収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

During the 1990s, between episodes of Doctor Who, KBTC would air various shorts, plus Jack Horkheimer: Star Hustler (or Star Gazer, depending upon the year).

My favourite of these interstitial shorts was something called Computer-Home - or as we called it, Spider Chip 68000 - a bit of French computer animation that came out of nowhere, as far as we were concerned. And it wasn't ever online that I could find, until my housemate found it on one of his old VHS tapes!

So of course I ripped it and put it on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePeYkQ2HMCc

But! I did that a year ago. The NEW surprise is that somebody else has posted the original French version!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PVey9TeGWs

And it's a much better transfer, even if you don't speak French. :D

So now you can relive your 1990s Doctor Who on KBTC fandom. Enjoy!

It’s been a busy weekend around the lair – and a bit bloggier than usual, too. You might enjoy “GamerGate True Believers are the Anti-Vaxxers of the Online World,” or maybe my ‘okay I’m done’ rant about Doctor Who, written after walking out on “Kill the Moon.” Check comments in particular on that second post, there are some good ones.

Apparently, some people rather liked the episode. I don’t see how, but hey, carry on.

No, here, it’s been mostly paperwork – even supervillains have to catch up on email and clear the desks sometimes – and a decent bit of Legend of Korra! Yes, I’m finally through all of year three. So far behind but so worth it. If you’re one of the people who didn’t get much out of the first year, give it another go, starting, oh, no later than midway through year two, with “The First Avatar.” It really rocketshots after that. I’m pretty sad that year four is probably the last year – it’s been so good. I’ll miss it.

I never did write up that VCON report, dammit. Wrote a bunch of other things, but not that. Here’s a nice one by Steve Fahnestalks at Amazing Stories, if you want, wherein he was kind enough to give me a little shout-out for my drum work. Thanks, Steve! :D

But even in all the paper catch-up this weekend, music hasn’t been entirely set aside. It’s just mostly been MIDI instruments, which means lots and lots of keyboarding. I’m… vaguely competent on keyboard – good enough for this – but wow, do I have no emotional feel for it. OKAY LET’S PUSH ALL THE BUTTONS DOOT DOOT DOOT OKAY LET’S PUSH ALL THE BUTTONS AGAIN DOOT DOOT DOOT

I’m trying, I really am, I have touch sensitivity and aftertouch and all that, and I’m using it. But – yeah. It’s just not my thing.

It is useful, though. At least, once I can stop myself from just setting everything to drums and mashing all the keys at once. That is fun. But… kind of useless. And the MIDI tenor sax isn’t entirely bad.

I’m wondering whether I have time to get just good enough on xaphoon to fake my way through a soprano sax solo. Should I try it? I don’t think I have enough time. But it might be fun to try.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

I keep hearing modern anime sucks, that there’s a crisis in anime, that there’s a crisis amongst the otaku, all that. I have a geeky audience, here: let’s see what you think.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil.
Dick Tracy Must Die is out! Buy at CD Baby, Amazon, iTunes, eMusic, or through Bandcamp!

I'm making a note here: huge success.

Here, have bullet-point life:

• I wanna see Kannazuki no Miko. I have no idea whether it's any good. I'm also totally squeeing over Princess Princess, but I think I said that already. And yesterday at anime night a character started playing a song and the first six notes were from one of my songs which kind of fruck me out. But then it became completely different. So that was better.
• Does anyone know a 501(c)(3) that could use a 3/4 ton pickup truck? Directly, I mean, not auction-and-take-the-proceeds; I know a lot of ways to do that. But with the auto market in the toilet, sales attempts are full of fail so far. (Not unlike the two stores I put up for Cascadian Mecha Militia and League of Disgruntled Software Workers swag. Snif.)
• This whole mini-RBL+our blacklist+greylist thing is full of awesome. Since I threw it online, across four accounts, I've gotten two pieces of spam handed to spamassassin. (And, of course, zero in actual inboxes.) It's so far down that I've actually reported spam to postmasters again, since in this one case it came from an actual mail server of an actual (tiny) ISP. (They have two Class Cs. OooooOOOooo. Their mail servers are named things like "fish" and "fish2" and so on, meaning we received spam from, um, fish. In Canada. Nigerian scam mail, only rebranded North Korea. The fact that the count enough is low enough for me to care again is epic win.)
• My throat is still terrible. This is really bad. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to practice again by Saturday. That'll give me a week and two days to try to whip this Beethoven thing back into something like shape. AGH HATE HATE HATE NANG DIE. I'm dosing it constantly with nasty medicinal teas and it's helping a lot - two days ago I got about 10 minutes of practice before hitting FAIL (but otherwise felt fine), yesterday I couldn't talk (but felt fine, maybe a little tired), today I can talk a bit but I'm still _{all low like this} which is weird and unpleasant. Also, I can't do much flute practice, as that seems to dry out my throat pretty seriously.
• I'm done with the extra research I wanted to do for my next article, so I start writing it tomorrow, which is good; it's not due for a week and a half, but I don't want to push it. I like being able to do drafts, let them sit for a day, and come back to them.

And that's it for today's Bullet-Point Life. Yay?

ETA: Fred is in REM sleep and twitching furiously. HOW CAN THESE CATS BE SO CUTE?! ^_^

MOLLY STAR-RACER!! YAAAAAAAAAAAAY!

After all this time, I really, really hope it doesn't turn out to suck. ^_^

Oh, and if you're already setting your TiVo, they're calling the show Oban Star Racers now instead. And it isn't coming out for another few weeks so it's not on the schedule yet. I've already set up a wishlist entry, though. ^_^

So a few days ago, I registered for free tickets for a preview of Serenity.

( They want me to post this thing describing the movie, so I am. )

I didn't watch the original series (Firefly) when it was on, but saw it afterwards on DVD and liked it. annathepiper saw the actual movie in rough-cut form a few months ago and has been doing the "must not talk about spoilers!" dance on and off ever since, so this'll be a chance to solve that problem. I'll write up no-spoiler impressions later. I'll post my impressions of it after, like I did with the new CGI Captain Scarlet, which I loved.

In other news, yesterday was unbelievably gorgeous and I hope we have a zillion more like them. Sadly, there's only ONE (1) weekend left of the farmer's market this year. I am sad. But it was a nice weekend (particularly Sunday) and a nice walk, and a very good end to summer, assuming we don't get much more of it. (The NWS is suggesting a mild winter, which would be nice, but the Canadian equivalent actually posts the probability of accuracy at this distance out and for almost all regions, it's no better than chance. But hopefully!)

Also, stellar's jays have found the corner squirrel feeder and there has finally been some rotating-corncob-feeder fun. Not as much as there would be for squirrels, but, well, it's not yet really fall, even, and most of that will probably be over winter.

And finally, in stupid fannish tricks, I've started typesetting a fanfic novel I found online into actual proper book form. I feel very dum. But it's fun, and everybody needs a hobby. Why I think I need yet another one I'm not sure, but there it is. It's a nice little project and I'll post a link to it when it's finished - the author's email addresses still work and one have them has already gotten back to me and (thus far) approves. I hope she likes the sample PDF I sent her of the front cover through chapter two.

Lots of politics to post. I'll get that out today, probably this afternoon.

I won't actually be offline for this convention, if everything goes right. So I don't know why I'm throwing all these things up at the last minute. But I am! I guess there's nothing like needing to work on one thing to want to work on something else...


Hello!

