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Below are the 25 most recent friends journal entries:

November 9th, 2009
05:08 pm bonerici [Link]	gear review here: http://www.slashgear.com/nanovision-mimo-720-s-touchscreen-display-review-2053124/ this one is super cute, it's the nanovision mimo usb monitor. the 720s is the touch screen version which according to cnet doesn't actually work right. still for under $200 you can't really beat it. (Leave a comment)
08:34 am theferrett [Link]	Squish I am terrified of spiders. My wife is terrified by house centipedes. This morning, we found a house centipede lurking over the TV, so large and furry it looked like a gigantic eyebrow. I squashed it. It was very fat. House centipedes hunt spiders. And it occurred to me that I'd seen no spiders for the past six months. I don't want to be rooting for the centipedes. I'd rather we had no creepy-crawlies. But if we have to have one dominant, I'd rather it be the one that doesn't make me shriek like a small child. Alas, this puts me at odds with Gini, the bold spider-killer. Her position is being rendered obsolete by walking ribcages that make her shriek. In truth, Gini is much cuddlier than a centipede, though less effective. But I'm not sure I can have both in the same house. Posted via LiveJournal.app. Tags: via ljapp (41 comments \| Leave a comment)
05:59 am theferrett [Link]	Conversations With Ferrett Me: "Sometimes, I wonder how many women I could satisfy simultaneously in bed." Gini: "Well, you have two hands..." Me: "I think six." Gini: "...are you counting your FEET?" Me: "Yeah. I'd have to wear a harness, though. Like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. Just for position's sake." Gini: "You had damn well better cut your toenails short." Me: "No, no, I'd wear flippers of some kind. Mind you, I'm not saying the women in the lower quadrant are going to have a mind-blowing experience, but I think I could, you know... Well, once, anyway." Gini: "Are you looking for simultaneous orgasm here?" Me: "Hey, I'm not crazy." Posted via LiveJournal.app. Tags: via ljapp (31 comments \| Leave a comment)
November 8th, 2009
10:39 pm hedonistpoet [Link]	entries I've been spurred on by a few people here. Some are quiet in their spurring (hkpuss comes to mind as someone I know is quietly wanting me to post). Others are more explicit (you know who you are tlhinganhom and kiparui). But, regardless, I know I am remiss. Life has been interesting. Grad school is by far more challenging than I had had any idea it was going to be. When I was finishing up my belated undergrad, I had actively sought out challenging coursework. I wasn't just trying to acquire a degree, I was hungry for a real education. I took a number of courses that were crosslisted for undergrads and grad students, and I made it a point to take things that were actively challenging. The way those crosslisted courses were challenging is a faint shadow of the way it is challenging to be in the same courses, but be a grad student. I largely feel like it is a big shadow over my life. I read a lot, and I start to feel guilty when I have reading to do but I'm not doing it, but at the same time, there comes a point where I've been reading fucking .pdfs, and I'm just done, and I need to put some fucking cotton candy in my head, and watch a crappy TV show, or do something not thinky. A part of me feels guilty when I'm doing this, but most of me is just thinking, "Thank, god! A break from thinking!" I know that I need it, on some level. Despite the frustrations of it all, I'm really hoping I can find a cheerful place in all of it that makes me happy. At the very least, I'm going to hang on until I get a Masters, but the program I'm in is absolutely a PhD program; getting a Masters is something that happens along the way. Essentially, if I stop after the Masters, I know that it is a kind of failure... but I've actually become okay with this concept. It's not failure if its not right. I want things, if nothing else, to be right. Grad school can be a place to hide away from the real world, sure, but I won't keep at it if it isn't working for me. On another, short note, I'm so glad I have insurance now. I've been to the doctor for some totally benign, yet painful things, and I can't imagine what it would have cost me without... Til next time, (and hopefully more frequently from now on)... (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
