opusculus: Black hole (Default)
Guys, I went out and got my passport photos today, and I didn't look like a zombie axe murderer in them. I am shocked and stunned and amazed! And if my passport photos end up being the best photo I have ever taken I will laugh forever. I am the least photogenic person on the planet.

Catching up on my booklist! )
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
You know, you'd think after weeks of packing my breakfast and lunch in the morning, I'd stop gagging at even handling food that soon after waking up. Seriously, I will never understand how people can even eat less than an hour after waking up. It's been 2 and a half hours since I woke up and I'm just starting to be able to contemplate eating.

In other news, I have been incredibly bleh lately. I need to kick my ass into doing stuff rather than just sitting around with no energy or motivation for anything. I also need to replace my tires. BAH. I hate car shit.
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You know, it's a sad commentary on the state of assassins in literature when your first comment on discovering one is "Oh my god, an assassin who kills people without remorse? And isn't a retired and regretful badass? HOW UNUSUAL." ...So of course the assassin retires at the end of the first book, and picks up a hobby of saving innocents in the next. Is it so much to ask for the occasional assassin protagonist who's actually a remorseless killer without being a bleeding heart for anyone in trouble?

Although urban fantasy seems to have gone past the whole "it centers around a woman! Romance is always required to be just as important as the main plot!" since the last time I dug around for some shortly after I gave up on LKH for good. And I'm the kind of person who's happiest when the author never bothers resolving any romantic relationships, so it was a frustrating trend for all the entertaining Mary Sue badasses to care more about their relationships rather than kicking ass. I mean, shit man, badass Mary Sues are fun if you can identify with them at all. Why do you think equally badass and usually even more bland Gary Stus are pretty much universal as the protagonist in thriller type novels? (Seriously, do thriller authors have something against giving their protagonist a personality besides generic badass or something? Jack Reacher had to be one of the blandest protagonists I have ever read about. I hate the idea that you have to make a protagonist boring in order for people to project themselves into their heads. ...Actually, now I totally ship Jack Reacher/Bella. PersonalitylessProtagonistTP!)

I'm three quarters convinced that the entire reason paranormal romance/urban fantasy is so popular right now is because it's the first genre to really figure out fantasizing about being an impossible badass is a fun activity for all genders.
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
Is anyone else weirded out by the concept of dog neurologists for some reason? I mean, I kind of find it awesome, but seriously it weirds me out.

Edited because I don't like spamming my journal: On a perhaps surprisingly completely unrelated topic! I'm always taken aback at just how common pit bull prejudice really is. I mean seriously dudes, the only way my neighbor's pit bull is likely to injure anyone is if she bruises someone's feet in her haste to roll on to her back to get belly rubs. And I grew up with a fairly dangerous breed! (Chow.) And you know, much as I loved that dog, we were very careful with her, because the potential for her to get violent with a non-family member that didn't get dogs was always there, because she did have the full, stereotypical Chow dislike of everyone who wasn't her family. And then I look at the pit bulls I've known, and look at the chows I've known, and all I can think when people start going off on how dangerous pit bulls are is "...Seriously, you've never met a pit bull, or a potentially dangerous breed, have you."
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So, I just finished reading The God Engines, by John Scalzi. Way too much horror and not enough fleshing out for my taste, but he did some interesting things in there too that I want to ramble about.

Cut for some pretty big spoilers )
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
...Something that the current manga pirating issues brought to mind, that I'm really not sure how I feel about.

In a certain sense, companies that import anime and manga legitimately are parasitic on fansubbers and fan translators, because they're profiting on a market that was in large parts created by fansubbers and fan translators being willing to do the work they're trying to profit on, for free. I don't think anime and manga would have ever become half as popular as it is today if not for the fact that translating and bringing over stuff in another language for free falls into somewhat of a loophole where it's probably technically illegal, but no one gives a shit about prosecuting because no one's making a profit anyway. Except let that run long enough, and suddenly there's a profitable market that can be (theoretically, at least) sued into being properly compliant customers.

Rambling at length on the morals of piracy and giving money to anime and manga companies. )
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
Yes, my ear infection is finally actually dying! \o\ Now if only my other ear would pop already since I still can't hear worth crap out of that ear and it's bugging me since I can finally hear okay out of the other one.

(And of course, I forgot my antibiotics before I left this morning. SIGH. Oh well, missing one won't kill me, I assume.)