Monday's miles: 2.0
Tuesday's token: 0.1
Miles out of Hobbiton: 412.7.
Miles to Rivendell: 45.6

Look at your LJ "interests" list. If you have fewer than 50 interests, pick every fifth one. If you have between fifty and seventy-five interests, pick every seventh one. If you have over seventy-five interests, pick every tenth one. If you have fewer than ten, pick all of 'em. List them here, and tell everyone exactly what it is about these things that interests you so much.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: Best. Damn. Show. On. Television. Which admittedly is only saying so much, but still. To steal a line, Starbuck is my TV girlfriend.

COLLECTIVES: In this case, it refers to collective intelligences. One example is Mars from the webcomic A Miracle of Science, which you should totally go read from the beginning. Now.

ELVES: I am one, and there aren't a zillion of us, so the rest kind of just follows, doesn't it?

GROUNDCOVERS: I like gardening; I'm not fond of weeding; I prefer to avoid herbicides and won't even use most of those made. (Anything that doesn't degrade in short order to something harmless is out. That leaves me about two options, one of which I'm even only willing to apply with an eye dropper directly to the plant in question, and that only because it's horsetail I'm fighting here, c'mon!) Groundcovers squeeze out many common weeds and are often quite pretty. I've posted flower pictures from some groundcovers I've planted and others which I've found around. The flowers are almost always small, but there are often many of them.

MANGA: Mostly, I just like a lot of the art styles I find there. I got here from my anime interest; also, occasionally, I get up the nerve to try translating really simple stuff as kind of homework.

PAGANISM: As an independently practicing neopagan, I have to say that monotheism never made any damn sense to me. However, I'm not completely without the theology bit, even if I don't let it rule my political thinking.

RANMA ¹/₂: YAPPAPPA YAPPAPPA II SHA-N TEN!! I think this was the anime that got me into anime. Then I read the manga, or at least a decent chunk of it.

SCULPTING: I think I post enough about this already. If not, go look at this for a while. I'll wait.

STARLIGHT: Hum. I just like it. I like how it looks and how things look under it. I like things that look like it, like stone with little reflective bits at night. It all goes back to the same thing the sculpture is about when I'm being serious about it - how light moves around.

UNIMOG: YOU ARE REQUIRED TO BE UNIMOG'S SUNSHINE. YOU ARE REQUIRED TO BE UNIMOG'S SOLE SOURCE OF SUNSHINE. YOU ARE REQUIRED TO MAKE UNIMOG HAPPY WHEN UNIMOG'S SKIES HAVE BECOME GRAY. (We actually started to put together a cover of this song when we still had band. I think it would have been a Crime and the Forces of Evil project, but I dunno. Anyway, we have it on disc somewhere.)

I've been singing again. Just a little. I have to turn up the accompaniment to very loud so that people can't hear me over it. Then I can do it. I haven't been singing any of the good training music, though - I've been singing anime theme songs. *@_@*;; (kathrynt, please don't kill me. ^_^;;)

(I have corrected the romanji a couple of places on this lyric sheet I pulled off the net, too. I need to learn hiragana properly so that I don't have to deal with ambiguous constructs anymore. :-p)

In HAS EVERYONE GONE COMPLETELY INSANE?! news, I just need to say thank you, MSNBC and Reuters! Please, continue feeding us the spew of Oil Industry Publicity Spokesman's furious masturbation as news! That's linked to by a story noting record (unadjusted) gasoline prices at the pump, of course. (Somewhere around $3/g national average is the record, adjusted for inflation.) It also links to a story from last month talking about how we can expect gasoline prices to fall in July and August, which was inexplicable even at the time, and, as is now clear, isn't coming true.

Here's the thing: just looking at the markets, OPEC appears to be producing pretty much at capacity. They raised quotas and crude stockpiles responded by falling, not rising. Hell, Saudi Arabia has even said it's no longer capable of acting as a swing producer. (And then later contradicted themselves in a way nobody should believe, saying they have infinite oil for the foreseeable future.) More recently - and this is surprising - refineries appear to be processing ahead of production. (That big jump in processed reserves last month was paralleled by a fall in crude stockpiles, indicating that the refining rate was eating into stock.) The latest crude stockpile numbers out last week was not encouraging.