04:40 pm bonerici [Link]	that pinback sound armistead burwell smith the 4th of pinback plays an almebic bass. This sort of bass has active pickups and a very distinctive sound, it is more like a guitar, clean and crisp. I don't have $12,000 for a signature almebic deluxe 5, so i was playing around with some vst and sound effects to find that "sound." The bass guitar is a "peaky" instrument. It is one of the few instruments (along with some drums) where it is common to compress the sound before it hits the a/d converter. The reason is that the peaks are so high that if you actually captured them, you would lose too much fidelity in the low end. So you have to compress the signal. So I was listening to the almebics and decided that's where the sound came from, that is, the signal was uncompressed. Normally you can't do this, but if you have active pickups this means you can process the signal before it gets out of the guitar so you can compress or limit the signal and then re-expand it to give back the dynamics inside the bass guitar, and that signature texture of the active pickup. So here's what I did, I compressed my bass signal as normal and then routed that to an "uncompressor." I tried a dozen different compressors, and finally found one that gives me that "sound." http://thirtytwoaudio.co.uk/Downloads.aspx That's the Multi-band expander by 32 audio. I was able to get something very close to the pinback sound by keeping the sub expansion at 25%, low expansion at 25%, low mid at 100% expansion, mid hi at 0% expansion, hi at 0%. This is not an eq. An eq just filters (actively or passively) the sound. An expander will make a soft sound even softer and a loud sound louder, but just for particular frequency ranges. I also tried ampeg's bass guitar cabinet and pickup emulator, guitar rig's bass cabinets and heads by native instruments, redshift's pickup emulator, but none of the emulators gave me the right sound that this multi-band expander does. (Leave a comment)
09:22 am revdj [Link]	One More thing I will never find it - it will never be rebroadcast. Don Rickles once hosted Saturday Night Live. In the opening sketch, before the theme, Joe Piscipo had to slap him. And Don's reaction was not to say the scripted line. "What did you hit me so HARD for? You didn't do that in rehearsal! I hope Eddie Murphy robs your house!" And everyone broke up, and Don just went from cast member to cast member, berating them, and they were giggling or shocked but all silent. The cue cards could not help them. Then the band went and the credits rolled. Next sketch, as it went on, the actors started to look worried as they read their lines. Don was clearly not where as he was supposed to be, as he was edging closer and closer to Joe Piscipo. And then his character found an excuse to start slapping him repeatedly. Everyone else broke up, and Don slapped him until they cut to commercial. Next scene (this was the season where Joe Piscipo and Eddie Murphy were in everything) they were doing something and Don had a line in an accent or a dance or something, and Joe read his line from the cue card, and Don was like , "What did you do that so soon for? Let me do my accent for crying out loud! I practiced for this!" Again - cast goes silent, and then Don starts insulting them until we cut to commerical. Not a single sketch got finished that night, and I've never seen it rerun. I wish they did... it was the best episode of SNL ever. Tags: improv and performing, movies and tv (4 comments \| Leave a comment)
08:45 am revdj [Link]	Don Rickles Okay, so you've already dealt with me talking about Don Rickles, to the extent of listening to a a dream I had about him. But last night, when it was time to go to bed, I stayed up too long watching clips of him on You Tube, and I want to talk about him some more. I know that posts like this are not why you love me, but I must follow my Path. First point: He is fucking Hilarious Okay, so since I started this relationship with Jack Benny, I've been fascinated by the contrast between the Earth 1 and Earth 2 versions of the great comedians. It is hard to reconcile the 1940s Benny that's been making me laugh for a year with the Jack Benny I remember from my childhood - an old man who wasn't that funny telling stories about the radio while the talk-show host acts like he's the funniest man in the world. I recently discovered the Earth 1 Bob Hope, a rapid-fire comedian whose snappy comebacks make him dominate any show he's on - how unlike the one I grew up with, an old man who reads cue-cards while flirting creepily with young women. Sometimes it goes the other way - I grew up with George Burns - a funny man with a cigar who always made "old" jokes. The 1940s George Burns of Earth 1 was completely different, but I like the one I grew up with better. Similarly for Dean Martin - I prefer the one I grew up with. But my POINT is that there is this huge chasm between the old comedians I grew up with and their younger selves. ...except for Don Rickles. That's what you get out of the You Tube videos, where you see his chronology all screwed up, randomly getting older and younger as he sits in the same talk-show chair, or standing on the same stage. He's always funny. He hasn't lost a thing. You see him eviscerate Merv Griffen, then Johnny Carson, then Conan O' Brien, then that talentless guy who used to be Ben Stein's sidekick. Sometimes the jokes are the same ("give him a cookie and he'll go away") but somehow they don't get old for me. But the quick parts - where he reacts to what's going on around him... and the hosts all try to cope differently. Andy Richter's Improvolympic training- as he "yes-ands" everything Rickles says about him... that should turn things around in his favor, but they don't. How David Letterman is clearly used to establishing dominance over his guests with his quick wit, and how