The Mote in God's Eye; Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle; 1974

How I hate the 60's and 70's mainstream SF androcentric gender politics.  There are some direct attempts to criticize the strict gender roles of the Second Empire of Man, but the actual writing of the only female character betrays these efforts**.  Lady Sally Fowler is a competent, if well-connected***, anthropologist who does useful work for the expedition to the Mote, but whose ultimate purpose is "to keep Blaine active.  When he does not brood, he is good officer."  Cordelia Naismith, we need you!


This is otherwise one of the better 70's Nebula finalists that didn't actually win the award.  




** the wikipedia entry notes that Heinlein gave them extensive advice; never a good sign for the female characters.


*** being well-connected is acknowledged as a "sin", both against Lady Sally's credentials as a xenobiologist and Lord Rod Blaine's credentials as a naval captain.  Rod is able to expiate these sins beyond all reasonable doubt, but there remains a shadow over Sally's accomplishments.

Super 8 (2011)

I don't trust Spielberg anymore, so when his name was heavily attached to Super 8, I didn't even want to watch it.  However, JJ Abrams directed, and after the Star Trek reboot, he's got a lot of credit with us.  So we warily put it on the netflix queue, and finally watched it.  


==spoilers==


It opens with a beautifully simple bit of storytelling, showing us a sign outside an area of heavy industry that proudly proclaims no accidents in ~740 days.  Then an employee starts to take down the numbers.  We cut to a boy sitting alone on a swingset on a snow-covered yard, while the wake is being held inside the house.  The muted conversation between two adults reveals it's his mother who has died.


This is great.  We're hooked.  We're ready for more.


Four months later, school lets out, and the boy is helping his friend, an aspiring filmmaker, complete his entry for a competition.  The group of kids are well-developed caricatures.  All is good (especially Elle Fanning, who is playing a 15-year-old while 12 herself).  While they're out shooting a scene by a train station at night, a truck purposefully drives onto the tracks and crashes into a passing train, which derails.  And derails.  And derails, so unbelievably ridiculously spectacularly that it derails all enjoyment of the film for a couple minutes, but eventually we get back to the kids, who now have a mystery on their hands... but mostly they're still just trying to shoot their Super 8 film for the contest.  


With Spielberg's name attached to the film, you'll never have guessed this, but... there was an alien in the train.  Unlike E.T., the gubbamint got to this one first, and they held it captive and did tests on it and generally pissed it off for 20 years, but now it's escaped and running loose in the American Heartland.  Also unlike E.T., it captures innocent bystanders and eats them, at least until "our hero" shares his memory of his mom dying to let it know that "Bad things happen... but you can still live."  Mmm-kay, thanks, but I don't see how that suddenly turns Alien into E.T.  I'm certainly not going to be staring up in wonder as it leaves, like this is Close Encounters or something.  


The whole last 30-40 minutes is a mess, really.  I assume the filmmakers want the alien to be a misunderstood monster, like Kong, or Mighty Joe Young, or Frankenstein, but there's no time to get to know this creature on a personal level, so it's impossible to sympathize with it, beyond a general sorrow that it's been held captive for so long.


As the credits roll, we see the film the kids made... and sadly, it's ultimately more satisfying than Super 8.  Boo.  I'd rather have had the Star Trek sequel sooner.  Honestly, this was the worst film we've seen since we Green Lantern hit the top of our queue last week (that was far worse).

Google search killed the bookmarks toolbar

Sure, we've known this for a long time, but it really didn't hit home until I switched to Chrome as my browser and got used to its severely limited bookmarking capabilities.  Still, the enormous crusty old set of bookmarks remained on Firefox until I recently got the go-ahead from Sarah to clean 'em out.  But I couldn't simply throw away seventeen years of accumulated stuff without lovingly clicking on each one...

• A number of them simply didn't link to anything anymore.  
• A bunch of them are to sites and information that is trivial to get to with a Google search.  
• There are a very few that I'm considering keeping because they represent something that I might need but would have difficulty remembering the correct keywords to find with a Google search.

And, there are a few that deserve a little retrospective before they go.


(approx 1997-98?)  What every new grad student should know.  I assume Sarah found this while at NWU.  I certainly didn't have it at Duke; maybe I would have finished the PhD if I'd figured out some of this stuff sooner.

