Scrabcake

Now I remember...

2010-11-09T23:08:00.000-08:00

....why I hated having the Republicans in any sort of power. I'll admit, the mirage of finally getting someone without clouds between their ears was pretty alluring, so I voted for a few of them on a local level. My general policy was to vote down anyone sponsored by the California Teachers' Association or the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer's Association of Unwilling Taxpayers Who Wish Civilization Would Pay For Itself but Include Them in the Benefits... the HJTAUTWWCWPIITB.
Also, if you mentioned any of the following words in your voter's guide blurb:
"Toxic Chemicals" possibly in conjunction with "Our Children",
"Family Friendly",
"Big [industryname]" ,
"Big [union name]", or
"Big Government" and "Spending our hard-earned money"
I voted your sad ass DOWN.
I'm a moderate. Or maybe a Marxist. I can't decide. You all annoy me.
We ARE in a recession, but everyone has the attitude that cuts need to happen...to someone else! We need infrastructure improvements...but not in my backyard! The same people who demand that we make draconian cuts protest in the streets when we decide to close a firehouse and have 8 instead of 9 firehouses. The CTA demands we cut anything but school funding even though schools and prisons suck down most of the state's budget.
The conservatives in the wealthy suburb who whine that the liberals are all lawyers who like to sue and hold up valuable construction projects that encroach on the territories of rare earthworms suddenly have a NIMBYfit when we try to build an important rail-line above an existing railline a block away from their boutique downtown. Wonder how much THOSE suits will cost the state....
Fundies like to say that morals in this country started their downhill spiral when we got rid of prayer in school. Or the pledge. Or something like that.
I'd like to propose that this country descended into chaos when we stopped having citizenship classes. I'm going to sound like a bloody hippie here, but we need to all give a little if this state is ever going to be fiscally stable again.
CTA: No matter how many tenths of a percent we shave off the school budget, you will still be getting off far easier than the crazy, old, and homeless who are always the first people we screw when it comes time to shave off programs. No one wants to hurt the kids.
Suburbia: You don't like your work commute? Stop bitching it when we try to build trains! They're slow, don't go anywhere and you don't ride them. Well, guess what? They're never going to get better if we don't build more and make them go more places. If they get riders they'll get better, so quit bitching about how you are paying for something no one is going to use and set an example by using it!
Can we pause work on the duck sanctuary that the local green club is pushing for? Yes. The ducks can wait.
Can we close one of our eight firehouses? If not, can we have volunteers to help run it as an act of charity to the community?
Can we pay more taxes? We're going to have to, so stop whining and do your part. The Guvmint is not taking your money. You participate in our society and reap its benefits, whether those are social welfare or the provision of a nice stable and fairly free environment for you to do business in. Even if you are independently wealthy, you are still reaping the rewards of living in the US and as such you have received a service for which payment is due.
So STFU and give a little, and I will give a little, and together we will make this place a nice place to live again...and then I might be willing to give a little on your agenda next time it comes up.

Sympathy for the Devil

2010-05-30T17:13:00.000-07:00

This is essentially a repost of a comment on this article on scienceblogs:
I am a Democrat.
And right now, my party, and the people I usually agree with are making me very angry.
Post after post on scienceblogs and in the news from scientists covering the spill in the gulf are referring to the regulatory lapses of the industry as a whole. We liberals have a tendency to demonize entire industries for the sins of a few people within those industries. Apparently the scientists on scienceblogs don't realize that there are scientists working on this--engineers within BP and the other companies that are involved in putting an end to this mess. BP has nothing to gain and everything to lose by putting less than 100% into this effort, so I tend to look for the motivation of the speaker when I hear that they are not doing enough or they're doing things that are stupid. If anyone has a chance of stopping this disaster, it's the same people who had the expertise to let the genie out of the bottle in the first place. There's not much the government can do except enforce the law and stay out of the way.

As a person who has grown up around the oil industry and who has a close relative who is involved with operations safety at a company that is not BP, this whole tragedy has hit really close to home. It's made me question some deeply held beliefs about what motivates Environmentalists of the crunchy and scientific varieties, and business of the benevolent and greedy varieties. I think it's important to remember that big businesses and for that matter, the special interests that both parties respectably rail about are comprised of normal people and that for these people, big business puts food on the table and sends kids to college. These people get lost when we start talking about "big oil" as if it was some ominous monolithic concept.
Heads need to roll at BP over this, but they need to roll for the right reasons...not because BP is a monolithic evil entity that loves to destroy nature and start wars and kill puppies etc. heads need to roll because BP betrayed the people who made it possible for deep water horizon to operate. Some pencil pusher, his supervisor, and the managers above him who were too busy planning their next political maneuver to care about real world implications sold them out for a monetary drop in the bucket. It approved plans that did not include robust safety standards. It did not, apparently, run simulations on it's emergency plans--we can simulate fluid dynamics and pressure and basic physics. Judging by the crystals on the containment dome, BP did not. It cut cost corners putting lives at risk, putting a deep ocean habitat of which we know little at risk, and putting the entire fishing industry In the gulf at risk.
Accidents happen, and this is new, intensely complicated high stakes technology that is on what could be called its maiden voyage. All the more reason to do everything possible to ensure that corners are not cut and every possible safety precaution is taken. I'm not convinced BP did.
Lastly, I think those who are quick to call out the oil industry need to look in the mirror. Do you drive a car? Use plastic containers? Use electricity? That fuel comes from somewhere, and if it's not a repressive dictatorship it's increassingly difficult to access domestic sources.
We the laypeople and our politicians knew exactly the risks involved in deep sea drilling. The politicians gave it the go ahead and the politicians represent us. We also knew the fail points of the available technology and exactly where it should have been regulated. It's not like info on blowout preventers and their track record of flakiness is an industry secret. We apparently were delusional in thinking that something like this could never happen to us.
Anyway, this is a national tragedy. My heart goes out to the people who died, and I'm hoping that they will be seen as the victims of this tragedy and not part of the cause. My heart also goes out to the people from BP and the other oil companies (from what I have heard the effort to curb the spill is industry wide) who are trying everything they can to stop this. Some of them are doing this not only because it is their job but because they are horrified at the environmental and human impact. Talk about a stressful thankless job.
My heart also goes out to the fishermen and local volunteers who face financial hardship and are doing everything they can to mitigate the environmental impact.

And a final, very snarky word to Democratic Rep Ed Markey of Mass who said: "I have no confidence whatsoever in BP. I think that they do not know what they are doing. They started off talking about golf balls going in as a junk shot. People thought they would be dependent on MIT or Cal Tech instead of the PGA and golf balls. That was in the first couple of weeks. So I don't think that people should really believe what BP is saying in terms of the likelihood of anything that they're doing is going to turn out as they're predicting..."
Oh! I didn't realize we had an expert in congress! Stop, everyone! Representative Markey knows how to solve all our problems! Markey knows the oil industry, oceanography, and geology better than the best and brightest minds in the industry! Let's put him in charge!
Wait...as a person who knows nothing but always has an opinion anyway, I know another idiot mouthing off when I see one. Ed Markey, you don't have any better ideas, do you? No? Then:

Well, at least it wasn't a chicken suit...

2010-04-22T21:45:00.000-07:00

On my commute home from work I sometimes like to listen to a talk show host named Gene Burns. He's generally pretty reasonable. Usually a moderate, which I like, and a little liberal on the universal healthcare concept, which I also like, but tonight I he said something that I almost totally disagree with.
He mentioned a recent episode of Southpark where the creators were forbidden by comedy central from showing Mohammed in the irreverent cartoon, because pictures of the prophet as a living entity are haram.
So, instead of omitting the Prophet, Southpark featured him as an unseen guy in a bear-suit.
Gene proposed that some things ought to be beyond the reach of satire--not in the sense of making them illegal, but that it should be highly frowned upon to poke fun at religious icons. He listed Mary, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha (you know, just to be all inclusive and stuff) and Moses as well as a few arbitrarily chosen "secular" topics, like breast cancer.
Firstly, I think Gene fails to make a distinction between forums in which it is in poor taste to crack jokes about people's dearly held beliefs. I would argue that we as a society NEED satire. Satire generally isn't addressed towards one particular type of person, but instead as an amorphous blob of anonymous people out there. Satire is addressed to a group. Among those people might be Muslims, Catholics, and Atheists, and let's face it: all of those groups have done some godawful stuff in the name (and sometimes though they might deny it, spirit) of their worldviews. It's good for the rest of society to remind people that there are other people with worldviews outside of their little bubble, and that not everyone believes the way they do. Humour can be a way for the oppressed to vent, as it was in the case of the jokes that sprung up in the Ukraine targeting the Soviet Union after the Chornobyl disaster in 1987. It can be a way for groups to cope with tragedy internally, by laughing at something that hurts.
Satire can be a way of reminding a self-confident group of its faults--we'll know when the Catholic Church has rehabilitated itself because the priest jokes won't be funny anymore, just like the Pollack jokes aren't funny anymore. (Why was that ever a fad?) Sometimes, wounds NEED to be poked, because if they didn't hurt, we'd not do anything about them until they were necrotic.
Satire can also be a telling diagnostic about the ills of a society for an outside party, and it can also teach historians about a society's worldview in a way archaeology can't. The profusion of Gay/AIDS jokes which were apparently socially acceptable in political circles in the eighties tells me a lot more about the worldview of the Reagan administration than does a trite gradeschool history text. You'll notice that the fact that those aren't funny anymore shows that we've grown as a society...
Satire is an indicator of the weakness of society, it can help society heal, and it can also be a sign that a weakness has been overcome.
For example, as a white middle class middle American, I can happily joke about things like Teryaki chicken with a maraschino cherry and a slice of pineapple. The haute cuisine of my people. It means I'm comfortable enough with being a bit of a bumpkin that I can make fun of it.
I think I've stated why it's important that there are no sacred cows in the public forum when it comes to satire, but just to cement that point, let's imagine a situation in which Gene Burns' wish came true, and joking about the Virgin Mary was viewed as something one should not do in satire.
If we were to say "people shouldn't make jokes about the Virgin Mary because she's an inspiration to millions of people", where would we then draw the line? Should we not make jokes about cow tipping because there might be a Hindu in that amorphous blob of an audience who might be offended? How small does a group have to be before we can say: "Eh, that's ok, we can offend them." Does this rule only apply to the world major religions? And what makes their feelings more worth sparing than the Scientologists? If I draw much inspiration from A Tale of Two Cities, and my friend draws much from the Bible, why is it in poor taste to make fun of the Bible but not Tale of Two Cities? Are my life lessons less important than hers?
How do we keep from marginalizing people by making their cherished beliefs fair game while the cherished beliefs of the majority are off limits? Or do we just make any belief off limits for satire, acknowledging that something sacred to one group can be ridiculous to another? And if in refraining from satirizing any beliefs of anyone, what if we rendered ourselves easily controlled by a tyranical entity because no one would speak out for fear of offense? Worse, what this rendered society mirthless and boring?
Now, where I *might* agree with Gene is in the private sphere, even though he was clearly talking about the public one. This is where joking becomes personal, and becomes a judgment on specific people. Already, society draws lines here, designating what is polite and politic and what is not. I would not, for example, make a joke about Mohammed to a Muslim friend unless I was certain they would not be hurt by it. I care what that person thinks about me, and I care that I not hurt that person's feelings.
The work sphere is similar. It is in your best interest, in your coworkers' best interest and in the company's best interest that you be nice and not make that joke about women drivers on the company-wide emailing list. Firstly, it would be rude. Secondly, you then become less employable because when people get offended, they don't play nicely together and the whole company suffers.
So yes. I agree that the old adage that one does not talk about Money, Religion or Politics in private spheres like work and amongst one's non BFF friends.
So, to sum up, being polite to people you know and sort of know is good for you and them.
While there is a right to free speech, there is not a "right to not be offended." And for good reason.

Tale of Two Cities Fanart Contest Results

2010-03-08T20:20:00.000-08:00

Hello, hello! I've finally stopped being lazy and decided to upload the results of the fanart contest! I think we have PBS to thank for this...DAMN THEIR CONSTANT FUNDRAISING!

I would like to thank the winners and only entrants, Gina and AlbinoGrimby for swelling the very low count of Tale of Two Cities themed fanart out there.

Gina drew the close of the chapter Congratulatory in which Sydney Carton, having dined and drunk with Charles Darnay, and having in his drunkenness informed Darnay that he thinks that he hates him, Sydney has fallen asleep with his drink. The wax of the candle drips down upon his hair like a winding sheet--an illusion to a shroud.
Carton will waken in time to write Stryver's arguments for the next day's case--a dead-end occupation from which he prefers to escape into his frequent drunken stupors.
I think Gina captures this scene very well because of the simplicity of her drawing. She draws it at an angle where you can see his arms, and that captures the desperation in the scene.

Next, we have the two entries from AlbinoGrimby. One is an adaptation from the cover of the copy of the book that he has, and the other is a depiction of Lucie and Sydney.
He's done a really good job of depicting Lucie as a dreamy, pretty, golden-haired doll. I love his style that comes out in the way he portrays Lucie.

His Sydney, on the other hand....is so...boyish, and anime....and...androgynous...and kinda hawt. AND A TESTAMENT TO ALBINO'S INABILITY TO FOLLOW DIRECTIONS!!!1

You guys are both legends! Thanks for entering. Drop me your address and tell me which one of the illustrations from the below posts that you liked--the only ones I'm not willing to part with is the one with the Richard Sharpe illustrations and the A A Dixon one since that one's kind of falling apart.

I also have a copy with photographs from The Only Way...they don't have Martin Harvey in them but the pic on the cover is nice!

Women in Fantasy Novels: Venn Diagram

2010-03-01T19:58:00.000-08:00

While I'm waiting for my lovely new hard-drive to format so I can install some games and visual studio, I thought I'd humour you all with this visual representation of the one of the things that seriously irks me about the fantasy genre. I'm lookin' at you, Tolkein! I feel that male authors are especially prone to writing female characters that fit very neatly into one of these categories. I think we can put Eowyn in the Good Wife Wise Mother category inasmuch as she takes on the role of mother to her people. I think this category also encompasses "dutiful daughter", too. That's definitely Eowyn. Galadriel. Yup. Good wife/Wise Mother. Cersei from Song of Ice and fire? Princess-Whore. Arwen? Good wife/wise mother. If we extend this model into video games it gets even easier...

Speaking of Tolkein, did you notice that The Hobbit (my favourite book as a child) has NO female characters? I think they mention Bilbo's dead aunt in the first chapter, but that's IT. I wrote a fantasy story in a class once where all the characters were female and my classmates were like "Nice Lesbian Fiction!!!1" Wait a minute, if a book has no female characters no one even notices, nevermind sticking it in a special genre...

On another note, the results of the Tale of Two Cities fanart contest will be up in a few days. Even if you think you can't draw, you should still send me a picture. ASAP! And thanks to those of you, or you who sent a picture. :)

Remembering and Reimagining Dracula

2010-01-13T00:31:00.000-08:00

I'm watching the 2006 Dracula on Masterpiece Theater. At first I thought that this was another case of me reading a book a long time ago and not remembering a good part of the plot. This happened with Oliver Twist. I remember the scene where Bill Sykes is hunted down and killed like a dog very clearly, but when I watched the Masterpiece Theater version, I was surprised to find that it had a large role for a character named "Monk". Who was this Monks fellow, and why didn't I remember a thing about him? Did they just make this stuff up? Oliver Twist didn't need an evil cousin for Oliver. A quick check on Wikipedia revealed that I had forgotten a good part of the plot of Oliver Twist, or more disturbingly that the copy I'd gotten from the library was abridged and that I had read the book without realizing it!
To this day I'm not sure why I don't remember Monks.
So, when I started watching the new Dracula, I was baffled.
I don't remember Holmwood as having Syphillis! I remembered that the novel had sexual undercurrents but in typical victorian fashion, I remembered them as being rather frustratingly masked in quaint melodrama. All in all, my impression of the book was that it was rather trite. Idealistic women are attacked by a menace from the mysterious east. Brave and manly English men will try to save their idylic maidens through donating large quantities of blood through archaic surgical methods, but to no avail. One woman is brought back to life as a sensual vampiress. The manly gentlemen hunt the beast to his lair and drive a stake through his maiden-corrupting heart.
I didn't really realize that the story could be reinterpreted as an allegory for Victorian attitudes towards sex until I saw the brilliant, wordless ballet "Dracula, Pages from a Virgin's Diary".
While "Pages from a Virgin's Diary" was clearly a fantasy on the theme of Bram Stoker's novel the new Masterpiece Theater version goes as far as to reauthor parts of the story but keep the original title.
Lucy's Westenra's husband, Holmwood has "the syff". He'll do anything to avoid passing it onto the pure Lucy, and anything to avoid the horrible death that his father and mother endured as a result of the disease.
So, Lucy marries him and experiences extreme sexual frustration as her husband avoids the bed and joins a mysterious cult that promises him brand new syphillis-free blood and immortality.
Guess who the cult is bent on importing to England in a ship full of dead men?
Speaking of which, that guy playing Dracula looks really familiar....oh, God. It CAN'T be.

A quick search on IMDB shows....Marc Warren....in the role of MONKS in OLIVER TWIST.

Anyway, MONKS....sorry.....Dracula shows up and, in what seems to be a nod to Buffy, Lucy invites him in. It doesn't take too long for him to suck Lucy's blood, transforming her from frustrated newlywed to undead sexfiend vampire-beast. He then proceeds to mack on Mina while Holmwood and the some other guy who was into Lucy find a hobo hiding amongst Satanic altars in what appears to be the Holmwood Manor's wine cellar who says his name is Van Helsing. Turns out the death cult duped Mina's squeeze, Harker into taking some real-estate deeds to Dracula in Transylvania. Van Helsing was the realtor who started the deal and managed to get out of going back to close it.

Anyway, there is very little suspense leading up to the eventual staking (innuendo may or may not be intended) of undead Lucy and Monks, but a whole lot of people get killed who shouldn't and the fate of the death cultists isn't really tied up. Also, because it's a modern horror movie, it has to have the two seconds of twist at the end that nullify the activities of the last hour and a half. The undead corpse opens its eyes. The TV flickers on and evil Sadako's hand reaches over the rim of the well. The serial killer escapes from prison. You know what I mean.

I might be being a bit harsh on the movie. I liked the idea of Holmwood having syphilis and needing dracula to relieve him of it, though I thought the whole death-cult thing was a bit cliche. I agree that any interpretation of Dracula needs to make clear the sexual undertones of the book, but I thought this movie handled it a little inelegantly:
The story does keep the basic skeleton of events of Bram Stoker's original. Harker goes to Dracula's castle, finds disturbing things about his host and escapes. Dracula bites Lucy. Lucy's two lover-boys try to save her. Dracula goes after Mina. Lucy comes back, gets staked. Van Helsing is a crusty old man who beleives in dead vampires and the missionary position and he and the men go hunt down Drac and stake him too.
Everything in between is made up, though, and a lot of the players are killed off and their roles taken by other characters who had a bit part or none at all in the book. I say that this reimagining is inelegant because the screenwriters could have underlined the sexual aspects of the story without rewriting it.
There is a reason that Stoker's work is a classic. As antiquated as its narrative sometimes is, it handles sexual repression in a very subtle and masterful way. To make a work of the same name that rearranges and cobbles stuff into the plot is in my mind arrogant. It's saying "I can do better than that". If you're arrogant, you've got to have the chops to back it up, and the screenwriters here don't.
Aside from my philosophical beefs, though, the addons feel clunky and out of place. As I said, the death cult subplot isn't tied up and is pretty cliche. I also couldn't figure out how Drac and all those Satanic symbols ended up in what seemed like someone's root-cellar. Van Helsing was chastity's badass, but now he's not even an expert on Vampire, but a hobo who got sent on an errand to deal with Dracula.

Tale of Two Cities Fanart Contest-ish

2010-01-11T14:30:00.000-08:00

I've been searching google images for "Amateur Illustration "(AKA Fanart) for Tale of Two Cities in conjunction with my previous two posts on the subject of Professional Illustration from the novel. Guess what? I can only find a few things that aren't as a part of an English Assignment and aren't by ME.
That I can find gobs of hawt pictures of Sydney Losstarot but not of Sydney Carton makes me think that the English Lit Geek crowd has a lot of ground that they need to regain. So let's have it.
Send me your fanart for Tale of Two Cities by the end of February 2010 and I'll post it on my blog. The one I select as the winner gets an antique copy of Tale of Two Cities with pretty illustrations in it!
Here are some guidelines:

-No Ex-English Lit Assignments. You need to do this because you want to, not because you had to.
-Must be original. I'll know if you traced or eyeballed something else. My knowledge on this topic is encyclopaedic.
-No slash or shonen-ai. Please. For the love of all that is holy.
-Must be a picture of an event or character from Tale of Two Cities.
-Manga is discouraged. Unless you are crash hot at Manga style. I realize this is a bit of a jerky thing to do, but a) everyone draws manga and I'm kind of sick of the style in general and b) every fanart that isn't by me seems to be Manga.
Mail your pictures to scrabcake@gmail.com
That's it. Happy Arting!

Art of Madmen and Convicts

2009-10-27T23:18:00.000-07:00

When 25 year old artist Richard Dadd traveled through the Holy land and Egypt on a cruise with a patron, he suffered from a series of debilitating headaches which he claimed were caused by sunstroke.
It soon became apparent that something was very wrong in Dadd's head. The artist began suffering from paranoid delusions, in particular, that he was a decendant of the Egyptian god Osiris, and that the god was compelling him to battle with the devil himself. After being sent back to England, Dadd's father, who had begun to notice odd behavior in Richard's brother as well took Richard to a doctor, who proclaimed him mentally ill. (Remember, this is the Victorian Period. "Madness" is a valid diagnosis)
Unsure of how to proceed, Richard's father travelled with his son on holiday. Richard promised to share his thoughts with his father and instead murdered him with a razor and fled to France. Even in his flight, Dadd attacked his fellow passengers, perhaps thinking that they too were agents of the devil.
Dadd was spared a trial. He confessed to the murder of his father and was forcibly committed to Bethlehem Hospita (AKA Bedlam) indefinitely.
Up until the mid 19th century, Bedlam was open to the paying public as a freakshow backslash prison. Visitors could agitate the prisoners and watch them fight like bugs in a jar. By nearly all accounts, the asylum was every bit as hellish as the slang-term derived from its name indicates. Dadd was lucky enough to get in just as Bedlam was remaking its image as a more "patient oriented" establishment. He was allowed to continue painting. Dadd captured fellow inmates, scenes from Shakespeare, and minutely detailed obsessively intricate images of faeries. His most famous work is Faerie Feller's Master Stroke: a mob of fairies intertwined with foliage in a scene that can only have been created by a talented man with waaaay too much time on his hands. He worked on the painting for over nine years, using a magnifying glass to paint the details.
Then, Queen wrote a song about it, which is, of course, the highest apex to which an artist can aspire.
My favourite of Dadd's works online is a Sketch of an Idea for Crazy Jane, which is inspired by a poem by Yeats about an older woman's justification for her sexuality. Dadd's model for Jane is a fellow inmate: a crossdressing man. Dadd's inner turmoil and struggles with his own mental demons are apparent in his work. Jane is beautiful, haunting, and oddly tortured. She's trapped. His Walpurgis Night needs no analysis. In Dadd's other work, faces are oddly distorted, and eerie details grab the corner of your eyes which are focused on the normal victorian subjects of a woman and her child or a Biblical scene.
Now, I'm going to venture into fuzzy headed liberal territory here and propose that when art is created by the most despicable members of our society, people whose crimes we cannot overlook and whose crimes colour any other thoughts on their lives, it gives us a window past the damage that they have inflicted on society. Art reminds us of the humanity of the inhuman. Or at least allows us to empathize with their extreme boredom.
Prison artists in the US are sometimes participants in rehabilitation programs that encourage arts and crafts among inmates. The ones I find interesting are the ones who create art out of hoarded prison supllies, making papier mache out of wet toilet paper and bread, and elaborate sculptures out of matchsticks and cigarette wrappers. A characteristic of this art is that it's painstakingly detailed: a testament to the obsessions of men and women who have nothing else to do and are desperate to take their minds off of their situation.
Another great link on prison art is here: this one even details the extraction of pigments from objects aquired in prisons in order to paint.

By popular request, A Hand at Cards

2009-10-25T23:29:00.000-07:00

Game made is my favourite chapter of Tale of Two Cities -- there really aren't any illustrations of that one besides the one I've posted, but Gina has requested Hand at Cards, and I've found a few illustrations from that chapter, which are displayed below. Yeah, I know, it's not popular request so much if there's only one request, but if you commented, maybe *your* requests would be featured as well!

At the beginning of the chapter A Hand at Cards, Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher walk into a bar...(insert bad punchline here). Actually, they meet two people whom they have not seen in a long time--a spy named John Barsad (whom we have seen before as a witness against Charles Darnay in the earlier part of the book) who also happens to be Miss Pross' prodigal brother, Solomon.

They also meet Sydney Carton, who has made his way to Paris for unknown reasons. Sydney Carton, having a keen memory for faces knows exactly who John Barsad is. Illustration by Rene ben Sussan from the Heritage Edition.

Sydney Carton blackmails John Barsad, whom he has seen at court in England and known as a spy. Carton has also seen Barsad acting as a turnkey at the prison La Force--his history as a spy for the English Aristocracy will doom him if the French Revolutionaries ever discover it. Jerry Cruncher, meanwhile has just made a startling connection, causing his hair to stand on end in a disturbing manner. This illustrator is uncredited in the editions in which I have seen his illustrations. This set of illustrations is pretty common and I've seen it a lot in Brittish editions from the early 20th and late 19th century.

Further Pictures from A Tale of Two Cities

2009-09-26T21:49:00.000-07:00

As promised, here are the rest of the images scanned from my antique copies of Tale of Two Cities. Enjoy!

Lucie is forced to testify against Darnay, her future husband at his capitol trial in London. Her distress is noted by Sydney Carton who is assistant to Charles' defense lawyer, Stryver.
This for me is one of the iconic pictures of Lucie. I think that Raphaelo Busoni, who illustrated the Junior Illustrated Classics edition of Tale of Two Cities (which sadly went out of print after my childhood) depicts a Lucie as both thoughtful and lovely. His faces tend to be rather angular and squarish, which makes his Lucie slightly different than the other ones I've seen. Apparently Busoni's Lucie also likes the colour blue. I find it kind of a fun coincidence that one of Lucie's paralells, the seamstress is wearing bright blue in Busoni's final scene.

