opusculus: Ursula/Ariel tentacle shipping (Destroying childhoods with tentacles)
So I'm reading Multiethnic Japan and really enjoying it. It's really giving me a lot of background on various things I saw in anime that I saw and could see there was more to it than what I had the knowledge to see, plus a lot of things that are, unsurprisingly, almost completely ignored by Japanese pop culture. The most surprising thing to me so far (bolding mine):

During World War II Okinawa became the only Japanese site of armed combat. The Japanese military had regarded Okinawans as unreliable, believing them lacking in martial spirit, unable to speak Japanese, and insufficiently loyal to the emperor (Ishihara 1992:269-270). Not surprisingly, many Okinawans in turn considered the Japanese military as an occupying army (Yoshimi 1995:145-147). The military consciously used Okinawa as the last line of defense before the anticipated American invasion of the main Japanese islands (Ishihara 1992:263-265). The Battle of Okinawa resulted in one-fourth of all Okinawans dying (Takara 1992a:13; cf. Fujiwara 1987:11). The scar remains a potent reminder of the difference between Okinawa and Japan.

I mean seriously. I saw that Okinawans were regarded as Japan's backward country cousins, and wasn't surprised to hear that it was nastier and more complex than that, but I didn't think it was even half that bad.

Also, it may be sad that I'm currently refraining from killing a spider, not through any sort of fellow feeling towards all living creatures, but because I don't want spider guts on any nearby books. Because books > getting rid of spiders.
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
You know, I'm finding the current slow evolution of fanfic into something resembling legitimacy to be absolutely fascinating to watch. And with all the discussion currently going on about fanfic due to Gabaldon, the Marion Zimmer Bradley case is popping up a lot, and forcing me to completely rethink it.

...This is almost 2000 words what the hell self )
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
Why is it always the most important emails that get eaten? I've been waiting for some coworkers to get a list prepared for me for a couple weeks, and they just asked me if I'd received it because they'd sent it a while ago and I never responded or did anything with it. I will never not be convinced that computers are malicious.

In other news, I've been experimenting with tracking my food and counting the calories in it, mostly just out of curiosity since I haven't really done it with any degree of accuracy before. But I am just incredibly bemused at how inaccurate it has to be unless you eat nothing but prepackaged food or weigh every single ingredient and then weigh your leftovers and subtract. Even then, you're still dealing with pre-existing water weight and the fundamental fact that no food can ever be fully standardized nutritionally. I mean, like. Most the time in the morning, I eat some fruit, some cheese, and some hard-boiled eggs. I'm weird about eggs because I eat maybe a quarter of the yolk, because I like a bit of yolk to flavor the whites but I don't like it as a dominant flavor.

Now, how the hell would you calculate this? I mean, theoretically yes, I could cut the egg apart, pull the egg white away from the yolk, weigh each, eat my eggs the way I like them, and weigh the remaining yolk and figure out the calorie content from that. But a) I'm not quite that neurotic about it, thank you, b) really if we're talking nutritionally varied foods, I kind of assume that yolk has to be one of the most varied just because I can't imagine egg laying hens don't adjust the amount of nutrition they give their eggs a lot based off their current health, because a sick hen who's off her feed and barely laying eggs just can't afford to give up as many calories as a healthy hen.

Or bacon. I've gotten some bacon that was mostly fat. I've gotten some that was mostly meat. Is there any sane way of calculating that besides some generic "bacon" ideal that's probably horribly inaccurate for the individual piece?

And then there's apples and really fruit in general which I have to think is just incredibly off. I've been alternating between baby Jazz apples and rather large Pink Lady apples and just entering the same amount because they're apples and I'm not weighing them individually to see how big a difference the differing size makes. How much of a difference is there between a Jazz and a Pink Lady nutritionally? How much is there between a Pink Lady that came from a healthy tree that was well-watered versus a Pink Lady that's from a tree that just isn't quite rightly positioned to the irrigation system and underwatered and also had an animal eat a hole through its trunk? Are you supposed to like, weigh the core after you're done? What if you eat the core? Some people do. Is that incorporated into any calculation of an apple's nutritional value?