David tries, really tries, to do that with Rickles, and yet he is clearly outclassed, and is clearly enjoying losing the game for a change. You can see the admiration under his acting... beautiful. And then there's Johnny Carson, who (I decided last night) is the best Rickles host. Because Don Rickles gives you the chance to see how freaking sharp and quick Johnny Carson was. Johnny was the only one who could score a few points off of Rickles - who could go toe-to-toe with him... hilarious. And the admiration is clearly there - Johnny enjoys the contest. (Ed McMahon clearly doesn't, but he fakes it well) You also get to see tales grow with the telling. Young Don telling the story about messing with Frank Sinatra at the restaurant with the dancer when they were both young and single... Middle-Aged Don telling the story ... Old Don telling the story... the story changes, grows. I don't care about the literal truth - Old Don's version is the best. Because I did want to go to sleep, I avoided all the clips of outtakes of the series with Richard Lewis. Old Don making the audience scream as a take is blown, and then just ranting. Even though I never saw the sitcom, it is obvious to me that the audience is enjoying Don's schtick between takes more than they are enjoying the actual show. Particularly during the later clips, where the show is clearly not going to make it and Rickles feels free to let fly. I once lost a night watching them all - didn't want to do that again last night. I doubt I'll ever get to see him live; I came within one day when Al took Mom and I to Vegas last Spring. But I wish I could - check out the 2008 and 2009 clips... the man is still funny, and still runs circles around David Letterman. Okay, you can scroll down now, you hockey puck. Tags: movies and tv (Leave a comment)
09:46 am bonerici [Link]	the internet eats all retail in ann arbor, on hoover street right next to the football stadium there was a store called "Purchase Radio" founded by roy purchase in 1930. After roy retired, he got Dan McCullough, his son in law to run it. For decades people who did their own electronics would go there, you could buy op amps, tubes, wire, transistors, circuit boards, and of course, all kinds of cool shortwave radios. It was a very typical small electronics parts store, which used to be found all over the nation. Home brew guys would go to the store, and sit around talking shop, and would even help you draw up a circuit. sad pictures here: ( Read more... ) In 2007 Dan retired. Of course, it's easy to find electronic parts you want on the internet. You can go to mouser.com or digikey.com. There are plenty of people to chat with too. You can post your circuits on diyaudio.com, and yes it's cheaper now, of course you have to wait for the mailman to come, and you never talk face to face with anyone. It's become strangely impersonal, but internet shopping is an irresistible force. I checked one day to find out how far I would have to drive to buy a power audio ic to fix an amp I had and the nearest place was chicago. I think there are less than a dozen electronics parts stores like purchase radio used to be left in the nation. The internet ate all of the rest. The internet is busy eating up all the specialty shops like this. But it won't stop there. The internet will eat up anything that can be easily shipped. One day the only retail that will be left will be furniture stores, grocery markets, pet stores and clothing stores (pre-built furniture is expensive to ship, food you eat every day, pets don't travel well, and clothing needs to be tried on). sears and roebuck was the pioneer of shop at home. The reason that sears and roebuck catalogs never killed brick & mortar is that it was impossible for any paper and ink catalog to have enough selection. The internet fixed that. (Leave a comment)
12:53 am revdj [Link]	1999 was 10 years ago. Tags: observations (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
November 7th, 2009
03:41 pm theferrett [Link]	A Note To Those Who Read Dear Bookstore: I like the fact that you're across the street. I like the fact that you have a zillion books. I want to give you money. So would it kill you to actually stock a few books I want to read? I'm perfectly willing to understand that people aren't automatically going to have everything. But you didn't have Pride and Prejudice and Zombies when I wanted it. You didn't have the latest Laurell K. Hamilton the third day after it was officially released, leaving my wife bookless. And today, I actively wanted to purchase Crumb's version of the Book of Genesis, a book by a long-standing comics figure that's been written up in most major magazines (including Newsweek and Entertainment Weekly), and no. You were out. Again. Yes, you can order it for me, I know. But I'm trying to do you guys a favor. I can get it at 10% off with your special order process and then come back and get it, or I can get this latest bestseller 43% off from Amazon and have it delivered to my door. (Admittedly, Amazon is out right now, but the principle still applies.) I mean, I'm actively taking a hit on my own price to try to prop up a local business - can you do your duty and have what I desire? I'm not asking for totally weird stuff. Trust me. When you had China Mieville's latest book (shelved, strangely, in fiction and not science fiction), I did purchase it. Allow me to recompense you. Let us both profit. Just get the goddamned inventory in, okay? Love, T.F. (22 comments \| Leave a comment)