*Everyone* illustrates this scene. The revolutionaries sharpen their knives outside of the window of the closed Paris branch of Telson's Bank. The Manettes and Lorry are living upstairs and their window overlooks the crazed mob preparing to slaughter the prisoners of La Force. The massacre of these prisoners is a real event during which many royalists were tortured and murdered--dragged out into the streets by the mob. Princess Lamballe was brutally killed and beheaded. Her head was paraded on a pike before the window of her best friend...Marie Antoinette. This picture, of all of the grindstone scenes captures the hellishness and drunken action of this scene the best. The sociopathic behaviour of the mob and their devilish glee imbues this depiction. I don't know the illustrator...they aren't credited in the frontspiece of the book. This illustrator's images were in many of the turn of the century copies of TOTC, but his illustrations are fairly rare in modern versions.

Here's another one by the same illustrator. This scene isn't terribly commonly illustrated, but it's one of my favourites. Doctor Manette's sanity is finally broken as his past tragedy is dragged out in a very public and devastating way in order to condemn his son in law whom he loves.
Sydney Carton supports him--he too is undergoing a metamorphosis. Sydney Carton's facade of insolence and carelessness is falling away, revealing a gentle and broken but intelligent and pragmatic man who is committed to his own redemption.

Charles Darnay has been reduced to a frightened and desperate shell as he counts the hours until his death and tries to detach himself from his memories of Lucie and their daughter.
This painting by Harvey Dunn captures Charles' heartbreaking fall into helplessness (While is double assumes a position of power and control). Charles looks like a frightened animal. Harvey Dunn is a fairly well known Western artist. Tale of Two Cities is quite a departure from his usual work. He does the best work when illustrating the peasant scenes, and he definitely seems to prefer these. A few of his scenes, including the scene of the last chapter are rendered fairly awkwardly and in garish colours. I find this picture of Charles haunting, though.

This picture is from the Heritage Edition, and is by Rene Ben-Susan, a fairly well-known French illustrator. I find myself getting more and more fond of Ben-Susan's illustrations. He's drawn a small vignette at the beginning of each chapter , so the size of this picture on your screen is about the size of the picture in real life. I enjoy the illustrator's stylized profiles and head-on perspectives, and how he draws the details of the clothing with as few lines as possible.
This is Sydney Carton speaking with the diabolical wood-sawyer, who ironically encourages him to go watch the work of the guillotine as a spectator. With amazing restraint, Carton carries on a brief, morbid conversation with the wood-sawyer about how many pipes the wood-sawyer can smoke until the executions of dozens of people is finished. This desensitization to the brutaility of the terror contrasts with the following scene where Carton prepares for his own death.

Sydney Carton rides to his death at the guilotine with a young French seamstress who has been wrongly convicted of plotting against the republic. They find comfort and solace in each-other to the end.
This depiction by A. Dixon is almost ethereal. The seamstress is both beautiful and sad, and the light outlines around both of their faces is either ghostly or angelic.
This is my favourite TOTC illustration.

And, on a slightly lighter note, I leave you with this one by an unknown illustrator. This has to be the most badass Sydney Carton ever. They're only executing him because he's *letting* them. He could seriously WTFPWN both of these pansies at any time.

Ancient Egyptian Topics for Kids

2009-09-25T13:46:00.000-07:00

I've been asked by a friend to provide information on Ancient Egypt for an elementary school class. Since I can't be there in person, I decided to write some little blurbs on topics that elementary kids might be interested in and provide lots of nice colour pictures to go with them. (Because *I* like big coloured pictures).

Pets in Ancient Egypt

The Egyptians kept many animals as pets, but their favourites were the same as ours. The

Egyptians loved their cats and dogs. Egyptian dogs looked a lot like greyhounds. They had long noses and skinny bodies, but unlike Greyhounds, they had short little tails that curled up over their backs. The Ancient Egyptians gave their dogs names that are very similar to our dog names. One man had a dog named Abutiw (ah-boo-tee-you), which may mean "One Who Barks"

or "Barky". Abutiw would bark at people who approached the pharaoh. The pharaoh thought that this was funny, so he gave the Abutiw the title "King's Bodyguard", which was usually reserved

for people. When the dog died, the king ordered tomb built for him and provided the money to have him mummified! The king wanted Barky to bark at Pharaoh's enemies in the afterlife! The picture is of a man named Khui (koo-ee) and his dog, Iupu (ee-yoo-poo).

Cats were common pets, too, and the Egyptians were among the first people to have cats as pets.

We now think that Egyptian cats were the descendants of several types of African wildcats that still live in Egypt today. (One of these wildcats is in the picture at left) Egyptians generally didn't name their cats. They called their cats Pa-miw if a boy or Ta-miwt if a girl: Mr. Cat and Miss Cat. The one exception to this is one man who had a cat named Nedjem...or "Sweetie". He had a picture of his cat carved in the wall of his tomb so that Nedjem could be in the afterlife with him. Notice that the word for cat sounds a lot like the sound that cats make:"Miw".

The Egyptians may not have named their cats but they did name humans after cats! A very common girls' name in later Egyptian history was "Ta-Miwt!"

One prince loved his pet cat so much that he had a special sarcophagus made for her when she died. The sarcophagus has a picture of his cat, Ta-Miwt looking her very best with a scarf tied around her neck, and sitting in front of a plate of offerings, just like a person would. On the ends of the sarcophagus were pictures of the goddesses Isis and Neb-het (Nephthys) along with a prayer asking that the goddesses protect Ta-Miwt in the afterlife.

Note that the Egyptians didn't really worship cats as gods. They had several goddesses who had

catlike qualities and were associated with cats. Cats were sacred symbols of those goddesses, kind of like doves are symbols of peace or the Holy Ghost in Christianity. We don't worship doves, but we have a respect for them in our culture because they represent peace. The most famous cat goddess is Bastet. Bastet was the goddess of joy, fun, and music, but also a goddess of motherhood. She represented everything nice about the mother goddess, Mut. Cats were also sacred to Mafdet, Pakhet, and Sekhmet, who are all goddesses of the desert and also of sickness. They represent the cruel and unforgiving side of nature. Pakhet's name means "She who scratches."

The Egyptians kept monkeys as pets, and also horses. One princess was even buried with a baby gazelle...apparently her pet!

Egyptian Religion and Death

The Egyptian civilization lasted nearly 3,000 years. That's twice as long as the Romans lasted, and 4 times as long as the classic Mayan empire existed. The Kings who built the pyramids would have been just as ancient to King Tut as King Arthur is to us!

Over this time, Egyptian religion maintained the same gods and goddesses, but their roles changed over time. Egyptian religion was very complicated because it helped to keep the country united. The king had to make gods of southern Egypt and gods of Northern Egypt equally happy. At the center of the Ancient Egyptian gods was the great-grandson of the sun god, Horus. He had gods that were from both the north of Egypt and the South of Egypt in his family.

Horus was represented as a falcon or sometimes a man with the head of a falcon. The king was his spirit on earth. This is how the king stayed in charge of the nobles and priests; when you

come down to it you do not argue with a god!

When the king died, he would travel through the underworld, meeting gods and goddesses who would help him, and various demons and trickster spirits who would try to confuse him and make him lose his way. Finally, he would climb a great ladder into the sky to join his great-grandfather Ra in a boat, and together they would sail the sun accross the sky in the daytime, and through the underworld at night. Some people think of pyramids as a staircase that the king's spirit could climb in order to get to the sun-boat. In the time of the pyramids, when normal people and nobles died, they would just be citizens in the King's afterlife.

As time went on, the king lost a little bit of power, and ordinary people decided that instead of just being subjects of the king in the afterlife, they too could journey through the underworld and up into the sky to join Ra in the sun-boat.

Some people started to beleive that instead of sailing in the sun boat, they would be farmers in the fields of Osiris, who was the King of the underworld. Since the afterlife is no fun if you have to work, they had little figures made to do farm work for them. Some egyptians were buried with a figure, or Shabti, for every day of the year!

People who could afford it started building themselves lavish tombs and were buried with

models of things that they would like to have in the afterlife and belongings that they'd like to take with them. We know a lot about how people were fed and where they got their clothing from these models which show entire shops filled with people and tiny goods. To the left is a model of a butcher's shop that's about the size of a fruit-crate. You can see the butchers slaughtering the cows. One man walks through the door. Is that a duck in his hands?

Cuts of meat hang from the ceiling in the back with hides that would then be made into leather.

Go to the link below to see this picture.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24332240@N03/2993570718/in/set-72157608575094517/

The ordinary Egyptians have left us lots of evidence that they cared more about the gods of everyday life than the gods that helped the king rule politically. The god Bes was a dwarf with a beard. He and the goddess Taweret, a hippopotamus, and later the goddess Bastet protected mothers and children from sickness and snakebites. Bastet and Hathor were goddesses of drinking and merrymaking...of music and art. Thoth and Seshat were deities of writing and building. Making an offering to the goddess Sakhmet could prevent you from getting the plague or starving if you were sent out into the desert to mine or explore.

Hint: if you ever have to make Sakhmet* happy, she likes beer a lot. In Egyptian mythology, the sun-god Ra decided that he thought humanity was evil. He ordered Sakhmet to destroy all humans. Sakhmet went crazy--she's a cat, She likes to hunt -- and killed so many people that Ra

regretted ordering that everyone be killed. He told Sakhmet to stop now, but she refused. She

was enjoying hunting humans! Not knowing what to do to make Sakhmet stop, Ra consulted with the other gods and they came up with a plan. Together with the surviving humans, they made gallons and gallons of beer and mixed it with red ochre, a mineral that ladies used to make their lips red. It looked like blood. They put the beer in a place where Sakhmet could find it. When Sakhmet came to the city to destroy it and its inhabitants, she found troughs and troughs of red liquid. Thinking that it was blood, she started to lap and drink it..and drink...and drink....and drink..........and drink until she got so sleepy and drunk from the beer that she fell over.

When she woke up, she had forgotten why she was killing people, and Ra managed to persuade her to stop.

Humanity was saved!

Added to the gods that we've talked about already were special gods and goddesses that were only worshiped in particular cities.

The Egyptians believed in magic and sorcery--that a sorcerer who disliked someone could make a crocodile out of wax and bring that crocodile to life to eat his enemies. A hairclip shaped like a fish could protect a child from drowning. In the age of the pyramids, people were even worried that the animals depicted in hieroglyphs could come to life. Sometimes, artists who carved hieroglyphs would cut a line through them to "kill" them and keep them from becoming real.

Mummies

Before the pyramids were built, the Egyptians buried most people in the ground or in small flat tombs called "mastabas" which means "bench" in Arabic, which is the language the Egyptians speak today. They reminded modern Egyptians of benches. A normal person would be buried

with some jars of beer and some small pottery dishes for food in the afterlife and placed unwrapped in the ground. Eventually, someone figured out that if you place a body in the dry sands of Egypt, sometimes it will dry up and survive. At first the Egyptians didn't know why certain bodies survived, but their religion taught that in order for a person to enter the underworld, that person's spirit, called a "ba" must come back and reunite with the body. The picture on the left is a what the Egyptians thought the Ba of Queen Nefertari looked like. The Egyptians wondered how a person's spirit could recognize their body if that person's body was a skeleton? It became

important for them to figure out a way to replicate what the sand did naturally. They started wrapping bodies in river reeds or cloth, and placing them in rock tombs only to discover that the bodies would start to decompose.

So, the Egyptians tried doing the same thing that the sand did. They dried out the body to preserve it. The art of mummification survived up until around year zero and then, as people started to convert to Christianity, they started to see mummification as a barbaric thing of the past. Gradually, the practice died out around 500 CE. The practice survived for nearly 2000 years, and this is roughly how they did it.

Making a Mummy

When a person died, they would be taken to the embalmer's tent, where their relatives could pick out a mummy-case for them. A scribe would write the person's name on the mummy-case amidst the prayers and wishes for a good afterlife. The mummy cases to the right belong to the wife of the chief artist in the valley of the kings. Her name was Iineferty.

The embalmers would then make a cut in the person's stomach and remove all of their organs, but they would save the liver, the intestines, the stomach and the lungs, and mummify those

seperately. They didn't know what the organs were used for, but they knew that they were important and that a person might need them in the next world. After mummifying the organs, they would wrap them and put them in special jars so that the person could get them back when their spirit reunited with their body. After removing the organs, the embalmers would remove

the brain by inserting a hook into the nose and pulling the brain out with the hook. They would throw the brain away, because they didn't think it did anything...the Egyptians believed that you

thought and felt with your heart.

They would be very careful to keep the heart, which they also mummified seperately. The embalmers would then wash the body and perfume it with spices and oils. Then, they would fill the inside of the body with a salt called natron which they wrapped into small cloth packets. They would bury the body in natron and allow it to dry out for several months.

When the body was through drying, the embalmers would remove all of the natron packets and return the heart to the body. They would sew up the incision through which the organs were removed and put a wax or gold plate over the suture to protect the body. Then, they would try to repair any damage that had occurred during the drying and make the person look as nice as they could for the afterlife. One man was fitted for a metal toe because he had lost his in life. Pharaoh Rameses II's nose lost some of its shape when he was drying out, so the embalmers

gave him a very aristocratic nose by stuffing his nose with peppercorns. A queen had her cheeks made plumper with linnen inserted beneath her skin, and an old woman had long black hair extensions woven into her gray hair.

A priest would pour black pitch over the body because it was believed to help preserve the body and because black was also the colour of fertile planting soil--good luck for rebirth into the afterlife. The embalmers would wrap the body in layers and layers of linen that was probably gathered by the mummy's relatives--bedsheets, old clothing, hand-me-downs--all were used to wrap the body. Priests would insert protective amulets into the wrappings and smear pitch over them. Finally, the mummy was covered with a clean sheet and placed in its coffin. The organs were wrapped in linen and placed in special jars that had pictures of either the dead person or protective gods on top. A priest would then perform spells and rituals over the coffin to enable the mummy to come back to life in the afterlife and to be able to speak and eat the offerings that were given to it. The picture below is of a canopic jar belonging to a noblewoman.

The mummy, the canopic jars with the organs inside, and some of the person's belongings were

then placed in a tomb, sometimes with other mummies. The coffin was painted with gods and goddesses that the person might meet in the afterlife as well as prayers and good wishes and spells that the person may need to make a safe journey to Osiris' fields. Some coffins even had a map of the underworld painted on the inside! The dead person's relatives would accompany them to the tomb and have a great feast outside of the tomb in honor of the dead person--and to say goodbye. They would wear necklaces and headbands made of flower petals sewn onto paper, and when the feast was finished, they would leave the remains of the feast and their flower-necklaces at the tomb. A priest would sweep out any foot-tracks that were in the tomb and the tomb would be sealed, hopefully forever.

If you want to see some natron filled embalming packets, some linen, a bed on which the mummy was placed for ceremonies, and some coffins that were never used in a burial, check out this site on the recently discovered tomb KV63 in the Valley of the Kings.

http://www.kv-63.com/photos2009.html

Hieroglyphs
The Ancient Egyptian language was written in hieroglyphs: letters that look like pictures. The pictures don't always mean what they depict. For example, a glyph that shows a picture of a mouth sometimes means "mouth", and sometimes means "r". Some Egyptian letters represent sounds instead of single alphabet letters: for example, a picture of a fish represents the sound "in".
The Egyptians combined these pictures to make words. They were more concerned about making their writing look pretty than good spelling! They also didn't write vowels! They assumed that if you knew the Egyptian language you would be able to figure out what the word was by the words around it. This makes it very hard to tell the difference between some words. For example, if we were to write like the Egyptians, we would spell both "cat" and "cut" like "ct". How could we tell the difference? Well, we could look at the surrounding sentence, we could make a guess. My ct's name is Fluffy. Well, most people don't name a "cut" so we can assume that here, "ct" is "cat". The Egyptian scribes came up with another really clever way to tell the difference between words that were spelled alike. They put a picture at the end of the word to remind you of its meaning.
In our case, after the word "Ct", we could put a picture of a cat to indicate that this "Ct" spells "cat". After the other "ct", we could put a picture of a pair of scissors so that people could tell that *this* "ct" meant "cut".
Here are some hieroglyphs and words in Ancient Egyptian. You should know that the Egyptians today don't speak Ancient Egyptian anymore. They speak Arabic. They also don't write in hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs were used for about 3,000 years though, and there are many words in our language that are loan words from Ancient Egyptian. For example, the name Susan is from the Ancient Egyptian name Seshen, which meant "lotus flower".
See if you can write a sentence in Ancient Egyptian with the words below!

*In some stories, the bloodthirsty goddess is Hathor.

Pictures for a Thousand Words (Pictures from Dickens' Tale of Two Cities)

2009-09-21T23:31:00.000-07:00

I am scanning my vintage copies of Tale of Two Cities so I can let them go to other owners for the move. It's truly fascinating to see so many different interpretations of the same subject. Her are some favourites.
1) From the Folio Edition, Illustrated by Richard Sharpe. I'm in love with the almost fantastical take on historical clothing in these, and the exaggerated facial expressions. Think this is my favourite set of TOTC illustrations. This is Sydney Carton, working late into the night to research cases for Stryver, his employer. Stryver is a blustering and argumentative man, which serves him well in the courtroom, but he is not able to analyze evidence for a case. This is a task at which his schoolmate, Sydney Carton excels. Carton's work makes Stryver's reputation and fortune, but his own life is lost in drink and self-loathing.

2)Don't know what to think of this one by Tom Fogherty from People from Dickens. This is, of course, Sydney Carton confessing his love to a rather uncomfortable looking Lucie Manette. She is rather uncomfortable in the scene. She's never felt at ease with him, and he knows it, but he opens himself to her completely. On one hand, I like the colour of this image. On the other hand, the Victorian-ness of it makes me a tad queasy.

3) The Revolutionaries torture and hang a farmer generale at the beginning of the revolution. He has told the peasants that they are to eat grass if they hunger. The impoverished suburb of Saint Antoinne has its revenge on him at the storming of the Bastille. When they finally kill him it is written as a mercy. This rather graphic depiction captures the horror of the moment, and the dichotomy in the book between empathy for the peasants and horror at their increasing violence. It is by Rowland Wheelwright.

4) Madame Defarge is described as a Tigress of a woman, attractive in a wild and fiery sense. She is the antithesis of Lucie Manette. Though their families have both been ruined by the excesses and sadism of the aristocracy, Lucie overcomes this through her love for her mentally broken father. Madame Defarge is consumed by her desire to avenge her murdered and violated siblings. She knits the names of those whom she will denounce to the revolution. Most illustrators draw Madame Defarge as an ogress, ignoring that the text describes her as attractive. Gedo does not in this illustration, but he does not capture her ferocity.

6) Miss Pross is Lucie's nurse, and she and a family friend, Mr. Lorry are left in charge of her mentally unstable father while Lucie is on her honeymoon. Doctor Manette again lapses into madness upon learning that his new son in law is the scion of the aristocratic family that imprisoned him in the Bastille for eighteen years. Doctor Manette falls back on the one thing his jailors would allow him: a humble cobbler's bench and shoemaking tools. These tools kept him linked to reality for two decades in solitary confinement, and so he resorts to them when he feels himself losing sanity. Upon his recovery, Miss Pross and Lorry destroy his shoemaking tools in hopes that their absence will prevent his future detatchment. This scene is illustrated a lot, but It's one of my favourite representations of Miss Pross. By F. M. Blakie.

More to come....

What is this feeling in my cold, dead heart?

2009-09-09T20:12:00.001-07:00

Could it be President Obama Speechifying?
The last few weeks have made me a cynic. I can't turn on the radio, tv, or look at the internet without reading yet one more story of rampant incompetence and flaming dumbassosity.
( Way to think that's mis-spelled, OSX! You know why? It's because I MADE IT UP! Right click, add to Dictionary. Dumbassosity.) \
From the "just phone it in" attitude of the clemency panel for Texas' death row inmates (Which is vying for a place in the "banality of evil" hall of fame.) to the r-tard who called into KGO Talk Radio to explain that he didn't let his kid listen to the Obama Speech to schoolkids because "encouraging them to go to college gives them false hope when there's no guarantee of success if you have a degree", to the scores of even bigger idiots who didn't let their kids listen and forced their schools to hand out a GODDAMNED WAVER so that parents could give their permission to hear THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES speak (Because, you know, he's a Commie and a Nazi, and fuck it, let's just be honest, he's the Antichrist) , It's raining fools!
Anyway, listening to the speech was like a little ray of sunshine piercing through my cynicism. Yes, this country can produce powerful people who are not complete morons. Warm fuzzy feelings. His words were like a knife cutting through bullshit.
He also said something that made me a little weak in the knees, and that is that he'd listen to well-thought-out ideas no matter where they came from...the door is open.
So there's a challenge for the republicans. Come up with a workable plan. Don't just complain that no one is listening to you, because the intelligent public IS listening, and we aren't hearing anything other than bitching and moaning.
Come up with a workable plan, and you have a seat at the table. It's no guarantee you'll win the debate. If you lose, you need to prove you can take it like gentlemen...not toddlers. And you need to prove you can compromise. Do you see what a mess California is? It's because none of the reps on either side will budge on anything. Any debate is reduced to meaningless catchphrases.

"2 teach is 2 touch a life 4evar: GO UNIONS!", "No new taxes", "Save the trees!", "Everything can be solved with a tax cut!!!!", "Not in my backyard!" , "COMMIE!" , "Asshole!", "Hippie", "corporate shill!", "Nazi!","Think of the children!" , "babykillers!"

At this point, one of the parties lays down on the floor and starts screaming and pounding their fists, and that's one more day that went by where we didn't have a damn state budget... but I digress.
This country needs healthcare reform, and if you don't think so, you're a tool and people were wrong to elect you because you certainly aren't doing your job to represent them. If you don't have anything to bring to the table, shut the hell up. No one wants to have dinner with a whiner. If you do, those of us who want our future to be hinged on something other than gut feelings will pay attention.

EA Marketing Does Ethically Reprehensible Things....Again.

2009-08-07T08:42:00.001-07:00

Dante's Inferno & the Sexist Marketing Campaign
This bullshit floored me. OMG. How did someone NOT catch that this was crazy sexist, offensive, and nearly criminal before it got out the door? Before it got anywhere near the door? When it got sent out as a marketing email? What is HR doing? Smoking? Probably defending the company's SUV sport-star schmoozemobile from punk employees who write "wash me" in the dust on the window. Perhaps they need to refocus their efforts. The funny thing is that heads are probably going to roll over this, but probably would have gotten kudos for great work had there not been an outcry. Only a sin if you get caught. You know?
I'm now convinced that Ethical Dubiousness is the rule, not the exception for marketing everywhere, and that I was naive to think otherwise.
Brass Knuckles Against the Law (EA)
Way to Offend the Christians (EA)
Blogger Previews (EA)
And the Non-EA example I stumbled upon:
Wyeth Pays for Ghostwriting in Medical Journals

Deconstructing an Antique Japanese Doll

2009-08-04T21:58:00.000-07:00

I bought this doll for about 10 dollars online. I was struck by her age--she was probably made in the late 1700's and she represents a Tayuu, or a courtesan in Edo period Japan. ie, a "Classy Hooker." This type of doll is fairly rare, and it's a pity she's in such a bad shape. Since I don't really want to sell her, I've decided to try to restore her kimono. The beginning step here is to figure out how she's constructed by taking her clothing off and documenting it.
I've decided that the lower layers of her kimono are in good enough shape to save, so I'm going to try to preserve them. You can see most of her clothing is silk, except for her obi, which is velvet (probably imported). Her obi is slightly crumbly but in better shape than her outer kimono. The bottom-most robe, which is visible only in a small triangle at the bottom beneath her outer robes, is made of yellow chirimen and you can see it if you look closely at the above pic.

Here's a surprise! Do you see that black bit with the yellow and red dots on it? That's the *real* outer kimono. The blue papery substance next to it is the backing of the original black outer-kimono, which has been sewn to the inside of it to give it strength and form. Most of the damage on this doll isn't bugs or physical damage, although there is a bit of bug damage to the blue lining, as you can see.
It's that the outer kimono was originally dyed black. This early black dye has a tendency to dissolve the fabric beneath it over time, resulting in many dolls from the Edo period being left with only their paper kimono-linings. As I started removing the lining, the remaining fragments of black fabric crumbled to dust The paper lining is Japanese Washi paper which is hard to tell from fabric. It seems to have been sewn in the same exact pattern as the original kimono so I'll be using the remains of it to create my pattern.
Here's some of the "powder" that is all that remains of the black outer-kimono.

I started removing the outer kimono, which is sewn on to the layers at the bottom. These are also backed with paper, and the inner kimono, instead of actually being full robes, are just a facimile stuffed with cotton batting and sewn onto the outer kimono. Instead of being a full unit, the kimono is comprised of a top and a bottom. The bottom is wrapped around the base and glued into place. The obi covers the join between the top and bottom halves.
Here's the bottom half, glued to the base. You can see that the base is just a wooden dowel...the clothing gives the doll shape. You can see that around the doll's waste, the kimono is folded back to hold it open in the front in the style of the Tayuu. You can see that the fabric is held in place by a bamboo peg. I'm not sure why this was necessary. The pillow shape at the top is the doll's right sleeve. It's stuffed with batting and has bug-holes in it. You can also see the original black outer-kimono at the right of the picture where it has been held in place by the velvet front of the obi, which I'm lifting up. You can also see a gap between the top and the bottom, which is again covered by the front of the obi.

The outer kimono has been taken off in this picture. I've taken off the top outer kimono with the sleeves, and I've taken off the bottom of the kimono, only leaving the bottom three layers of the top kimono. You can see how this doll is constructed. She's made of two dowels, about 1 inch in diameter One is slightly larger to represent her torso, and the part where the obi is tucked under the top of her outer kimono in the back. Her arms are wire, surrounded by batting and wrapped in place with washi paper. You can also see how the doll's hair is inserted, by lining up the ends of the hair in a "hair sheet" and gluing it into the slits cut in the head. This doll's hair would have been upswept into a fashionable hairdo. The "legs" dowel is pegged with a bamboo peg into the lacquered base.

