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Tagging pics from the Norwescon picnic. Cursing my feeble brain for not remembering the names of all the people I met. Curse you, brain!

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Silliness: My Twitter stream says I’m 60% hetero. Indicative words: pride, fame, rent, shopping, summer storm. http://tinyurl.com/natxro

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Sometime between July 10th and July 14th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• The 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads of All Time: "What do murder, pedophilia, suicide and a baby tiger have in common? They have all been used to sell stuff in these amazingly disturbing vintage ads! These are real, untouched advertisements from the good old days. It doesn't matter if it's lovely ladies or adorable clowns, somehow these old-time ad wizards found ways to traumatize us while pedaling everyday products."
• Top 10 Myths about Mythbusters:: "There's a rumor going around that Jamie is a human being. This is plain wrong. The show admits this one itself. Several episodes refer to the fact that Jamie is a robot — I mean, how else can he keep his shirts so well-cleaned and his moustache so well-trimmed? But believe it or not, there are people out there who are convinced that Jamie is in fact a human — Homo sapiens, just like you and me. This one is surely busted."
• Watchdog Group: Dozens of Active-Duty Troops Found on Neo-Nazi Site: "It is Facebook for the fascist set, and the typical online profiles of its members reveal expected tastes. Favorite book: 'Mein Kampf.' Favorite movie: the Nazi propaganda film 'Triumph of the Will.' Interests: 'white women.' Dislikes: 'anyone who opposes the master race.' But there's one other thing that dozens of members of newsaxon.org, a white supremacist social networking website, have in common: They proudly identify themselves as active-duty members of the U.S. armed forces."
• The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin: A Round-Up: "After you have read these, ask yourself: what wouldn't Sarah Palin lie about if she felt she had to?"
• DateLine: "DateLine is a small, simple app which displays a linear calendar on your desktop in a transparent window. It provides easy access to iCal by double clicking on a day. The background and text colors are customizable with support for transparency."

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“I took my car in for a realignment; my front end is now chaotic evil.” -@akgeek

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Starting to dig through links to Norwescon people I’ve begun to meet, finding them on Facebook, LJ, etc. Hoping I’m not annoying.

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Are you more science-savvy than the average American? Take the quiz and find out http://bit.ly/D28kx (via @seattlegeekly) I got 12/12!

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Two weekends ago, Prairie and I headed down to Corvallis to visit my brother and his family. Emily, my sister-in-law, is just finishing her doctorate in oceanography, and has accepted a position doing post-doc work at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, associated with MIT. Great news, of course, but it does mean that they’re all moving across the country to Falmouth, MA. Since that’s going to be a lot harder to visit than Corvallis, OR, we wanted to make sure to get a visit with them in before they left.

The full set of photos is on Flickr, here’s a small sampling…

Noah, on day two without training wheels on his bike!

Me, Noah, Kevin, and Paul swimming at the campsite Prairie and I stayed at.

Noah, Prairie, and Paul coloring.

Me reading Noah a couple chapters of some of his current bedtime story (The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe).

We’ll miss being close enough to take a weekend to drive down and visit, but it’s a great opportunity for them and for Emily, and we wish them the best.

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As most who pay much attention to my ramblings know, I’ve spent three out of the past four years wandering around Norwescon taking pictures (29, 30, and 32). A couple of weeks ago I got an invitation from the Norwescon 33 publications director asking if I might be interested in the con photographer position. I, of course, said that I was very interested, and we agreed to meet at today’s Volunteer Appreciation Picnic.

So, today I showed up at the picnic, chatted with Adrienne for a bit, and signed on as photographer for Norwescon 33! This will be pretty low-key for most of the year, getting shots of various meetings and Norwescon promotional events as they happen, and then be pretty intensive (but fun!) during the con itself, adding getting official shots of key events (the opening ceremonies, panels with the guests of honor, the Masquerade, the Fetish Fashion Show, etc.) as well as the usual candids and hall costumes that I’ve been doing on my own. I’m really looking forward to this, it’s a great way to combine interests and have a lot of fun doing it!

So that’s my little happydance for the day. Woohoo!

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Thunder a few minutes ago, now a good ol’ summer storm coming through Kent. Fun to listen to the rain fall.

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It’s official: I’m now on board as Norwescon’s photographer! Next ‘con, I’ll be wandering around taking random pictures with authorization!

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Quiet morning of laundry and general home stuff. Planning on heading to the Norwescon Volunteer picnic between 1 and 2 this afternoon.

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I really wish the three ice cream vans making multiple passes a day would look up the concept of ‘market saturation.’ Oh, and get new music!