In other news, I caught up on Jennifer Fallon's latest series, at least as far as it's out yet (sigh I choose to catch up ten days before the last book in it comes out. I know I'll forget about it after it comes out too). And as much as I love political epic fantasy, I wish she'd cut down on the woman with an active sex drive = evil, heroine = damaged sex drive because she's been raped trope. I mean, she manages to write some seriously awesome female characters despite that! ...Usually. The women in the Wolfblade series were all pretty much awesome and avoided that trope entirely iirc, and the chameleon spy was in the Immortal trilogy was awesome. And I have a weird fondness for Marqel who's like the bastard love child of both those tropes because I like unapologetically sociopathic and ambitious female characters and the use of religion to gain power. In some ways the entire Second Son trilogy feels to me like an dissection of the saw "Pretty women have more power than men because they control sex!" and what it would actually take to be even temporarily and partially true (hint: it involves combining religion, sex, and convincing the most powerful ruler on the planet to kill his firstborn child for your religion, because after that that guy will never allow himself to doubt in that religion. And it's still made clear that that's an innately fragile source of power). But those tropes still piss me off.
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So I read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin last night! And...idk, I really enjoyed it, but I really enjoyed it in that way where some things really bug me.

It's an unusual book with an interesting style. The style reminds me a bit of Lies of Locke Lamora, and I think it really does suit the book well. A lot of the book's about gods and divinity in general, and it's one of the few books in fantasy I can recall that genuinely managed to convey a holy sort of feeling when dealing with gods, and I think that jumping around had a lot to do with it. And I really enjoy well-done inhumanity and humanity, especially where they're very close to human but they never quite work off the same underlying assumptions, and I thought the book handled that very well.

But there were a lot of things I didn't like about it, to be honest. Even the well-developed characters never quite caught me. Her dialogue isn't all that good, and I can see frustrating amounts of potential in there, but they never quite drew me in. I enjoyed Sieh and Nahadoth and Itempas, but they never quite...felt real? I mean, for me a lot of liking characters is getting into their heads and seeing what makes them tick. And I can do that with them, but it feels....flat and shallow.

And the main character just doesn't work for me. I don't dislike her, but I don't have any real opinion on her. I think the problem here is in the very tight focus. The book takes place in two weeks, after she's arrived in the palace that rules the world. Even when she was focusing on dealing with the things that she grew up loving...I never really got a sense of her outside the situation she was placed in, and since she was so lost and overwhelmed by the situation, I just never really got a good idea of who she was. I guess I never found a good way to place her in her context, and I need that to get a good understanding of characters. And so reading the book with that giant gap in the characterization when it's written from her perspective just kind of frustrated me the entire time.

Also, I realized reading it that I am starting to get really sick of hot guy/in between girl/cold guy threesomes. I mean, I still enjoy them? But I'm somehow simultaneously really sick of them while enjoying them idek. I think what bugs me is always putting the girl in between the two guys as a sort of bridge, rather than letting her be her own sort of extreme. And not all of them do that, but I really don't like this underlying expectation in a lot of these kinds of threesomes that of course it's the girl's job in a threesome to make sure that the boys are getting along, and girls are never allowed to be the extremes.

I mean, overall I really enjoyed the book! It has a really interesting mythological feel and I really enjoyed the ending and a lot of the subtle touches and I do plan on rereading and getting the second one. But I think the author got so caught up in the mythology that she neglected the world, and that kept bugging me the entire time.
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
I FEEL LIKE I AM MADE ENTIRELY OF PHLEGM. I swear, once I get over this stupid thing I am boiling the interior of my car. And my sheets. And my entire place. Because sneezing + giant amounts of phlegm = EW

/end tmi

Also man, I miss being able to read the back of an epic fantasy and not going "eh, seen it before." I mean, they're so much a matter of how well they're written that reading the blurb doesn't help me at all in making up my mind to buy it. Does anyone have any recs for any really well-written epic fantasy? I've been wanting to read large-scale stories involving politics and saving kingdoms and random dragons and stuff like that (mystic phallic symbols optional) but every blurb I read involving that puts me to sleep.
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
Huh! I just realized that the reason my father will deny that secondhand smoke could possibly have any effects whatsoever to his dying day is because his whole justification for smoking cigars is that he doesn't inhale when he smokes, so it's not actually bad for him. I mean, it's still a stupid and denial-filled rationalization. But at least there's a half-assed attempt at internal logic there.
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I was planning on writing a long, ranty post on attitudes towards any form of caring about your health that doesn't involve self-sacrifice in America, including sleep, but I'm too braindead due to not passing out until after 4 in the morning due to insomnia to want to. This strikes me as about as funny somehow. I guess it could be the hour or so of sleep speaking!
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
So I think I'll try to actually keep track of what I've been reading by writing up a quick review of the books I've finished lately. WHAT A NOVEL CONCEPT.

cut for length )
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
I have finally figured out the art to actually managing to get through advanced physics pop science books!