Finally, here's the lining of the outer kimono. This poor doll is missing her hands which would have been wood and glued to the end of the wire armature finding the core of her arm. You can how the sleeve has been sewn at the top and down the outer edge halfway to leave a hole for her arm. You can see how it's been stitched--the thread is a thick twine, probably paper-based. The sleeve forms a pillow which is stuffed with batting. it is attached to the back of the kimono top, and the other sleeve is attached to the other side, forming a "U" shape. The collar is folded outward and sewn. You can see this around her shoulder.The under kimonos are simply strips that are wrapped around the torso dowell and glued carefully into place.

I hope this post has been informative and has perhaps given you ideas for construction of your own pieces. When I get around to rebuilding the kimono, I'll post pictures. If anyone has some nice black kinran that they'd like to share for the reconstruction of the outer kimono, let me know!

Google-bombing for Christ

2009-08-01T00:51:00.000-07:00

I decided to obsessively check google news one more time (you know, to make sure that the horsemen of the apocalypse haven't started galloping towards my home in the last 30 seconds since I last refreshed the browser), and I noticed the following top story.

Hmmmm. Wonder what that story is about? Waiiiiit a minute. "Many Christ-followers, like myself, talk about being "in a relationship" with God..."
There's got to be actual news in here, somewhere, right?
Click.
Oh. I see. The story is about some lady who was a former drug addict who found Jesus and was saved and has changed her relationship status on facebook to "In a relationship" in an attempt to get everyone she knows to ask her who the lucky bloke is so she can have an excuse to witness them. At least that's what half the story was about. The rest was various allusions to Bible verses. Quick! Someone! Stop the presses! Some chick in seattle just changed her facebook status to "in a relationship"! But get this! She's in a relationship with JESUS!!!1"
So, I clicked "More stories"...I mean, because clearly, this must be actual news to be at the top of the front page, right?

Uh, no. No, there was no actual news story here. Except, apparently, Christ can Help You Resist the Devil's Power.
It seems like someone is out there google-bombing for Christ.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Obligatory Rant:
Now, I know that the Jesus that I would believe in would be someone who was humble and meek and encouraged his followers to be thus. THIS Jesus advocates turning the other cheek, as in "taking any entertainment away from someone who might be antagonizing you by not giving them the satisfaction of a reaction while doing nothing to harm them back." THIS Jesus probably would have thought google-bombing his name was the equivalent of worshiping a golden calf. THIS Jesus would probably say that if you wanted to win souls to his side, and by "his side", he would mean, "to act like him instead of worshiping him like a statue", what you would need to do would be to actually act like him and expect people to see the benefits of kindness and goodness and follow your example. This would be *real* worship.
But unfortunately, THAT Jesus isn't terribly popular. He's been consistently shoved aside (probably since the time Christ was crucified, if he did actually exist) by the "sword bearing"Asshole Jesus who says you're better than everyone else and you must. conquer. to show those freaks and heathens the right! Cuz, you know. You worship the right calf, so you're going to be saved. It's not the ideas that count. It's the calf.
Not that I worry too much. I'm an atheist. I just wonder what the world & human history would be like if Asshole Christ was switched for Be Nice to the Samaritan Christ.
At the very least, the top spot on google news would be *Real News*.

A SFW Picture Essay on Abortion, Part I.

2009-07-21T01:49:00.000-07:00

One of these pictures will grow up to be a human some day. Can you guess which one? Can you match the rest up?

List of Best Covers Evar

2009-07-11T10:37:00.000-07:00

I don't usually like listening to covers--they usually don't add much to the original song, but there are a few covers that I can say add a new dimension to the original or are even musically better.

Cover: Billie Jean - Chris Cornell
-Cornell adds a dimension of agony to this song which is present in the lyrics but not in the original performance/arrangement. I think that this cover adds a elucidates a dimension to this song that was already there and just waiting to be let out.

Original: Billie Jean - Michael Jackson
It's growing on me. Definitely more fun than the cover

Cover: Sweet Dreams - Marlyn Manson
The lyrics to this song are genuinely creepy, but the original music is errrr....80's pop style annoying.Marlyn fixes it.

Original: Sweet Dreams - Eurythmics
Not the biggest fan of this song. Creepy lyrics sung to a peppy little tune with little to no emotion.

Cover: Comfortably Numb - Scissor Sisters
This song takes the opposite approach than the above. It takes a pretty angsty rendition of a pretty angsty song and turns it into a really queer disco anthem. This one is good for tweaking noses, and it's a surprising and fun re-envisioning.

Original: Comfortably Numb - Pink Floyd
Themesong of angsty teens everywhere.

Cover: New Years Day - Frontline Assembly
FLA puts this song in a different key, "industrializes" it, and casts defunct 80's star Tiffany as the lead singer. The result is a wierdly familiar industrial song with stellar vocals and lots of surprises.

Original: New Years Day - U2
I like the original a lot. I suppose my only clue that it might need a cover was that it is wayyyy too hummable and predictable. Which is the mark of songs you can listen to obsessively for a few weeks and then never want to hear again.

I'm sure this list is going to grow as I think of more.

Removing the Imagine from Imaginal Discs AKA "The Maggot Post"

2009-06-24T22:56:00.000-07:00

A friend on twitter posted a little snippet linking to the following site, in the context of using diverse individual (cell) inputs to create a workable synergistic economy. I read the page and thought: "Imaginal cells...I do not think that word means what you think it means." Granted, the above author was referring to a childrens' book about butterfly metamorphosis. Even in that context, though, the biology is a bit...er....wrong. But what are Imaginal Cells? And do they have anything to do with Imagination? Or a stable economy?
So I set off on google to find out, and found this paper.
Granted, this might be totally wrong. I have an undergraduate degree in biology and I've forgotten most everything. So when the author of this paper goes off on microarrays, I only have a vague fuzzy memory of what he's on about. So feel free to flame me if you want. For those of you who don't want to read the paper, here's the real story of imaginal cells, or more properly, imaginal discs.
-Firstly, imaginal can mean "imagine", but in the context of bugs, it means "adult."
-When baby flies (maggots) come into this world, they have two types of cells. One type becomes their internal organs and muscles. The other type doesn't differentiate quite yet. They're all plain, vanilla generic cells. These are kind of freeloader cells while the fly is still a maggot.
-When the maggot starts to metamorphose into a fly, certain patches of imaginal cells, ie. near the wings and near the eyes start to divide, forming hollow disc-shaped structures. These are called imaginal disks. The ever-popular Pharyngula has a nice article on this with pictures of imaginal discs.
-So how do these tumorous disks of plain cells know how to become fly eyes on flies, or catterpillar wings on a butterfly? How come the eye disks don't turn into wings? How come the leg disks don't turn into antennae? They're the same sort of plain vanilla cell, afterall.
-The paper above decides to find out. They have some poor grad student mutilate a dead maggot for various imaginal discs..the wing one, the atenna one, etc. They smash these up, then, they amplify the RNA transcripts in each one seperately. When you amplify mRNA with reverse transcription*, you wind up with a small strand of DNA called cDNA. That's why it's called "reverse transcription." Eventually, they have a bunch of cDNA transcripts from the wing disc, a bunch of cDNA from the eye disc, etc.
-Remember, that in basic genetics, the double stranded DNA seperates in places like a broken zipper, and RNA polymerase will slap base pairs onto the single strand. These are mRNA transcripts which then get sent off to the ribosomes so that they can get translated into proteins. The genome itself has several mechanisms by which it can block transcription or crank up production, winding up with a pile of mRNA or just a trickle being produced by different cells with the same genes. These are called transcription factors.
-The scientists then labeled all of these cDNA bits with a florescent element.
-These scientists then used a microarray to figure out exactly how much each gene was getting transcribed in each different imaginal disk.
-Microarrays are pretty damn neat in themselves. Think of a little chip that has millions of tiny little dots on it. Each dot is a bunch of pieces of the sequence from a different gene in the genome, which each have one end glued to the chip. You can get whole genomes for some organisms on a microarray.
-When you dump a bunch of pieces of flourescent cDNA on a microarray, they stick to their corresponding dot like iron filings to a magnet, and the more of them that stick, the brighter that spot glows when you stick it under a UV light. So, if your imaginal disk has a transcription factor that is bumping up production of gene A and gene B is getting transcribed normally, you'd expect the dot corresponding with A to glow bright green and B to glow a little.

What they found was that there was little difference in the numbers of transcripts for particular genes, on imaginal disks with the same type, ie. the left and right wing, but that there was a very big difference between the numbers of certain transcripts being produced on the wing disc vs the leg disc or the eye disc. Thus, the major difference between the pretty much identical patch of wing-disc cells and the eye-disc cells was the amount of each gene that was getting transcribed. Production of certain genes was slowed down in the wings and increased on the eyes and vice versa.

So, is a wing cell always destined to be a wing disc cell? Can you take a cell from a wing-disc and stick it on the maggot's face and end up with a fly that has a wing stuck to its face when the maggot pupates?
Well, actually, yeah.
This tells us two interesting things. Firstly, the part of the head outside the disk isn't doing anything to turn the antenna disk into antenna. Secondly, even though disks look pretty much the same on the pre-puation maggot, the cells in these areas must have already differentiated from each-other to the extent that their transcription factors can push them towards different ultimate fates.
So, in short, the imaginal cells of the caterpillar don't have any vibrations or harmonies. They also aren't any more of a prime example of creative synergy than any other cell in embryo development. In fact, if I were to pick a unique flower synergy cell, I'd choose the totipotent plant cell which can dedifferentiate and become a different kind of cell if it needs to. That's how you can grow a plant from half a leaf with a little auxin horomone slathered onto it and stuck unceremoniously in a new pot.

*I decided to spare you guys the picture of the guy sitting in a bathtub filled with maggots as an illustration for this. Come on, folks. It's not disgusting if you're doing it for charity! Wait. Yeah, it is. There are definitely parts of my body that I do not want maggots near, thank you. If you want to see some things that you just can't unsee, Google Image "maggots."

** The paper discussed here is

Expression profiling of Drosophila imaginal discs. Ansgar Klebes, Brian Biehs, Francisco Cifuentes and Thomas B Kornberg .Genome Biology 2002, 3:research0038.1-0038.16doi:10.1186/gb-2002-3-8-research0038

***Yes the fly in the picture has legs growing from its face. It's from a paper where they messed with the expression level of a gene called antp in the imaginal disc for the antenna and ended up growing a leg instead.

Tirade on Healthcare

2009-06-17T19:30:00.001-07:00

At least I'm honest.

A few notes on healthcare that were too long for twitter. Twitter, by the way is like putting a message in a bottle and tossing it into the ocean. It's addictive, fun, and good for venting into cyberspace.
Anyway, I have a message for politicians of both persuasions. Don't stuff this up. Seriously. Healthcare in this country is a fracking joke to the point that I think I'd rather die than have my relatives suddenly land in a crazy amt of debt for me being in the ICU. My savings would probably pay for about a day of it. I'm insured, but I'm sure the bastards have some way to get out of paying if the price goes beyond a certain amt*.
As to the bumpkins who think they'd rather die than have socialized medicine, you're going to be the ones that are going to be living on the public dole because I'll bet most of you are uninsured. So just suck it up, ok, and make life easier for everyone else.
Firstly, Republicans: We don't agree on much of anything and this is not an exception. I and most voters, when it comes down to the wire, don't give a flying f*ck about being presented with a smorgasboard of slightly differing expensive insurance policies. This is not a valid argument against Public Insurance. Sure, the rhetoric about wanting the government out of your health sounds nice, and it's fun to repeat at the top of your lungs...but think about it. Could the government really do that much more of a craptacular job of providing good care at low costs than private business has? Last time I went to the emergency room, I waited 4 hours, got led to the x-ray room, and then got forgotten while all the doctors and nurses went out to lunch. I spent 30 seconds with a doctor after waiting for another hour and impatiently pulling aside an orderly and reminding him that I was *there*. I got a $2000 bill in the mail of which I paid $200. I'm glad I had insurance to pay for it, but come. on. $2000 to get service that I wouldn't tip for in a restaurant and 30 seconds with a doctor?
Can you imagine what kind of situation my sprained wrist from riding my bike to work would have put me in if I *hadn't* had a job or insurance? If I get to wait 4 hours in the emergency room in Canada but the state covers me, the Canadians are STILL getting a better deal.
So take your "government never does anything right" scare tactics, and shove them, ok? It's not like people won't have the choice to spend a load of money on private insurance if they feel they want it, the rest of us will just have a safety net.

Democrats: You guys aren't off the hook. I have a few words for you to ponder while you're teeing up on your "all expenses paid by your lobbyist buddies" golf-cations.
There are some things big business does well. For example, you know how today Obama and Clinton and Berry mustered up the cojones between them to extend a few Federal benefits to gay couples working for the state? Yeah. Employees of many of the nation's giant evil multinationals have had those benefits as WELL AS full health benefits for a while now. Companies are pretty progressive when it comes to maintaining a happy , profitable workforce. Where they come up a little short is when profit is inversely proportional to peoples' wellbeing. ie. if an insurance can save a boatload of money be refusing insurance coverage to a person with a history of illness, forcing them to pay out of pocket and forcing them into debt, it will.
I always vote for you guys in the odd hope that you might actually do something to change this country for the better, and I'm always disappointed because YOU ALWAYS FLAKE OUT and play politics instead of working towards doing what you know deep down is the right thing to do...the thing most in line with those ideals that you profess to have.
I'm not going to appeal to you to remember the people who voted for you, because honestly, the people working for the pharmecutical companies and insurance companies and medical associations who are now doing their very best to butter you up probably voted for you, too.
I appeal to you to remember that your actions have the power to directly help a lot of people. I appeal to you to remember why you got into politics--probably because you thought you could actually make a difference for the American People. I offer the thought that while a compromise with industry on universal healthcare might benefit those workers at the various lobbying companies and associations in the short term, it's going to have a toll on ALL OF US in the long term.
Lastly, I'd like to suggest that for this country, doing nothing is going to be better than doing something halfassed and ending up with an even more convoluted version of the spaghetti we have now, which is what's going to happen if you guys BUDGE AT ALL ON THIS ONE.

Your Unicorn Chaser

2009-06-06T00:13:00.000-07:00

And also,
http://freeworld.thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html
How to write unmaintainable code!

A Disturbing Story about a Psychopath

2009-06-05T23:47:00.000-07:00

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/06/a_heartbreaking_absence_of_emp.php

Don't read that unless you have a tough stomach.

I posted the following on it in response, because it really bothered me, and I'm reposting it here because I have an ego and I thought it would be a good blog post rather than just a mere comment.

Oh man. I'm going to have to drink some warm milk and think happy thoughts in order to sleep tonight. Thanks for that. I'd really like to say I can't imagine the suffering that poor animal went through, but I can, and it makes me sick to my stomach.
How can you judge a psychopath? A person with no empathy. It's not like Cheyenne was there when they were handing out minds and was like "yeah, I'll take THAT one". She didn't ask for a lack of empathy or to be totally selfish.
It would be a hell of a lot easier if there was a devil. It would be so much easier if people like Cheyenne had just sold their souls to him and then we could say "oh, that person is an evil bastard and will rot in hell" and move on. I think the hardest thing about atheism for me was accepting that no, that kitten did not go to a better place. Yes, the person that killed it is evil, and there's no divine justice that's going to rain down on them. Plus that, how can they be truly evil if they never chose to be evil? There is no way this situation will ever not exist or be made right.

I catch myself thinking as have a few people on the forum that the goons on 4chan /b/ enact vigilante justice from outside. Then I have to check myself--vigilante justice is never a good thing because it has a tendency to spiral out of control. Plus that, that's what this girl wants. She wants attention. What is this if not wishing for divine retribution, or at least some sort of internet superman?

I think sometimes that religion is an easy and comforting way out of thinking about these problems that present a huge moral dichotomy: people who are evil but don't understand that they are or why. It's unpleasant and confusing to think of because the solution is simply accepting that at this point, there is none and that's a hard thing to do.

Top 10 Most Disgusting Things I've Ever Done on Purpose

2009-06-02T22:57:00.001-07:00

#10 The Fish Dissection

I got to dissect a pickled crawdad in 4th grade as a part of a science program offered over the summer called Bugs, Guts and Microscopes. The teacher was a really nice middle school teacher who new my mum, but you don't care about that, you want to hear about the crawdad. The crawdad was very tricky to dissect. Its feathery gills were falling apart in the formaldehyde and leaving greyish-brown fishy chunks all over the baking pan filled with wax that served as a dissection tray. Man, those things were foul. Smelly wax filled with punch-holes with chunks of organic debris clinging to their sides. I wondered how they got them clean, or if they even bothered, and who the lucky shmuck was who had the job of cleaning up after us. Anyway, the worst part of the crawdad was that your hands smelled like a truly ghastly combination of dead fish and formaldehyde for days after.
In college, I graduated from crawdads to normal fish. Not even sure what kind of fish it was, but you could tell that it was "fish day" in the biology labs halfway accross campus from the stench. I think in the nine years between fourth grade and college that animal pickling technologies had improved to be less...err...pungent, but preserved dead fish will never be anything but overpoweringly vile.

KQED has Pissed Me off for the Very Last Time

2009-05-29T00:21:00.000-07:00

Urg. KQED did a show on the Chevron vs. Trial Lawyers on Behalf of Theoretical Rainforest Inhabitants in Ecuador. Listen to it if you have a taste for shallow thinking and BS. I apologize on behalf of Northern California for this steaming turd of tree-hugging Berkeley liberal propaganda. I also apologize for central California for prop 8, and also for Sacramento for being incompetent, but that's a different post. If you want to hear Chevron's side of the argument, and they get brownie points for being able to provide actual evidence for their arguments, go here.
Anyway, time for another scathing letter to KQED, this time hopefully giving Krasny a damn good spanking for being such a drooling yes-man to a troupe of goons with an obvious agenda. He probably won't read this masterwork...but you can.

Dear Forum,
I was deeply disappointed in your reporting on "Chevron Protests," May 28, 2009. Although your website states that Chevron itself was unable to provide a representative to argue the company's case, I feel your show has a duty to present both sides of an argument that has two valid points of view. Both of your guests were very anti-Chevron and anti-oil, and both of your guests had an agenda which coloured their analysis of the events surrounding the lawsuit between Chevron and Ecuador. It was not made clear to the listener that Chevron never directly operated the field in question, Texaco operated it for a short period of time in conjunction with Petroecuador, the national oil company of Ecuador. Both of your guests made painted this lawsuit as a David vs. Goliath battle between the poor oppressed natives and the evil multinational corporation, and Mr. Krasny made no effort to refute this or to indicate that this may not be a simple, black and white issue. No mention was made of the fact that Petroecuador has operated the field in question since 1992. No mention was made of the fact that almost all profits from the operation there went to Ecuador.
I have a relative who works as a mid-level manager for a large oil company and has worked in places where the state govenment is both corrupt and impotent. In these countries, companies like Chevron often have to broker deals with the local warlords and landowners (some of whom are opposing each other) in order to drill or mine. These deals often involve building roads, schools, and hospitals as well as giving the local officials large cuts of any profits made. These deals can go south, often when the local warlords reneg on their contracts. My relative has coworkers who have been killed or directly threatened when gangs of thugs lay seige to the office and plant with automatic weapons. To always paint the multinational as evil and oppressive, and the local regimes as being used and manipulated is both factually wrong and a disservice to your listeners. It is entirely possible that these local officials perceive an easier time and a bigger dollar in suing Chevron to clean up Petroecuador's mess than in trying to get their own government to pay for it.
In conclusion, Chevron is not evil or corrupt. Chevron is a corporation that exists, like all corporations do, to make money. It is owned and operated by average people with families and kids to send to college and food to put on the table. It is simply not cost effective or profitable for Chevron to polute the rain forrest. It puts them at risks for multi-billion dollar lawsuits and it inhibits diplomacy for future exploration within the area. The people who stand to gain from this lawsuit are corrupt local officials and trial lawyers. This was not refuted with evidence from your interviewees.
In short, this program was the far left equivalent of hosting a show on the ethics of torture with special guests Dick Cheney and John Yoo, and with everything boiled down to black and white heroes and villains. This is a pretty lowbrow view for KQED to espouse, I think.

Sincerely,

And, oh yeah. I'm not continuing my subscription or giving you clowns any more money. Ever. Thought that might be a bit of a cliche ending for the letter, though.

The Housing Bubble has Popped? You don't say.

2009-05-19T18:51:00.000-07:00

I was listening to NPR in the car on the way home (KQED again. didn't have any fresh podcasts for the commute. I wanted them when they started into fundraising, let me tell you.), and they were discussing, yet again, the housing bubble.
What gets me is that everyone is still scratching their head over the fact that it popped! "We could have never predicted this!" and "Isn't hindsight 20/20?" and "I thought it would never end!"
Funny thing is, I know jack shit about economics, finance, banking or real estate, but if you'd asked me a year and a half ago, I'd have told you that the housing bubble was going to burst. I couldn't have told you when, but frankly I was hoping for sooner rather than later, and I couldn't have told you how. But I could have told you that the housing bubble was dangerously overinflated, and dependent on a large fraction of money which simply didn't exist.
Now that I think about it, I can't understand how anyone with any sort of umbilical cord to reality could have *not* seen this coming.
It's like totaling your car in an accident where you hit a cow. They're not camouflaged and it's not like the cow jumped out in front of you. You had to be blind or high or stupid or drunk or all of the above to have a car smash with a cow.
I grew up in one of the cheaper parts of the midwest. My family was upper middle class at the time, and we lived in a small house, which my parents sold. They put the money towards a bigger house. My family had loans, but my mom always found enough cash in the till to make the monthly payments. My father's income was such that he could afford to pay off the house in less than thirty years.
Cut forward twenty years. I've moved to California. I make about what my dad made when I was a kid, and don't tell him this, but I think I have roughly the equivalent "rank" at work that he did. My friends are starting to get married, and with marriage comes the purchase of their fist house--they usually try to find one in a good neighbourhood with a preschool, just in case they find themselves with kids in the comming years. The problem is, with what they are paid, around 60K a year apiece, 120 K with both husband and wife maintaining a fulltime job, they can't afford to make any sort of normal monthly payments on ANY houses in the area. This includes the ones near the train-tracks on the bad side of town. House prices in California in 2007 are greater than 10 times more expensive now than your average Utah house twenty years ago (lest you think this is an invalid comparison, houses all over the west have increased in price by large factors. Of course, we all attribute this to the damn Californians).
But wages are about the same.
So my friends would take out these massive loans which they knew that they could only pay off through selling the house at a price that was significantly greater than the exhorbitant price that they had paid for it. The only thing keeping these people out of massive debt was the faith that their house was worth more than what they paid for it, which was sold for more than the previous person paid for it and so on. These houses hadn't actually had anything valuable added *to* them. In some cases, I reckon the wear and tear of 20 years of family usage probably devalued the houses.
So, the question comes down to--what's going to happen when one person can't pay off this debt they've gotten themselves into? What happens when they can't afford the expanding interest on their "bubble" loans because these loans are given on the premise that they have money that they cannot possibly have with today's wages? What happens when this happens to a bunch of people? What happens when the bank finds out that a lot of money they'd counted on having from these loans simply doesn't exist? What happens when people who are already scrambling to pay their mortgages get laid off?
*Pop*
If you didn't see that one coming, you weren't looking, and if it was your job to *be* looking, then you'd better get to work finding a solution. Hint: the solution is not doing anything and everything in your power to raise house prices again, and it doesn't involve giving loans or credit to people who cannot by any arithmetic trickery afford the loan they want.

The "Oakland Road Portal"

2009-05-14T22:18:00.000-07:00

Leads to another dimension. Specifically, the dimension of the street below.

This is a massive fissure in an overpass on the southbound 880 in Oakland, approximately 1/4 mile south of the Broadway exit. It's in the far right lane. I first noticed it when stuck in the traffic that tends to condense in this area during rush-hour. I was looking down, and I thought: "Hey, wait a minute...isn't that the surface street down there through this massive crack in the overpass? Shouldn't there be like re-bar or girders or three feet of concrete there?"

The road is rough because of the trucks that use this route on their way to Los Angeles. The speed limit around here is 55, but no one seems to care. Imagine what 24 hours of 365 days a year of double-trailered semi-trucks barelling down the highway at 75 will do to a highway that is on top of that, almost never maintained. I've been on dirt roads that are nicer than the Nimitz. Other noticeable features of this freeway include: the "bowling-ball sized crater near southbound High Street", and "That big step where the pavement type changes," and "The precariously leaning sound barier that caught on fire late last year.* "

The fissure is the most worrisome of these, though, because I can't help but think that the entire right lane is going to fall off into the trainyard below during the next major earthquake. I mean, you can see the street below through this crack as you drive over it, and you can't see girders. That is one deep crack in the overpass. It has odd greenish blotches of cement in it as if someone had made some halfassed attempt to fill it in in the past**, but these repair attempts seem to just crumble and fall through.

So, in conclusion: California legislature, I know you guys couldn't spend money wisely to save your lives, but could you maybe spare a couple million to stabilize this part of the Nimitz?

Coming soon if I can get it: picture of the blue sky from below this crack.

*The sound barier *used* to have vines growing on it. Now it's just bald.
**Perhaps with bubblegum?

A Note on "Conscience" Laws

2009-05-03T11:47:00.000-07:00

In response to this .
If you're a Muslim, don't work at a pig farm. If you're a Christian Scientist, don't work at a hospital. If you're Amish, don't work at the Sony factory.
Actually, it seems in most of the above situations, the said people would acknowledge that they are not fit for these jobs and so not consider them, kind of like most Silicon Valley guys accept that Olympic Marathon Runner is not a valid career choice for them.
Why then do Fundamentalist Christians want to work as Ob/Gyns or pharmacists? It seems like a greater percentage of them would want to sabotage their jobs than anything. We don't protect environmental terrorists who get jobs at factory farms. That would be stupid. Why the hell are we protecting fundamentalist Christians who choose to work as pharmacists that fill contraception prescriptions for everyone in a community? With the anti discrimination laws against creed (which I agree with), I don't think employers can ask a potential employee whether they'd fill a contraceptive prescription while hiring them. And now they can't fire them for not doing their job? If I was a right winger, and this crap was coming from the left I would be screaming "SOCIALISM!!!! ZOMG SOCIALISM!!!"*

*I don't think that REAL socialism, as opposed to the right wing definition of socialism, is a terrible thing. Rather, it wouldn't be a terrible thing if the US government didn't have such a penchant for wasting money on ideological wankery.

