opusculus

...well that was intelligent of me. So! If you have made a comment to me for the last couple of weeks that I haven't responded to, it's because my LJ/DW/JF email address had stopped forwarding to gmail because the forwarding service I used changed and stopped forwarding. I was wondering why all comments had suddenly ceased! So I just set up a new gmail account at limemeringuepie, if anyone for some reason had sarracenia@devils.com in their email address list and wants to update that. Sorry if you commented/emailed and wondered why I didn't respond.

In other news, I picked up a book about how religions might have evolved: The Invention of God: The Origins of Religious and Scientific Thought by Bill Lauritzen. It is absolutely terrible. It's vaguely like if Erich von Däniken was an atheist and talking about religion and had a strange obsession with volcanoes as being what everyone talking about gods was actually referring to. Though I'm only 12% of the way through so I guess it could improve! Somehow. Maybe. I am highly doubtful of this, really.

ALSO

Dear programmers of video games for the iPad:

Women exist. We even exist outside of prizes for the male hero! SHOCKING, I KNOW. Also penises are not magic learning learning devices.

Though I suppose I do almost admire how quickly you managed to make it clear that despite the mage being capable of using the Most Powerful Spell, she was really a sweet, charming, helpless girl who'd stay at home and cook for the hero and needed the help of someone with a penis to access any power. I mean, driving me off by the end of the first cut scene takes some skill.

No love,
Me

You know what I want Mercedes Lackey to do? Stop dancing around writing a male non-human character/female human character who loves him despite his appearance, and give the next human character who falls into that situation a furry fetish rather than trying to write it as "OH SHE JUST LOVES THE BIRDMAN BECAUSE HE SINGS PRETTY AND THEY'RE BOTH OUTSIDERS". They can love their personality while being hot for their furry and/or feathery body, too and I'd actually be less weirded out by it.

I mean, if you've got a weird fetish and you fall in love with someone and that person happens to be one of the very few people on the planet who can satisfy your fetish - awesome! Good for you! But there's this underlying presumption that all these women are totally okay with screwing a half-wolf or half-bird because they love their personalities just that much that just makes me go "Uh. Pretty sure not everyone would be willing to bang a half-man, half-wolf. I'm also pretty sure that there's a lot more people who would think all there dreams who just came true if offered the chance to do so, so please stop acting like she's unique in her ability to look past her love interest's body into his soul."

...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. )

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.