Even prepackaged food isn't entirely a solution. I've known for a while that the FDA really doesn't have the power to enforce much on the food end of things, so I was really vastly unsurprised when I heard that someone did some unofficial studies that said nutritional labels are incredibly inaccurate. I'd google it, but I'm at work so I don't want to further distract myself.

tl;dr inaccuracy bugs me.
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
So, I got an iPad as a belated Christmas present! And I really kind of embarrassingly love it. It's shiny and useful and has all these neat bells and whistles and it's pretty and fun to read things on and. Yes. I am kind of a dork don't judge me.

But one of the things that was going through the back of my head when browsing through the app store was "...This thing is designed to be a prosthetic brain." And that requires a bit more explanation! One of the things I've noticed when dealing with a few people I know who have smartphones and tend to use them to their full capacity is that they basically use them prosthetic brain. They use them to store vast quantities of information and allow them to look it up at the drop of a hat, without having to burden their brain with storing it. My brother is particularly bad about this, to the point where if I eat dinner with him, he's grabbing it out to support his point at least three times during it.

But smart phones aren't really designed for this! They're stuck in the form factor of a phone, and that's not really the ideal form factor for this. Both the phone factor and the brain prosthetic aspect are hurt by this. I can't figure out how to answer the average smart phone in the time it takes to ring. (I am, admittedly, REALLY BAD with phones.) And they look awkward to use and I just don't really see the appeal. But they're also not really the best form factor for a prosthetic brain device either. I can't even count the number of times my brother's told me to look at a picture of something on his cell phone and I've gone "Uh, bring it closer, can you turn the brightness up" etc. And trying to do anything for more than ten minutes...it's just too small. I can't imagine ever feeling comfortable.

Meanwhile, netbooks lose out from the other direction. They're not intuitively designed for one, but more importantly they take a lot longer to boot up. When you're grabbing out your prosthetic brain device to bolster your argument or show someone the perfect couch, the last thing you want to do is wait. And they're pretty much designed around the "browse the internet" model which is a lot of what people want out of something like this, but it's not all of it.

And you can tell just looking through the app library that that's where a lot of apps are going directly towards. You can track your period on your iPad. There's multiple software designed for personal information management database type stuff. There's maps, there's encyclopedias, there's Spanish lessons, there's medical reference stuff, there's weather stuff - it's all the information you want to keep track of but can't organize or can't remember or can't fit it all into your head.

Reading through the press on this, its brain information access utility seems to have gotten somewhat overlooked. Those who go near the topic dismiss it as "but since it's too big to carry in pockets, it'll never be a replacement for my smartphone." To which I say, dude, if you haven't noticed, probably fifty percent of the population carries around bags all the time. (It's amazing how many tech writers are men, really.) If you're already carrying a purse around, suddenly the iPad's form factor makes a shitload more sense. I mean, I'll be thrilled the day they have a flexible screen that can be folded into your pocket, because I don't really like purses that much myself. But that doesn't mean that something this size doesn't make a shitload more sense for most smartphone uses than the average smartphone.

So basically the only way this could be more awesome is if you could directly implant it into your head and access all this information in your brain. I'm totally waiting for the cyborg revolution, guys.
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
This morning, I managed to get my lunch/breakfast/dinner packed, exercise, and still leave for work an hour early so that I can also leave work an hour early tonight. I may feel too proud of myself for this.

On the minus side, I discovered that even when there's like, 5 people in the entire place, people still hog the only woman's bathroom for ridiculously long periods of time. I swear, trying to go to the bathroom at work sometimes feels like the bane of my existence.
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
You know, I stumbled across the newest David Weber the other day, and felt absolutely no urge to buy it. I've always figured it was all authors becoming too big for their breeches and refusing to edit their works of perfect genius after they have enough power that their publishers can't make them. But I do kind of wonder if, after a certain degree of success, some publishers just don't bother editing their best selling authors as much on the basis that they'll sell millions anyway, so let's save our editors' time and effort for series where they will improve sales. I'd guess it to be a mixture of both, honestly.

