Categories
Blather Oddities Science Fiction and Fantasy

Redhaired Scissorman makes Atomic Tacos

I seem to have completely stopped posting to my blog. Two reasons I can think of for that (aside from the obvious laziness): First, recent versions of WordPress have broken the “Blog This” bookmarklet which used to make it pretty convenient to grab a link and get a new blog entry window to post it in. Second, I started using my Scuttle to save interesting links, or (more rarely), the Shared Items page in Google Reader. And since most of my posts are quick links to something from someone else’s blog anyway, making new blog entries has become rather pointless, most of the time.

But sometimes the urge is not just to link, but to wave as well.

  • Is gingerism as bad as racism? (BBC). Apparently, virulent prejudice against redheads is endemic to Britain. The topic came up in a podcast I listened to, and the next day I found this article. My family includes Brits and redheads (as well as British redheads), so, interesting.
  • Bash vs. Snip: How to Win at Rock, Paper, Scissors (through John Wick’s LJ) This bit is interesting:

    The World Rock Paper Scissors Society claims rookie men tend to lead with rock. If you’re playing a spontaneous game against a male rookie, there’s an increased chance that his opening throw will be rock, so you’ll want to go with paper. Why do men start with rock? Perhaps the clenched fist evokes power and makes guys feel tough. If you’re playing a female rookie, however, keep in mind that competitive player Jason Simmons claims that women tend to start with scissors, so go with rock.

  • Robert Rodriguez’s Ten Minute Cooking School has two installments up on youtube. These were originally packaged as DVD extras. Rodruguez is as cool on film as Tarantino is creepy. Or more so.
  • Canadian king of Hard SF gloom Peter Watts (of Vampire Domestication fame) has finally converted his fascinating newscrawl page to a real blog you can subscribe to. When he’s not being pessimistic about his writing career, he can be fascinatingly pessimistic about the implications of the latest scientific research. Sometimes he combines both.
  • Also SF and also with the pessimistic implications of science (this time to space-opera style science fiction, not to human life on Earth…) is Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets site, which has a ton of cool info on interstellar spaceships and hard science in between a whole lot of retro art. It includes such sobering thoughts as “Jon’s Law for SF authors”, which states that “Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction” (where “Interesting is equal to ‘whatever keeps the readers from getting bored'”).
Categories
Blather

Chop

I cut my hair. Took a pair of scissors, grabbed a fistful of the hair on the right of my head, cut it, grabbed a fistful of hair on my left and cut that too. Between the right and the left, I realized I’d cut too much. This wasn’t shortening the tips. My hair was shorter then it’s been in twelve years. And because of the way I cut it, I can’t tie it back to keep it out of my eyes, until it grows at least a finger’s length more.

I tried to figure out who this silly seventies/eighties hair style looks like, and I think it’s sort of what my nephew has.
Goodbye Robert Plant, hello Tom hpvphvhpv!!!.

me, after
my hair, after

Categories
Blather Software and Programming

Sweet, sweet /dev/null

Dada spam word of the day: tuberosity boudoir.

Talk about statistical improbabilities.

More then a year ago, I complained about spam-mail bounces cluttering up by inbox. But I didn’t really bother doing anything about it for a long while. And in recent months, the weekend spam-bounce-storms have gotten very bad.

So this Saturday, on a whim, I added a small rule to the bottom of my .procmailrc file, dropping any message sent to the SF society domain that wasn’t specifically filed elsewhere into the dark oblivion of /dev/null.

Ah, blessed silence.

Categories
Blather Science Fiction and Fantasy

Pan’s Labyrinth

I saw Pan’s Labyrinth on the Saturday evening just before national Holocaust memorial day. After seeing it, I found the timing fitting.

Pan’s Labyrinth isn’t about the Holocaust, but it is set during World War 2, although in the isolation of post-civil-war Spain, the one country in Europe where the fascists actually won. And it has a lot of the imagery we associate with WW2/Shoah stories – an oppressive fascist army lead by a sadistic captain, partisans in the woods, an atmosphere of fear , hunger and the hovering shadow of death. The heroine, Ofelia, and her mother are in a very real sense refugees, moving to live in the country with the mother’s new husband, the aforementioned sadistic captain, after Ofelia’s father died in the war.

As a child protagonist, Ofelia is refreshingly mundane, and although the world of fantasy she escapes to is rendered in glossy CGI, the character and her story remain firmly grounded in the grim reality of an ordinary withdrawn and imaginative girl struggling to escape a terrifying and oppressive world. I suspect there’s a bit of sleight of hand here regarding the weaving of the fantastic and the real – the viewer’s expectations are focused on the distracting “goth muppets” and it’s only gradually that we understand how closely the fairy elements reflect and comment on the harsh state of affairs around Ofelia.

A little detail that struck me was a scene where Ofelia is tempted by a forbidden fairy feast. The temptation of food doesn’t seem like much to us, I think, not when you match it with the threat of a very real supernatural wrath; but for someone who suffers from real hunger, like a medieval peasant or a child in wartime, food is a strong lure.

Categories
Blather short

Salt

אינטרנט, פצעים, מלח.