01:22 pm revdj [Link]	open office I had an old OLD microsoft word document. A recipe. All the fractional quantities didn't show. All my font-efforts couldn't get them to show. I tried Mac help. Ho ho ho. Then I opened it in open-office. Bam. Perfection. Score one for open office. Tags: apple and microsoft (3 comments \| Leave a comment)
November 6th, 2009
11:35 pm theferrett [Link]	Party People When I was young and at a party, sometimes I would be overcome by sadness. Then I would have to leave the party and sit outside. Being stupid, I would sit out there until someone noticed I was gone and came and got me. If they did, then they loved me. If nobody did, then I was alone and unloved. I was very, very stupid. These days, I know: I just get overpeopled sometimes and need to retreat. That wave of sadness is my introvert circuits ticking over, and I need a bit of space. I thought back then that I was sad because I was lonely; quite the opposite. Now, I just feel slightly foolish should anyone discover me, alone, in some back room. "I'm fine," I smile. "Just need some time.". And I realize that no matter how good life gets, I am the sort of person who'll have spikes of sadness from time to time, and no matter how beloved or wanted or desired I am, I will occasionally just need to withdraw and contemplate this strange isolation. I'd like to be at a party and always on. Sometimes I am. Lucky enough, I guess. Posted via LiveJournal.app. Tags: via ljapp (26 comments \| Leave a comment)
12:54 pm bonerici [Link]	fuelling this asset bubble is the weakness of the US dollar, driven by the mother of all carry trade Fuelling this asset bubble is the weakness of the US dollar, driven by the mother of all carry trades. The US dollar has become the major funding currency of carry trades as the Fed has kept interest rates on hold and is expected to do so for a long time. Investors who are shorting the US dollar to buy on a highly leveraged basis higher-yielding assets and other global assets are not just borrowing at zero interest rates in dollar terms; they are borrowing at very negative interest rates – as low as negative 10 or 20 per cent annualised – as the fall in the US dollar leads to massive capital gains on short dollar positions.Let us sum up: traders are borrowing at negative 20 per cent rates to invest on a highly leveraged basis on a mass of risky global assets that are rising in price due to excess liquidity and a massive carry trade. Every investor who plays this risky game looks like a genius – even if they are just riding a huge bubble financed by a large negative cost of borrowing – as the total returns have been in the 50-70 per cent range since March. So the combined effect of the Fed policy of a zero Fed funds rate, quantitative easing and massive purchase of long-term debt instruments is seemingly making the world safe – for now – for the mother of all carry trades and mother of all highly leveraged global asset bubbles. But one day this bubble will burst, leading to the biggest co-ordinated asset bust ever: if factors lead the dollar to reverse and suddenly appreciate – as was seen in previous reversals, such as the yen-funded carry trade – the leveraged carry trade will have to be suddenly closed as investors cover their dollar shorts. A stampede will occur as closing long leveraged risky asset positions across all asset classes funded by dollar shorts triggers a co-ordinated collapse of all those risky assets – equities, commodities, emerging market asset classes and credit instruments. The Fed and other policymakers seem unaware of the monster bubble they are creating. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9a5b3216-c70b-11de-bb6f-00144feab49a.html Roubini has been right before. The carry trade is appealing because of the type of returns it can earn, particularly if the proceeds are invested in bonds. These returns may not be huge, but they’re steady and consistent, and so they appeal to money managers who want a steady income stream – for example, hedge fund managers with pension fund investors. But the counterpoint to these small, steady returns is the possibility of a very large, very sudden loss. The biggest risk is generally that the exchange rate moves against you – the higher-interest rate currency rapidly devalues, reducing the value of your assets relative to your borrowing. That's why these trades are often described as “picking up nickels in front of a steamroller” http://www.moneyweek.com/investments/why-is-the-carry-trade-so-dangerous.aspx that's moneyweek in 2006 talking about the japanese yen carry trade, back when the japanese government set interest rates to 0 (5 comments \| Leave a comment)
