@42 One of the best things about RSS feeds is they let you keep an eye on things (blogs, comics, etc.) you're interested in without having to check them every day.
Of course that doesn't make it any less frustrating trying to follow something with a continuous storyline that only updates once in a blue moon, which definitely seems to be the default state of webcomics.
@297: Much earlier this evening, the CBC was showing large crowds pushing up against the White House fence and claimed that people were chanting, "Bush out!" so it seems possible.
@291: The other hope, I think, is that the Supreme Court decision made it pretty clear that the justices felt that they had two choices when it came to ensuring equality for same-sex and heterosexual relationships -- they could either call them all marriage, or California could stop sanctioning state marriages and make all such relationships domestic partnerships or similar.
Plus, with Obama as president, we can hope to see the U.S. Supreme Court move back to the center (or even a bit left), which might make dealing with these issues at the federal level possible.
I'm still hoping that 8 won't pass. Unfortunately, a number of people (including our "Director of Institution Diversity") at the college I work at came out as pro-8, and I'm not looking forward to trying to pretend I don't despise them.
@236: But SF has no results in, and L.A. proper is really low. Unsurprisingly, San Bernardino, where I live and drive past Yes on 8 signs every day, is craptastic. But we knew that when we moved here.
@236: But SF has no results in, and L.A. proper is really low. Unsurprisingly, San Bernardino, where I live and drive past Yes on 8 signs every day, is craptastic. But we knew that when we moved here.
@79: Awesome -- I grew up there. I'm sure my dad is disappointed.
We have the CBC's coverage on C-SPAN2, plus a variety of maps and blogs (DailyKos, Pandagon, Huffington Post, CNN).
I'm pretty sure that when McCain said he wasn't awarded Miss Congeniality in the Senate, what he meant was that he wasn't popular because he took on his own party. Presumably that was part of his whole "Barack is a celebrity" thing.
@24 McCain let Lehrer push him into saying he'd freeze all government spending except military, veteran's affairs, and entitlements. Which is nuts on so many different levels.
We were also very impressed (although maybe a bit annoyed) by the way that McCain scrambled to have the last word on every question (aided by Lehrer) whereas Obama would start to respond, then just shrug and let it go. I would have liked to have seen him be a bit more aggressive in response to some of things McCain said, but I think he came off as being a lot more presidential by shrugging it off and trusting the audience to see that McCain was lying and wasn't worth arguing with on those points.
@26 Turns out I misspoke -- the covers I buy are actually 1.5 mil
polyester (from Gaylord). The oldest covers I have date back to the
80s. I will definitely check to make sure they're not Mylar, though --
thanks for the warning!
Also, I have to agree on the McSweeney's fiction, although I'm not
sure I have a particular quibble with the quality so much as it's not
quite my cup of tea. But they do produce some really beautiful
artifacts.
@15 & 16 It is shrink-wrapped. I sent McSweeney's a
bunch of money a year or so ago when they were hit hard by the
Publishers West (?) bankruptcy, which included a bunch of
subscriptions, including the next some number of books. Since then I've
received an awful lot of books, all of which have been very
attractively bound. (Alas, I haven't actually gotten around to reading
most of them.) Anyway, to my surprise I got another package from
McSweeney's, opened it, and found the Chabon book!
Now, of course, I'm going to have to figure out how to cover it....
(Note another issue -- different words from the title are printed on the different bands, so if a cover band slips around, the words don't line up properly. It is still a handsome book, though.)
I've always been a bit confused by people leaving the dust jackets on when reading the book, as the dust jacket is the most easily damaged part of a book.
If you look at library practice, you tend to see one of two
alternatives -- university libraries tend to remove and store (or
discard) the dust jackets, leaving the books naked. Public libraries
tend to put mylar covers over the dust jackets and attach them to the
books. Either method protects the dust jacket.
Personally, I've always removed dust jackets when reading a book. I also tend to put mylar covers on them, but I still remove the protected dust jacket when reading the book.
Of course the annoying thing about fancy overlaid covers like this one is that they make putting mylar covers on the book a real challenge....
@58, I'd heard (from a conversation in The Other Change of Hobbit) that there were several trucks knocked over on the Richmond-San Rafael bridge; that every time they'd gotten one moved, another would get knocked over, which is what led them to close the bridge.
We'd cleverly picked this weekend for a trip to SF (from LA) to see the Joseph Cornell exhibit at SFMOMA. Having done that, we spent the nastiest day wandering around the East Bay (on foot). We didn't see any major accidents or problems ourselves, although there was a lot of debris from trees scattered around, and BART trains were delayed or unable to reach some stations for a while (when we set out that morning, debris on the line was causing them to stop service south of 24th Street).