(approx 1998)  Duncan House.  We got our wedding rings from Duncan House.  Back in '98, he was still on the U.S. Pacific coast and presumably dreaming of one day moving to the Isle of Skye.  He still does beautiful work, though the skyrocketing price of gold probably means that we'll be looking at the Cuchulain rings in silver.

(approx 2000-2001) Seascape sailing.  


Best.
Vacation.
Ever.


We did this the summer we moved to Vermont.

American county to county migration

Maps awesomeness.  I wonder about the income numbers -- presumably people typically move for higher paying jobs?  but if you move from NYC to AL, you might take an absolute pay cut in return for a relative pay raise?  Also, the numbers for the year will be some mishmash of the job people had in the old location and the job they had in the new location, plus possibly some job seeking time.  If we could look at the numbers for the prior year and the following year, we might have a truer view of the incoming/departing incomes. 

Test 2

This is a test to see whether twitterfeed does an adequate job of updating FB from Blogger.  From further reading, it looks like I'll just have to wait for the Blogger/G+ integration.

And here is a picture of me Tin Tin:

Test

This is a minor test to see how well blogger posts to G+ (now that my profile is linked) and FB (using e-mail).

And now here's a photo of lettuce seeds:

No more automatic blog imports to Facebook

I have to admit that I never really liked the fact that the way you "integrated" your blog into FB was for FB to mangle your blog posts into FB Notes -- it would always have been better if the automatic integration was a wall update with a link to the new blog entry.  Now... now I wonder if there is (or always was) a way to update my FB status by sending an e-mail.  I know that blogger can automatically send an e-mail when an entry is posted; now I just need to figure out how to get that onto FB (and, ideally, G+).


Aha, there is.  Sort of.  Maybe.  Or maybe one of these ideas will help.

Separated at birth?

My mom pointed this out during the 1987 playoffs.  It's still eerie.

Open letter to Vanguard

I recently received a snail-mail letter telling me to stay invested in Admiral Shares.  This pisses me off for a couple reasons:

1. I'm signed up for e-Delivery on all possible communications from Vanguard.  Only letters that the Feds require you to snail-mail to me should come via the post office.  I seriously doubt this falls under that category.
2. This was my Roth IRA account, which I opened in 1998 and have maximized contributions to every year.  Because of Vanguard's once-stricter conditions on switching to Admiral shares and the crappy economy over the last 13 years, it wasn't until last year that I *could* switch to Admiral shares.  I had been desperately wishing for Admiral shares until then, and I certainly don't need to be told to stay in them.

I love Vanguard, but you are wasting money on fluff.  Whatever you spent snail-mailing me this letter (over and above the cost of sending me an e-mail) is money that should be going into my retirement account.  Stop it.  Never, ever, ever, send me another paper letter about how great Admiral shares are.  You have my e-mail address.  I read e-mails from Vanguard.  Send communications there.

Toys

A few weeks ago, PA talked about Skylanders touching on the issue of our kids' toys vs. the ones we grew up with.**  I was set to violently disagree, because my own kids' toys are either the same as those we had (Playmobil, Lego***) or look pretty for display, but aren't good for actual play -- however, my only real basis for comparison are the Star Wars figures (the Galactic Heroes line holds up fairly well for play, but the figures are less poseable than the old Kenner line).  Completely separately from this, I discovered Shortpacked!**** when Dave Willis guest drew for QC this week.  While catching up on back issues of the comic, it was interesting to see Willis' take on the Battle Armor He-man action figure vs. today's toys.

At any rate, I looked up Skylanders, and it seems that the innovation is that your action figure is also a gussied up flash drive that holds your character information and achievements from playing the video game.  Okay, that's cool, but to my eyes the figures themselves aren't really good for play outside the video game.  They're a step up from static *collectible* figures, but are orthogonal to *action* figures that you actually play with.  


** The news associated with the comic has little to do with the comic itself, but is a must-read for Andy Schatz's commentary on how the one-button Mac mouse influenced his game design.


*** You could argue that Lego is better now because of the Star Wars / Harry Potter / Indiana Jones / etc cross-branding, but I would argue that many of the SWLego vehicle designs, while they look pretty for display, don't hold up to extended play the way, say, the Battrax did.


**** It's a comic about toys, but even if you don't play with or collect toys any more, you'll like this.