11:04 am theferrett [Link]	Anthony Perkins Watching Psycho on Netflix, I can see why Anthony Perkins had next to no career after it. Thing is, everyone remembers Psycho for, well, the Psycho. The shower scene, the crazy killer, the OMG BLOOD. But watching it now, as someone would have in the 1950s, there's really no sense of menace about Norman Bates; we've already seen at least three people (the cop, the car salesman, the rowdy Texan who gives the money) who were crazier. Norman's a strange little guy, but strangely charming. He wouldn't be out of place in a modern Indie film - the quirky habits of his taxidermy, his nervous stammer, his misplaced kindness, his lonely hotel. Actually, with a slight twist, he could be a likeable character in The Office. He's not a crazy guy for a lot of his performance, which is why the twist works - he's a nice guy, a hint of crazy, and then STABBITY STAB. Which left poor Anthony Perkins in a horrible casting place. The studios wanted to cast him as an evil villain, but really he has little innate menace. Even when he's angry, he's strangely meek - which works for this film, but no other. And of course, after he became Hollywood's most famous killer, he couldn't be a leading man. So there he was, caught between extremes. I feel bad for him. He was a good actor. He deserved a better career. But his breakout role placed him straight in the Kobayashi Maru. (9 comments \| Leave a comment)
10:53 am vyolynce [Link]	Happy (Belated) Birthday (present) to ME! I've needed a new computer for a while now. The box I'd been using was purchased in 1999 and was still running WIN98SE. empress_tigress and I have been drooling over some amazing and inexpensive laptops at BBuy for months now, but the finances have never been there to justify a purchase. With the expiration of my Student Loan a couple of months back, I began putting some serious consideration into it. Then we had $200 worth of plumbing work done -- a particularly stubborn slow drain in the kitchen (one of us wasn't paying close attention in her Science 101 class: oil and water DO NOT MIX). Fuck. My two active credit cards are each hovering at about $500 under their limit, so a $450+ laptop (plus tax) had to wait. Fast-forward to this past Wednesday. I come home from draft and check the mail. Inside is a letter from Capitol One, which I assume is just my monthly statement. I open it, and it says my credit line just got goosed by 4 grand. O_O Yeah, I think I can make room for that extra $500 now. Spent all last night getting the thing up and running, mostly figuring out how to carry over all of my emails. Transferring stuff from Win98 to Win7 is tricksy, due to about three other upgrades in the interim. But that's all taken care of now! Soooooooo much faster. :) (3 comments \| Leave a comment)
09:11 am courtly [Link]	What makes me Happy? A friend of mine asked me that a little while back. What makes me Happy? The first two answers were fairly simple and platonic and after that I got kinda distracted. (Probably on account of thinking about thing number two). The first was solving puzzles and problems. That makes me happy. Abstract is good, concrete is better, but THOSE often don't have clear-cut solutions, so I've had to learn how to break down concrete problems and back them up against their driving requirements, and find a way to solve THOSE. So Abstract puzzles and problems are both less work and usually more logical (and less about balancing various compromised needs). I think it's a huge part of why I'm drawn to video games, puzzle books, mathematics, computer program development, and the like. Puzzle solving makes me happy, gives me a rush of success and supports my confidence. The second thing that sprang to mind was sushi. Sushi specifically has this tendency to make my really fundamentally Happy. This, you might think, has to do with having a Japanese mother. Not quite so, I'd wager... I clearly remember my first encounter with sushi. It was Harrowing. Maybe I'll tell you sometime. But in any case, today, sushi makes me Happy. Well, good sushi does. Now I started this post because I feel the urge to continue. So... Pleasing people makes me Happy. This is a large part of my struggles with confidence, I think. I understand that it's risky and fairly volatile to put a large stake of your happiness on the reactions of other people. It gives them all these levers that manipulate your emotions, that they can throw accidentally or with intent. I've been getting better at putting up boundaries so that the inevitable instances where there's nothing I can do to please someone, or to make things okay for them, don't send me into a spiral, and don't send me into irritating fits of trying to fix things. Connecting with people makes me Happy. Connection is probably a fundamental driver for most people I know, in fact. Heck, I wouldn't feel like I was going out on a limb to know that connecting to people is a nearly universal human driver. So perhaps this isn't saying very much. But it's nonetheless true and good to acknowledge. Travelling from someone's outer circles of acquaintanceship down into their smaller and more intimate orbits is really delightful and rewarding. It works platonically and it works romantically, which