When I actually lived in the Bay Area, I'd experienced storms that seemed to be about as bad (from my perspective as a pedestrian BART user) at least a few times, the most memorable of which involved the winds blowing so hard that I literally could not make forward progress towards work for a few minutes. That was actually kind of exhilarating; sadly it stopped before I could decide it was a message telling me to go back home.
@39: We (me from central New York, my partner from England, and both of us having spent a number of years in Vancouver) are much entertained by "Storm Team 4" on the LA NBC station, which covers every piddling rainstorm as if it was the great flood from the Bible. That said, LA does seem to be unstable enough that the rain leads to all sorts of nastiness that I wouldn't have thought of based on my childhood (e.g., landslides, flash floods).
@58, I'd heard (from a conversation in The Other Change of Hobbit) that there were several trucks knocked over on the Richmond-San Rafael bridge; that every time they'd gotten one moved, another would get knocked over, which is what led them to close the bridge.
We'd cleverly picked this weekend for a trip to SF (from LA) to see the Joseph Cornell exhibit at SFMOMA. Having done that, we spent the nastiest day wandering around the East Bay (on foot). We didn't see any major accidents or problems ourselves, although there was a lot of debris from trees scattered around, and BART trains were delayed or unable to reach some stations for a while (when we set out that morning, debris on the line was causing them to stop service south of 24th Street).
When I actually lived in the Bay Area, I'd experienced storms that seemed to be about as bad (from my perspective as a pedestrian BART user) at least a few times, the most memorable of which involved the winds blowing so hard that I literally could not make forward progress towards work for a few minutes. That was actually kind of exhilarating; sadly it stopped before I could decide it was a message telling me to go back home.
@39: We (me from central New York, my partner from England, and both of us having spent a number of years in Vancouver) are much entertained by "Storm Team 4" on the LA NBC station, which covers every piddling rainstorm as if it was the great flood from the Bible. That said, LA does seem to be unstable enough that the rain leads to all sorts of nastiness that I wouldn't have thought of based on my childhood (e.g., landslides, flash floods).
#34: I'm on exactly the other side of the fence on the Locas-Palomar stories. Possibly my failing, but I identify much more closely with the 80s punk characters in Jaime's L.A. than with the folks in Gilbert's Palomar. Be warned, though: there are a few underwear perverts in Locas, though, especially in the earlier stories.
Other than various Alan Moore books (Promethea, in particular), the really nice Absolute Sandman collections, and some manga, I haven't bought much in the way of comics since the late 80s/early 90s. But I did recently pick up Grant Morrison's Invisibles books, which were fun. They're about a very twisty conspiracy, and some heroes who are maybe trying to fight the power, or maybe trying to be the power, or maybe the power is manipulating them... it's all very complex, and even a bit pervy if you like that sort of thing. They've been compared to Illuminatus!, and that's not too far off.
Another Moore classic among my faves is Halo Jones, about a girl who sets out for the stars and has various adventures and somehow becomes a famous and inspirational figure along the way. Similarly, Kyle Baker's Why I Hate Saturn, also featuring an underwear pervert ala Jaime's Penny Century, is wonderfully funny.
And, finally, I have to put in a plug for Megatokyo, another web comic that's occasionally collected into nice little books. It's about two gamer/manga fans who've managed to get trapped in Japan, and alternates between silly battle scenes and tearjerking romance. I think it's sweet.
Hmm -- Jonny Quest makes me think of The Venture Brothers, which, while not anime, is animation, is also on Adult Swim, and answers the question, "what if a Jonny Quest-like character grew up and was a complete loser?" It's always funny, and sometimes it's brilliant. Dr. Venture and his sons are fairly annoying, but the supporting characters are amazing.
The music in Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex is by Yoko Kanno. There's some great jazz, some okay rock, and some bits that make me flinch a bit, but I still listen to them.
Fullmetal Alchemist really kicked our butts. It looks like a happy-go-lucky anime at first glance, but, wow, is it much, much deeper. Definitely left me emotionally wrecked at a number of points.
Just saw someone talking about "vice grips" on Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site.
Bill Blum wrote
Linux drove me nuts after a while, especially since a lot of projects were becoming distribution-specific....
Can you give some examples? Other than infrastructural stuff (e.g., apt on Debian or RPM on Red-Hat--derived distros*), most everything builds on most anything. You can even build a lot of free/open-source software on Windows (via Cygwin) and Mac OS X (with DarwinPorts or Fink).
* Actually, even those apps aren't distro specific -- you can get apt for Red-Hat-like distros and Debian has supported the use of RPM on Debian systems for a long time. (And Progeny is working on putting together a mostly-Debian distro that can use RPMs as well as debs.)
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| 2008 | 12 |
| 2007 | 3 |
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