Difficult Truth #2

2009-04-20T19:40:00.000-07:00

No one is obliged to respect your religion.

This one hit me when I was reading about the Miss America contestant from California, who replied to the openly gay blogger Perez Hilton when he asked her about her opinion on gay marriage, that "In my family, in my *country*, I think marriage should be between a man and a woman." Emphasis mine. Firstly, I was ashamed of Hilton. He knew that there was a "right" answer to this question, and it was downright MEAN of him to give the contestant the choice between lying and shaming herself on TV. A director of the Miss California pagaent STUPIDLY replied that she didn't think religion had any part in a pagaent. Lady, you're doing your cause no favours. The christian right looooves to wallow in self-pity about how the world is aligned against them (even though they're a majority in the US). You just gave them some bait and they're going to bite.
My first thought was: "I have no respect for Christianity." My second thought was that that does not make any sense at all. Christianity is a concept. A philosophy. It's hard to have no respect for something as nebulous as a philosophy. I can't well say "I've got no respect for Marxism", afterall, there have been some communist movements around the world that have had good points. Marx had some ideas that I respect. I can, however say that I do not respect Chairman Mao's interpretation of Marxism.
And that's key. Religion is a concept of pairs: the idea and you. It's stupid to say "I don't respect any of the pairs", because it's likely there's one in the bucket that you'll agree with, and you will be wronging them and discounting their valuable ideas. This is one reason why the UN resolution against blasphemy is dangerous and dumb. (Link to fox news. Apparently their hate for the UN and Muslims in the UN trumps their love of Christian fundamentalism.)
I respect the Christianity of my friend James. For him, homosexuality is evil, and so is masturbation...but he respects and will listen to other people's opinions. His Jesus gave the time of day to people with whom he did not agree on moral issues. His Jesus led by example instead of condemnation.
I respect the Christianity of my boyfriend. For him, Jesus was a good, patient and inspiring teacher who has caused him to examine his own actions and to empathize with the actions of others. He genuinely wants to make the world a better place, and Christianity helps him to focus on this.
I do not respect the Christianity of my ex-landlady. Her Jesus was a narcissistic hillbilly who during his own lifetime and that of his parasitic followers has devoted himself to the extortion and blackmail of the human race. This is the Jesus of the NOM ads and the prop 8 movement, too.
Back to the beauty pagaent, though, I'd like to add a corrolary to this difficult truth.

You have the right to say pretty much anything that won't endanger others. This does not mean that anybody else has the obligation to respect your opinion.
Just because you CAN say something doesn't mean you SHOULD, and this is a lesson that both Hilton and Miss California need to learn. Miss California should have dodged the question or pointed out that her lifestyle choices aren't nessesarily right for other people. Hilton should have bit his tongue. Either way, this news story would have been non-existant.
Every time I hear someone whine about being persecuted for not being "politically correct", they're trying to cover their asses for saying something that betrays a lack of respect for their fellow humans, also known as LACK OF TACT. In fact, I can't think of a single instance of "persecution for lack of political correctness" in which this is NOT the case. The political correctness police are about as real as leprechauns, fairies, and the gay agenda.
So yeah. You have a right to be tactless. You also have the right to pick your nose while talking to me and in either case, I have the right to call you disgusting. Disagreement is NOT persecution.
Amen

Protecting Your Vitals from Demons

2009-04-05T23:54:00.000-07:00

The finer points.
I've been geeking out over Alexandre Piankoff's The Shrines of Tut-Ankh-Amon. Which is about (surprise), the theology and translations of the abbreviated religious texts on Tutankhamun's three nested shrines , canopic shrines, and other relevant bling.
I'm at the bit talking about the canopic shrines, and this has explained some interesting beleifs that I'd like to share.
The egyptians beleived that demons could take up residence in a person's vital organs before and after death. Since a person needs their liver, lungs, intestines, and stomach in the afterlife, important persons had theirs preserved, wrapped in linen and placed in special jars.
I have to wonder whether these demons were the Egyptians' way of explaining post mortem decay, or whether anti demon practices were intended to prevent Montezuma's Revenge in the Fields of Peace. There's probably a theological threat that possessed digestive tracts pose to the deceased, but I do not know what it is yet.
Anyway, a hint to how the Egyptians were thinking here can be found in a hieratic (cursive hieroglyphic) text in the British Museum. This is a spell to prevent demons from taking up in one's guts.
"Thou shalt not take thy stand in his liver, his lungs, in his heart, in his kidneys, in his spleen, in his intestines, in his rib, or in any flesh of his body. Imsety, Hapy, Duamutef, and Qebehsenuef, the gods who are in his body are against thee." (Piankhoff, 19)
Who are Hapy, Imsety, Duamutef and Qebehsenuef? They are the sons of the falcon god, Horus, who is the son of the God Osiris and his sister/wife Isis. At certain periods of Egyptian history, canopic jars featured images of these gods on their lids. Tutankhamun's canopic jars actually have portraits of him* on their lids, but the idea is still there. The idea is that these gods not so much protect these organs as are manifestations of them. Hapy is the lungs. Duamutef is the stomach, Qebehsenuef is the intestines, and Imsety is the liver. (Piankoff, 19).
Because the organs are manifestations of these gods, they need external protections to keep them demon and damage free. These "protections" come in the form of four goddesses: one for each son of Horus. It's interesting to note here that although each of these goddesses have their own mythology and function, ie. Neith is a very old war goddess, in the funerary tradition, they serve to protect the body and its components. In the case of Tutankhamun, protection comes in the form of tiny golden coffins, which each contain one of the canopic organs, and therefore "protect" the gods within these organs. Inside each of the coffins is an image of a protective goddess spreading her wings over the organs in protection. Isis protects Imsety(liver), Nephthys protects Hapy(lungs), Neith protects Duamutef(stomach), and Selkit, the one with the scorpion on top of her head protects Qebehsenuef. In fact, on the outside of these little coffins, the text reads along the lines of
"Words of [protective goddess]: 'I encircle with my two arms that which is in me. I protect [viscera god] who is within me. [Viscera god], the Osiris (here used to mean "deceased") King Nebkheperure (Tutankhamun), justified before the Great God.'" (Piankhoff, 19)
The little golden coffins are therefore manifestations of the goddesses** themselves, protecting the gods within them. If we move out a little, we can also see that the chest containing the little viscera jars and coffins has one of these four goddesses protecting each of the four corners--presumably the ones corresponding with her jar. Even the shrine wich encloses this canopic chest has a statuette of each goddess on each of its four faces.
So, if you happen to be going to see Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs (sounds like a greatest hits album, doesn't it?) at the De Young Museum this summer, hopefully those little inlayed innard-coffins will be a little more meaningful to you than just another piece of King Tut's bling.

*Maybe.
**If you want to impress your friends, you can recognize the goddesses by the emblems on their heads. Isis often has a throne which looks like stairsteps. She also sometimes has cow horns with a disk between them, but usually it's the stairsteps. Neith has a shield with two arrows crossed behind it, but by the time of Tutankhamun it looks more like an oval with two curly lines comming out of each pointy end. Nephthys has a rectangle with a basket balanced on top of it. This spells Neb(t) Hwt, which is her name in Egyptian. Selket is the easiest to remember. She has a legless scorpion on top of her head.You do not mess with Selket.
Cited:
Piankhoff, Alexandre. The Shrines of Tutankhamun. Bollingen Series XL 2. Princeton University Press. Princeton, NJ 1977. pp19.
Cited by Piankhoff on the Demon Warding Spell in the British Museum,
Alan H. Gardiner. Hieratic Papyri in the British Museum. 3rd Series. Chester Beatty Gift ed. London, 1935.
Pictures from flickr with the photographer as Meechmunchie were taken by myself in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The others belong to their respective owners whom I thank for letting me ninja their photos.

In Memory of Buyo

2009-03-29T23:10:00.000-07:00

2001-2009

Buyo, the family cat, passed away this Saturday due to a kidney failure. He wasn't a particularly nice cat, and hardly ever willingly cuddly, but he had a certain joie de vivre from which we can all take inspiration. He had a lot of personality for a cat, and was always good for a laugh. I will miss his tendency to drag in all manner of disgusting things from the garden--like that one time he brought in a giant tomato slug, gingerly carrying it in his mouth so as not to "pop" it, and placed it on the floor of the living room, rubbing his head against it as if to say: "look what I caught! Don't fight me for it, because it's MINE.", or the time he caught a drowsy lizard one morning and brought it in to exhibit, whereupon the lizard promptly escaped and ran for the nearest heating vent, or the time we were playing with those little kid halloween glo-sticks in the back yard and he ran after a flung stick and bit into it. We had to catch him and hold him while washing the glowing cat-drool from this mouth.
He had a fondness for sleeping on the dining room table, but knew it was against the rules, so he'd make sure no one was looking before he hopped up there. He hated riding in the car because it usually meant "vet", but he didn't mind so much if you let him stand on his hind legs to look out of the window.

He was terrified of even the smallest dogs, once climbing frantically halfway up the brick chimney on seeing a pommeranian despite having no front claws.
In short, I'll miss you, Buyo, you little devil. You were a good kitty. You were a really "human" cat, and if there is a heaven for cats, I hope there are lots of things to chew there.
Buyo is survived by Kenny, another Siamese who will need another playmate to clawlessly beat him down and then sit on his face.

The End of The Watchmen: Octopus vs. Blue Man as Scapegoat

2009-03-16T19:29:00.000-07:00

OMG PBS stopped fund raising finally, but they have some dumb crap on Katharine Hepburn on now, so I can post--until Antiques Roadshow comes on.

Anyway, I saw the Watchmen yesterday, and I loved it. I don't think I've ever been brought to tears by a comic book movie before--it was THAT good. Most of the goodness was in the writing, though, although I liked the imagery of the movie much more than the comic. The choice of colours in the comic was a bit garish for my taste. I also finished reading the comic. Oh. Excuse me. *Graphic Novel.*
Many people like that they changed the ending of the movie. I did not. I liked the ending of the comic much much better, and here are five reasons why. Spoilers Here but I suppose if you're reading this you've already seen this movie or read the comic, or don't give a crap about getting the end spoiled.

1) It has a giant beached octopus planted in the middle of New York. How bloody awesome is that?

2) In the comic book, Doctor Manhattan leaves earth of his own volition as opposed to being martyred. I realize that he would have left weather or not the final atrocity was attributed to him, but I feel that the story is more open at the end if the reader could imagine that he *could* come back if he wanted. Martyring him imposes a limit on a person who is pretty much a god at the end of the book.

3)The Tales of the Black Freighter comic within the graphic novel, the end of which was juxtaposed over the climax of the main story added a depth of emotion and meaning to the end of the main story, making it more raw and vivid than the end of the movie. Black Freighter is going to be released on its own as an animated feature, but I really felt that without the main story to compliment it, it wasn't that impressive.

4) The background of Adrian Veidt is explained more thoroughly in the comic. He's also a much less sympathetic character. The reader has to give a little more morally to relate to him before grudgingly admitting that he might be right.

5)Because Doctor Manhattan became the scapegoat for the final atrocity at the end of the movie, it becomes harder to believe that the peace between the US and the Soviets is going to last, especially given that in the aftermath of 9/11 where the outpouring of support for the US lasted only a few months. (And then our tool of a president screwed it all up). The giant Octopus is an unknown threat to both the US and the soviets. It gives them no model, assuming Veidt is not discovered, to build future weapons upon. Because Manhattan was a stoolie for the US government and because he was initially american, it's conceivable in the future that his ethnicity could be used as ammo by the Soviets. Because the Americans worked with him, it's conceivable that the Americans could conclude that he was not returning to earth and that the act was a one off "pox on both of your houses" in revenge. Neither party could try to psychoanalyze the octopus.

My Letter to PBS (KQED)

2009-03-04T21:59:00.000-08:00

People who read this blog know that I spend a lot of time bitching and moaning about fundraising on PBS and the crappy programming that accompanies it.
Today, I wrote my very first kvetch letter to the office of the president of PBS. I tried to temper the whinyness with wit--below is my masterwork in its entirety. Don't worry. Soon, I shall write something on this blog that doesn't involve me griping.

Dear KQED,

I love you. You're one of a handful of channels that I can pick up with my rabbit ears (with new digital converter box! Yay!) , and you're one of an even smaller subset of these that is in English. I love the mysteries on Friiday nights on KTEH and I leave work early to watch Antiques Roadshow on Mondays. However, this Monday, I turned on the tube to see---The boring self-help guy who goes on about reprogramming your mind.
"Oh, Gawd," I thought.
"They're fundraising.
Again."
I could tell within seconds, by the programming, the production values, the droning monotony and the very subject of the show *EXACTLY* what was going on. I quickly flipped to the little menu. Maybe KTEH hasn't been infected, I thought.
But no.
Both channels were queued up to be playing an old concert requiring that the viewer be over fifty and on a high dose of nostalgia to enjoy.
With my amazing psychic skills, I predict that KQED will air that yearning, dreamy documentary on The Summer of Love before the week is out.
At first, I thought that you guys were trying to get people to donate money as quickly as possible in hopes that you would cut this stuff and get back to the normal programming, which is so good. Or perhaps you were trying to give us a glimpse of a dystopian future where PBS is reduced to airing films of corporate team-building seminars 24/7 due to lack of donors.
Several fundraising sessions, and not a lot of time later, I came to the conclusion that KQED fundraisers are designed with one audience in mind: Aging Rich New-Agers and Ex-Hippies in Marin County. You guys seem to think that the only people who are going to donate fall in this demographic, and so you try to butter them up with nostalgia and self-help shows. The problem is, there ARE younger people who watch public television, but if you want to remind them of how great PBS is, a 2 hour Jerry Garcia concert isn't going to do it.
If you aired a Doctor Who marathon, you could probably double your intake from Silicon valley. We have money, too!
You could probably get local scientists to let you tape their lectures, too, and run that instead of the self-help show every once in a while. That would be awesome.
Anyway, when I turn on the tube and think--"Hey! They're fundraising! I'm going to get some popcorn and some knitting and watch this business!", then I'll be more tempted to call right now.
As it is, you will have to rely on the pushiness of the little angel on my shoulder telling me I should donate, and she's often drowned out by the little devil on my other shoulder asking me why I should donate when you guys obviously are soliciting money from the rich boomers to the detriment of my monday evenings.

Sincerely,
Kea Johnston
On-The-Fence Potential Donor

Difficult Truth #1

2009-02-24T19:44:00.001-08:00

You are the only person on the planet who has a biological obligation to love your child.
Corollary: You are probably the only person in the world who loves your dog.
What does this mean?
This means that most of the time, when you are regaling a person with tales of how little Haylee brought you a crayoned card for mother's day, or how Jayden could very well be the next Mozart and how you are going to shove your way up on the stage at the next community theater event so that everyone can hear him screech out "Miss-iss-ipp-i Hot-dog" on his viola, they are at best smiling and nodding, and at worst considering moving away.
Likewise, when you take your baby to an R - rated movie or on an international flight where it howls for eight hours straight, everyone else stuck in the 747-echo chamber is at best thinking that you are a crap parent, and at worst spiraling into madness.
No one thinks its cute.
I also feel that it is totally understandable for a person to be a tad annoyed when they go to visit someone and said person's dog jumps on them and licks their face in excitement. Especially if the owner expects you to think that this behaviour is adorable.
So, please.
Silence your spawn.

Smooth Moves, Microsoft

2009-02-22T22:43:00.001-08:00

In recent news, apparently, Microsoft made a little error in computing the severance of some of the 1400 employees it axed a few weeks ago--they paid out too much.
They've sent "sincere" apologies to the former employees, asking them to pay back the money. Predictably, they're not commenting. "Please bugger off, media."
It's hard to imagine a more boneheaded decision, and this from someone who worked for a giant company even more prone to boneheaded decisions than Microsoft.
I can see a little bit of the logic here. Microsoft has two choices. They are on the right side of the law in the US, unless of course the severance contract had the WRONG NUMBER on it, and then things will get a bit more tricky. They are perfectly within right to ask for the money back, and the former employees are obliged pay it back.
They can let it slide and write it off as a little generosity in a bad economic climate. This is what they SHOULD do for their own image and for their ex employees who may have already used that money to pay mortgages, etc. It's probably going to cost them a fair bit of change in lawyer's fees if they decide to pursue this legally when their employee don't give the money back, and they are going to look like complete assholes to just about anyone who doesn't already hate Microsoft. The PR damage is going to reverberate for a while.
On the other hand, the company is in the pockets of the shareholders, so if they perceive that their stock is going to bomb if they don't try to get the money back, they're going to go after it.
In that case, I propose the following solution.
The HR department spends a week handwriting personalized apology cards on nice stationary and the head of HR personally signs each one of them. Its a lot harder to be outraged about a nice note than a cold form letter in legalese. And HR gets to spend some time thinking about how to best peer review each-other's work for dumb math mistakes.
By the way, I'd give the money back. But I like one commenter on one of the tech sites' idea of paying it back entirely in pennies which are stored in unwashed bottles of Karo syrup.

Bread & Circus, Milk and Peanut

2009-02-02T18:37:00.000-08:00

You've probably read about the salmonella outbreak that is stalking the condiments aisle at a grocery store near you.
After months of searching and false alarms, the FDA has finally tracked an ongoing food-poisoning problem to good old homegrown Georgia peanuts. The peanut butter was mixed with sugar, high fructose cornsyrup and various other peanut mummification elements and squirted into peanut-butter and cracker snackpacks worldwide. At my office, an innocent looking bag of Ritz cracker peanutbutter sandwiches sits on a card table while nearby, a letter in a calming tone hangs on the bulletin board. Costco wants their crackers back--but please don't panic.
What happened here?
No one's going to say it, so I'd might as well: I thought we'd gotten past this in America. I thought this sort of greed-driven-corner-cutting-while-the-local-regulators-are-either-paid-off-or-napping-on-the-job was the province of the Middle Kingdom!
Let's have a look: The town of Blakely, GA is the home of a plant belonging to the Peanut Corporation of America. Creative name. They make all sorts of products of varying consistancies out of peanuts, and these peanut products end up in cereals, condiments, snacks, candies, and also, wierdly, doggie biscuits. Conditions at this plant aren't the most hygenic. The ceiling leaks, there's lots of milldew, the building contains lots of convenient entrances for rodents and cockroaches too, judging from their dead carcasses. And there's one sink for all handwashing and mop-washing needs. In other words, it's a pretty cheapass operation. A year ago, peanuts from the plant were rejected by Canada because they had chunks of metal in them. These peanuts got destroyed. If metal bits were too insignificant to warrant internal quality control, what chance does a tiny bacteria have?
The plant did conduct contaminant testing on their product. They found Salmonella. They kept testing the same batch until they got a negative result--and then they shipped it. One wonders if they "read" that final test result with their eyes closed! In fact, the inspection report from the plant reads like a microbial star-chart to the food-poisoning world.
So why did they ship contaminated peanut butter? Exact same reason that Chinese farmers decided to fake out regulators by putting melamine in milk products. Chinese regulations on milk require a certain level of protein content in the milk. This is to prevent manufacturers from watering down milk. Demand was high and money stood to be lost by not keeping up with demand, so dairy plants added a plastic, Melamine, to the milk and watered it down anyway, since Melamine will produce a false positive on certain protein tests.
Where were government regulators while this was going on? Well in Georgia, up until the poop hit the fan, they were noting the lack of hygiene at the Blakely plant and were administering small slaps on the wrist. They were sleeping at the wheel. In China, regulators were probably getting a cut.
Let us compare some numbers here. So far, in the US, there have been 550 illnesses. About a fourth of those are children. The population of the US is 303,824,640. That's 0.000002% of the population of the United States. The Chinese melamine scandal made 300,000 people ill. Mainly infants, children, and the infirm. The population of China is around 1,330,044,544. So, that's around 0.0002% of the population of China affected by this scandal. A couple of orders of magnitude higher than the peanutbutter scandal, but a fairly small percentage of the overall population in both cases.
Yet, it seems like American outrage about the Melamine scandal in comparison to the homegrown peanutbutter scandal is a little bigger than 10e-2. We view the Chinese, with their Communist government drifting towards capitalism with a mixture of suspicion--because they're foreign and commies, condescension because their economy is newer and more immature than our own, nevermind that the United States was in a similar economic position just a century ago, and fear because of the threat China poses to American superpower. We have an inability to empathise with the Chinese towns where mainstreet is held aloft by dairy--leading to an unwillingness to crack down on known health violations, but we can somehow feel for workers in Blakely who put Salmonella peanuts back on the conveyor belt for the same reasons.

The King and You

2009-01-19T16:14:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you have read the recent news story about the Australian man who has gotten sentenced to prison for publishing a book FOUR YEARS AGO which sold less than ten copies and was then recalled. Apparently, in his book "Verisimilitude: Is the Truth the Truth", author Harry Nicolaides said some rather nasty things about the current king and crown prince of Thailand.
In Thailand, it's illegal to say anything not nice about the royal family, whether or not it is true or is valid criticism. Insulting the King carries a sentence of up to 15 years in prison.
Mr. Nicolaides was on his way home to Melbourne, when he was arrested at the airport. One thinks that this could be a political statement--if you're going to arrest a man for slander, why wait three years? Three years, sadly, is what Nicolaides will be spending in a Thai oubliette--the prosecution decided to go "easy" on him because he plead guilty.
Anyway, what struck me the most about the articles I read, and I read about five, was that none of them would say what exactly it was that Nicolaides said that was so insulting to the king! The above article insinuates that it was something bad concerning the love life of the crown prince. The reason for this lack of full coverage comes out in the frank Christian Science Monitor article.
What? International reporters are too chicken-shit to do their job because they're afraid that they'd be thrown in jail or barred from reporting in Thailand? Ok, I guess that this is one thing that Blogs are good for.
So, since I am not ever planning to go to Thailand*, I did do a little internet research as per the CSM's suggestion, and here is what Nicolaides wrote that has gotten the pants of Thailand's government in such a twist.

“From King Rama to the Crown Prince, the nobility was renowned for their romantic entanglements and intrigues. The Crown Prince had many wives “major and minor “with a coterie of concubines for entertainment. One of his recent wives was exiled with her entire family, including a son they conceived together, for an undisclosed indiscretion. He subsequently remarried with another woman and fathered another child. It was rumoured that if the prince fell in love with one of his minor wives and she betrayed him, she and her family would disappear with their name, familial lineage and all vestiges of their existence expunged forever.”

Oh, come on! Like this is something that everyone on the planet who has seen "The King and I" didn't already know.
The censorship is even extending into the blogosphere, with this site removing the copy of the book that it posted because of fear of retributions towards Mr. Nicolaides. However, if you request a copy of the book, they'll send you one. I encourage you to do so!
This is bullying by the Thai government on people who are NOT Thai citizens. That a person who is not a Thai citizen could be coerced into censorship for fear of retributions upon an innocent person is twisted and wrong. The royal family of Thailand has shown themselves to be petty tyrants paying lip service to justice--the 81 year old king himself has expressed displeasure with this law but has not made any action to change it!
If I had a curse to wish upon the royal family of Thailand, it's that they be the subject of the next stupid 4chan internet Meme, but until then, I encourage everyone to find their Thai embassy and send them a letter, email or call of protest. You can also do a video response to one of the many Free Nicolaides clips on Youtube.
I encourage people to blog about this and to get the word out. The more people know about this heinous affront to liberty, the better.
Since GOD himself apparently can't punish people for criticizing him, the King of Thailand should get no better.

*From what I have heard, you can't walk through the airport in Bangkok without getting offers for hookers, drugs, and the latest scam directed at people who can't speak the local language. It seems like a totally tiresome place to visit where the harassment outweighs any pleasure one might get from getting to know the local culture. Thailand has real issues to work out while their court system is busy apparently wanking and prosecuting imaginary offenses like this one. Until they get their act together, I have no intention of visiting.