I would guess is why affairs happen and appear to even sometimes take the participants by surprise. But if you can keep those feelings somewhat distinct, I think it poses much less of a risk. Creating makes me Happy. Why am I not engaging in it right now? Well, I've asked myself that a lot in the last few years (my SCA scribal hiatus). And now I see that it's been crowded out by other things that make me Happy. My life is blessed with a huge cup-running-over crowd of Things That Make Me Happy. I am, inevitably, dropping some to keep room for others. So now I'm a lot less worried about the source of my writer's block. But I'd still like to make some balance there. So I'm going to keep trying to install it. Besides, this reign in the SCA, the Royals are using ribbons and wax seals. I just GOTTA get some of my work done up like that. Yay! Thinking further, learning makes me Happy. I have a curious (if sometimes quite lazy) mind, but it does enjoy acquiring knowledge, skills, new perspectives, techniques, approaches. I went through a few years when a friend was becoming a contractor, that I really wanted to set aside time and learn from him a lot more about the skills he was picking up. I've never felt terribly handy, and I don't even really know what sorts of tools exist to get various jobs done. But it wasn't so much the need to know it, as the opportunity to expand my knowledge that drew me, I think. And here I might be stagnating a little too much also... time to study something perhaps. Or tackle a different challenge in one of my existing hobbies. There are surely others I could list, but This seems a good start. Current Mood: happy Tags: about me (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
09:20 am theferrett [Link]	A Question For Those Who Have Been Here If you've ever attended a party at La Casa McJuddmetz, you'll know that people tend to congregate in the kitchen. So we're thinking of renovating. Specifically, we wish to tear down this wall: We wouldn't remove it entirely, of course - what we want to do is take down the wall and create a counter at roughly waist height, wherein we could a) have a place for people to rest drinks on, b) open up this central area, and c) install some cabinets under the counter and get some more chopping/storage space for the kitchen. What Gini is worried about is affecting the flow of our parties. When we play Rock Band - which is, admittedly, often - people go to the kitchen, which she thinks might be to get away from the noise. I think people go to the kitchen because it's the only other comfortable place to stand in our house - when we're rockin', the living room is full up on people, and unless you want to sit down at the dining room table or wedge yourself into the hallway by the door, your only other choice is the kitchen. Which, may I remind you, the wall facing the living room looks summat like this: I think if we open up that area, we make a larger talking-to area - you could stand in the dining room and lean to talk to people in the kitchen, and I don't think the noise would be much of an issue. But if you've gotten this far, you've evidently been to one of our gatherings. What do you think of the idea? (76 comments \| Leave a comment)
09:06 am courtly [Link]	PAX East Yeah, I think I'm going to make the time to go. I'm not as ENTRENCHED in the gaming community as I once was, and still not as entrenched as many of my close friends are, but I think it'd be a good time. I'm even turning over the idea of offering to work it. I haven't really done anything like it, but I'm fairly sure it would fit my demeanor and "alignment" if you will. Diplomatic, Rational, Extroverted... Considering it. Wonder if any of my friends are considering going. (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
08:56 am theferrett [Link]	Mystery Modules And Magazines On Sunday, November 22nd, I will be DMing for charity. That's right; I'll be running a roleplaying game down in Akron, and for a mere $20 ($25 at the door) you can not only give to children, but be a part of a mini-con that involves LAN parties, gaming, and Guitar Hero. What will I be running? A Planescape game, of course! Here's a description: Couched In Mystery: A Planescape Game Morty the Dustman has a serious problem: he cannot die. He's tried everything from leaping off of the spires to mouthing off to tanar'ri, and nothing hurts him. The problem is that he's a member of Sigil's Dustmen faction - a sect that idolizes and fetishizes death. And in helping Morty solve his horrible un-murder, you will wander through the stranger nooks and crannies of Sigil, the city at the heart of the multiverse.... (D&D 3rd Edition, roughly) (5 players) If you can't make it to the charity, you can help me in another way: on Saturday, November 21st, I'll be holding a Mystery Module runthrough of the game to make sure all runs smoothly. So if you're a local who wants to play some Planescape (and who doesn't?), let me know which you'll be attending. Either will help me, but I hope you all can come to Akron (or just give to Child's Play in their name). As a secondary bit, I have not forgotten my commitment to the Monthy Magazine Review, but the wedding has sapped my ability to read short stories now. I will have it up later in the month, hopefully just before their Black Friday sale - for the magazine I shall be reviewing is GUD Magazine! W00t! (13 comments \| Leave a comment)
