Sub-Eclecticism

Official Norwescon Photographer

2009-07-13T01:15:53Z

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

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!

Thunder a few minutes ago, now…

2009-07-13T00:54:12Z

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

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

It’s official: I’m now on boar…

2009-07-12T22:51:14Z

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

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

Quiet morning of laundry and g…

2009-07-12T17:26:50Z

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

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

I really wish the three ice cr…

2009-07-10T21:06:18Z

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

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!

Links for July 8th through July 9th

2009-07-09T23:00:07Z

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

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.

Is there a TV-listing competit…

2009-07-09T21:50:10Z

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.

I’m #reading Spock, Messiah! b…

2009-07-09T17:37:59Z

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

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

Off to CWU Des Moines for my o…

2009-07-08T23:15:40Z

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

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

All browsers add it automatica…

2009-07-08T22:35:11Z

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

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.

12:34:56 7/8/9

2009-07-08T19:34:17Z

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

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….

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

2009-07-08T17:15:33Z

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

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….

Judging by the way Sam’s mom behaves after eating a single pot brownie as they’re dropping Sam off at college — because she’s so dim and so disconnected with the world around her that she doesn’t realize what she’s eating even when there’s a picture of a pot leaf on the baggie — it seems that Michael Bay’s only experience with or knowledge of the effects of pot comes from scare films of the 50’s and 60’s like “Reefer Madness”. She gets extremely loopy, runs around campus gleefully telling girls to go up to Sam’s room, tackles students playing frisbee on the lawn, and generally makes a total ass of herself, acting far more like she’s jazzed on some form of serious uppers than on any form of pot. It’s rather sad, too, as her character was one of the few things I liked about the first film.
During Sam and Optimus Prime’s conversation in the graveyard, I had to stifle my laughter as Prime kept striking a classic “hero pose” during his lines. Even though he’s 40 feet tall and having a conversation with a maybe-six-foot teenager, rather than looking at Sam, he keeps standing tall, putting his fists on his hips, and staring off up into the sky somewhere as he orates about the great destiny before Sam and how important he is.
The college girl who suddenly is revealed to be a Transformer (which raises a whole host of questions, not least of which is what happens to all the soft, curvy, fleshy bits when she transforms into her robot form) really looked like a ripoff of Sil from Species (Google Images link, potentially NSFW).
Whether or not it was intentional, I had to laugh at the ironic subtext of Michael Bay taking a few minutes to blow the crap out of a college library. What better imagery can there be in a Bay film than destroying a repository of literature meant to educate and inform the mind?
The Autobot ‘twins’ were horrendous, going beyond racial stereotyping into racist stereotyping. Sure, they were animated robots, but they were also obvious inner city street trash, in everything from behavior to accent and slang to facial features exaggerated to the point of looking like a robotic minstrel show. Disturbing and sad.
Wait, Transformers can transport? Just like magic, poof, suddenly they’re in Egypt, with no real coherent explanation or reason, aside than it let Bay make another crazy quick-cut.
So much unnecessary and, to my mind, unfunny stupid lower-than-lowbrow humor, from the dogs humping each other to the robot humping Megan Fox’s leg to Turturro’s jock strap to the wrecking ball ‘scrotum’ of Devastator.
Wait, they brought in Jetfire? The original Jetfire was my all-time favorite Transformer, so realizing that they’d put him in the film was actually kind of cool. And, I’ll admit, they did a better job on his design than some: though they changed him to an SR-71 Blackbird, they kept more of the Blackbird’s signature look in his robot form. The ‘beard’ seemed a little silly for a robot, but overall, one of the better designs in these films.
One of the things I didn’t like about the first film was how confusing the fight scenes were:

I kept wanting to scream at the screen and tell Bay to back up about 50 yards or so. I assume he’s trying for a very “you are there” style, but by constantly putting his camera all of ten feet away from any action, you can’t really see anything. You end up figuring out what’s going on by the surrounding establishing shots — sort of like figuring out an unfamiliar word by the context of what’s around it. You don’t really know if you understand, but you’re pretty sure you’ve at least got a good vague idea of what it should be.

This time, there were a couple of sequences where Bay seemed to listen to that particular criticism, and pulled back to let us get a better view of the action. That turned out to be a mixed bag — it was easier to see what was going on…but it was also more apparent just how silly it looked to have these huge robots banging on each other. Kind of a mixed bag on that one, as it turned out.