The Bible & Real History

2009-01-16T00:21:00.000-08:00

In a continuation of a rant started like twenty posts ago on being a hack historian, I'd like to bring up one my favourite sticking points in Middle Eastern archaeology. The Bible.
In Egyptian History class in college, the professor brought up an interesting point that I'd never considered seriously before. He said that the Bible, and here I'm referring to the Old Testament, is really the only historical document that we have from the ancient world wherein a people documents their history from their own point of view. It gives us an insight into the mentality of an ancient tribe far removed from ourselves. It also gives us the point of view of members of a fairly unstable ancient society, which was, in its early history, constantly getting in petty squabbles with its neighbours, sometimes ending in genocide, and getting fairly regularly WTFPWNT and occupied by the more cosmopolitan empires surrounding it.
Usually, ancient texts are esoterically religious (which this one is as well in bits), diplomatic calls of the super-elite, shopping lists of the middle class, or pure propaganda.
Rameses II announces in stone his victory in the battle of Qadesh, while his rival Muwatalli, leader of the Hittites, who actually won the battle, does the same. Rameses' "victory", it turns out is code for "We avoided Total Destruction in Syria."
Anyway, as valuable a document of the minds of the Ancient Hebrews as the Bible is, it's not a "history." It's a combination of myths and legends.
Sometimes, the rough outline of these events turn out to be true. There really was a King Nebuchadnezzar, for example. His regime left us plenty of clay tablets with his name on them. The Biblical city of On probably corresponds to the Egyptian city of Iwnw, and there probably was a Land of Goshen in Egypt. A stelae from the reign of Merenptah, son of Rameses II, mentions a Land of Ysrw(?), which we can relate to Israel.
And you know what? Paul Bunyan was probably a real lumberjack at one point. He probably won a medal at the State Fair for log rolling and a hundred years later, he has a blue ox named "Babe."
Snark aside, my point is that many historians assume that the events in the Bible really happened, and try to work history around it, instead of going from evidence and fitting the Bible in if tangible evidence for it is found. I feel that "Biblical Archaeology" is a logical fallacy. It's not at all scientific, and I think there needs to be more scientific method in archaeology. Saying you're going to dig for the Jerusalem of King David and then trying to prove that any burnt up ruins you find are the remains of King David's city is starting on the assumption that your hypothesis is true and fudging up your calculations to "prove it." It shouldn't fly, but it seems to get a unanimous pass from the public and other middle eastern archaeologists.
How many documentaries have I watched and papers have I read where someone's theorizing that Pharaoh X was the Pharaoh of Exodus? I'm talking TV Heads and serious scholars here, and no one seems to be able to grab the big logical booboo here!
Waiiiiit--there's no evidence that there actually was an Exodus, so how can we find the Pharaoh of Exodus?
A GREAT, although somewhat lowbrow example of this is the Wikipedia Article on the "Land of Goshen", where Joseph is depicted as a historical figure and history is built up around him. (He was buried in Avaris during the 12th Dynasty, for example) There is no evidence that there ever was a man named Joseph nor that his brothers backstabbed him, nor that he had a pretty coat.
Here's the deal on the people of Canaan in Egypt. I'm not even going to say Hebrews, because to my knowledge, there's no indication that all of these people identified themselves with one group. At the end of the 17th Dynasty, Ahmose and his brother/uncle Khamose kicked the Hyksos (which is derived from a generic Egyptian term for "Fucking Foreigners") out of Egypt. (We still don't know who exactly the Hyksos were, except that they brought things like horses and chariots into Egypt.) The capitol of the Hyksos was Avaris, which is near the supposed "Land o Goshen." The period in which Egypt was overrun by these foreigners, who didn't invade all at once, but gradually migrated into Egypt and then styled themselves as Pharaohs ruling over Northern Egypt was called the Second Intermediate Period. Ahmose and Khamose came from Thebes in the south, and in a twisty maze of succession, their scion took over and founded the 18th Dynasty. Over the next hundred and fifty years Amenhetep I, Thutmose I, and Thutmose III stormed the Middle East, conquering everything from Sudan to the Euphrates in modern day Iraq. The chaos these guys caused while sacking the city of Megiddo is reflected in the term Armageddon.
Modern day Israel was, for the next few generations, ruled by Egyptian-supported toadies who sent their children to be brought up with pharaoh's children, both to make them like Egypt, and to ensure the good behaviour of their parents.
Around 1350 BC, the area erupted in infighting between local warlords, and unfortunately, the current Pharaoh didn't really care to come break up the fight. This king was Akhenaten, who banned the worship of the traditional Egyptian pantheon in favour of a single ancient and until now symbolic god called The Aten. Some choose to see in Akhenaten's short-lived religious reform inspiration for the monotheistic religion of the Hebrews, but this is speculation. It does seem however, that Akhenaten's Hymn to the Aten is echoed by psalm 104.
During this period, Egypt was actually a very diverse society, with Nubians and people of Canaanite stock in high posts and within the echelons of the aristocracy. This is underscored by Egyptian renderings in tombs of some very semitic names--Aperia the Vizier under Akhenaten's father is a rendering of Aper-El. El was a Canaanite deity. As in El Shaddai. During this period, we get mention of a people called the Habiru, which may or may not be the Equivalent of Hebrew, we just don't know.
Anyway, Egypt's eastern empire fell apart while Akhenaten was busy playing God, and his successors, Ankheperure and Tutankhamun found themselves inheriting a situation similar to what Obama has inherited from George W. (Although I picture Akhenaten as being a lot smarter than Dubya. Maybe a bit spacy and detached.) They patched things up the best they could, but Egypt didn't get their empire back until about twenty years later when the general Seti I took the kingship from his elderly father, Rameses I. Seti and his son Rameses II re-exerted Egypt's influence over the middle east, but Egypt would never have as much influence as it did during the 18th dynasty. The point here is that the Jews fleeing from Egypt to Palestine during this period would have been like fleeing the Chinese by going to Tibet. Palestine was spoken for during this time, and just about everyone there was paying tribute to Egypt.
A hundred years after Rameses II becomes king, we have the first mention of a people referring to themselves as the People of Israel, so a lot of people assume that the Exodus was under Rameses or Merenptah, his son. This scant evidence is ALL WE HAVE, though. There is no evidence for an Exodus during this time, no evidence that the Hebrews were slaves--in fact, several people of semitic ancestry were involved in high society at the time!
Anyway, I hope that this diatribe has helped to illuminate just how patchy the Bible can be as a historical record. Like Homer, it tends to get things like people and places, and maybe even vague outlines of events correct. We have to remember, though, that often the people writing this document were nowhere near where this history was happening either spatially or temporally. There were no telephones for breaking news--it's his cousin's friend's friend's friend's girlfriend's mom's acquaintance told me that some sea captain told her that there was this guy named Joseph once upon a time...
Yes, the writers took it seriously, but it is a work of mythology and its value lies in what it can tell us about the way an ancient people viewed the world around them, not in what it can tell us about the reality of that world.

Some News Items.

2008-12-22T17:18:00.000-08:00

Retina Burning Cuteness

2008-11-17T12:51:00.001-08:00

Chi's Sweet Home. I feel kind of guilty about being so in love with a fake kitten. I want one!

Episode 2

Episode 3: The Bath

More Japanese people filming their cats can be found at the blog of Maru.
And also, this cat, who seems like he enjoys having little bits of tape stuck to him.
And of course, there are a million videos of people chasing their cats with RC Daleks. This one made me crack up.

Worst of Both Worlds

2008-11-15T01:26:00.000-08:00

The above describes California. Not only do we as a state have the craziest enviro-terrorist liberals, the type who burn down the houses of research scientists, we also have a state full of people who think that they're justified in ripping apart families because anal sex gives them butterflies in their delicate tummies.
Yes, this is another prop 8 post.
I've yet to see an argument for prop 8 that is logical, reasonable, or backed up by any data. I've yet to see an argument that doesn't boil down to a) religion, or b) often underlying "a", 'people who are gay are different. Gay sex is gross. Different = gross = bad."
Before we reconstruct some of these arguments, I'd like to tell you a little story.
I met a woman last week at a concert. Her name was Bess, and she and her husband, George, been together for twenty years. They had lived together for fifteen of those.
Bess and George have been married THREE TIMES.
Each time Bess and George get married, Bess is relieved that she can visit George in the hospital if George gets sick, and George can be satisfied that the decisions about George's health can be made by someone whom George loves if George is too ill to make them. George is happy that George and Bess can get a tax-break in these economic hard times because they're a couple, and Bess is happy that if she dies, George can inherit Bess' property. These are things Bess and George cannot get unless they are MARRIED in the eyes of the state. Bess is happy she gets to wear the frilly dress and go to church, but that's really just the cherry on top of the sundae. She really just wants to know that she and George are recognized as a couple by the state and get the benefits therein.
However, each time Bess and George are married, their happiness and security are short-lived.
Bess and George, if you haven't guessed yet, are both women. And each time the state decides to let same sex partners marry each-other and then takes that right away, the people who were married when it was legal get their union forcibly annulled.
Can you imagine the pain of being forced into a divorce by the government when neither you nor your spouse wants it? If this happened to heterosexual Fred and Mary, it would be the sign of a totalitarian state!
Can you imagine living with a woman who was your "wife" yesterday and knowing that this status has been taken from both of you because half the state thinks you've no right to inherit each-other's property, make life decisions for each-other, or get a tax break so you can afford to jointly buy that house in San Francisco?
Can you imagine knowing that half of a huge population of people who don't even know you have already labeled you as a SINFUL ABOMINATION?
And for those of you whose religion has deadened any sense of empathy you might have as human beings, let me couch this in millenia-old terms you can understand. Where in the Bible does it condemn homosexuality? Bible.org, a fundamentalist webpage seems to have an idea, but if you'll mouse over their Bible passages, only a few actually mention homosexuality. They try to equate being gay with adultery and fornication but can't provide any passages to back this up--just passages that condemn fornication and adultery.
I Corinthians 6:9 mentions it, but I Corinthians 6 pretty much nixes sex in general and also thinking about sex, and we don't take that at all seriously, so why single out 6:9's proscription against homosexuality unless we have a deep seated pre-existing conception that homosexuality = different = wrong? It's similar to singling out the bit about not suffering a witch to live, but conveniently ignoring the bit about it being easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man into heaven.
Leviticus 20:13 calls for any man who lies with another man as with a woman to be put to death along with his partner. Let's see what else Leviticus says in chapter 20. Hmmmmm:
Leviticus 20:18: If a man lies with a woman during her monthly period...both of them must be cut off from their people. (ie. Outcast). Haven't heard too many preachers rail on that one recently. Little kinky, but definitely not something to run people out of town for.
Leviticus 20:9 If a man curses his father or mother, he must be put to death.
The rest are proscriptions against every permutation of incest and prostitution, usually calling for the offenders to be burnt, stoned, or run out of town. If applied today, the punishments in Leviticus 20 would mark a person as a complete sociopath.
Leviticus 19 is really special. There are a lot of legitimate rules here, such as "do not cheat people out of their wages", and "don't seek revenge on your neighbours." Mixed in with these are: "Do not wear clothing of two kinds of fabric.", "If you plant a tree, its fruit is FORBIDDEN for the first three years of growth. The fourth year, you need to offer your harvest to God, and you can eat it by year 5." Finally, for those of you who "Clip the edges of your beard," the Lord Almighty is NOT AMUSED.
In short, you cannot use the Bible as an absolute ruler for morality on this issue, because for every good rule in Leviticus, there's one that's totally nonsensical. How do we tell if the Homosexuality rule goes in a bucket with the "thou shalt not eat meat with any blood still in it" or the "Thou shall not sell your daughter into prostitution" bucket? We can't. We have to make the call ourselves. Since in a gay relationship, there's no degradation of either partner--no one is hurt, no one is raped, it comes down to "Gay people and gay sex makes me feel squeamish."
I was going to go on about Sodom and Gomorrah, too, but I'm not really sure how this boils down to Homosexuality. Lot is living in Sodom, and is visited by a troupe of Angels from God. The citizens crowd outside his house, begging for some Hot Angel Action. Lot offers to let them gang rape his virgin daughters instead (God doesn't seem to have an issue with this), but they'd rather have some Angel Flesh, so Lot flees, and God smites both Sodom and Gomorrah. I don't know how people interperet this story as "Gay is bad." If I were god, I'd be much more put out that there were people who wanted to rape my angels than the fact that the Angel Rapists were MEN. How you can come away from this passage with any message other than "GOD DOES NOT LIKE ANGEL RAPISTS" indicates that you're reading something of your own cultural view into the passage. Again, "Homosexuality makes me uncomfortable. It is different from me. I don't understand it. It's bad."
For all of you who advocate tearing apart a loving couple based on your Gut Instinct, I'd like to speculate that if Jesus were here today, he'd be ashamed to even associate with you. You would be the money lenders in the temple. You'd be the fig tree that didn't get the bloody message even though God was standing RIGHT THERE. Love is not some code-word for "shun them until they do what I want." Love is not even code for "tough love".
I'm not going to say anything about the Mormons, because the above applies to them as well, except for a caution that they're probably going to reap what they sow on this one.
Good luck to Bess and George. Meeting you was truly eye-opening.

End of an Era

2008-10-31T11:52:00.001-07:00

I don't generally post personal things on here. Yesterday I got laid off as a part of a downsizing. I guess misery loves company (and also schadenfreude), so it's not as bad as if I'd gotten fired.
My heart goes out to those who lost their jobs who have more financial obligations than I do.

I was already actively looking for a new job, wanting to broaden my horizons as a coder.

To all of you with whom I worked,(except for a small few about whom I have less than polite feelings), I'll miss you and I hope we run into each other again.

So, farewell to The Sims, and on to bigger and better things.

Null Pointers and Large Spiders

2008-09-18T02:20:00.000-07:00

So, today, I borked the game temporarily by doing something stupid. I mentioned this to the guy sitting at the cube next to mine who is an animator and I was faced with the task of explaining to him exactly what a null pointer error was.
It was obvious from the blank look in his eyes that I was doing a bad job of this.
At least, I thought later, I could make my nonsensical explanation amusing.
(So I came up with this)
So, say you want to get a pet tarantula. You go to the pet store, and you can either get a cage and get the tarantula later -
Tarantula *beulah;
Or, you can get the cage and put a tarantula in it.
Tarantula *beulah = new Tarantula();
The cage is big enough for the tarantula to get really hideously big and wander around and stuff, when you decide to stick the tarantula in it. Note that you can't get a tarantula without a cage, because it would inevitably escape and you would have no bloody clue how to find it, and the idea of having a tarantula running around on the loose is against the general order of the universe.
Above musings on tarantulas aside, let's say you get a tarantula cage without the tarantula, and you take it home and set it up.
Then you try to hold the tarantula.
This is the point where you become totally batguano crazy, or if you are a computer, you crash.
You have a null pointer error....the the computer has given you a chunk of memory space for your tarantula, assuming that if there's a tarantula cage there's going to be a tarantula living there, but there is no actual tarantula at that memory address.
So hopefully I've confused you even more with this dumb analogy and given myself job security. It's all part of the plan.

Godwin Poll.

2008-09-06T01:26:00.000-07:00

Answer my poll, newbs. Then there will be a discussion about the answer.
And just so you know, I consider myself a moderate democrat who thinks that the sky would probably not fall if McCain got elected. Thus, there is no "Godwin" answer in the multiple choice selection. Because I'm too sleepy to figure out how to make the poll widget not place the title squarely on top of the options, I'm going to put it here.
Here's the question:
If the recession got worse and America's image got significantly worse with the world, and such a man happened to be running for President, would Americans vote a man just like Adolph Hitler into the presidency? (And No, I'm not talking about McCain or Obama)

Some Highlights from My Doll Collection.

2008-08-21T12:52:00.000-07:00

Those of you who know me know that I collect, and am constantly trolling the internet auctions for antique Japanese dolls. My budget is not the best, so I tend to end up with the "Fixer-Upper" type, along with the occasional pristine treasure. There's not a whole lot of literature in English about repairing and collecting Japanese Dolls. One great resource are Alan Scot Pate's books and website, though his pieces tend to be high-class museum pieces. Mine are more pedestrian. Judy Shoaf's pages are also good for the beginner, though most of the links are dead. Stella Rajendran's collection is online, and is much like mine in taste and quality.
I'm not sure what these ladies are. I don't have much to compare them with. They remind me of footmen from a Hina set, but I've never seen female footmen. When they came to me the insides of their heads had rotted away, leaving their heads like eggshells. I was able to fill their heads in with some wood powder from a Kimekomi kit and some elmer's glue. Now, they're pretty stable.
They have labels on the bottom which I'll someday research.
The doll in the foreground is my Maruhei doll. The one in the background is unlabeled, but has such a pretty face that I had to show her. I don't know much about her, but she's in near perfect condition.
Here are some nice hinas. These are probably two of the nicest sanin-kanjo (ladies in waiting) that I've ever seen, with embroidery all over their tops and collars. The girl in the green in front is a tiny sanin-kanjo or tableau doll that I found in a local store.This is a mitsuore, or triple jointed doll. They are supposed to be able to kneel and balance, though she needs to be propped up. Usually, these are kind of out of my league price-wise, but this one is missing her foot and has a small chip in her bottom lip. I had a co-worker model a new foot for her in a 3d imaging program, and "print" it out on a 3d printer. It's almost a perfect mirror of the original foot. I have yet to attach it. Maybe I can find a professional to do so.
This lady's face is not the most expressive, but her kimono is exquisite. I've never seen a doll of this age quite like it.
This lady, to my knowledge, probably dates from around the 1940s. The fabric on her outfit is faded and probably older than that. She's built around a solid base like a kimekomi doll, but the fabric is folded and sewn rather than tucked into grooves. I love the attention to detail on this doll, from the tsumami bauble in her hair made from paper, to her little obidome. Anyway, I'll probably post more at some point, but these are some of my favourites.

Ana Mummiya

2008-08-16T22:39:00.000-07:00

So, I was surfing around the internet and was somehow reminded , probably by this, of the amazing mummies of the Han Dynasty in Hunan Province, China. (This is appropriate for the olympics? Right? Right?), and I got to surfing around the internet, looking for these interesting time-capsules from the past, and what they teach us about what life and also technology was like thousands (or hundreds) of years ago.
This is Xi Zhui, Marquess of Dai. (Stole the picture from here. Check it out for an even more disturbing picture of her face.) She's about 2,000 years old--she lived during the Han Dynasty in modern Hunan province. She's an obese, middle aged matriarch who outlived both her husband and son, but her dotage was not at all healthy. She had a fused disc in her spine, a few intestinal parasites, a blockage in her gall bladder, and severely clogged arteries, which caused her death of a massive heart attack shortly after enjoying a meal. We know this because due to an apparent fluke of nature, Lady Dai has been almost perfectly preserved, enough so that after her discovery in 1971, doctors were able to perform an autopsy on her body. She had just eaten some bitter melon. (Click for an interesting discussion of what Han aristocrats ate, based around the meal provided in Lady Dai's tomb.)
It is not known exactly how lady Dai was preserved. Since her tomb was opened by construction workers in the process of digging an air raid shelter, initial reports on the condition inside are limited to hearsay. Some sources say she was immersed in an acidic substance, perhaps Mercury Sulfide. It is likely that as a complete fluke, (link is a debate on how she was preserved) her tomb was sealed airtight, preserving both Lady Dai and her funerary banquet. Evidence points to a fairly limited knowledge of mummification by the Han Chinese, who believed that encasing a body in Jade would preserve it.
Anyone who works in a lab knows how difficult it is to get a fully airtight seal, so it's an even more amazing coincidence that in 2002, another mummy was found in Hunan province. This lady was partially submerged in a yet unknown liquid. Her name was Huiping Lin.
It blows my mind, by the way, that we still don't know what these mystery chemicals are. I mean, it would take a few hours, maybe a day to do a mass spectrometer analysis on them. WTF?
Anyway, I couldn't find much information on Lin, and no one on flickr has any pictures of her although she's supposedly on display. If anyone sees anything, please post it!

Addendum: I just found this chronicle of Lin's Autopsy! Pretty cool stuff there!

Batman Blasphemy

2008-08-07T18:43:00.000-07:00

I went to see Dark Knight with O last night, and at risk of getting my Nerd card revoked for good, I did not think it was the movie equivalent of the Messiah. Don't get me wrong, it was good. It was well shot, well acted (except for Bale's unintentionally hammy bat-rasp), well cast, well plotted, and fairly well written. It just wasn't *fun*. It was gritty, dark, and disturbing, taking it squarely from the "Fun summer movie" bucket and sticking it in the "Movies that are painful to watch that everyone should see just once so they can talk about it over cocktails." Movies like "A Clockwork Orange", except that A Clockwork Orange was more whimsical, more meaningful, and actually had a little literary merit.
I came out of it thinking two things.
a) That movie could have been an hour shorter. Did we really need THREE long, drawn out prisoner dillemma scenes? Did we really need all the stuff in Hong Kong? Did the Joker really need to do the whole "I'm going to slice your mouth open" dialog TWICE?
b) Christopher Nolan must have been watching him some Takashi Miike movies. Or at least "Saw".
In comic books, at least the ones I've read, and that includes some of the more horrific ones, there's always an element of the fantastical, because no matter how gritty they are, no matter how psychologically deep, the characters are still stylized caricatures on a piece of paper. They are squarely in their own reality.
The two new Batman films try to challenge that, and in doing so, I think they loose their soul. Take away the costumes and makeup, and you can rename the Dark Knight as "Silence of the Lambs 4" or "Saw XVI: Jigsaw Does Chicago". The Tim Burton Batmans were fun: Nicholson's Joker, while horrific, was squarely in the realm of fantasy, and a lot of fun. He couldn't be a serial killer in the real world, and the viewer doesn't want him to be a real serial killer. He's a squarely fictional villain. I could watch that movie as a kid and be pleasantly spooked.
If I'd watched Dark Knight as a child, I'd still be in therapy. WTF kind of ratings board gives this movie a PG-13? It's like Japanese Rape Porn getting published solely on the grounds that it doesn't show penises. It's horrific, but there's no penis, therefore, it's not obscene! Dark knight doesn't show a lot of blood, but for Chrissakes, some clueless schizophrenic (because all insane people gravitate towards the homicidal clown.) gets a bomb surgically implanted in his stomach and collapses on the floor moaning before blowing up and setting a jailhouse on fire.
For those of you who think I don't like serious movies, that's not true. I like getting what I'm expecting. I was expecting a fun summer movie, and didn't get it. What I got was a dark, grim serial killer flick where the good guys have some hot technology. I should have known beforehand, but one's impressions of the genre doesn't really lead readily to the above.
I also like serious movies with insight. If a movie is going to make me watch a guy put a pencil through another guy's head, it had better be either hilarious, or be rolling out the epiphanies about the human nature (or b as an effect of a). Batman pretends to be deep but ends up uttering the same boring platitudes that hollywood gives us in every damn movie. Humans are evil but sometimes their inner goodness will surprise you. Yawn.
The psychological babble uttered by the characters makes no sense outside of the movies, and as much as ledger tries to give his Joker some depth, the character is as flat as a comic book page. What's his background? Uhhhh. None. What's his motivation? He's a psychopath! He likes chaos! Who is he? A psychopath that likes chaos! Does he have any emotions? Glee at chaos. Glee at murder. The movie gives up trying to understand the character, explaining any insight into his past or behaviour with "He wants to watch the world burn."
Anyways, I'm sorry Heath's dead. I remember the days when my sister had a crush on him.
But that's not going to keep me from taking a shovel to this golden poop that everyone around me seems to think came from the very bum of God.

I has Friends! (ZOMG DALEX!!!1)

2008-07-03T10:13:00.000-07:00

So the other day, my usual lunch companions and general cohorts in mischief decided to do Chipotle for lunch. After I had a basketfull of tacos in my hands, I realized that we were going somewhere else to eat. No one told ME about this! I got in the car with a bagfull of tacos in my hands and was a bit baffled when we pulled up to an apartment complex that one of my other friends lived at.
"Hey," V lives here. Do you live here, too, B?"
"No, but I want to"
Apparently, B was going to go get a brochure for the apartment. And apparently, we were going to take our tacos, too. Maybe we were having a picnic in a park near the apartment complex? I was starting to think something might be up. Definitely knew something was afoot when V came out and handed me a blindfold to put on.
I was lead into an apartment and finally told I could take my blindfold off....I was staring into the barrel of.....an eggbeater and a plunger?
EXTERMINATE!!!!1
The following is a record of the creation of the surprise birthday party which ensued! Thanks guys! There are no better friends than the ones who will make cupcakes that look like Daleks for a friend's birthday!
(and if you want a dalek cupcake, too, I'm sure they'd be happy to share their secrets!)

BAMMM! My sinuses!

2008-06-11T23:17:00.000-07:00

I feel like an automaton with a virus. The bugs (of the software variety, and not of the type that are currently pwning my immune system) just do not. stop. coming. That's what comes from working on a game with a hojillion expansion packs. You know that thing from the third expansion pack? Well it breaks your feature. You know that menu you added in the fourth expansion pack? Well, if you run your feature with that special option from expansion pack five, that menu doesn't show up. Gaaahhhh! It's like I fix twelve and get thirteen more! I'm bailing this canoe as fast as I can, eleven to twelve hours a day (and have been for at least two weeks now), and I can't WAIT until we get this thing out of the door and hopefully out of my hair.
To top it off, I now have the plague. Can't take the day off, because the bugs would pile up too high.
So here I am, snotty and irate.
On a happier topic, here's my list of most epic awesome songs EVAR.
(This has been at least two years in the making. Most of these songs just hit the event horizon of stupid and slingshot off into the dimension of WIN)
-My Console - Eiffel 65
A song about how much this guy likes to play video games. In all seriousness. "We're going to play the game! The playstation! All DAY!" Vid brought to you by some kids who need more homework.
-Future Fail - Frontline Assembly
Now here's a song for pwning newbs. Probably the pinnacle of Bill Leeb's career. Close second: Columbian Necktie by Frontline Assembly. Sadly I couldn't find a vid of this one. There's a short clip of it while some guy is playing WoW. This song was MADE for WoW.
-Birthday Cake - Cibo Matto
About a crazy Japanese mother making a birthday cake for her son and his wife.
-Gheib Anni Gheib - Nawal El Zoghby
Disco hits Lebanon. The album cover has the usual sultry looking middle eastern woman wearing clothing that would be haram in the street, but Nawal's wearing a COWBOY HAT, too. The video is for a different song by her.
- Cream and Bastards Rise - Harvey Danger
I used to think this was a song about my job. Apparently I was wrong. Or maybe I've just become a bastard.
-Tragedy for You - Front 242
A sweet love song from half the genius that brought you "Future Fail."
- Existence - Project Pitchfork.
Ah. One of my favourite purveyors of disgruntlement. Listen to the lyrics. This song is extremely touching and poignant, or at least it would be if the vocal processing didn't make the singer sound like a bulimic vulture. Also check out Renascence, my favourite soundtrack to being pissed off.
-Stick it Out - Frank Zappa
Best song ever about having sex with a robot. The source of every bit of German that I know....that is, the bits that didn't come from Rammstein.
- Doctorin' the Tardis - Timelords/KLF
Nope. Haven't decided whether this song embarrasses the hell out of me or is just guilty fun. Rides the same short-bus as "My Console", but sits closer to the front so the driver can keep an eye on it. Actually was the subject of a book by the authors on how you can make a #1 hit with no talent.

Secret Passages

2008-05-15T23:54:00.000-07:00

I've always loved mystery stories involving secret passages. My favourite Nancy Drew was #2: the Hidden Staircase, about an old lady who lives in a house that's riddled with passages behind the walls, and staircases everywhere. Another one of my favourite stories was something that landed in my lap after the elementary school library decomissioned it. It was called The Hidden Cat, by Brent Locke, about three little girls who discover a hidden treasure trove in the passage ridden walls of their friends' Victorian house. The story came complete with the girls having to solve a puzzle to gain access to the final room. (Says something in a fake old-person voice about not having video games and having to read when I was a youth!) The Hidden cat is long out of print, and even that sage of human knowledge, the Internets, doesn't seem to know all that much about it except that Brent Locke was a woman and that the book is rare, and holy crap! The only copy on Ebay is $80!
The internets doesn't seem to know much about secret passages in general. To be honest, I was not looking for real, purposeful secret passages, such as the ones on the underground railway used to hide runaway slaves, or the ones used to hide Jews during WWII.
I was looking for secret passages built by eccentric lunatics with way too much money. Secret passages like the ones in H.P. Lovecraft, used to hide nefarious doings, or maybe a dark secret, at the very least a hiding place for someone's stash! Hell, I would have settled with a nook providing habitation for the occasional hobo.
When I was a kid, I used to want to be Nancy Drew. I went around tapping on the walls of our old house, convinced that the area between my room and the adjacent room contained a secret room. In reality, it was probably a chimney. But that did nothing to hinder my dream that someday, I'd find a secret passage in our house.
Typically, of the internet, most of the hits I found when I was looking up secret passages were pages for companies that will install one for you. Subtly. Behind a bookcase. THAT's never been done before. I think the whole concept of panic rooms is self-indulgent...what makes you so special that a gang of weapon-bearing criminals would invade your house? But I suppose that we can add panic rooms to the list of things that the idle wealthy use to massage their own egos.
So, any prospective constructors of secret rooms, here's my two cents. You're lame. Unless you're going to hide a treasure in there, or puzzles, or a dark secret worthy of a secret room, you're just a posseur. Really, what are you going to put back there? An office with a computer? Where you can do your "secret 9:00 am phone-in meetings?"
The idle rich have been installing secret doors in their mansions for hundreds of years now, for the sake of paranoia, midnight trysts, or keeping the filthy prole servants out of sight.
I'll depart with telling you of the only secret room I've ever managed to find. In Machado House, at Brown University, there's a foyer that the resident programme club never uses. It has an old piano, and a marble fireplace with the most expressive head of Medusa carved into it.
To the left and right of the fireplace were mirrored panels. Behind the one on the left, there was nothing...but a little tug on the mirrored panel to the right of the fireplace revealed a hidden door. There was a small passage to the dining room behind it, with shelves set into the walls. This was one of the "keep the dirty servants out of sight" passages....but it was still pretty damn cool. I felt like I'd finally lived out my childhood fantasies of being Nancy Drew.