...It involves reading three at once, and switching whenever I get too confused. SO YES. I FEEL VERY ENLIGHTENED AND EDUCATED AND STUFF RIGHT NOW. Granted I have no idea whether the impressions I got/am getting from the books are in any way accurate. PHYSICS IS HARD

Also I am also reading Germs, Genes, and Civilizations because I am apparently incapable of reading less than four books at a time and wow I am really kind of offended at the idea that just because there were occasionally silver linings to hundreds of thousands people dying horribly to the plague it in any way made up for the fact that hundreds of thousands of people died horribly. I'm not going to abandon it quite yet since I'm still in the first chapter and I love history of epidemics but... wow have I mentioned that I'm really offended by that? BECAUSE I AM.
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
Is it spiteful to be seriously considering switching from gmail just because their HTML display is broken and I'm freaking grumpy at it because the newsletter layout works in EVERY OTHER EMAIL CLIENT but gmail is what I use so AUGH. Apparently they're adding space to table cells. Which wouldn't be a PROBLEM if they'd just get their html in email support out of the 90s and support even limited CSS already. Fuck gmail.

...Actually creating HTML newsletters feels strangely nostalgic. I'M HAVING TO CREATE ENTIRE LAYOUTS IN TABLES. IT'S LIKE I'M A TEENAGER AGAIN.
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So I'm still reading The Spiritual Brain, but slowly because it keeps pissing me off. I figured it would be basically neuroscience from a religious perspective, but actually it's basically a giant diatribe about atheism, so... yeah. Considering I'm an atheist, this book has, to say the least, not endeared itself to me. But I want to finish it anyway, so you get to deal with my ranting while I try.

Quotes and my ranting underneath )
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The most famous of them was a pigeon named Cher Ami - Dear Friend - who was as well known to schoolchildren of the 1920s and '30s as any human hero of World War I.

[blah blah blah pigeon heroics I am not typing all this up]

Cher Ami died within a year. But his legacy lives on: he is stuffed and mounted in Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Birdology by Sy Montgomery


...When did stuffing and mounting become a heroic legacy? Did I miss something? (Well. Stuffing and mounting the hero, at least.)

Also, do vending machines for crows sound like the weirdest yet most awesome way to make money ever? They'll put in coins for peanuts! Talk about a higher profit margin than vending to people. I'm sure this totally won't result in disaster as crows mob small children bringing their coin jars out into the open air to buy their long-saved-for toy.
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
You know, I would have so much more respect for neuroscientists and biologists who argued for God's hand in the brain and evolution if they'd just make better goddamn arguments. Ignoring creationists hiding behind the thin fabric of intelligent design for now, I just picked up a book on religion and neuroscience and AUGH IT IS PISSING ME OFF SO MUCH AND I'M NOT EVEN THROUGH THE FIRST CHAPTER. (The book is The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul, by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary)

Okay first off? He dedicated the first chapter to attacking atheism - no wait sorry materialism because y'know, let's just pick the term for what we dislike with the worst connotations. And y'know, that's not the way to endear yourself to an atheist. Then he's so completely wrong on what most atheists in general tend to believe I have to assume that either a) he's deliberately lying, b) he's so bigoted about atheism that anything said to him by atheists gets filtered through a thick layer of "atheists are materialistic heathens who hate God because they're just that evil", c) he deliberately sought out the most nihilistic atheists he could find as the one true atheists because that's what he believes all atheists believe. I also tend to figure that if you have to start off your argument by attacking other people's beliefs rather than making your point, your point isn't all that strong.

Second off, his arguments so far are really, really dumb. He tried to make a serious argument for the separate nature of the mind and the brain because of an idiom. The fact that we say "I made up my mind to buy a bike" versus "Bike helmets protect against brain damage" doesn't mean anything except that the English reflects the fact that people have historically seen a major gap between the mind and the body. This has nothing to do with science. And...seriously? If you're saying that brain damage doesn't affect the mind and soul, I'm...not really sure how to explain Gage then. I mean, brain damage turned him from a nice young man into a lying lazy asshole who didn't give a damn about anyone but himself. That would seem to reflect on his soul, wouldn't it?

Third off, what I've seen so far of neuroscience is...not incorrect so much as ignoring the mechanics behind it in order to presume that the soul causes changes in the brain. I will note while I am an avid reader of anything neurosciency I can get my hands on because I find it fascinating, I am not a neuroscientist so I could be wrong here. But this is my understanding of how the brain and neuroplasticity (which is the term for brain changes) works.

