The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by PiscusFiche:

I think I parsed Ho--bolts drink, I mean, successfully. Could be wrong.

But let there be rejoicing.

I saw another, much smaller advert from H&M hanging off of another building here in SF (my new haunting ground) and pointed it out to Lee. "Look, the same people who are mucking up the Flatiron." He recognised the logo immediately.

Glad to hear it is down.

Thanks for the recommendation, Michael. I'll have to see if I can look it up somewhere.

I'll have to remember to frame the Iraqi war in business terms the next time I talk to some of my more conservative friends and family.

That said, I'm kinda curious as to how much power General Franks has over a situation when the President informs him we are going to war. Does Donald Rumsfeld override Gen. Franks in terms of strategy advisement? Does Gen. Franks get to lay out the majority of the strategy and tactics? Can he put a kibosh on the whole enterprise if he thinks it is ill-advised? Please bear with me--I'm not very well-informed as to how chain of command works. I can tell it has broken down heavily during this war, if Abu Ghraib is anything to go by, but I still know very little.

JVP: That reminds me of the Tick issue where Chairface Chippendale tries to write his name on the moon, and the Tick stops him halfway through. (The whole rest of the series, whenever you see the moon, it's got a C-H-A.)

UGH. How did they get permission to go ahead with that?

(The funny thing is, that I liked the similar banners they had up on the buildings of SLC during the Winter Olympics--but those buildings have no historic significance and no real architectural style. Plus...they weren't advertising blazers for 49.99.)

Just finished: Elizabeth George's A Place of Hiding

Meaning to get: Zen and the Brain by James H. Austin

Saw this morning: In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot by Graham Roumieu

*snerk* I just read Beth Meacham's response to my boyfriend, and without missing a beat, my boyfriend responded, "But that's all in the past, before he accepted Jesus as his Lord and Saviour."

I read that as tongue-in-cheek--a flippant response to those people who like to argue that voting against a sitting president merely because he's who he is means that the other options can't be good, since we're not voting FOR them, but AGAINST Bush. (I say, if the devil I know is rotten to the core, and the devil I don't know so well, but have a reasonable expectation of a better expiration date and a taste more to my liking, then I'm going with the devil I don't know so well. After all, Bush has PROVED he's incompetent in the job. Even if you don't have somebody to fill the spot, most jobs would boot the incompetent. I don't know why the US government isn't held to a higher standard.)

Side note: Been reading Le Guin's books Steering the Craft (a book with writing exercises for the go-it-alone writer or writing groups) and A Wave In the Mind. Wave is more of her personal politics and ruminations....it's fascinating reading.

I heard him interviewed on NPR last night. Tight stuff, would love to hear more.

I can combine two of those. I saw a review for Spider-Man somewhere online--a user review, nobody writing for a paper--where somebody reviewed Spider-Man solely on the virtue of it NOT being Fahrenheit 9/11.

I have no compelling reason for most of these. Except the tablet pen.

Acoustic or electric?
Electric.

Bagel or bialy?
Bagel.

Homousion or homoiusion?
*blink* I guess I need to study more.

Mingus or Coltrane?
Coltrane. I think.

Dante or Chaucer?
Dante.

Trackball or mouse?
Wacom tablet pen.

Sherman or Grant?
Sherman.

Shaken or stirred
All the drinks I like say "Shake well before opening".

Congrats on all that time together. I hope I'm that lucky someday.

"Kid, have you rehabilitated yourself?" *

(Sorry....couldn't resist.)

That's a really lovely idea. Are people still in line or did it trickle down with the hearings over the last week?

Whoa. Those are sweet. I called my boyfriend over to look and now he's grabbing them for reference textures and colours--he's a video game artist, and since he often has to paint very sci-fi stuff, he loves shots like these.

Xopher: A hellmouth! Why didn't I think of that before? :)

Mary Kay: I'm a big map junkie too--I ALWAYS navigate when we go on road trips. I ♥ the map. And honestly, when I see people with maps in public, I kind of expect to see them looking at things, or surveying them.

I also had the guidebook thing pop into my head. I can just see German or Japanese tourists getting harrassed in the future. "Oh, wait, you said you were a tourist. Not a terrorist. I get it now. But we still have to take your Fodor's Guide--can't have you wandering around with reference and surveying our national landmarks."

While I am certainly disturbed by the WMDs being found, I'm a little amused by where they were found: Tyler, Texas.

This is probably only cosmically funny to me, but hey....

Random aside: The only time I like to drink milk is after eating pancakes/waffles with syrup OR after eating microwaved convenience store hot dogs. I have no explanation for this.

Does anyone else find it funny that one industry wants to protect its business models so badly that it doesn't care about screwing up the business models of other industries?

The idea that one group can control ideas and output of those ideas seems pretty horrific. Those ideas COULD be used for illegal means but there's many other perfectly legal uses (such as the backup copies Stefan mentioned) as well. I don't believe in regulating potential theft by limiting technology.

A little something which doesn't often get brought up in piracy stories is that blank CDs and now computer storage devices have a tax built into their price which gets disbursed to the RIAA, precisely because of the piracy issue and the case for potential theft. This money is supposed to compensate record labels and the artists who worked on the albums. In reality, only the top ten percent or so of the artists actually seem to receive the money...but either way, this means that every time I buy a blank CD to burn my digital art onto, or everytime a garage band buys a thousand blanks to fund their own recording, that money goes to the record companies on the off chance that I'm using it for other purposes. Buy a blank CD, fund the RIAA.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=CD+tax+RIAA

Also, regarding those work-for-hire types in the movie industry, playing the poster child for piracy victims: Do they recieve a percentage of the movie profits? (I honestly don't know this, and I would be happy if it were so, but I do doubt it.) Will their wages go up in a similar percentage to actors and directors and producers if a studio makes more money? (Again I kinda doubt it, but we wouldn't have as much sympathy for the super rich actors and directors and producers?) Who gets hurt the most by movie piracy?

BTW, I'm not saying run out and pirate everything because these people make loads of money. My BF works for a video game company, and the recent hacking of the Half Life source code, and subsequent posting of it online was a very big deal for them. But the RIAA and the MPAA have a very vested interest in controlling the technology and I don't trust that their interest will serve technology and advance us. It serves only to control us, their end-user market, and to tell us exactly how we can use their product. Heaven forbid that we start enjoying their product without them seeing extra money for every single usage. And the rhetorical tools they use to manipulate the public are extremely misleading.

I scribbled down a few brief thoughts in my journal, regarding your situation, Kathryn. It's here if you want to read it:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/pixelfish/191626.html

Obviously my brief con experience with a child in tow was that of a fan, not a professional expected to participate in the community, but I do think that many fans would certainly enjoy an opportunity for quality childcare and who might agree to pay for childcare participant tickets. At least with the bigger cons.

(Sadly one of my favourite "conventions" is a professional convention for video game developers and they have a very strict No Babes In Arms and nobody under 18 rule.)

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