So, all in all, that’s it — one big incoherent mess of explosions, screaming, explosions, lowest-common-denominator jokes, explosions, and…oh, yeah, explosions.

What really blows my mind about all this is that not one, but both Transformers films were written by Orci and Kurtzman, the same team behind the recent Star Trek film. I’d either expect Star Trek to have been far worse (which was one of my worries) or the Transformers films to be much better, but…well, we got what we got. I’ll just blame it all on Michael Bay.

Links for July 5th through July 8th

2009-07-08T14:00:13Z

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

Sometime between July 5th and July 8th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Monsignor’s Confessional: Darkness That Exists Just for You: "Once a month, The Vogue would fill with people who joyfully attended the famous party. It provided them sanctuary and freedom, it was a place they could feel safe and comfortable while expressing themselves in any way they saw fit. The outfits ranged from fetish wear to costumes, pony falls to dread falls, bright colored hair to black hair, large amounts of make-up on both women and men. It was not uncommon to see guests dressed in corsets, dog collars, chains, or any variation thereof." I have a few sets of photos I've taken at various confessionals in my Seagoth collection on Flickr, including the final Christmas Confessional at The Vogue mentioned in the article.
Introducing the Google Chrome OS: "Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve."
Sarah Palin’s 10 Most Awkward Media Moments: "If the soon-to-be-former Alaska governor's rambling resignation speech made some viewers wince, it was probably not the first time. Here's a look back at the soon-to-be-former governor's most cringe-inducing moments. And yes—we included the turkey." Listening to her speak makes my head go all asplodey.
Fiction World Rocked as Woman Claims No Sexual Attraction to Neil Gaiman: "At a recent book signing, Joan Green, 24, stunned her friends when she admitted that upon meeting Neil Gaiman, she did not find him attractive. 'He was nice and all,' she confessed a few minutes after getting a copy of American Gods autographed. 'But, he's not, you know, my type.' One of Green's friends, speaking anonymously, said, 'She's lying. Everyone thinks he's dreamy. Everyone. Even Hillary Clinton.'"
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2009 Results: "Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the 'Ellie May,' a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

4 of 5 stars to Harry Potter …

2009-07-08T04:42:30Z

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

4 of 5 stars to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling - http://goodreads.com/review/show/15562765

Oh, wow…and I thought the _f…

2009-07-08T00:50:53Z

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

Oh, wow…and I thought the first Transformers was an incoherent mess. Bay outdid himself this time…and that’s not a compliment.

Waiting for @fractalzend to ge…

2009-07-07T20:19:34Z

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

Waiting for @fractalzend to get me, we’re off to see the glorious Bayhem of Transformers! Apparently I’ve got a bit of a masochistic streak.

Yikes! Eight IM accounts set u…

2009-07-07T18:49:01Z

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

Yikes! Eight IM accounts set up and active in Adium: 2 on AIM, Bonjour, Facebook, GTalk/Jabber, LiveJournal, Yahoo (djwudi), MySpace.

For technology that should ‘ju…

2009-07-07T00:45:52Z

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

For technology that should ‘just work’, we’re having no luck getting iChat’s voice chat or screen sharing to connect. Mac/Mac or Mac/PC. …

28 Days Later started strong, …

2009-07-05T23:18:47Z

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

28 Days Later started strong, but we didn’t like it after they get to the mansion. Too depressingly real and violent to be fun, bad ending.

The 2005 version of Amityville…

2009-07-05T18:16:36Z

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

The 2005 version of Amityville Horror was better than we expected. Still prefer the original, but as far as modern horror goes, not bad.

Tired, ready to sleep. Unfortu…

2009-07-05T06:27:21Z

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

Tired, ready to sleep. Unfortunately, it’s a wee bit noisy outside. Apparently the local militia is using up all their surplus ammunition.

Funny, this is the first time …

2009-07-05T05:16:36Z

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

Funny, this is the first time I’ve lived in a town where fireworks are legal. Sitting on our porch, listening and catching glimpses. Neat!