Think of the roads in your town. You can ultimately get from any point in town to any other point in town, but there's basically an infinite number of pathways you could take. However, some of these paths are a lot easier to go through. There's been a lot of people through there, so the road's a lot wider and it's paved nicely and the brush is kept off the roads and everything. Then there's older, more worn down roads that are basically dirt and gravel and there's bushes overhanging the road and if you go through there, your car's probably going to get scratched up a little. But you theoretically can. It's just a little more difficult. And if you do decide to go through that worn down road, then you'll widen it just a little more and make it a little easier to go down next time. And if you keep going down it long enough, eventually that road will the new Main Street, with paved surfaces and three lanes and everything.

Those roads are neurons, as you've probably figured out. By the time you're an adult, these pathways are relatively established and very hard to change significantly. However, it is possible! Everyone's doing it to some extent all the time, when they learn and think new thoughts. This is what the author's talking about when he talks about "People who suffer from phobias can reorganize their brains so that they lose their fear". Or like...your morning routine. Most people have a fairly set routine that they don't really want to change. This is a pathway you've created in your brain to do this in this order without really needing to think about it much because the pathway's so ingrained. But you still can. I recently forced myself to completely redo my morning routine into something more efficient by cutting out my computer time. It just takes effort until you've gotten the pathway a little more well-trodden.

But to me, saying that the mind as a separate entity is necessary to initiate these changes in the brain just doesn't make any sense to me. It might if you lived in an isolation tank, I suppose. But people encounter new stimulus every day, and the brain responds to that stimulus by making new connections and reorganizing. Or it might make sense if the pathways didn't in some sense already exist and needed some kind of divine intervention to connect them. (Wow, that would be...a lot of divine intervention. Seriously.) But every neuron inside your brain is already physically connected to every other neuron, if indirectly, so it shouldn't take some kind of self outside the brain to strengthen these connections.

I mean, I suppose there's a chance that he'll make some really good arguments in the future as to why this could be so! I hope so, at least. I pick up these books in hopes of them making a good argument, damnit, and I don't want to be out $15 for this book if the quality of his arguments remains the same. But so far, I am so not impressed.
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
So I'm in the middle of setting up an email newsletter, and am trying to set up my email on as many different types of email so I can test the HTML. You would think this would be simple but NO. So far:

  1. I lost my email password and had to change it.

  2. Thunderbird is now refusing to give me a password prompt so I can change it there.

  3. Outlook apparently has no spamguards and will let anything run HTML in it. As I discovered when I went to check to see my newly set up account there and saw an obviously tracking image in a clearly spam email. THANKS OUTLOOK.

  4. My gmail is for some reason getting email sent to my work email. No really what. I never set this up and I just changed the password so HOW IS IT DOING THIS

  5. My iPad is just deciding it hates this account and is just informing me that I'm inputting something wrong despite the fact that it's the exact same thing that just worked in Outlook.



I am going to lunch before I give up and start punching my computer.
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So I wrote the other day's ramble back when I was just realizing what exactly had happened, and as such it's rambly and unfocused and more "huh, rethinking things now" than establishing what all happened back then. And I wanted to write out the actual tale of what happened with the Marion Zimmer Bradley case out while my mind's still fresh from looking it up and I can still dig up most the links for my own future reference. As far as I can tell, no one's just written out the whole series of events in one place before, and trying to find out everything that happened is a pain in the ass, even with fanlore's help. (By which I mean half of the links in here I stole directly from there.)

I will note that I am not personally acquainted with anyone involved; I am relying solely on publicly available information to put all this together; and there's a whole lot of conflicting information on this case out there. I tried to rely on sources that had a direct relationship with MZB or the fan during this time period and otherwise reliable sources and ignore the 8th hand reports, but I am still almost certainly dead wrong on some aspects, and I have no idea which ones. There's also just a ton of stuff I have no idea about. Who brought in the first lawyer? How similar were the ideas? How incapacitated was MZB by her stroke? Hell if I know. All I can do is reconstruct the events as they happened as best as I can from the publicly available information. I'm just tired of having the only side written out in public are variously garbled versions of MZB's, since only having one side of a complex and contentious issue speak in public is always going to give you a bad answer.

(And in regards to the other MZB scandals I found while looking it up, I'm just going to say wow. Seriously.)

Cut for length )
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I'm currently reading Here Be Dragons: How the Study of Animal and Plant Distributions Revolutionized Our Views of Life and Earth, which is pretty good, especially for popular science. But man, I have never been quite so UTTERLY CREEPED OUT by a popular science book as during the part where the author really drove the point home that Antarctica's climate had once been temperate - say, about the level of the state of Oregon - until the climate shifted and the continents split and the ice took over, to the point where the land underneath is literally warped from the weight of the ice. And of all the species that had been living on there at that time, the only ones larger than a bug still extant in any form in Antarctica are the penguins.

Suddenly I am so much more creeped out by the Eternal Winter cliche, you don't even know.

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