Hell. Wow. Happy Nenya. I may actively *like* Biden now, rather than feeling he's a reasonably decent guy but not too exciting. He gets it! And he's a GOOD speaker, too. I hope he gets a chance to be heard.
I am so jealous. And yay, faces to put with names! Somehow I imagined John Scalzi with more hair. Hmm.
In other news (from the Hugo awards pictures), whoever Mary Robinette Kowal is, she has AMAZING taste in golden gowns. *sigh*
Ooh, I saw this! My Gmail has been catching these by the bucketload this week. It's kind of strange to see a whole page of spam subject lines, all alike. (Since that address is not signed up for any services remotely like CNN, I wouldn't have clicked anyway. I can't say I'm immune to doing stupid things online, but at least this one wasn't a temptation at all.)
Sigh, Nix said what I was going to say. I don't find BoingBoing's comment sections entirely unreadable, but neither do I really get why HuronBob's first comment was disemvowelled.
*shrugs*
However, the poetry is pretty fabulous, and the watch amazing (if, indeed, ostentatious). I love the idea that it's really a trans-dimensional portal control device! :D
I am highly amused by the phrase "giant robot miniatures", even though I know exactly what is meant.
Oh, geez, I hope you guys can get online again soon. It's like losing a body part to not have the access one is used to. (Parenthetically, I am entirely thrilled that I am not the only one who feels this way. Sometimes I feel like there must be something wrong with me to miss being able to hop online, the times when my access goes down. Confirming this is the fact that I actually get more real-world projects done when I can't go online...hmmm....)
Er, crossing the border by myself as an adult in 2006, in case that was confusing. :)
That's really wonderful, if there is going to be an extra few months or a year for everyone to get passports. American/Canadian border culture is a wonderful, beauteous thing, and should not be stomped on like this.
This whole thing makes me sad--I am one of the Canadians who used to be proud of the fact that our border with the US was the longest undefended border in the world. I remember looking at world maps as a child and comparing our border with the one between Russia and China. I would read all these books about people trying to get into or out of highly-controlled countries and it seemed so bizarre, because my experience with border crossings was my dad pulling up to a little kiosk, being asked whether he and his family were Canadian or American, maybe showing his driver's license, and being let through. (This was in the late 1980's/early 1990's.) Of course as a kid if there was more documentation than that required I didn't notice it, but I remember crossing into Canada from the US in 2006 (the first time I ever did it, and just before the must-have-passports rule) and seriously wondering if they would let us through.
I now have an American passport (yay for windfalls that mean you can pay the $97) and hope to get a Canadian passport (I'm dual-citizen) as soon as I can. Living in the States now has me worried about not being able to leave. Maybe I'll be back home in Canada by June 2009. But I don't expect the DHS to lighten up much, Democrat win or no Democrat win. Which breaks my heart for the loss of the border culture that was so much a part of my youth. :(
jmhm! How cool! Congratulations.
(Also, regarding the opening post: Ramen!)
Sadly, I have in fact seen a very serious fundamentalist pamphlet stating with great finality that there could not possibly be extraterrestrial life, and quoting some scripture or other to support this. I'm a sci-fi geek and fond of CS Lewis's idea (from one of his essays) that if aliens do exist, then God would arrange it so they could get in touch with him themselves (Christ would incarnate for them in a form compatible with their own if they needed him to, for example)--no need to pretend we know whether aliens exist or not, since under this theory it doesn't hurt Christianity at all if aliens do exist. So I spluttered incoherently at the pamphlet for a few minutes, and finally gave up, tossed it in the trash bin, and hoped the relatives watching me didn't think I was nuts for being so put out at it. I'd really LIKE for there to be aliens! And the writers were very, very sure that if there were, their religion would utterly crumble...sad.
Argh, dammit. I have been studiously trying to forget that I know about the mouseovers, because it will mean reading them all over again (not so terrible a fate, except I ought to be doing other More Productive Things).
My favourite version of "to win the Internet" is "to wih an Internet", which variant took off after GWB said "I hear there's rumors on the Internets" in one of his speeches, and was roundly mocked for seeming to claim that there are more than one. The handy thing about "Internets", of course, is that any given person can win one Internet and still leave plenty for other persons whose actions are made of win and/or awesome to also win their own Internet (or leave space for themselves to win another Internet in the future). Thus you get awards like, "That was brilliant! Have an Internet," or "One Internet, slightly scuffed, all yours".
On Fred Clark's Slacktivist (and perhaps elsewhere) someone is said to have "won the thread" if they say something so amusing that no one else thinks they will be able to top it. (For example, I believe cjmr of Slacktivist won the thread in response to the question "What will be Jerry Fallwell's greatest surprise in the afterlife?" by saying "St. Peter is Catholic.")
What Tania said. I didn't know we had so many veterans here (I did know about Terry because he posts about it often).
The colour photos really do make WWI seem real....
Wearing virtual poppy, and using PixelFish's desktop, because I didn't have a real poppy to wear this year.
Solemn thanks.
#126--I have often wondered if people who think that "soft" torture techniques like bombardment with sound, light, or extreme temperatures have ever read the memoirs of anyone who's survived that. Take, for example, political prisoners in the USSR. One of the reasons I am devoutly against torture even on the so-called 'light' end of the spectrum is that I read at about age ten the biography of Richard Wurmbrand of Romania and other Christians imprisoned under Soviet regimes. Sometimes they were able to hold up under torture and give false information, and sometimes they confessed--but you could never say, going in to it, which would happen to you. And for example being taken from a metal cell where you were starved and beaten to a nice, comfortably furnished room where you were offered a wonderful meal, a soft bed, and a bath--and then had it taken away just before you could eat it, with the caveat that you could have it back if you confessed: this may not sound like "torture", but it was a very effective method. Same thing goes for blaring lights 24 hours a day or turning on loud music at unpredictable intervals.
I'm not Terry Karney and have never been an interrogator or a subject of interrogations. But having read the first-person accounts of people who have been the latter, I am far more likely to believe Mr. Karney & associated folk on this thread than anyone who says, "Oh, I wouldn't tell a lie, I'd rather take the pain." Sure, you'd rather take the pain and not lie--but there's a point at which your body betrays you. And what if you were being asked to tell something true to make the pain stop?
"There are four lights" -- Picard and the Cardassians. Torture isn't about information, it's about breaking your will.
As an outsider to anime fandom, can I just say that a) most of these titles are really weird-sounding and I am wildly curious as to how the authors came up with them (kind of like how band names are always so strange), and b) you guys are making me want to go raid my sister's manga collection again. This stuff actually sounds interesting now. Thank you!
Hmm. I dropped by here to leave a link in the latest open thread, which now seems rather off-topic. Ah, well.
Here is what I was going to post: a singing Tesla coil which I have been assured plays the Tetris theme music.
I suppose this fits with the Mythbusters/things-go-splodey theme, tangentially at least.
Back to the hoarding of words--is being a blogdragon related to being a bookworm?
If I have to choose between Quantum Fetish Mechanics and the Law of Conservation of Bigotry, I'll have to go with the former....
*shudders, thinking of AdultFanFiction.net*
One could, of course, just say "guts" and leave out the gonadal references altogether. (Perhaps that lacks a certain punch.)
And good on Judge Aiken!
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