Jason Webley Elevanniversary

2009-07-05T01:50:22Z

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

Last night, Prairie and I went out to see Jason Webley’s Elevanniversary show, our first Webley show in a few years. We’d been skipping them lately, but between this being his eleventh anniversary show, having it at Seattle’s Town Hall (a venue we really like), and the guest list he’d lined up, we decided this was one we wanted to see. In the end, while it wasn’t our all-time favorite Webley show, it was still good, (mostly) a lot of fun, and we’re glad we went. I took a few pictures during the course of the night, and they’ll be up eventually, but as we sat towards the back and I was more interested in just enjoying the show, it won’t be among my most comprehensive sets of Webley documentation. I’m sure you’ll all survive.

We headed downtown a little early, in order to make sure we got a good parking space close to Town Hall and have time to get dinner before the show. Parking successfully obtained, we wandered down to the Cheesecake Factory for dinner, after stopping off to get a few pictures of what little is left of the Alfaretta Apartments at 8th and Seneca. As crappy as that building was, I liked my little apartment there, and it was where I was living when Prairie and I first met, so it was a little sad to see it reduced to just a few walls and a lot of rubble. After dinner we spent a while wandering around Barnes and Noble, talking each other out of spending money on new books when there are so many good used books available far cheaper, and then headed back up the hill to Town Hall.

There was already a small crowd of people milling about when we returned to Town Hall, and it wasn’t long before a table was set up to process those of us who had will call tickets waiting. (A quick aside: I’ve got to give props, this was by far the most organized and prompt Webley show we’d ever been to. Getting our tickets only took a few minutes, the doors to the lobby actually opened at, and perhaps slightly before, the scheduled 7:30pm, we got into the house and found our seats by 7:45, and the lights dimmed to begin the show at 8:05. Impressive!) Tickets in hand, we waited for the doors to open, and ended up spending a pleasant few minutes chatting with Paco, a burlesque performer from Baltimore who was in town for the weekend to visit Seattle and see the Elevanniversary show.

Once in the auditorium, Prairie and I grabbed seats towards the back of the house on the assumption that most rowdiness would be towards the front, and this would make it easier to dodge overexcited fans later on. As we were all entering and finding our seats, Seattle’s Orkestar Zirkonium was providing entrance music, their euro-klezmer-ish style setting a good tone for the evening to come, as balloons both big and small bounced around the room and Jason’s ever-present goddesses danced and twirled through the aisles.

The show itself was divided roughly in half, with the first half devoted to Jason’s friends and collaborators doing short sets on their own, and Jason coming out for the second half. This ended up having some definite pros and cons: on the plus side, we got some more exposure to the people Jason’s been working with over the past few years, all of whom had quite enjoyable sets; however that also meant that Jason himself had a somewhat abbreviated setlist, and many of the quieter, more introspective songs that Prairie and I enjoy so much were passed over in favor of the louder, more exciting, get-everyone-bouncing-around songs. As fun as those are — and plenty of people were quite rightfully enjoying them — we’re just not quite so bouncy, and missed hearing some of our old favorites. Still, different shows have different intents, and this minor grousing shouldn’t at all be taken to mean that we didn’t enjoy ourselves!

Anyway, the first guest performer up was Andru Bemis, who worked with Jason on the How Big is Tacoma EP, with three of his own songs. Jay Thompson (of Eleven Saints fame) read a few poems for us, then the Rev. Peyton came on (though without his Big Damn Band). Some of Jason’s goddesses did a silly Billy Joel “We Didn’t Start the Fire”-inspred pseudo-retrospective of Jason’s career, accompanied by only a big bass drum. Then the last guest performer, and for many people in the audience the most eagerly anticipated, Amanda Palmer, of both Dresden Dolls and solo fame, not to mention her work with Jason and Evelyn Evelyn.

After Amanda’s set, we were treated (after some slight technical issues) to a short, four-minute edit of video from Jason’s first public performance from eleven years ago, featuring songs from his first album, Viaje. It was fun to see — younger, shorter hair, a bit more unfinished, but definitely Jason.

After the video, out came Jason, along with his usual bandmates Alex (Sprout) Guy, Jherek Bischoff, and Michael McQuilken. They did a few of Jason’s songs (including possibly my favorite-ever rendition of Goodbye Forever, Once Again), and then he invited his guest performers up one-by-one to perform songs from their collaborative EPs. Before his collaborators started joining him, though, Jason invited onstage one of the first people to welcome Jason into the world of busking when he started all those years ago, Seattle legend Artis the Spoonman, who joined Jason for an incredible performance. Then, Jason’s co-conspirators: Andru, then Rev. Peyton, then Amanda. After this there was the one “WTF?” moment of the night for us — a short, bizarre, techno-Devo-ish piece that just seemed odd and out of place. Perhaps there was an in-joke that Prairie and I have missed out on, but it pretty much just confirmed for us that Jason doesn’t have much of a future in the rave scene.