On History, Science, and the Prevention of Hackery

2008-03-27T11:46:00.000-07:00

Recently, I made a board post on Egyptian Dreams which was pretty much universally refuted. I gently suggested that a certain well-known scholar of Egyptology was a "hack", and gave several mild-mannered reasons why. ;) My accusations pretty much boiled down to: 1)Dr. Brier allows emotional manipulation and storytelling to stand in for actual evidence in his book The Murder of Tutankhamun. 2) Dr. Brier omits any scholarship that doesn't support his theory that Tutankhamun was murdered. He is also guilty of making unsupported statements in documentaries, and one of the readers on the msg. board rightly pointed out that this is more the fault of Discovery Channel/History Channel 's editing than Mr. Brier's. However, he doesn't do much to dispel this image in his own writings.
I was also accused of being a cynic and not giving Brier his dues for his role as an enthusiastic ambassador to the layperson. This is what I'm going to discuss here, along with some of my thoughts on the study of history in general.

I have a bachelor's degree in computer science and in biology. As a layperson, I'm very interested in the study of history but find the tendency towards the portrayal of opinion as fact, and the seeming acceptance of this within the field is disturbing.

In a biological paper, evidence is king. You do not make an assertion unless you have hard data to back it up, and you accept that your peers are going to shred you if that evidence is flawed. I would like to see this same principle applied in historical works, but I find that even in papers not aimed at laypeople, seemingly farfetched and currently unprovable hypotheses are thrown out with minimal and circumstantial evidence to back them up. A good example of this aimed at the layperson is Joan Fletcher's "discovery" of Nefertiti's mummy. Her evidence to back this discovery was a)a fragment of hair nearby looked like it might have been styled in the style of a wig popular in the general time period of the queen. b) the mummy was damaged and in a royal tomb, and even though it had been cached there, she seemed to take this as evidence that the mummy was royalty and that it was damaged as an act of spite (appropriate to one involved in heresy, ie. Nefertiti.) and c) an arm found near the mummy was bent in the style often used with mummies of queens, (and also other royals and nobles, depending on the time period.

A paper on this would have been torn up nine-ways from Sunday, but this woman was given a TV special and allowed to present this theory to the general public...who can't be expected to know any better.

Some would say that the enthusiasm exhibited by Fletcher is a credit to Egyptology. I think she's doing more of a disservice to the field by spreading bad information. Anyone who truly becomes interested in Egyptology based on her TV special probably would have become interested by a TV special that was more substantiated. There are plenty of interesting things to say about Nefertiti without venturing into the realm of utter bullshit.

The problem with history is twofold. We can't write a history paper like a biological paper because history is determined by human emotions. To understand history, you must try to understand why people behave the way they do and the mechanisms within society that allow for it. The trouble is this: a person can never truly know how another person feels. A person explains the emotions of others by projecting their own emotions onto others, which may or may not correspond with how others actually feel. We can make educated guesses on why people act in certain ways based on textual evidence and archaeological evidence from the times in which they lived. Sadly, the further back in time we go from the present, the fewer keys we have to deducing why people did what they did, and we are left with guesswork. When you blindly guess at the emotions of others, and therefore the reasons why certain figures in power acted a certain way, you are at best telling why YOU would do something, and at worst, you're telling a fairytale. Even worse is trying to piece together the actions of ancient people based on how you think they must have felt.

Case in Point: Dr. Brier's Murder of Tutankhamun. Dr. Brier deduces that King Tut was murdered based on a fracture in the skull of his mummy, which has been thoroughly manhandled at least twice since its discovery and once during mummification. King tut was obviously smacked upside the head with a blunt object. Who did it? Brier thinks it was Ay, pretty much because he thinks Ay had something to gain from it. (Ay was an old man who was king for a very short time before he died.). Brier writes a whole book about how Tutankhamun was murdered with no actual hard evidence aside from a fracture in the boy-king's skull which could be a pre-mortem injury....and the emotions which Brier projects onto the people around Tut at the time of his death.

I feel that this trap is a lot easier to fall into in history than in the hard sciences. We're emotionally invested in these historical figures. A little bit of storytelling can make these figures more relevant and more real to modern scholars. Sometimes, it seems like scholars, especially when talking to the layperson, confuse storytelling for factual evidence, and this is very troublesome.

In conclusion, if it were up to me, I'd like to read works on history where no conclusions are made without pretty solid epigraphical or archaeological evidence to back them up. Don't know why Tut died? Then just accept the fact you don't know and keep looking for clues. Make a hypothesis and test it by finding evidence that backs it up and evidence that doesnt and fairly weighing both.

I know that this is not "neat" and not "tidy", and sometimes not as interesting, but that's why God invented historical fiction. :)

Hina Ningyo Monogatari, Continued

2008-03-25T22:24:00.000-07:00

I recently bought a book called "Japanese Dolls: the Fascinating World of Ningyo" by Alan Scott Pate (http://www.antiquejapanesedolls.com/). Mr. Pate's other book, Ningyo: The Art of the Japanese Doll is mainly on the styles of dolls that you seen in museums and the kind that aren't allowed to leave Japan. The kind that live in temperature controlled rooms carefully monitored by their obsessive-compulsive rich owners.
Fascinating World of Ningyo is more about collecting Japanese Dolls, and features more like the very upper end of what you might find on Ebay on a really good week. This book is invaluable for any non-japanophone who is looking to collect Japanese Dolls....
Forget I said that. Buy the shiny ones! Yeah! The ones with the finely rendered faces and hands that aren't made of plastic? Those are not the dolls you are looking for.
What? My Jedi Mind Tricks do not work on you? Fine. But if you ever outbid me on anything, I'll send you a bloody virus!
While looking through this book, I found a doll label that looked oddly familiar. Remember when I was trying to decide if my little "bijin" (beautiful woman) doll was a Maruhei doll? I mean, the label was similar, but some parts just didn't match up?
With the help of Kimiko, I'd decided that the doll was made by a company called the Ooki doll company. The label in the book was captioned "Ookiheizo(Maruhei) in Kyoto, Ca. 1900."
If you'll remember from the previous article, Ookiheizo (or, to us yanks, Heizo Ooki) was the name that the master dollmaker and store-owner and his successors took.

So, this Ooki Doll Company was, after all, Maruhei.
The label stamped on the bottom of my doll reads: (Thanks to Kimiko for the translation!)
TOP ROW: (Item in circle is the store logo), From right to left around it, it says "KYOTO"
LEFTMOST COLUMN : Phone number
SECOND FROM LEFT COLUMN: Ooki company, or Ookiheizo
MIDDLE COLUMN: Hina Ningyo
RIGHT COLUMN: Northeast Corner, Sakai St. Sijyo.

To top it all off, I found a website about Maruhei dolls. Not sure it's the official store site, but it provides a list of labels since the mid 1800's. (Maruhei still makes dolls)
My label is the stamped one about halfway down. Babelfish says it's from the late Meiji Period to the Early Showa period, so I was about right in my dating.

This is how you please a time-lord.

2008-03-11T01:29:00.000-07:00

Well, PBS is fundraising again. They have been for the last three weeks. I'm wondering how many crappy talks this corporate motivational speaker has given in his life and whether we're getting to the end of them....or if there are any crappy 1950's top forty bands with names like "The <verb>-ers" or "<proper-noun> and the <adjective><plural animal name>s" that they have left to do biopics on. There's got to be a finite supply.
Anyways, I've found something better: Old Doctor Who episodes on Veoh.
I had a crush on the 4th Doctor as a child, or maybe more like hero worship. I dressed up as him for Halloween when I was like 7, complete with one of my dad's dress jackets and a "wooly muffler" my mom had borrowed from someone. No one knew who I was. Newbs.
I was a bit nervous about watching it now...was it going to be one of those things that I loved as a child that still holds its charm like The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth? Or would the shlock be overwhelming and a little embarrassing like, for example, the movie Willow, which was awesome when I was a kid, but was badly written and unbelievably crappy as an adult?
Little bit of both, actually. The old Dr. Whos are cleverly written, at least the ones I watched. I mean, there were (and are in the new series) plot holes you could drive a Crown Victoria through, and part of the fun is trying to make up events that could have happened to fill these gaps, but the dialog is a lot of fun.
I found that the acting and the dialog owned the really bad special effects (even by the low, low standards of '70s TV) and made them kind of charming. My god, that guy is getting bit (mauled) on the face by a molecule-rearranging cyber-leech that looks like a piece of tinfoil on a string. I knew the FX were bad when I was a kid. The sound effects are even more awesome. Anything electronic beeps, and rayguns and teleporters make their signature pewpewpew and weeoohweeooh sounds. A lot of other things go "pewpewpew", too. Thank you, Dr. Who for showing me once again that scientific progress does, in fact, go "Boink."The doctor is constantly alternating between strokes of genius and bumbling eccentricity, with the genius eventually winning out.
And the fourth doctor, with his wooly muffler and his ability to taunt the aliens at exactly the wrong moments still kicks a crazy amount of ass--in a quirky, clever, non-violent sort of way.
Which makes it really sad when he dies off and gets regenerated into the fifth doctor, the doctor of the eighties, who is a total square. (Thought so when I was 7, too.)
Although, watching one of his female companions explain the value of recursion to the other in a "brought to you by the number 3 and the letter R" moment completely rawked my world.
And btw: that picture is of a tinfoil leech. Apparently they're really called "Cybermats".Yeah. It's up to something naaasty. It's going to go suck some face.

Our Bastards & Their Bastards

2008-02-01T01:24:00.000-08:00

The recent idiocy about whether waterboarding is really torture, whether it's ok to torture in certain circumstances, and whether we should export torture when it gets too politically inconvenient to do it here has gotten me to feeling like the supposed lack of barbarism in modern society is a sham.
Any tool who likes to view the world in terms of black and white, good and evil, and who likes to kid themselves about America's Christian values would do good to look up Unit 731 on Wikipedia. Not for the weak of stomach, it discusses the human experiments that the Japanese Army performed on Chinese civilians, Mongols, Koreans, and POWs. Think of the most horrible, barbaric tortures you can think of and square it. This was the holocaust we never hear about.
But wait a minute. Macarthur and the other Japanese Occupiers *knew* about Japan's experiments in brutal detail when they were dealing out the war-crimes punishments.
So, the shining leaders of the greatest generation incarcerated these bastards and threw away the key!
NO.
Yeah. You see, actually, we granted the Japanese scientists blanket amnesty on the condition that they'd share the results of their torture experiments. Because, you know, it would sure be unAmerican to hang someone upside down until they suffocate...but it would sure be useful to know how long it took! The excuse for this of course, was that we were maybe saving american lives by getting tips how to build the most effective bubonic-plague bombs before the dirty commies did.
Except there were a million other less evil ways to get this information (how about infecting mice?), and to even prevent the Soviets from ever using it should they have gotten to it first. I should think that the Soviets would be smart enough to realize that the incubation period for Plague gives you plenty of time to push the big red button and blast the Kremlin towards Mars.
And as a result, Japan's bastards went on to be leaders in the Japanese pharmaceutical industry, and even the president of the Japanese green cross, and we name highways after our bastards!
And the Chinese, Mongols, and Koreans who died in agony in the name of a pointless statistic rest in obscurity outside of the bounds of their own countries.

In the end, a few of the Japanese scientists got rounded up and tried for warcrimes, but not by us. The *Soviets* rounded some of them up, tried them, and shipped them off to work camps in Siberia where they could do experiments on their OWN frostbitten extremities.

One good thing to come out of the clusterf#k that is the GW Bush Middle east is that we won't be viewing the last eight years through the rose coloured goggles of victory. Here's hoping that we can have the humility to admit the wrong of what we have done and make sure that it does not happen again.

Oh yeah. And if you were thinking that the whole "let's charge into Iraq with absolutely no idea of what we're going to do once we get there or who we are even fighting" thing was an anomaly, it looks like we're just now finding out that, Wow! We did that in Afghanistan, too. Can America have possibly screwed the pooch even more?

Kimekomi Lessons

2008-01-29T00:06:00.001-08:00

I've decided to do some Kimekomi lessons on youtube for people who want to learn but don't have access to 1:1 lessons! At least I hope certain people will understand it that way...
I've uploaded the first three, in case you want to know.
Video 1 --What is Kimekomi

Video 2 --Neat fabric

Video 3: Tools

Finally, here are some links to sites where you can get kits and supplies.
Mataro Dolls...doesn't offer much in english, but does offer the basic tutorial dolls. The doll from tutorial one, Hikaru Genji is here. They also have some lovely dolls that you can buy already made, but Mataro tends to be pretty pricey.

If you're looking for cheaper dolls without the certification course, you should look at Juho-Tougei. The webmaster on this site is really nice and their customer service is great. Their dolls are a lot less expensive than Mataro, and the fabric tends to be a lot more modern in pattern. (You'll see the irridescent fabrics here)

Finally, the dolls at Absolute Japan range in price and quality...they're from all sorts of different companies, but I find the webmistress to be pretty nice. I was pleasantly surprised by the high quality of the fabric on the doll I bought here. She also offers dolls from the Kyugetsu certification course, and teaches lessons on them, though I have not taken lessons from her.

Culture of Fear

2008-01-08T22:46:00.001-08:00

I was going to write an enlightening article about Richard Dadd, my favourite batshit crazy Victorian artist and painter of Fairy Feller's Master Stroke, but certain events have persuaded me that I need to share the exciting story of my evening instead. (And why I'm currently not staying at my home.)
So, this morning, as I was putting on my shoes, I happened to brush up against the burglar alarm just inside the door of my small apartment. I heard its sinister beep, and thought "Gee, I hope I didn't just activate that." I quickly hit the "reset" key and a few other keys for good measure. They made deceptively reassuring beeping sounds.
I've mainly ignored the thing since I moved in. The burglar alarm was one of those features that the corporate receptionist liked to point out when she was giving tours of the apartment. Along with the garbage disposal and the gym. When I moved in, I got a manual, which I stuck somewhere. I mean, seriously, my apartment's tiny. If it did get broken into, I'd probably run into the burglar en-route to use the burglar alarm to call the cops. "Oh, gee, mister. Just let me hit F5, F8, my secret code, and the "." key. What? No, you can't have my jewelry box!"
A bucket of ice water balanced over the door would be a more effective burglar deterrent, especially given the outpouring of caring I got from the neighbours when I trudged down the hall to my apartment, weary from another day of dragging the block up the pyramid called "The Sims 2 Expansion Packs", and opened the door to my apartment, setting off the burglar alarm. Beeeeeeeeeeeeep......Weeooohweeooohweeeohhh (for about ten minutes at a few billion decibels). God, I hope it's not calling the cops, I thought. Turns out you need to punch in a keycode and a special "dial the cops" sequence for that, as noted above. For the most part, loud as it was, the neighbours ignored it. A young couple walked by en route to their apartment. "I accidentally set off my own burglar alarm," I said. "Do you know the default keycode?" They were really friendly. Showed me how to unplug it and gave me what they guessed was the default code.
I went back and set off the alarm again. Because apparently the default codes vary between apartments. Also, the little bastard has battery power so it can give you a false sense of security even when the power is off.
You need the keycode to shut it off. Unfortunately, I don't know the keycode since I never set one.
I thought, "well, maybe the keycode is in my lease agreement," but I'm not quite sure where I put that, and was also afraid that the neighbours might start to pay attention (and not in a good way) if I set off the alarm yet again.
So I called a cab so I could go crash at my boyfriend's place.
It struck me, reading the alarm manual, how totally superfluous they are. There was an instruction page on what special sequence of keys to press if the intruder forces you to disable the alarm. Well, the damn thing doesn't even call the police, and the neighbours don't give a crap, so why would the intruder even care? And how many people have ever been in that situation, anyway? How many actual burglaries are prevented or deterred by these things? Also, the things involve setting a keycode for motion sensors over every door and window. I imagine you can keep the same one....but with every keycode you set, the risk of you accidentally triggering the alarm and forgetting the code increases. It's like having a really loud BIOS password to your own apartment.
I think if burglar alarms do serve a function, it's to give people peace of mind more than it is to actually prevent and deter burglaries. I'd recommend sleeping with a baseball bat under your bed as a cheap and safe alternate.

Hina Ningyo Monogatari

2008-01-05T21:09:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has been to my house has seen my growing doll collection. It all started when I went into a store called Mignonette in Providence and saw some Japanese Girls' Day Festival dolls priced for $90 apiece, which was way more than I could afford on the $250 a month salary that I got in college. The lady who owns this store is a flaming bitch who made a point of obviously following me around the store and yelling at me for touching the merchandise. Don't ever shop there.
Despite or maybe because of the efforts of the odious shopkeeper, I was enchanted by the miniature white-faced dolls with their black teeth and their long black hair, and their multi-layered court robes, and resolved to find myself one on that yardsale of the internet, Ebay.
My collection has grown into a small army of geishas, musicians, court ladies, and princes since then. I like to joke that I'm going to lead my army of creepy dolls to take over Gotham City a la The Penguin.
You can find a lot of basic facts on Ningyo (Japanese Dolls) on the internet, but not many specifics. There's not a lot of literature in english on the subject. Ningyo are more along the lines of sculptures and other works of art than playthings, but they are very rarely signed, and often the head and hands will be made by one person while another will make the body and dress the doll. For some basic stuff on Ningyo and their types, you should look here.
For pictures of some museum quality Ningyo that I couldn't afford in my wildest dreams (if you have to ask how much it costs, you don't want to know....), you should look here.
I bought a doll a few weeks ago on Ebay, which had a stamp on the bottom. I didn't think much about it at the time, but made a note to myself to ask Kimiko, from whom I take doll-making lessons, to translate it for me sometime.
Two days ago, I was surfing on Akanezumiya, and found a very similar label on one of their museum piece dolls. (Click on the one in the upper right-hand corner). The doll on Akanezumiya is a Maruhei doll. Maruhei is a very famous Kyoto doll shop which was founded roughly around the same time as the French Revolution. Maruhei has been run by generations of master dollmakers, taking the name of Heizo Oki, and has created dolls for the Japanese elite and also the royal family since its founding.
Here is a set of Maruhei hina dolls in a similar style to my hina doll.
The green-pantsed boy above is a musician from a Maruhei hina set. This set used to live in the Narumi doll store in San Francisco, whose proprietor is not a jerk. I had to look on the wayback machine to get the picture though, so maybe he sold them.
My doll definitely has one of the finest faces I've seen on a doll, so maybe she is a Maruhei doll, I thought. It would be cool to have gotten something really valuable off of Ebay. I decided to take the doll to Kimiko to have her translate the label.
The characters on the top row translate to "Kyo-to", with a company logo between the Kyo and the To. This company logo is similar to, but not the same as the Maruhei logo. Looks like my doll was made in Kyoto, though. Kimiko says that the characters for Kyoto read from right to left, and since WWII, the Japanese don't write like that anymore. It seems like my doll probably predates WWII. If she came back with a GI (I bought her from an American), he probably found her in an antique store.

According to Kimiko, the rightmost column reads: Shijyo St. Sakai, Northeast corner. An address of the doll company (I love the lack of numbers in the address...I wonder if it's still there in the NE corner?).
The next column reads "Hina Ningyo, Ooki Doll Company", and the last column is the phone number of the Ooki doll company. This doll must have been made after telephones became commonplace. I'm going to date this doll, based on the style of her face and the above information, to around 1920-1930, and I'm leaning more towards the earlier part of the decade. This would make her a late Taisho or early Showa period doll.
Kimiko also says she's a geisha, because normal people do not tie their obis in a sideways bow like this doll has.
While it's too bad she's not a Maruhei doll, it was really neat to be able to find out something about one of the members of my collection...So few of them are labeled at all. If anyone has heard of or has any more information on the Ooki doll company and what kind of dolls they made, please let me know.

Die! Die, Rebel! Die!

2007-12-06T11:00:00.000-08:00

Today, while my game is compiling, I am going to discuss crime and punishment in Ancient Egypt as illustrated in the paper Harco, Willems."Crime, Cult and Capital Punishment (Mo'Alla Inscription 8)". Journal of Egyptian Archeology. EES. London. Volume 76. 1990. Willems discusses an inscription in the famous Mo'Alla tomb of Ankhtify (First Intermediate Period) whereby any violator of the tomb is threatened. Whether the vandal is threatened with ritual dismemberment or with a scapegoat-like sacrifice is the subject of the paper. Willems argues for human sacrifice. I don't really care about Ankhtify, so I'm going to cover the parts where it illustrates how you can get the hard spanking of the law.
The "natural order" of things was very important to the Ancient Egyptians. They were a very conservative people. To commit a crime such as, say, vandalism of a tomb, was a digression against this natural order from both a societal point of view and a religious one. A vandal would be labeled not only "criminal", but "rebel". (Sbi) You have to remember that there was no real difference between government and religion in Ancient Egypt (or most ancient societies). Religious mores were an integral part of Egyptian Society. So if you go and rob someone's tomb, or deface their inscriptions, you're committing a crime worthy of punishment and an offense against whichever local god currently has a powerful cult.
The problem with pointing to a particular punishment for vandalism is that the Egyptians didn't like to speak of horrible punishments, or non-military violence, or sex in polite company. Since most inscriptions are religious or in tombs, what we get are a lot of euphemisms along the lines of the phrase "skhi hpsh-f" "sever his foreleg" (foreleg clearly implies the leg of an ox via the determinative). (Willems, 29) The question is whether this means that the offender had a limb severed or had an ox's limb severed on their behalf. One could also argue that these threats are more along the lines of wishful thinking from the tomb owner and not the actual law. We know in the new kingdom the punishment was clearly mutilation, though whether it was always enforced is questionable.
A vandal would presumably have a limb cut off, have their head cut off, and be burnt, the ashes scattered. This is BAD in a society that believes that the spirit has to recognize the body in order for a person to have an afterlife. If you vandalize stuff, or rob tombs, you get no afterlife, and you get killed rather nastily in this one. This would probably take place in a temple. Willems likes to liken this to human sacrifice, but if you look at it in the context of religion = government, it is really more of an execution with a ritual component. The robber's family would be stripped of status and there would be implications for the culprit's children, too (execution or just loss of status?). The wife isn't really mentioned in the punishment lists.
But what was that ritual component, and more importantly, How can I curse people who have offended against my personal natural order?
How To Curse Your Enemies
The Egyptians were big on consigning peoples' memories to oblivion. If no one remembers you, there can be no afterlife. A sentence for a severe crime would be to change a person's name such that it was a "bad" version of the name. For example, if a person's name meant "Amun Protects Him," his name might be changed to "Amun Abhors Him", and he would be referred to as such in record. We don't know the names of many of the conspirators in the Harem conspiracy that probably resulted in the death of Rameses III. They're all referred to in the trial documents by their "evil" names.
A person's name could also be simply removed from any inscriptions in which a person was mentioned. Tombs III, and IV in Asyut also say that "his remembrance will not be with the living and that his name will not be with his children" (Willhems, 37). I don't really know how anyone could have enforced this...it strikes me more as wishful thinking on the part of the tomb owner.
If you wanted to curse someone by voodoo, you could do that, too. A part of the execution for tomb vandals described by Wilhems was that the condemned's name be written on wax figurines, which were then burnt, or on clay pots which were smashed.
As far as proclaimed curses go, wishing that a person was bitten by snakes and eaten by crocodiles was a perennial favourite in the Old Kingdom. When I was on a dig at the Abu Bakr Cemetery in Giza in 2005, we uncovered a false-door stela (previously found by Abu Bakr) where such a curse was proclaimed on one of the sideposts. The poor determinative at the end had multiple snakes hanging off of his limbs, and a few crocodiles chowing down on his legs, In case you didn't get the threat outlined above and needed a visual. Wishing your enemy's wife and children to be raped by a donkey was a fairly common curse as well, though fairly unrealistic. I don't consider donkeys among the group of animals that go around rampantly raping people but maybe they were different back then.

A Sad Story

2007-11-27T00:28:00.001-08:00

-I have a cold. I feel like crap on a crap cracker, and I am going to go to bed soon.
-PBS is again fundraising. It was a Andrea Boccelli marathon tonight. I called in and donated $60 bucks, and when the guy asked me if I wanted the Andrea Boccelli free gift, I was like, "Nope, sorry. I'm actually just donating because I want you guys to go back to your normal programming."
-PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF BABY JESUS, STOP THE OLD AFFLUENT WHITE GUY PROGRAMMING!
-A Sad Story I remember how evil teenage girls can be to each other. That a grown woman played a catty, cruel childish game that drove a mentally ill young girl to suicide is a more close to home example of pure evil than any tale of foreign genocide.
The Aztecs could not have thought up a Hell vile enough for these people. (Of all the people who have inhabited this earth, I think they were probably the best at coming up with horrific nastiness.)
Reading this article, I thought "I hope these people rot in Hell". I wished that there were for certain a God so he'd rain down wrath on these people. I think that's the lure of religion for a lot of people. I think that people have a hard time coping with the fact that there may be no tangible punishment for those who cause them pain. I think some people restrain themselves from revenge on the basis that spankings will issue forth from daddy in the sky. Why would you hold back if there wasn't? Knowing that there is no divine retribution for evil and still being able to turn the other cheek is one of the most pure and selfless acts that there is. When you've reached the point when you are able to do this, you are being moral for the sake of morality and not out of any sense of ultimate benefit for yourself.
If there is no God, and no physical Hell, could it be that "Hell" will describe the "life" of the memories of those such as Lori Drew? That this woman will forever be remembered as a wretched bitch whose own petty cruelty drove a little girl to kill herself? That every time anyone ever thinks her name, it will be inextricably coupled with the words "petty" and "cowardly?"
-This was a pretty heavy post. I'll post on something fun and frivolous next time.