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Sometime between July 8th and July 9th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Mythbusters to Test Star Trek’s Gorn Cannon: "Finally someone is going to put the Star Trek cannon to the test (that is 'cannon' with two n's). Mythbusters, the Discover Channel show that puts urban legends (and TV & movie magic) to the test, is finally going to take on Star Trek. Specifically they are going to test the feasibility of the cannon that Captain James T. Kirk built to defeat the Gorn in the original series Star Trek episode 'Arena'"
• "Harry Potter" Stars Felt Pressure to "Ace" Kiss: Dan Radcliffe's reaction to seeing his kiss with Bonnie Wright (as Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley, respectively) in HPatHBP is great: "'I saw the film again a couple of nights ago at the premiere and … my God, my lips are like the lips of a horse, kind of distending independently away from my face and trying to encompass the lower half of hers,' Radcliffe, 19, said. 'So I apologize for that.'"
• Ritz Camera, Parent of Wolf and Waxman, Plans to Sell Remaining Stores: "Ritz Camera Centers Inc., which has been struggling to reorganize and save roughly 400 of its more than 800 stores, says it no longer has enough money to purchase fall inventory and continue operations. Beltsville, Md.-based Ritz Camera, which is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, says the lack of funds now forces it to auction off its remaining locations by the end of July." Wow, not good. Good luck to everyone I know at Ritz/Kits!
• Paste Without Formatting by Default: "Here's something I know affects plenty of users out there. Have you ever pasted text in a document or email message, only to have it formatted differently than all the text around it? Irritating, right? There's an answer, thanks to the Keyboard & Mouse pane in System Preferences." Thank you! Mac OS X's default 'paste with the source style' has been driving me up the wall for ages — I honestly can't think of a single time recently when I've wanted to work the way the system does by default. One of the weirdest, most brain-dead UI decisions in the Mac OS.
• Marvel Wants to Help You Look Stylish!: The latest in costume fashion from Marvel: Boys! Be The Hulk! Or Captain America! Or Iron Man! Or Ghost Rider! Girls…um…girls? Oh, girls. Here, have some lip gloss.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Is there a TV-listing competitor to @mediamyway’s i.TV iPhone app? Functionality is good, but gets slower and crashier with every update.

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I’m #reading Spock, Messiah! by Theodore R. Cogswell - http://tinyurl.com/mxunof

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Just saw the news about Ritz/Kits imploding. Best wishes to my friends and former co-workers from Kits, Northgate and elsewhere. Good luck!

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Off to CWU Des Moines for my official orientation into the Law and Justice program.

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All browsers add it automatically, but I just can’t kill the habit of typing the http:// before every URL I type into the address bar.

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Just a fun little numerical oddity: at the time of this posting (more or less, as Wordpress doesn’t let me schedule a post time down to the second), the combined date and time (if you drop the leading zero from the two-digit abbreviation for the year) becomes 123456789.

Or, if you prefer not to worry about those silly leading zeros, wait until five minutes and six seconds after four o’clock, at which time it will be 04:05:06 07/08/09.

That’s all, nothing to see here, move along, go about your business….

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Yesterday, nearly two years to the day after going to see Michael Bay’s first “Transformers” film, Rick and I once again channelled our inner 12-year olds, did our best to turn off our brains, and headed off to see “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”.

My original summary of the first “Transformers” was:

Mini-review number one: It was glorious, incredible, over-the-top, in-your-face, enjoyably bad.

Mini-review number two: Moments of “holy shit, that was cool,” buried in a whole mess of, “what the fuck?”

I can quite easily update that for this sequel, with just a couple brief changes:

Mini-review number one: It was incredibly over-the-top, in-your-face, bad.

Mini-review number two: Moments of mild amusement buried in a whole mess of WTF.

Admittedly, after seeing the first and reading some of the reviews of this one, I wasn’t laboring under any illusions of what I was walking in to. Mainly, Rick and I wanted to go because we’d gone together to the first one, we new it would be bad…and we knew we’d have a lot of fun suffering through it. Mock me if you wish, but I doubt we’re the only two people out there who’ve done such a thing!

Actual reviews of the movie have been handled far more ably than I’m likely to do. Here’s a few choice quotes from three of my favorites. First, from Roger Ebert’s official review:

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

Second, and again from Roger Ebert, his blog entry The Fall of the Revengers:

The day will come when “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” will be studied in film classes and shown at cult film festivals. It will be seen, in retrospect, as marking the end of an era. Of course there will be many more CGI-based action epics, but never again one this bloated, excessive, incomprehensible, long (149 minutes) or expensive (more than $200 million). Like the dinosaurs, the species has grown too big to survive, and will be wiped out in a cataclysmic event, replaced by more compact, durable forms.

[…]

The term Assault on the Senses has become a cliché. It would be more accurate to describe the film simply as “painful.” The volume is cranked way up, probably on studio instructions, and the sound track consists largely of steel crashing discordantly against steel. Occasionally a Bot voice will roar thunderingly out of the left-side speakers, (1) reminding us of Surround Sound, or (2) reminding the theater to have the guy take another look at those right-side speakers. Beneath that is boilerplate hard-pounding action music, alternating with deep bass voices intoning what sounds like Gregorian chant without the Latin, or maybe even without the words: Just apprehensive sounds, translating as Oh, no! No! These Decepticons® are going to steal the energy of the sun and destroy the Earth!

Lastly, from io9’s brilliant review by Charlie Jane Anders:

Since the days of Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmmakers have reached beyond meaning. But with this summer’s biggest, loudest movie, Michael Bay takes us all the way inside Caligari’s cabinet. And once you enter, you can never emerge again. I saw this movie two days ago, and I’m still living inside it. Things are exploding wherever I look, household appliances are trying to kill me, and bizarre racial stereotypes are shouting at me.

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that’s because people don’t understand that this isn’t a movie, in the conventional sense. It’s an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

And the true genius of Transformers: ROTF is that Bay has put all of this excess of imagery and random ideas at the service of the most pandering movie genre there is: the summer movie. ROTF is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane. You. Do. Not. Leave. The Cabinet.

If I haven’t bored you enough already, what follows are a few things that stuck out to me during and after the film. Mostly bad, of course, but there were one or two things that I actually liked….