Next up came a short word about Sunday’s Camp Tomato, along with indoctrinating (or, for many of us, re-indoctrinating) us all into the Tomato Scouts, with both the Tomato Scout Oath and the Tomato Scout Song. Jason read a sweet short story about a boy with a dream of feathers, boats, balloons, tomatoes, and lots of friends, only to wake up to find that the dream was still ongoing, and then he started inviting more performers on stage. Alex, Jherek and Michael came back on stage, joined by a string trio of two cellos and one violin; after a few songs, they were joined by the Orkestar Zirkonium; shortly afterwards, Jay Thompson came on for “Eleven Saints”.

Many more balloons were launched, both big and small, people got up and danced in the aisles, and the marionette version of Jason from a few years back floated around the room underneath big red balloons. Finally, Jason and company launched into “Music That Tears Itself Apart”, arms stretched upwards, fingers waggled, arms slowly dropped down, and much mass tickling was accomplished, and then finally, the concert was at an end.

Though there was a giant tomato cake over in Freeway Park, Prairie and I were ready to head home, and so we wandered up the two blocks to the car, leaving the post-show festivities to the younger, more energetic set, while we worked our way home and fell into bed.

Happy Elevanniversary, Jason. We’re glad we could be there.

Links for July 1st through July 4th

2009-07-04T21:00:17Z

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

Sometime between July 1st and July 4th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Giant Squid Caught in West Seattle: "A Puget Sound resident reeled in what is believed to be a Humboldt Squid Friday in West Seattle. Rodney Sarkees estimates the squid was roughly 8 feet long, and roughly 80 pounds. It took two people to lift. Sarkees released the squid back into the water after catching it. Fish & Wildlife later captured and relocated the squid. Officials told Sarkees it was a Humboldt Squid - the largest they'd seen in the area." Okay, yeah, I don't think I'll be swimming in the Puget Sound at any point in the foreseeable future.
Keep Khan Out of Star Trek 12: "I had been meaning to write this 'keep Khan out of Star Trek 2 (or 12, rather)' blog post for a while now — but honestly I thought Orci and Kurtzman were just kidding about including him. The script for the next Trek, at this point, consists of a few Gorn cartoons on a cocktail napkin, and they're barely batting ideas around. So it's easy for them to hint at all sorts of fan-favorite stuff…. Why not? Anything's possible at this point, and it doesn't do any harm to answer 'maybe' to every question. And of course, if the fans get particularly thrilled about one of these trial balloons, then that tells them something. But now, it sounds as though the Fringe co-creators may actually be considering resurrecting Khan, who's still sleeping in his little suspended-animation capsule in their revamped timeline. So just in case they're really serious about this, here's a list of reasons why a new Khan would be a terrible, epically bad idea."
Water Seeping Through Howard Hanson Dam Is Picking Up Speed: Oh, my — I'm glad we live on the third floor of our apartment building! "The speed at which water is seeping through a flank of the Howard Hanson Dam has, by one key measure, increased since January, and the people who operate the dam don't know why. Nobody's saying there will be large-scale floods for the first time since the dam was built, but the weakness in the dam abutment — the side of the valley against which the dam was built — means the Corps of Engineers may have to severely restrict how much stormwater the dam can hold back for the next several winters. And that could mean more water flowing through the valley below, raising the risk of flooding for the cities of Kent, Renton, Tukwila and Auburn."
The Blue and the Green: "You see embedded spirals, right, of green, pinkish-orange, and blue? Incredibly, the green and the blue spirals are the same color. At first I thought Richard was pulling our collective legs, being a trickster of high magnitude. So I loaded the image in Photoshop and examined the two spirals. Like I said, incredible! For pedantry sake, the RGB colors in both spirals are 0, 255, 150. So they are mostly green with a solid splash of blue."
The Puppet Show: Creepy-cool: photos of children to make them look like puppets, dolls, or ventriloquists dummies, depending on your interpretation.

I’ve been getting a lot of Ope…

2009-07-04T20:41:00Z

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

I’ve been getting a lot of OpenDNS ‘this website isn’t responding’ pages lately. Is this a me thing, a Quest thing, some other thing?