Huh. Come to think of it, it might just be because I'm tired, but I can't think of a single author who I've liked, who I thought continued to improve after becoming big. I'm not talking about decline, because although I've seen a lot of authorial declines that strike me as an ego-driven editor-free decline, David Weber's among them, it's also sometimes just...the fact that they've gotten incredibly stale on the series they're writing but the market demands more, or the fact that they're going senile, or the fact that they managed to strike one-hit wonder gold and will never be able to write another book that good again in their lives, and it seems unfair to judge on that. But continuing to improve despite the fact that your books are already selling like hotcakes would impress me a lot more, but I can't think of any.
opusculus: Little old man in a cheerleading uniform approves! (Cheering you on)
I like this meme and interesting conversations! \o\

Ask me questions about anything. My opinions on politics, my opinions on sex, my opinions on food! ANYTHING. I will ask questions in return, too, and we can do a dialogue thing. Let's be opinionated or thoughtful or whatever.

In unrelated news, I really need to like. Talk to someone at work about running the air conditioner over to where I work. It hit 80 degrees in my office yesterday, and I was just absolutely exhausted by the time I left because of that. And it's only going to get hotter, considering the area I work in regularly hits 110 in the summer.
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
I'm not sure which is sadder, the fact that I felt the need to tell my brother that you're supposed to wash new kitchen gear before using it in case he didn't know, or the fact that I was right and he didn't actually know that. He wouldn't believe me that boiling stuff in it without ever rinsing it out wasn't totally sufficient for all purposes. I hope he doesn't eat too much plastic dust, I guess.
opusculus: Little old man in a cheerleading uniform approves! (Cheering you on)
In no particular order:

  • Wearing purple makes me happy. Considering it's not even particularly my favorite color, this bemuses me. I mean, I like it. But it's tied with blue and green for my favorite colors, and neither of those make me particularly happy to wear them.

  • I thought I found out that a sequel to Phantoms in the Brain was coming out around November, but now I can't find any information about it ever. Considering that's my favorite nonfiction book ever, this makes me sad. :(

  • For some reason I feel really comfortable over at Dreamwidth in a way I haven't been feeling with LJ. It's the difference between a startup company that's actively engaged in its users and innovating and all that crap and an established company that's been stagnant for years and never really quite understood the segment of its customers that I'm a part of. I mean, I would guess that SUP actually understands its Russian userbase relatively well, if only because that seems to be the market it bought LJ for. Just... not fandom. At all. I mean, I still plan on crossposting over to LJ and reading my flist, but I do think I'll be using my DW as my primary.

  • I need to get back to exercising. I quit while I was sick, for obvious reasons, but now that I'm mostly better, I'm still having a hard time kicking myself into doing it again. Surprisingly though, despite the fact that my posture's been absolutely horrible lately, my back hasn't been more than twinging. Usually the easiest way to make myself exercise is I know that if I don't strengthen my back, I'm going to either have to get a breast reduction or just deal with a lot of back pain, and without any back pain I'm lazier about it. PAIN IS A WONDERFUL MOTIVATOR. Or. Well. Effective motivator?
opusculus: Black hole (Default)
Because the way to start a new journal is totally to essay at ridiculous length, right guys?

I actually got around to watching Black Lagoon the other day. It's really a pretty fun and awesome action series if you don't mind it getting a tad overheavy on the nihilism on occasion, and it made me want to ramble on strong female characters and why Simon R Green's skeeves me out while I like Black Lagoon's when in some ways the dynamic is very similar.

Simon R. Green, if you don't know him, is a noir sf/fantasy author who consistently writes very strong and very crazy women, who are generally kept saneish by a mild-mannered male partner. Black Lagoon is filled to the brim with very strong and very crazy women, generally kept saneish by a mild-mannered male partner. At a quick summary, they're very similar and it should be pretty obvious what I find problematic about it.

Giant ramble about gender roles in Black Lagoon and Simon R Green's work goes here. Mild implied spoilers for Black Lagoon )

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