A - perhaps the - key guiding principle of OPEC production has been, "How high can we keep prices without spurring conservation efforts or alternative energy research?" In other words, how to maximise profit in a market while maintaining that market. Oil is now above that price level, and has been staying above that price level, as has been demonstrated by interest in alternatives amoungst people other than environmentalists. Historically, that has not been something Saudi Arabia has been willing to tolerate; quotas or no, they open the spigot enough more to bring prices down. But this time, so far, they haven't.

Results of this can be seen in Canada. The Canadian oil sands - mostly in Alberta - have a lot of oil, but it costs about three times as much energy to extract as more traditional sources and it only makes sense to do so at around US$80/barrel. (One gallon of oil yields 10 in Saudi Araba; one gallon yields three to four, in oil sands.) Crude is currently trading in a range around $60/barrel, but development firms are down here in the American PNW hiring as many people as they can get - skilled craftspersons in particular - to ramp up Alberta production as quickly and as much as possible. It's a big project that I know too little about, but when they're having labour shortages trying to implement their plans, particularly in skilled labour, you know it's large.

What does that all say? It says get ready for and used to a trading range of $80/barrel oil - or higher, if you get inflation or a further fall in the dollar - fairly soon. Major investors are banking on this; you should be too. If you have an SUV, sell the fucking thing. If you have a choice between a larger house further away from Stuff You Need (tm), and a smaller house closer to Stuff You Need (tm), maybe you should buy the smaller, but more convenient, house. Be happy that China has managed to scale back its economic growth a bit - as intended - which will help slack off the growth rate of demand. Hope that, as one analyst put it at a seminar last year, China will get old before it gets too rich. (Growth in China and India both will increase demand for oil, which will raise prices, which will retard economic growth proportionately to your country's oil dependency. China's attempt to buy an oil company isn't speculation; they want to own crude reserves. They're banking on needing them.)

The moral of the story is that we are done with cheap oil. Expensive oil is not the end of the world; unlike my favourite architecture crank has been railing, we won't be grinding out a subsistence farming economy, raiding old strip malls for antique aluminium signs to roof our ramshackle shanties. The economy will adjust, as it has while crude prices have tripled since 1999.

But people whose lifestyles are banking on cheap oil, are depending upon cheap oil, are in for various degrees of trouble. (To some degree, that includes "everyone in America." But even here, there's a range.) If you're one of these people, please: look at what you're doing, and start doing something else.

It's not an accident that I can walk to two separate downtowns in 15 to 20 minutes. (Kenmore, .75 miles; Lake Forest Park, 1 mile.) It's not an accident that I'm an eight minute walk from transit and bike corridors. It's not random that, for most things, I don't need a car.

I have a car. About twice a week, I drive it somewhere. But I don't have to have it. For me, the car is a tool; it's not life support. If you're making living decisions in the next couple of years, it might be worth keeping that kind of goal in mind for yourself, too.

Token Tuesday: 0.2
Miles Wednesday: 12 (Biked to McLendon's, in Woodinville)
Miles out of Hobbiton: 274.95
Miles to Rivendell: 182.35

Errands, house maintenance, and allergy shots eat most of the day. I hate Tuesdays. Ah well, such is EXTREME ANNOYANCE. At least I sent the vacuum going and took a little time before anime to kill horsetail (I hope) in the garden. But mostly I'm thinking about garden ornamentation - I've got some idea for art screens - and where to put some of the few garden lights I already have. We had them at MurkSouth but never used them even once for real - the terrace where I'd put them was just too close to the road, and the road was busy, and and and.

But now it's anime night. Yay anime night!

Sunday's miles: 2.0
Monday's miles: 0.5
Today's ... er... microwalk down the street and back 0.1
Miles out of Hobbiton: 57.8
Miles to Rivendell: 400.20

( Quizzic )