Egyptology on the Cheap, Part I

2007-11-05T23:41:00.000-08:00

I've been too po' and too lazy to get a membership to the Stanford library so that I can look at their new Egyptology books. and so I've been trolling ebay for old Egyptology books and periodicals. I've met with some success, though I've had to dig through piles of occult books, biblical "history" books, etc. I've found a few gems which I'm going to summarize here occasionally. I find it really hard to find any sort of interesting Egyptology content with sufficient depth on the internet (aside from the Egyptology blog to which I link on the left.), and my intent is to perhaps enhance the little that is available without too much of my own unprofessional opining.
Recently, an ebay member listed a bunch of back issues of The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. These are really a treasure trove of information...and they're fun to read in the bathtub. The below is a summary of some of the more interesting articles.
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology Volume 74 (1988)
I like to start with the briefs in the back because those are short enough for me to read in the bathtub. There were a lot of "first publishings" of collected Ushabtis by their private collectors here, and one guy speculating on the origin of a statue that looked like the crap that gets listed under "antiquities" on ebay. (Ok. End snarky opinions here!) John H. Taylor discusses coffin fragment depicting part of the name of a formerly unknown daughter of the 22nd dynasty high priest of Amun and self-styled "king" Hariese, whose name can be theoretically reconstructed as Taditanebethen. This is a pretty odd name and isn't attested outside the 3rd intermediate period. The name probably means "The one whom the Lady of the Chest/Box has Given". The lady of the Chest/Box is the goddess Nut who gives birth to the sun every morning and is therefore similar to a coffin which gives birth to the resurrected occupant. This strikes me as a bit of a macabre thing to name your daughter, but ok.
Also, in the 3rd intermediate period, Andrzej Niwinski discusses the wives of Pinudjem II, another high priest of Amun in Thebes. Niwinski equates this position of priest/city-state-king with the Pope, which I think is pretty accurate. It's traditionally believed that Pinudjem was initially married to a lady named Nesikhons, who was his niece, and after her death was remarried to a woman named Isetemkheb. However, the mummy of Nesikhons, found in the cache at Deir El Bahri (DB320), was buried in a coffin inscribed for Isetemkheb, listing the same titles as the coffin in which Isetemkheb was found which was also inscribed for this lady but made 20 years later. Niwinski speculates that Pinudjem was initially married to Isetemkheb, fathered four children by her, and then either put her aside for the newer younger model, Nesikhons or divorced her. Nesikhons was only married to Pinudjem for four years during which she bore him 4 children, among whom is the famous Nesitanebetishru. After the death of Nesikhons, Isetemkheb again rises in status and commissions a new coffin for herself. Niwinski mentions that he thinks Nesikhons' death to be "suspicious" but doesn't list any reasons for this other than she was a good looking young woman at the time of her death, and a curious decree of the Oracle of Amun published by Maspero that seems aimed towards protecting Nesikhons and her children from harm (Niwinski's implication is that that harm comes from a jealous first wife). On these lines of high speculation, it seems equally reasonable to say that since Nesitanebetishru was buried in linens woven by Isetemkheb or in her household that there was little animosity between the offspring of wife number two and Isetemkheb. Pinudjem's successors as High Priest, Djedkhonsuefankh and Psusennes II skip their father and list their grandfather as their most direct ancestor in their own geneologies. If my father was perving on my cousin I'd skip the old lecher in my family history, too!
Speaking of shameful family histories, perhaps no one in Ancient Egypt had one quite as tarnishing as Tutankhamun. The woman whom many now believe to be his mother if one is to accept that his father was Akhenaten (which is likely) is the "Great Favourite Kiya". Kiya was a minor wife of Akhenaten around whom there are a lot of conflicting theories based on circumstantial evidence. C. Nicholas Reeves, in the paper New Light on Kiya From Texts in the British Museum makes it abundantly clear that Kiya was a person of extreme importance. (Whether she was important because she gave Akhenaten an heir is anyone's guess). One of the few things we know for sure about Kiya is that most of her monuments were appropriated by Akhenaten's first daughter, Merytaten, who rose in prominence later in his reign. <> Reeves lists fragments from various important sites around Amarna, which careful epigraphy has revealed to have been altered to the name Merytaten. Barely discernable remains of the original inscriptions leave no doubt as to the identity of their original owner. Among the more interesting items is a fragment of what appears to be an offering tablet held by a long vanished statue--presumably of Kiya. Many of the fragments come from colums at the northern palace at Amarna, and even more are from the large garden-temple called the Maru Aten. There seems to be a shift recently towards again discounting the role played by Lady Kiya in the Amarna episode, and I would highly recommend this paper as essential to any discussion of Kiya's role. I'm sure I'll post more on Kiya at a later date as I find her very interesting!
Note on pictures: The top one is Isetemkheb's coffin in which her mummy was found in DB320.
The bottom one is Isetemkheb's coffin in which Nesikhons was buried in the same tomb.
The pictures come from here.
This guy has some cool if photoshopped pictures of Isetemkheb's coffin.

Dancing on the Walls

2007-11-05T01:01:00.000-08:00

I finished a really great weekend of camping in the redwood forests by going to an interpretive dance show up in the city. We went to see Owen's friend Susan Voyticky, who is a fantastically athletic aerial dancer and circus performer, perform in "Sky Dancers": an aerial dance presentation at Dance Mission in the Mission district. She did a really heartwrenching dance to Bjork's "Broken". Her costume was half ballet costume, lovely in shillouette until she turned, revealing that the rest of her costume was a bondage getup with a boxing glove and a painted black eye. She likes to do acrobatics around a ring hanging from the ceiling, and managed to bend her body in ways that mine wouldn't bend in my wildest, most Salvadore-Dali-esque dreams. It was a powerful performance.
The opening number was my favourite. It took place in the alley outside the theater. The dancers began on the building's rooftop and then rappelled down the side of the building, doing a weightless sideways ballet on the wall of the second floor. It was really spectacular.
Also of note was a lady doing a dance involving a trapeze and stilts at the Same Time, some beautiful ballet-like dances on the ends of bungie cords, and a really beautiful performance on green tissue where the wave of green cloth hanging from the ceiling was treated as both a climbing rope and the extravagant train to a flowing garment.
There was some of the usual San Francisco fuzzy granolaheaded anti-bush stuff. (Honestly, I hate bush as much as anyone, but sometimes the melodrama is just too much.)
Here are some blurry cellphone pictures which I don't have permission to post. I hope that you get enough of the gist from them that you want to go and see a performance for yourself. It was really quite spectacular. Unfortunately, Owen borrowed my programme so I can't tell you who is who in the following pictures...the performance starred the following people:
Jo Kreiter and Flyaway Productions, Susan Voyticky (the glowing blurr on the ring), Project Bandaloop (the building dancers), Sonya Smith and Alayna Stroud (I think the bungie dancers), STRONGERCircus, Chandra Krown, Beth Clarke, Hannah Griffith (I think the green tissue girl), Rachael Lincoln and Leslie Seiters.

Iki Ningyo: Lifelike Dolls

2007-10-13T21:37:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry! You must feel like I've neglected you, my online reader. I have been moving and working and doing other things. I have also not found anything sufficiently cool to put on this blog..until this morning. I decided to go to Japantown to intentionally spend money frivolously. I wanted to go to Sharaku, also known as "That tiny store that sells $10 antique obis" and get some old hairpins. Sadly, they were closed. (Sharaku is pretty much open whenever the little old ladies who own it decide they want to go to work.) So I instead wandered around the Japantown mall. I was walking past the store that I think is some sort of senior activity centre when I spied a large doll in the back.
I'm attracted to large japanese dolls like a fish is attracted to shinny objects, so I went in.
The doll was about a foot and half tall and dressed in a deep purple silk kimono with all the fancy trappings. She had a few paper cranes shoved in her bosom that probably weren't supposed to be living there. And her face was extremely lifelike.
This doll was the work of a master.
Every once in a while on my quest for random Japanese things, I'll encounter a picture of an Iki Ningyo, or Lifelike Doll. These were created in the Meiji period by doll artists Kisaburo Matsumoto and others. They were created primarily as exhibition pieces. The dolls were characters from history or from popular theater depicted with stunning realism. They were generally a lot taller than this doll and a little more elaborate in costume. Many of the Iki Ningyo that I've seen pictures of are almost grotesque in their depiction of musculature,* though the definition and angular qualities of this one's face seem similar to some of the museum pieces I've seen online.
In short, this doll looks like an antique Iki Ningyo but I wouldn't be too quick to categorize it. I don't think I've ever seen an Iki Ningyo come up on ebay or yahoo japan, though every once in a while you will see amazingly beautiful mannequin heads from the same time period and made of wood and gofun (Oyster-shell paste)
Of course I asked if it was for sale, and of course it was not. (And if it was, I'd probably never be able to afford it!) It is certain that its owner has a treasure.
* Click on the one of the brownish looking man with the red hair.

Dream Theater Concert!

2007-08-05T23:08:00.000-07:00

Ugh. PBS is menstruating ...er....fundraising again. It seems to happen about once a month regularly for about a week an a half during which all my favourite shows are canceled and the PMS just sucks. I only get about six channels, two of which aren't in English, so there really isn't that much more to watch.
Right now I am watching "Shit Music of the Sixties" during which people in shoulderpadded suits and big hair sing saccharine sub-doo-wop songs about their "babies." Every fifteen minutes or so, they interrupt the slow torturous death of music to beg the viewer for money so they can continue to bring "Great Programming like 'My Music' to the viewers!"
At least it's not "A Tribute to Elvis" like last time. I think they canceled Antiques Roadshow to bring us "Balding Middle-Aged Corporate Motivational Speaker" again.
I'd give them money to knock this crap off and put the regular programming back on for the love of Jesus, but I'm afraid they'd take that as encouragement to show more of this cat-barf in the future.
I shudder to think that when I'm old, affluent, eating bonbons and throwing cash at PBS, they're going to cancel my favourite shows to air live concerts of Vanilla Ice and Billy Rae Cyrus. (urp.)
I'd better flush out that horrible thought by thinking about how hard Dream Theater rocks. RAWWWWKKKS. I've taken the liberty of putting up a few blurry pictures I took with my cell phone. I know I won't be sued because you can't tell what they are. Except that there's a glaring hot white light of screaming untouchable metal.
I saw them live in concert this past weekend, and I knew the concert was going to kick a huge amount of ass when the opening act was a group called Into Eternity.
They were loud, hard, and seemingly incapable of playing any two instruments in the same key. They were however adept at synchronized headbanging and looking badass. The lead singer vacilated between screaming hitherto undiscovered notes in a glass-shattering falsetto and the usual death-metal growl.
They were hilarious. And friggin' awesome in their bad goodness.
Next came a group called Redemption, which was pretty cool. In retrospect, they really don't stand out in my mind, but they were good musicians and rocked pretty hard.
And then...the candy. Dream Theater was simply the best, most rawking concert I've ever seen. Better than Delerium, ( and I was *this* close to throwing my undergarments on stage at THAT concert). They played In The Presence of Enemies--the first and last songs on their new album Systematic Chaos back to back and pulled the transition off beautifully. They also played Panic Attack and Blind Faith with its delicious, creamy, fluffy keyboard Solo. At one point, Jordan Rudess came out on stage with a keytar and guitar dueled with Petrucci. James LaBrie is going on my list (along with Maynard James Keenan of Tool and Cedric Bixler Zivala of Mars Volta) of rock singers with hottt voices.
In short, it was awesome.
The three rows of fifteen year old boys in front of me (and the whole segment of them in back of me) certainly thought so as well. Throughout the whole concert, they sat transfixed, headbanging along in their seats, frequently throwing up devil horns.
I joined them in headbanging and devil horns. I felt like a fifteen year old boy again.
Oh wait. I wasn't ever a fifteen year old boy.
Nevermind.

Evremonde and Advent Children: Fanservice for Two

2007-07-31T00:29:00.000-07:00

There's something alluring about fanfiction...since the birth of the novel, people have been unsatisfied with the ends afforded their favourite characters, writing them new endings, and putting them in new situations altogether. It's been a week flavoured with fanservice for me. I read the 600 page epic Evremonde--a "sequel" to Tale of Two Cities , and got to see Final Fantasy Advent Children. Because they have like nothing to do with eachother other than that both are complete fanservice (only really appealing to people who were rabid fans of the original) and because I once told someone that I could compare anything to Tale of Two Cities (he dared me to compare TOTC to Woody Allen's What's Up Pussycat. I hope this is close enough!) I'm going to review Evremonde and Advent Children *TOGETHER*. Here we go!
As an adolescent, I spent a really embarrassing amount of time composing epilogues to Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities in my head. The picture taped to the inside of my locker in 7th grade was a self-drawn fanart of Sydney Carton. In retrospect, I think this was my teen angst, which didn't get expressed in rebelliousness (or pyromania).
Naturally, I was really psyched when I accidentally found a book called "Evremonde" on Amazon. The book is a continuation of Tale of Two Cities, which takes place after Charles and Lucy escape the French Revolution at the expense of Sydney Carton's life. They have a son whose name is Sydney, after their late friend, and a second daughter, who becomes part of their family as a condition to their escape from the port of Le Sable. The book deals with the fear of discovery which plagues the family as it becomes apparent that individual grudges against the Evremonde family have outlived the Revolution (and Mme Defarge, who is curiously absent from this tale.)
Similarly, Advent Children deals with the trials which face the characters of Final Fantasy VII after the destruction of the city of Midgar. Tifa has returned to her erstwhile occupation as a barmaid at the 7th Heaven bar, but she has taken Barrett's Daughter Marylena under her wing. Cloud is now a mercenary, terrorized with guilt over the death of the enchantress Aerith. A gang of strangely familiar looking silver haired men has risen to power and threatens to resurrect someone who bears a really, really nasty grudge against Cloud...(and you know who THAT is).
Advent Children has some plotting and characterization issues. You get the feeling that if the Silver-Haired gangsters weren't the living incarnations of Jenova, they'd be hanging out at Hot Topic. They're really just a bunch of whinny momma's boys. And as far as the development of other characters goes, there really isn't any, so I'm not going to dwell on it. You get to see all your favourite characters and some of your not so favourite ones. In HIGH RESOLUTION!!! That's good enough for me! The plot itself was...er....NOT epic. There were a lot of intriguing and important plotlines that just kind of petered out, making the villains pretty much look stupid and ineffective. Why are the heroes even bothering?
Unlike Advent Children, Evremonde is excellently plotted. It is all beleivable and the characters are very good extrapolations of the characters in Dickens. Lucie Manette is still the demure golden thread, holding her family together, but she has developed through her hardships. I must give Ms. Mayer credit here. Lucie is far more interesting in Evremonde than she ever was in Tale of Two Cities. She's compassionate, but made tough through her trials. In Evremonde, it's Lucie, not Charles who wears the pants. It's Lucie who has the strength to patch the family back together after the Revolution.
Come to think of it, Charles didn't wear the pants in the original, either. He's still the well-intentioned dumbass that he was in Dickens. His relationship with Lucie, and the wedge that Carton has driven into their marriage is dealt with masterfully. I would have liked to see more development of the new characters in Evremonde. Sydney has been well developed, but at times, his actions appear too extreme for the personality which has been created for him. The love interest of the novel, Little Lucy's suitor, Manfred, is sadly pretty flat. You don't get a lot of sympathy for his character, which is too bad.
It's obvious that the author, Diana Mayer is a good writer. Where she gets bogged down is in trying to emulate Dickens' prose. Pages are spent describing an event which would have taken minutes, and while some of the philosophical musings are reminiscent in tone to the beautiful musings which make the original a classic, they tend to be too obvious and trite. Evremonde is self published through iUniverse, and would be made 100 times better through editing. The book would be far more powerful if Ms. Mayer could write in her own style instead of trying and failing to imitate Dickens.
One of the criticisms that I heard about Advent Children was that the action scenes obliterated any consistent narration of the plot. It's true that the action is sometimes sickeningly fast-paced, but it's fairly easy to follow provided that you keep the following in mind: coloured hair == good. Silver hair == bad. Physics == irrelevant and coloured hair+silver hair == beatdown. As fun as the beatdown is to watch, it's not a great substitute for, as I mentioned above, neatly tying off loose ends. I can't help but think Square has grossly underestimated the attention span and intelligence of the audience for this movie. We did, afterall, wait for about 7 years between the movie and the game. I want to see a little more than hot androgynous guys in tight outfits beating the snot out of eachother with crazy transformable sword-gun-chucks.
Although, Damn! Those guys were HOTTT! Especially with giant swords....
Evremonde is at its very best when it deals with each family member's grief over the death of Sydney Carton, and mixture of reverence and revulsion, guilt and thankfulness for his suicide. The scenes dealing with this subject are raw and delicate. The parts of the plotline wherein Sydney must come to grips with his unique past and his nationality are beautifully executed.
In short, Evremonde is a diamond in the rough. The characters are well fleshed out, and the narrative has moments of brilliance. I really hope that Ms. Mayer eventually finds an editor and gets this book republished. It would definitely be worth it. Hell, I've even pondered offering to help edit it even though I'm always crazy busy. If you loved Tale of Two Cities, you must read it anyway!
Advent Children is pure eyecandy. The movie's plot isn't the epic that you want it to be -- that the game was. But the really awesome animation and the pretty-boy beatdown make the movie incredibly entertaining. Especially the final battle, wherein you giant-sword fight your arch-nemesis with a metal cover of the Jenova theme blaring in the background as you fall through the sky amidst flying debris. It *RAWKS*.

And, lest you think Evremonde was totally devoid of similar asskicking, I leave you with this quote from Evremonde. [SPOILER] Sydney, battling towards Paris at the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars confronts a French military messenger who has caused about 400 pages of chaos in the life of his family. The messenger begs for his life:
"He [the messenger] therefore watched the same [Sydney] raise his rifle--having been asked by him, since he had such strong opinions on the matter of what Frenchmen might or might not do to one another, whether he had any further opinions on what the son of a Shrewsbury drunk and a London whore, as well might or might not do to a Frenchman--and when he came to no answer, whether from his astonishment or his inability to understand the question, he was shot once through the head and fell dead beside the wounded prisoner."
YEAH! EAT IT! EAT IT, BATCH!

Like a Kite...

2007-07-22T01:59:00.000-07:00

I've always said that when you were drunk, the little voice inside your head telling you not to do something stupid, ie. dancing on a coffee table with a lampshade on your head is a lot easier to ignore. When you are stoned, the little voice is completely silent.
When you are drunk AND stoned, as I am now, and also damn tired, the little voice says things like "write in your blog! The internet wishes, no, NEEDS to know of your debauchery for the collective entertainment of humanity!"
So I am thankful that only a handful of people read this crap.
It's been an exciting day. I took a whirlwind flight to Seattle, to go to Larissa Korhun's wedding, may she be di.s mrwt r nhh!
I went to the after party , after a magnificent wedding...somewhere between the uber-planned wedding which I attended this spring and the not-so-planned wedding I attended in early July. Her Ukranian grandmother was there, who very much reminded me of what my own mother will look like in about twenty years--her hair in a bun with twinkling blue eyes.
At the party, for the second time in my life, albeit with the same bunch of people as the first time in my life, I smoked a...er...cigarette. Yeah. One with tobacco in it. ;)
I then proceeded to tell my life story to the guy next to me on the couch in Larissa's friends' hotel room where the party was being had. I have no clue what his name was, but he was a very good listener. Hopefully he was just as wasted as I was, and will never be in a position to hire or fire me. I like Mannaheim Steamroller.
I will give a review of the fantastically awesome book I've been reading, Evremonde, when I am sober. Maybe I'll even compare it with something totally unrelated...like Final Fantasy Advent Children. This seems an apt comparison in the light that both are complete fanservice. You're not going to like advent children if your idea of a good time isn't watching hot androgynous guys beat the crap out of eachother. You're not going to like Evremonde if your idea of a good time isn't seeing Lucie pay out Charles for being such an irresponsible biznatch during the French Revolution.
So I have to catch a taxi down to the airport in the next hour, and I don't know what I'm going to do until then except that I want it to involve sleeping...but I know that if I sleep I'll sleep right through this damn flight oh why did I ever do this?
That, my friends, is stream of consciousness writting.
I don't know how the hell I'm going to manage to get there, but then I barely remember how I got to the Space Needle motel from the party at Udub, so I suppose if I just go with the flow everything will work out FINE.
I have the attention-span of a goldfish right now. And I'll probably regret this all later.
FISHY! FISHY!
Oh yeah. And in order to prove I'm not drunk off my head, I'll name for you the six wives of Henry the Eighth, whom Dickens thought was a blood-soaked brute, though he was approaching Henry from a stick-up-the-arse quaint-humourish, victorian, white male who's just left his wife sort of way: Here they ARE! The SIX WIVES!
Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, Catherine Parr!!!!
Golly, I'm glad my mum doesn't read this!

The 360. A Summary of My Thrills and Rage

2007-07-15T23:44:00.000-07:00

I was starting to think that the XBox 360 might not suck so much as a platform after being really disappointed in the backwards compatibility initially. I didn't own an original Xbox. There were a lot of games on it that I would have liked to have played, and I was really counting on those being playable on the new hardware. Log onto the Microsoft forums, and you'll see millions of flaming threads (with some notes from yours truly on some) asking, begging, groveling, flaming for games that were popular on the original system to be made backwards compatible.
I have nothing against the guys on the backwards compatibility team at Microsoft. I think they got a herculean task and probably about a fourth as many people as would be sanely required to do it (like that ever happens in the game industry :P).
I'm also sure that backwards compatibility was something casually spouted off by marketing that has now become a 2 year living hell for these guys, but their responses to user posts range from the thin-skinned to the accusing, all laced with a generous helping of pomposity.
Back to this later. I plugged it into the HD jack on my behemoth of a TV, and damned if it wasn't crystal clear. Oooh, neat! I thought. I'm going to play some games. This is going to be HOTTTT. But first, I'm going to stream some music and video! I have the network cable strung across the middle of the living room floor ....why not? (because adding wireless capability to the 360 would cost me $100. Let's chalk that one down as another victory for Nintendo.)
I have this neat program for the macintosh that allows me to connect to the 360 and stream video and music. It worked surprisingly well for all movies not bought at the itunes store, and I'm sure even those can be "taken care of". No need for me to buy an Apple TV!
Satisfied by my movie experience, I decided that I needed to give backwards compat another chance, and I popped in Munch's Oddysee, which I've been wanting to play for ages. Everything worked fine until the intro was over.....and then the controller became unresponsive. The Backwards Compatibility team STRIKES AGAIN. I tried again. Still can't move abe around on the screen.
Maybe I'm badly informed, but how hard can it be to test if something works when everyone who owns one of these systems has the SAME DAMN HARDWARE?!
You can assume that if a game works on one playstation, it probably works on all playstations unless the system is borked. Or that you can run a dos game under windows xp using the same tweaking with two identical PCs.
So in short, the 360 is shaping up to be a decent media machine. The video streaming is great. There *still* are only a handful of games which aren't squarely aimed at the 15 year old horomonal trigger-happy boy set (or the boys who are 30 going on 15), which is why us non-teenage-boys still have to put a little stock in backwards compatibility. I'm excited about Tenchu Z and Guitar Hero 2, both of which I own. Oblivion's a lot better on a PC. Viva Pinata sucks rocks. You can take that from a person who works on games like that and is therefore in the know.
The games I have which are supposedly backwards compatible don't work, and most of the ones I really want to play aren't backwards compatible. I shudder to think of sony ditching BC to cut prices and moving to software emulation. (They already have in europe).
Because however incompetent Microsoft is, Sony's an order of magnitude less so.

Far, Far Better Things

2007-07-12T00:37:00.000-07:00

I am the Tale of Two Cities equivalent of a Trekkie. Victorian novels in general, and Dickens is no exception, are a bit over the top for my tastes. Victorian humour for the most part has not aged well. Though parts of Tale of Two Cities do read like a soapy melodrama, the book as a whole is the most beautiful, resonnating of stories. Dickens aimed to create characters developed by their actions, not their dialog in this story and the result is that the reader develops very intimate relationships with the characters, where the characters's motives and thoughts remain realistically mysterious.
I was looking for the 1980 made-for-TV adaptation of the novel with Chris Sarandon (Prince Humperdink) as Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton. I've only seen about half of it, but it seems to be the most faithful to the book of all the adaptations. I watched the 1930's one with Ronald Coleman at a movie festival last year...and I found it very much a product of the 1930's. There was an overly gushy Christmas scene (historically inaccurate AND not in the book.) , and Lucie was very friendly towards Sydney Carton. She was slightly uncomfortable with him in the book, making his final martyrdom for her happiness even more poignant.
The 1958 Version with Dirk Bogarde sucks rocks. I watched about fifteen minutes. Half the scenes were pulled out of some script-writer's ass, and Sydney Carton was comic releif. It made Baby Jesus cry. It's like watching Timon and Pumbaa die for love.
The 1989 Masterpiece Theater version is probably the most solid adaptation. James Wilby is very good as Sydney, though his performance doesn't have the edge that Sarandon's does.
So anyway, back to topic, I found a link off the amazon page for the Christopher Sarandon movie to a book called Evremonde which is a modern sequel to Tale of Two Cities by Diana Mayer. I read the summary (the book is about the Darnay family trying to piece their lives back together) and got really excited, because "This is the sort of crap that *I* would write if I were to write a 600 page fanfic!"
There is another novel based on Tale of Two Cities called A Far Better Rest which is now out of print. I read parts of it and found it a rather simplistically written beach novel. Hopefully Evremonde will be less inane.
As far as good short fanfic that does not involve gay sex (of the hot Darnay on Carton variety) and cameos from Les Miserables (If I find any Sydney on Grantaire action, I might have to stab myself in the eye) , I've only found one. This is "The Seamstress" by Little Lotte. It's a sweet, sad little gem of a fanfic about the seamstress who rides to the guilotine with Sydney Carton which manages to maintain the tone of the original (as much as is possible). This is THE example of a good fanfic. Read it.
And finally....the holy grail of Tale of Two Cities interpretations....
Tale of Two Cities in Legos...made EXTRA special by the fact that these guys only have Star Wars and Lord of the Rings legos--and really, are there any Victorian novels that wouldn't be made better with Bobba Fett? Also of note is the B.ig F.**king G.un video card box in the background and the touching end sequence.
Along with Evremonde, I bought a copy of the OST for the 7th Guest and 11th Hour.