01:36 am courtly [Link]	Doin' the Pigeon Doin' the (coo coo) Pigeon! People may smile, but I don't mind They'll never understand the kind of fun I find... Wow... it's Sesame Street's Birthday, so claims Google's picture just now. Wow. One two three FOUR five six seven eight NINE ten eLEven twelve - doo dootdoo doo dootdoo doo doot doo doot doo doot doo doo ... doo doot doo doo! FORTY! :) Heh. So... been having a GREAT week. I'm a happy camper today. Tomorrow is bound to be a very good day too. I got a major puzzle solved at work (downside: that leaves only three more to bring me up to just "behind"), and next week H gets home! Wheeee! (4 comments \| Leave a comment)
November 5th, 2009
03:04 pm bonerici [Link]	on the to read list, Mr. Pleasants The composer is regarded as a source of spiritual and cultural enrichment and, as such, deserving of the encouragement and support of the less sublimely endowed. He is also assumed to know better than society what is culturally good for it. He is, thus, not only permitted, but even encouraged to write his own ticket. The result is to separate the composer from society. In free societies he is assumed to be responsible only to his Art, as interpreted by what he calls his own artistic integrity. In totalitarian societies his special calling is recognized. He is simply held responsible to his government for the manner in which he responds to it. In neither case does a popular estimate of his value, as evidenced by popular enthusiasm for his product, carry any weight. The popular music audience is amply supplied with a down-to-earth music of its own which the serious composer, by definition, cannot write, and with which his own product cannot compete, if only because its down-to-earthiness has an intellectual cast neither charming nor intelligible to the popular audience. In short, the composer would like to please, but is not pleased to write what pleases society, or at least that part of society which comprises his audience. Society would like to please the composer, whom it regards as an ornament and as a comforting guarantee of cultural continuity, but it is not pleased by what he writes. The situation is tolerated only because both composer and society have been persuaded to believe that this is the way it has always been. Society's concept of the composer-audience relationship is as distorted as the composer's. It imagines the present situation to be a replica of what has been happening for generation after generation for a century and a half -- which it isn't -- and assumes that the next generation will be listening to this music with rapture -- which it won't. The Agony of Modern Music -- Henry Pleasants I also want to read his book on popular singers from his generation. Billie Holiday: a meager voice - small, hoarse at the bottom and thinly shrill at the top, with top and bottom never far apart. She had hardly more than an octave and a third. She worked, as a rule, as Bessie Smith had worked, within an octave...." Ethel Merman: Her range was hardly more than an octave and a fourth. She herself gives it as extending from G below to C above. She sometimes sang higher, but not much, and when she did, she had to ease off into a thin, tenuous head voice reminiscent of Ethel Waters working beyond her natural range. Bing Crosby: Bing is right when he says that he has very little voice...... For years he persisted in carrying a lot of voice up to E flat, E, F and even an occasional F sharp. It was always a precarious endeavor, not just because, as he says, he often barely made it, but, more importantly, because his voice then lost its characteristic timbre. Elvis Presley: The voice has always been weak at the bottom, variable and unpredictable... On E and F particularly, there is almost always the telltale evidence of strain common to singers who have not mastered the transition from one register to another. On his very first records, he made distressing sounds of those pitches. They were open, callow, sometimes nasal... Judy Garland: a conspicuously limited vocal range that must have made problems for her arrangers, especially for Tormé when he was matching her with other singers... I can think of no other singer whose top was so low. One reads of Judy's occasional troubles in reaching for high notes. Those notes were not so very high, no more than Cs and Ds, and not a soprano's high Cs and Ds at that, but the Cs and Ds an octave lower... She hadn't much at the lower end of the range, either. She could always sing down to the contralto F or E, but there was not much to it below the A flat. Frank Sinatra: The voice itself was a typical Italian light baritone with a two octave range from G to G, declining, as it darkened in later years, to F to F.... The Great American Popular Singers -- Henry Pleasants That sounds accurate to me. By the way he's not being harsh, just realistic and critical, he loves the above singers. (Leave a comment)
