you didn’t have a park permit to protest and thus you were put down by the Man in the form of the US Park Service. (What happened to the 1M tea bags?)
* … and you protested taxation with representation by pretending you were being taxed without representation. Sometimes even dressing up! You didn’t even look up the Boston Tea Party on Wikipedia did you.
Okay, guys? I am seriously not against you protesting at all. Don’t think that I am. I’m good with you venting this way. But I think you need to go back, socialize a bit, run a few web searches, and try this again. Maybe try a few groups on Meetup? Meet at a coffee shop? Start small?
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
I had some pink yarn, and I wanted to do an experiment with it, so on a whim I gave in and decided to make a stuffy pink elephant. However, the pink elephant was (much) larger than I expected him to be, so I ran out of the original color mid-ear. So she is part-pink and part-purple.
Here is the pink elephant staring right at you in a pink elephant sort of way. She also sat for a nice side portrait. Then I did a size compare between the pink elephant and an ANSI Standard 4 Year Old. As you can see, the elephant is relatively large compared to the 4 year old.
My biggest sin: I am being too conservative with the stuffing. It leaves the stuffy very squishy but too floppy.
Originally published at /project/multiplexer. You can comment here or there.