I am the biggest of nerds.

PS. Perhaps the emo embarassing randy highschool kid of my soul enjoys this, or maybe it is that I am just a bastard. Here's a delightful bit of Sydney/Charles Shonen-ai.
There's also some lovely Sydney/Charles slash on youtube which I'll link to tomorrow between bugs.

Classy Hookers

2007-06-16T00:23:00.001-07:00

Shortly after reading Memoirs of a Geisha in highschool, I was trying to explain to a friend the difference between Oiran, Geisha, and Tayuu. This particular friend, who happens to have an aptitude for bawdy lyrics summarized my explanation with the following.

Tokyo ghetto whore
Get a little less, pay a little more
When she's out goin' on the hunt
Gotta remember: tie kimono at the front.
She's a ten-yen Tokyo ghetto whore...

Aside from the price (which might not be so off given inflation), she got a lot of things right. A lot of the time, when we see pictures Japanese Jolly Ladies, we tend to peg them all as "geisha". Given that geisha have been romanticized since Commodore Perry stormed into Tokyo Bay, and that quite a few ten-yen Tokyo Ghetto Whores claimed to be geisha whilst having a good time with American GIs during WWII, it's not surprising that we make this mistake.
Geisha, however, are not prostitutes. Their job was similar to that of today's hostess club hostesses: entertain male clients with talk, games, music and dancing. Sex might happen on the side for a little extra, but it wasn't in the official job description..at least for the city geisha. The Japanese themselves tended to blurr the lines between geisha and prostitutes in more rural areas. Sex was part of the contract for geisha at the hotsprings, for example. Anyone wanting to know about this should read Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata.
Many of the dolls and pictures we see, and some of the more diabolical looking women in ukiyoe are Oiran. Oiran are very, very classy hookers, and the highest ranked among them were the Tayuu. They had to be talented artists and dancers, but sex was definitely a big part of the job description. And it didn't come cheap. You can spot an oiran because she has her kimono tied in the front, and her elaborate hairdo is a virtual pincushion for things that dangle and jingle and stick out at odd angles. Her hair is often done up in a structure resembling butterfly wings (which was supposed to remind men of certain things), and her geta (shoes) are so tall that one famous Oiran of the Edo period became famous for her peculiar walk--swinging her legs out to the side in order to accommodate her shoes in her tight kimono. Oiran almost always have bare feet in the pictures and prints that you see of them. The purpose was to remind men that beneath the elaborate clothing, big hair, and thick makeup was a real woman....and SEX. TO. BE. HAD.

For some modernized oiran with unconventional hair colours, go here.
For more information on geisha (and the forums from which I stole that picture) click here.
For some vintage pictures of oiran, go here.
To see the full sized versions of the above pictures, click on them. They're worth it.

Too Many Friggin' Bugs

2007-06-14T23:46:00.000-07:00

Today was stressful.
I felt like I was playing whack-a-mole with my bug count all day...or that I was the little boy with his finger in the dike. I'd fix one, get two more. Fix two, get four more. All of them were things which were pretty lame, but which someone is going to find and whinge about if I don't fix them. I can't wait until I get it down to a manageable number so I can get some well-earned slacking in. I've written a poem on what it's like to be in the game industry and be on a 6 month dev cycle.
crunch.
crunch.
crunchcrunchcrunch.
crunch.
sit-on-butt-and-do-nothing.
cruunch.
get a bug.
PANIC.
crunch.crunch.
slack.
That being said so artfully, I love working in games. I really can't think of anything I'd rather be doing...except for maybe "not fixing bugs."
Anyway, I was going to transfer my stuff over to livejournal, but I started picking a layout for my journal, realized that you had to pay for all the neat ones, then realized that you get advertisements if you choose the "plus" account option to get the slightly less crappy layouts, and that you only get a limited amt of picture uploads. Screw that, I thought. I'm cozy on blogger. I have, however, added links to more of my livejournal friends' journals. I was going to hit random a whole bunch of times on blogger and then post the more interesting things I found, but then I discovered that the journals on blogger break down into the following:

Here Be Dragons

2007-06-08T00:06:00.000-07:00

So I was mucking about on Arstechnica, trying to get up enough energy to play a video game. (Pretty sad when you're feeling too lazy to play with the playstation), and I ran across an article on the new Creation Museum in Kentucky. Apparently some former Australian Guy named Ken Ham decided that there average IQ in Australia was a bit too high for his particular brand of fundamentalist religion and came here with the intent of preaching the absolute truth of Genesis, and in order to build a 23 million dollar museum of history. Take that, you godless-feminist-lesbian-college-edumacated-scientists!
Anyway, I could go into how dumb the idea of dinosaurs and humans living together is, or how I'm insulted to even think that I came from Adam's rib, but that's been covered by millions of other bloggers, most more eloquent than I.
But I will say a few things on the religious side that I don't think have been said very succinctly:
1) It seems to me that there are two types of religious people in the world. People who have thought out morality and truth, and have come to the conclusion after much reflection that their religion is truthful. I have nothing but respect for these people. The other type are lazy people: these people accept religions teachings because they know nothing else, because everyone else is doing it, or because it offers them an easy answer to questions that are anything but simple and easy--it saves them the trouble of thinking. I feel that if you are religious you have to be very careful to know what you are accepting as truth, and to know why you are accepting it.
2) It seems a testament to the lack of reflection and self examination...or, to be blunt, FAITH on the part of fundamentalists that if one word of the bible is a metaphor or false or the product of the primitive beliefs of an early civilization, their whole belief system crumbles. Why are these people so eager to prove that Genesis is scientific? What would be so bad about it if it wasn't? Couldn't the early Hebrews still have been divinely inspired even if their archaic creation story is a myth?
3) Maybe my bible is a bit rusty, but a lot of crap that these guys come up with is never mentioned or alluded to in Genesis or the rest of the Old Testament. Noah putting dinosaurs on the ark? How Noah's family took care of all the animals? Dinosaurs being vegetarian? Cain's marriage to his sister being OK because there was less sin in the time of the Old Testament. Have these people even READ the Bible? The Old Testament is RIFE with sin! God spends most of the book totally pissed off at the Israelites and most of the things they do. And you can assume that if God is irked by his favourite children, his other kids are probably being super-naughty.
Anyway, out of my sympathy for the frustration God must be feeling over the stupidity of his flock, I offer the following awesome flash games:
Wrath
Wrath II

The 7th Guest, Powerpoint Limbo, and How I Became a Game Programmer

2007-05-14T23:40:00.000-07:00

bI was just reading Glenn's Blog wherein he mentioned that he started programming in C when he was still in swaddling clothes. (Ok. So Maybe I am exaggerating a bit...but not much.) It made me reflect on how I had gotten it into my head in junior high that I wanted to be a game programmer. I could not program in swaddling clothes...in fact, until I was a junior in highschool, I didn't even know anyone who *could* program. Well, there was that guy down the road when I was in highschool, but I had a crush on him and I sure as hell wasn't going to go over there, knock on his door and ask him to teach me assembly...that might betray my raging hormones!
I was, however, interested in computers from a young age. I was interested in computers as a means to an end--and that end was games. My parents were of the correct conviction that Nintendo rotted a child's brains, so I made friends who had consoles and C64s. I begged my mother to let me stay after school to play the ascii driving game called, creatively, "Driver" on the Apple ][ machines at my primary school. I got very good at pretending I was controlling the actions of characters in the arcade games at the local Taco Time without actually inserting quarters into the machine.
When I was in 4th grade, my parents purchased a brand new, shiny, atom smashing Gateway 2000 486/66 with 8 megs of RAM and a SoundBlaster sound card. They also bought my sister and I a copy of Sim City 2000, which I never got very good at. Now I know people who worked on SC2000. And it's kind of creepy.
Around that time, I first played the 7th Guest at a friend's house. In stunning 3D, it was the coolest game I'd ever seen. My friend and I worked on the massive maze in the dungeon of Stauf's mansion and at every dead end, we'd look at eachother, giggle, and recite, along with the computer: "Feeling....Loooonely?" When I finally scrounged up enough birthday money to buy my own copy of The 7th Guest, I was dismayed to discover that it wouldn't run on my family's 486! It was the first time I'd ever had to troubleshoot the computer. (The soundcard settings were incorrect. I still remember that the IRQ channel for the later first gen Soundblasters is 5 and not 7 like it says in the manual.) I became fascinated with troubleshooting and started reading any literature on DOS that I could get my hands on. Which wasn't much.
Programming was completely alien to me at this point. I thought that writing batch files was equivalent to coding, and I was totally baffled by the fact that when you opened an .exe file in notepad, it was gibberish. I didn't even know that you needed a compiler, nevermind what one was.
The offerings for programming at my highschool were non-existent. The highest level computer class was basic HTML, and there were only four other people knowledgeable enough to take that class. My highschool had a lamentable lack of other geeks. The other marginally interesting sounding computer class was "Computer Media", which was really "How to use powerpoint". All computer classes were presided over by two incompetent vultures. Of this Clarice and Cora of the Computer Lab, I won't say much, except that I had no basic understanding upon which to learn how to program. Someone was going to have to teach me, but it certainly wasn't going to be these two.
At this time, I had developed a sort of hero worship for Graeme Devine, who was the head programmer on...you guessed it...the 7th Guest, and the 11th Hour. I'd found and xeroxed an article he'd written for Wired Magazine about developing the 11th Hour and the benefits of Object Oriented programming. I looked OOP on the internet. The first site I'd found talked about a black box and something called "encapsulation". WTF is THAT?
I thought, "I want to program games like Graeme Devine!"
At my second Highschool, I started learning how to code in Visual Basic. I wrote some rudimentary programs of the type that highschool kids write. I can't remember any of them. Faced with code and deadlines for the first time, I made a resolution that there was no way in hell I was going to do this as a career. So I applied to college as a major in biology.
Except that my resolution to stay away from code fell through...
Freshman year in college, a friend came to me and said "Hey, you want to take Object Oriented Programming with me? We get to write Tetris!" I said yes for three reasons: a) I finally got to learn what OOP was. b) TETRIS and c) misery loves company.
It wasn't miserable though. It was more rewarding than any of my biology classes.
OOP became Assembly.
Assembly became GPU coding.
C++ happened on and off, in patches throughout.
...and next thing I know, I'm working as a coder for the artist formerly known as Maxis!

The Top 10...Home Stretch!

2007-05-13T23:26:00.000-07:00

I just spend fifteen minutes playing a game which actually *credited* Bryce 3D as the tool used to create the graphics. That's "Kwality" there. I guess I can give the game a little break because the game was dev'ed by one person...but COME ON. BRYCE?!! And he used the Bryce default materials, too. Dude. I know you're a n00b, but could we have a little effort, please? Might play it again and see if the puzzles are actually fun. But it's certainly not going to be on the list of
TOP FIVE GAMES THAT DON'T SUCK!
5) The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002)
There are many reasons I flunked second semester organic chemistry, but Morrowind is my favourite. RPGs will never be the same for me. I lament the lack of unchecked ganking inWoW. The lack of moving clouds and water in just about every other game. Morrowind has not aged terribly well, it's true. The character models are pretty bad, and the textures are fugly. But the gameplay is still loads of fun. The mythos surrounding the world of Morrowind is lovingly developed through the books in every house which you can read, and each locale in the game has its own culture and flavour. It's a totally free play fantasy game where you are on a quest to uncover some prophecy or messiah or something, but screw that, you can wander around the world, and rob tombs and free slaves, and collect neat swords, and gank any NPC who looks at you funny. And you can take their awesome loot, too! And you can comandeer their houses! This is a game about stealing and killing, and it does stealing and killing better than just about any game out there.
4) Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (2002)
This is the most breathtakingly beautiful and atmospheric game I've ever played. Unlike Morrowind, it has aged extremely well, mostly due to the high res textures. It is the only Myst game built on a 3D FPS engine. (I think it was the original Half Life engine, but I'm not sure) and the series benefits immensely from it. The puzzles are diabolically hard, especially in one world, where all of the puzzles are number games, and the story is a trifle melodramatic at times, but this game is amazingly absorbing, and the addition of unique puzzles involving movement and jumping make it even more so. And the water and skies move. Ooooh. It handles the Myst mythos far more consistently and delicately than any of the outsourced Myst games do, (Myst III: Exile, Myst IV: Revelation) creating and experience of sheer wonder uninterrupted by incredulity.
3)Vagrant Story (2000)
I like this game because the main character wears assless chaps.
2) ...
Vagrant Story was the first RPG where I felt a real attachment to the characters. I wanted to know what happened to Sydney and Ashley, and I really wanted to smack down the SOB who was the main villain. It has a fighting system which I found very innovative and intuitive. Unlike the Final Fantasy games, Vagrant Story allows free movement of the character during a fight, pausing to let you select your moves. From this evolved the fight system in Final Fantasy XII. The game has plenty of replay value with areas hidden behind locked doors only openable when you obtain the key. Once you beat the game, you can go back and replay the game with a new set of bosses and new weapons to develop. The weapon development system is fun as well. You build your own weapons by combining parts of weapons you find and jewels which confer upon the weapons special powers. As you play, you will discover that your weapons become acclimated to certain enemy types, so you will have to develop your weapons to play to their strengths. Vagrant Story is a complicated, detailed, absorbing game, which will engage you like no other hack 'n slash RPG.
2) Obsidian (1997)
This won Games Magazine's Game of the Year in 1997, and there's a good reason why. Obsidian plays like Myst or 7th Guest with the user exploring a surrealistic world, and solving puzzles. Unlike those games, though, the puzzles in Obsidian fit perfectly into the premise of the game: You are an engineer named Lilah who has pursued her partner Max into a mysterious monolith growing near their mountain campsite. Lilah and Max have developed a satellite which repairs the Earth's atmosphere molecule by molecule via nanotechnology. Lilah's brilliant AI programming makes the satellite autonomous, but what happens when a machine that is written to reprogram itself actually develops consciousness? Religion? Curiosity about the subconscious of its creators in an effort to develop its own? The worlds in which the game takes place are Lilah and Max's dreams, created molecule by molecule by The Conductor: the "self" of Ceres the satellite. The first world is a beaurocracy built on the inside of a cube in which the gravity is constantly changing, allowing the player to walk on the walls.
The only complaint I have about Obsidian is that it's too short. I'd happily play a masterwork like Obsidian for much, much longer.
1) The 7th Guest (1993)
This game gets dumped on a lot. It was a showcase for people with their snazzy new CD drives. It's a badly acted FMV game with a hammy plot. It's linear. The puzzles aren't really integrated into the game play. Blah blah blah.
This game still amuses the hell out of me, just as it did when I first played it at a friend's house in 6th grade. The 7th Guest takes place in the haunted mansion of an evil toymaker, Henry Stauf. Stauf made a deal with demonic forces which enabled him to make toys highly coveted by children...toys which eventually cost them their lives as a mysterious virus scourged the village where Stauf had set up shop. Long after Stauf had retired as a toymaker, he invited six guests to a dinner party at his mansion; a party which Stauf himself did not attend. He instead left his guests a note with a promise of supernatural rewards to the man or woman who can solve the puzzles with which he has littered the house. As each puzzle is solved, a new room opens in the house until the player reaches the attic and learns about Stauf's evil designs on the mysterious 7th Guest.
One of the things I love about the 7th guest is the sense of reward it gives the player as they solve the puzzles. A new room is unlocked. A video plays, revealing more of the personalities of the houseguests. Spooky animations are unlocked. For a game built to run on a 386, the graphics in the 7th guest are still beautifully rendered. You have to scrutinize the screen to realize you are looking at a 256 colour picture. There is no graininess in sight. The soundtrack is also top notch, having some of the most memorable video game tunes I've encountered. The puzzles are not too easy and not too hard. I was able to play all the way through the game feeling challenged but not stumped, which is a great acheivement for a game of this genre.
Lastly, Stauf taunts you as you try and fail to solve his puzzles. Some of his one-liners are hilarious. I got to the point where I was yelling right back at him.
The 7th Guest isn't for everyone. Definitely not for people looking for non-linear gameplay and things to shoot. Or for people who can't enjoy a good bad horror story. But it's a great game for what it is, and executed brilliantly well in just about every area from gameplay to music.

Gentlemen....BEHOLD!

2007-05-07T23:36:00.001-07:00

And now, folks, it's time for me to list out the top ten so that I can get to bitching about games I hate. I'm sure you'll find this enlightening.
10) American McGee's Alice
When I applied to EA for a job, this was the only game I'd played that EA had made. Actually, EA published it. Rogue Games dev'ed it. Not sure if they even exist anymore. It seems like the companies that make my faves are short lived. Anyway, it's a 3rd person adventure where you control a goth Alice in Wonderland as she tries to reclaim her sanity in an insane (in a bad way) Wonderland. What really shines about Alice is the level design which is both innovative and fun. One level takes place in a hall of mirrors where murderous automata lurk behind the reflective walls.. One takes place in the mechanism of a clock. This game still stands as one of the best 3rd person hack 'n slash/platformers out there, along with Psychonauts, which seems to have been influenced by Alice from the similarities in tone and gameplay.
9) Bad Mojo
Is a 3rd Person point and click adventure where you get to play....wait for it......a bastard of a guy who has been turned into a cockroach! Your goal is to use your tiny size to discover the story of your own past and to perhaps redeem yourself. It's a very odd twist on the concept of Beauty and the Beast, and an excellent game. The "gross" factor is a big part of the appeal here as you crawl accross the face of a sleeping man, accross a TV dinner, and inside a radio. You solve puzzles by pushing things into place and by finding clues. You also have to avoid being eaten by the cat. Bad Mojo was re-released in more than the original glorious 256 colours just a few years ago, so unlike a lot of old games, this one shouldn't be hard to find.
8)Pharaoh
Is a traditional city building game like Rome or Civ, or more remotely, Sim City. Except you get to build pyramids. And set up trade with other ancient countries. And defend your city. And did I mention that everything is very Egyptian? YEAH! Also, as a note, in this game, it took me about eight generations to build a pyramid with constant building. The real pyramids took about 20 years and (something that the game gets right) were built by conscript labour, not by slaves.
7) The 11th Hour: The Sequel to The 7th Guest (1996)
If you look up this game on any review site, you'll see that it averaged around 6/10 or 5/10. Yeah. The release date of this game was pushed back, and then pushed back again, and by the time it finally came out FMV adventure games were about as cool as the Spice Girls are today, and "linear" gameplay had become a bad word. (At that time, multiple endings were the "Big Thing"). This game was exactly what this fan of the original wanted: pure bad horror cheese for a plot, puzzles that are wicked hard, quotable one-liners, and hottt graphics.* You play a sleazebag reporter searching for his skanky producer Robin Morales who has disappeared into a certain evil toymaker's haunted mansion and is perfectly willing to cut a deal with the devil to advance her own career. Naturally, you follow her into the mansion, and Stauf the Toymaker requires that you humour him by playing his games before he reveals what happened to Robin. This is pretty much the Ninja Gaiden of hard puzzle games with one puzzle requiring about fifty correct moves to solve.
*Hott graphics in this case means that this was one of the first games to have more than 256 colours. The programmer, Graeme Devine, also had to write his own video player/format do display the unusually high-resolution movie sequences in the game. When I was in middle school, I wanted to be like Graeme Devine when I grew up.
6) Zork Nemesis
I originally bought Zork Nemesis because one of my friends in high school told me "I had to play this game". She had a schoolgirl crush on Lucien (one of the characters in the game). I replayed it recently with a more critical eye and was really surprised when, despite the multitude of invisible walls and the aged graphics, it held up to my nostalgic memories. Zork Nemesis is like a movie where it's obvious that all the sets are obviously painted. It looks fake. It looks cheesy but also artsy. And somehow, it just works. The designers tried to build a serious drama on top of a game mythos that is known for its silly, non-sequiter filled humour. It feels cobbled together, but this sense of conflict is one of the things that makes this game really memorable. In a way, the oddly placed humour sets the darker, more macabre aspects of the plot in releif and punctuates them. The story of two young lovers used by their elders and willing to sacrifice themselves for each other becomes more sinister with the addition of the occasional silly reference to the previous games. This game has the most absorbing world and story of any game I've played with the possible exception of Vagrant Story. And that hasn't really diminished with its graphics and gameplay limitations.

I realize this is getting long, which is why I'm going to save the home stretch for later this week. As I look over this list, I realize that the games I've loved have sometimes had what modern designers would consider serious flaws, and that these flaws have served to make the games more absorbing and enjoyable. I think this might be a pretty big contrast between my list and others where the games are actually good. :D

Forty Games that Didn't Suck

2007-05-03T00:27:00.000-07:00

Well, there seems to be a bit of a fad to make a list of your favourite games. Albinogrimby has done it. Ohmi has done it. It's my turn now. I'll list the bottom thirty and then give more details on the top ten tomorrow. Likely there will be things on my list that aren't on Ohmi's or Albino's. That's because I'm cooler than they are.
And also a point/click adventure geek.

40 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
39 Zork Grand Inquisitor
38 Resident Evil
37 Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven
36 Myst
35 Kingdom Hearts
34 Katamari Damacy
33 Summoner 2
32 Pokemon Gold/Silver
31 King's Quest 6
30 3d Lemmings*
29 Eternal Daughter *
28 Alone in the Dark
27 Myst Exile
26 Super Mario World
25 Guitar Hero
24 Cosmology of Kyoto *
23 Return to Zork
22 Timelapse
21 The Sims 2 Open for Business
20 Final Fantasy XII
19 Lemmings
18 Clandestiny*
17 Donkey Kong Country
16 Oblivion
15 Final Fantasy Tactics
14 Yoshi's Island
13 Riven
12 Psychonauts
11 Final Fantasy VII
Ooooh. Bet you can't wait to find out what the last 10 are!
I'll admit, I displaced final fantasy VII off the top ten because everyone and their dog knows about it. I offed it in favour of something less popular but just as good.
Also, the games that are starred can be found at home of the underdogs for download, except Clandestiny, which just has a blurb.

Tudor Bonnets!

2007-04-30T23:26:00.000-07:00

I have been on a Tudor England kick of late, reading Alison Wier's Innocent Traitor, Sarah Gristwood's Arbella, and Vanora Bennet's Portrait of an Unknown Woman. I highly recommend the first, advocate Wikipedia as a viable alternative for the second, and can't give an opinion of the third as I'm not finished with it. Apparently it's based on the theory presented at http://www.holbeinartworks.org , though if you can make sense of what this guy is on about you're a more patient person than I. Why is it that the webpages of all conspiracy theorists, religious fanatics and alternate historians are alike? It's like someone somewhere decided that the most effective way to push a radical idea was through a juxtaposition of huge text, tiny text, animated gifs and nonsensical paragraph placement all splattered over a single really long page, preferably with a psychedelic background. It's probably the case that these peoples' minds are so full of big ideas that they can't wrap their heads around basic HTML.
Anyway, I got to surfing for portraits from the Tudor era. I remember seeing one in person at one of the on-campus museums at Brown, and remember the stunning realism of the subject's (in this case a woman) clothing and jewels. Even when scrutinized at a close distance the pearls on this woman's sleeve looked perfect.
Like the good nerd that I am, I was thrilled when I stumbled across a site with instructions on how to make a Tudor Gabled Bonnet. If Anne Boleyn is more your style than Catherine of Aragon, you can also make yourself a French Hood.

I don't go to cosplay or renfaires. I don't LARP. Frankly, the concept of LARPing weirds me out. But sometimes, when I'm alone, I take the blue and white kimono in my closet, dress up in it and sashay around the appartment.

In Which I Wax Nostalgic About An Old Computer

2007-04-30T00:22:00.000-07:00

I started this journal mainly because I couldn't remember the address or name of my old one. I finally remembered today in a lightning-like epiphany on the way to the electronics store to buy an external power supply with which to provide more juice to O's badass video card. Which is in fact, so badass that his computer can't power it. I named the old blog after my old, crappy computer; The one with the keyboard that I tried to clean with undiluted acetone back in my foolish college days wherein I wrote the majority of the old blog. (Newsflash: Acetone is an awesome solvent...Of plastic.) I also took apart that same computer today in order to extract the Fastest Video Card You Can Buy For A PCI 1 Slot For People Whose Cheapass Computers Didn't Come With AGP Slots Even Though They're an Old Technology (TM), so that we could stuff it into O's computer. Needless to say, my lovely old video card worked with flying colours while his badass video card started to make a screeching sound suitable to wake the damned.
It was cracking open the old bestickered chasis that reminded me of its namesake: the old blog.

Most of the old blog was inebriated rambling. Much like the above paragraph. The rest of it was an angry self righteous diatribe against what seemed to me to be a crumbling world. It was epic.
Hwt Shst Kiya
Highlights include:
-A selection of spiteful reviews of top forty music videos written while I probably should have been studying.
-A drunken explanation of Two-Way Genetic Screening
-"Daily Spankings by Phong Illumination"

It’s Like Sumo Wrestling...With Clumsy Stupid People

2007-04-29T12:38:00.000-07:00

Went over to a friend’s place today with the intention of doing some “research” using an indie game we’d picked up for cheap at a local bookstore. The game turned out to be worth the 9 bucks we’d paid for it--and not much more. This particular friend happens to be a procedurally generated graphics and physics geek, and so we ended up looking at some of his favourite freeware games. One riotous selection was Sumotori, a game where the objective is to knock the other player out of the ring sumo-style. Except that since the animations are all procedurally generated, in large part based on the surrounding objects, the wrestlers lose their balance, and trip over each other and every other surface and edge in the game.The result is one part sumo, five parts Three Stooges. The little block men fall in compromising and awkward positions, and struggle to get up, only to trip over another object while stepping backwards. There’s even a hidden level where you can just throw things at the characters and see how they respond. Good sadistic fun for the whole family.

Sorry, Mac People. This one’s only for PC. I’ll find you some games later.