11:27 am pers [Link]	The 25th Annual Vegetarian Food Fair, part II ( I eat until I assplode! ) (6 comments \| Leave a comment)
08:28 am theferrett [Link]	Kneeling Before Beauty I am lucky to be constantly meeting people who are beautiful, striking,and magnetic - and above all, kind. You can tell these folks by the way their friends react when you mention them: there's always that goofy smile, and that little satisfied head-bob, followed by a drawled "...Yeah." You know within minutes of shaking hands that they're cradled deep within people's hearts. These people are usually good-looking, of course, but it goes beyond that. Some folks are lucky enough to have a personality that seeps out of every facet of their being; yes, they're pretty but there are plenty of vapid handsome folks. No, there's something about the way they stand, the way they smile, that tells you that you're going to have an interesting conversation once you're eventually introduced. And you always do. But these people don't always know the effect they have upon a room, or how wonderfully people think of them. And it seems like such a loss to me when someone is beloved by all, but doesn't realize it. If I talk to them for a while and have these impressions confirmed, I want to tell them. It's so scary to do that, though. First off, if you tell them how striking they are, there's that danger that they'll think you're hitting on them - a danger that's magnified for me ever since I came out as poly. Because in modern society, "There's something about you that people find compelling" usually equals, "I want to get into your pants," and I don't want to put someone in the awkward position where they think I'm trying to use this as a way of forcing them to interact with me on future occasions. (Even if they're male and I'm straight, which happens more than you'd think.) Then there's the strange power dynamic: by telling them, you're assuming a very uncomfortable mix of whacky prophet and weak supplicant. To say, "You know, you're really amazing" is on some level telling them, "Hey, I'm a visionary who sees something that you're blind to." Modulated slightly off, it makes you sound like a swollen, pretentious prick. (Which, hey! You may be.) Yet telling someone that they have that kind of draw is also an admission that you yourself do not have that power; it feels oddly like you're abandoning something within yourself when you tell them this. The end result is something that can drastically go wrong. A word wrong, a gesture, and this simple acknowledgement of someone's magnetism can turn into a foul-breathed leer, or a cocky overwriting of their personality. It's so easy to offend by telling someone that they exude something unique that nine times out of ten, I don't do it. And when I do risk it - generally via email, because I can take the time to compose the words properly - I hold my breath until they respond, terrified that I might have offended. My whole day shrinks to an anxious worry that maybe I got it wrong. I usually don't. My record, for these kinds of studied compliments, is on the whole very good. Usually it's a positive response, someone happy to get a kind compliment. It sometimes leads to a discussion of what about them is compelling. Sometimes it makes their day, and I can feel like I've accomplished what I set out to. Most times, it goes well. Yet the world is so full of oafs who use someone's beauty as an excuse to invade their personal space, to demand things of strangers, that I don't want to be that sort of person. So I'll generally abstain, even if it means that the people who would take it well go without... And not just from me, but from the people around them that also feel that way. It's right not to offend people. I know this. Yet it also feels like such a strange loss that the folks who carry that kind of magic within them can go along their way, thinking they're just not particularly interesting, all because the good people are scared to say anything because the bad people use compliments like weapons. It's just very hard to tell someone that they're lovely on both a physical and personal level, whether they're male or female, your type or not. And I wish it was easier. I wish this was a less complicated world. (63 comments \| Leave a comment)
08:16 am vyolynce [Link]	A new role for Christopher Lee In addition to his upcoming role as the Jabberwock in Burton's Alice in Wonderland (FFS, if empress_tigress is working that weekend I just might go see that without her; I'm sure hellishduchess and countess_sam would be up for it...), Christopher Lee was recently knighted by Prince Charles. About damned time, frankly. (1 comment \| Leave a comment)
November 4th, 2009
01:54 pm revdj [Link]	Q) What do these quantities have in common? -> chromatic number of a graph -> independence number of a graph -> domination number of a graph -> clique number of a graph -> clique partition number of a graph A) I really, really, like the lecture where I discuss them. Tags: math, teaching (3 comments \| Leave a comment)

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