Three small bets I just made with myself:
1) I bet the City of Heroes website is red or blue. (I won - both.)
2) I bet the EVE Online website is black. (I lost, it’s brown.)
3) I bet the Star Trek Online website is dark blue. (I won.)
I didn’t think to make a bet about Star Wars, but it’s also blue.
What is it with “serious” game websites and light text on dark backgrounds, though? Are they scared of being taken for a flash game portal? If so, so are some of the flash game portals.
(Bad decision time is when I decide I’m going to play an MMO.)
What just happened? Why do I find the horrible romantic lead likable?
I like how it’s mentioned on one page in the second volume that all these people are about three inches tall, and then that’s never brought up again. It’s irrelevant! Doomed reincarnated alien love is relevant.
(My ability to get through the whole series so quickly is related to that fact that I’ve got a cold and an extreme reluctance to get out of bed.)
There’s an interesting interview here (via Ta-Nehisi Coates) about an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks whose cervical cancer cells were taken as samples in 1951, shortly before her death, and were found to reproduce in a culture so quickly and efficiently that they revolutionized research on human tissue. They called them HeLa cells, and her family knew nothing about it until twenty-five years later, when her daughter Deborah was contacted by researchers who were interested in getting a sample of her own cells.
There is no earthly way that Octavia Butler didn’t know about this when she was writing Dawn. The heroine with whom the frightening, inexplicable alien falls in love/lust mainly due to her body’s fascinating ability to develop tumors? I think that is what a metaphor looks like.
I just read this book.
And you guys.
It is Anne Bishop fanfic. Unequivocally! Terms and social structures are duplicated!
Lisa is a nurse at a New York hospital who has magic diagnostic powers - she only needs to touch a patient to know what is wrong with him/her! Obviously we must first see her doing this to a cute child. But within two pages, a man checks into her ward and immediately uses his magical powers to “touch her like a lover’s invisible fingers, stirring foreign urges and feelings within her that she had never felt before!” He’s bleeding all over the place at the time, but it’s cool - one of those feelings within her is bloodlust.
His name is Gryphon (excellent.) and he is on the run from the evil Mona Sera, his Queen, whom he serves because it is the natural order of things for men to serve the women who are born with the magical powers that make them Queens. If you are descended from the moon people, which he is. Turns out, Lisa is three-quarters moon person herself! In fact, she is the very first half-breed Queen ever! And could she also be… the most powerful Queen ever?! (Obviously yes.) Gryphon vows to serve her, and she vows to fix his evil-rape-y society - if they can find a cure for the poison that will kill him within 30 days!
Please assume that I got all these exclamation points directly from the book.
Continue reading “Mona Lisa Awakening, by Sunny”
So I’ve been looking at the message board for a Facebook game.
I know that I yelled at my cold cream the other day, and I made libelous remarks about Octavia Butler due to my displeasure at her having gotten Serious all over me, and I suggested that Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest series might have been the result of a stroke or head injury. And I may have threatened Nalini Singh’s pets.
But… I’m not serious about these things? I think I would feel kind of embarrassed if people thought I was truly distraught about my cold cream, or seriously angry at writers for not meeting all of my expectations. Yet I think these people on Facebook are seriously angry at the programmers of the little farm game.
Continue reading “Warning: Ill-natured post.”
1) Google Chrome is wayyyy faster than Firefox.
1a) But my life depends on search-as-you-type, and that’s presently only available via an extremely jittery alpha plugin.
2) It’s actually pretty easy to write a Second Life bot.
3) I like Metaplace’s aesthetics enough that I’m actually playing the Facebook time-waster game they set up when Metaplace went down.
ETA: 4) CVS house-brand cold cream is scented with something absolutely vile. It’s like citronella mixed with camphor and death. I’m sure they were trying to mimic the rose scent in the Ponds, but they… I actually have no idea how they could have ended up with this. Perhaps someone accidentally hired the mad doctor Jizabel Disraeli from Count Cain as a perfumist.
Anyway, the discovery is that in the future I’m going to have to remember to spend the extra two bucks on the Ponds. Also, try to return this stuff.
Technically, Maryland, but there’s a subway station. What should I do in Washington, DC? Aside from go to the Freer and Sackler galleries and wish I were a master thief, probably from a manga with peculiar ideas about either Catholics or consent. Because I can only do that so much.
(Restaurants and used book stores count as things to do. Also, protests.)
The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords manga. Four Swords is the one where Link gets split into five Links with different-colored hats, and the one in the black hat is evil! In the game, they basically just fight, but the manga felt that this situation would be improved by a little Linkslash. I guess Link/Link is officially canon now? There’s also Link/Link/Link(?)/Zelda if you own goggles.
You guys should read it, it’s pretty crazy.
Please everyone thank 
thegeekgene for pointing out to me that it had actually been licensed. For some reason I had thought the eventuality unlikely.
Bring back negative feedback for buyers RIGHT NOW.
Auction Title: Pokemon The Movie 2000 DVD - No Box
Gray Feedback Left By Stupid Stupid Stupid Idiot Buyer: i didnt know that it was only the cd with no box
(I am very petty.)
I regret to inform you that the Regency Buffy book - aka, The Rest Falls Away, by Colleen Gleason, #1 in the Gardella Vampire Chronicles series - just is not very good. At all. The prose is clunky, and there’s no pacing, and the love triangle has so little chemistry from any angle that I fear that in the vicinity of these three characters matter is actually continuous and not particulate in nature. The hilarious presence of magical protective Catholic navel piercing talismans does not make up for these problems.
With that understood, please go now about your business.
Neither Darkover Nor Manga
- Fool Moon (Dresden Files 1), Jim Butcher
I heard somewhere that Jim Butcher and the Ah! My Goddess guy can combine to form a bigger misogynist.
- Dawn (Xenogenesis 1), Octavia Butler
Octavia Butler punches you repeatedly in the stomach.
- Adulthood Rites and Imago (Xenogenesis 2, 3), Octavia Butler
Octavia Butler punches you in the stomach more lightly, provides gender-bendy but oddly heteronormative tentacle sex utopia, repeats.
Darkover
- The Spell Sword, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Guy from earth lands on the planet of the red-haired sorceresses and goes native (he doesn’t turn into a red-haired sorceress, ’cause that would be, like, weird). Disney could make the movie of this without changing it too much.
- The Forbidden Tower, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Guy from earth’s adjustment to his new psychic family life is hampered by his wife’s psychic powers accidentally zapping his testicles and his attraction to his sister- and brother-in-law. Maybe orgies will solve these problems?
- Heritage of Hastur, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Being gay is wrong and bad, but Regis Hastur thinks he might be gay! Betraying the Comyn is wrong and bad, but Lew Alton thinks he might betray the Comyn! OH NOES
(I would argue that “OH NOES” does not constitute a sentence.)
- Stormqueen!, Marion Zimmer Bradley
People have terrifying uncontrollable psychic powers that may destroy them and EVERYONE THEY LOVE, and pregnancy is TERRIFYING, and everyone’s family is trying to KILL THEM, and so is the WEATHER.
Manga
COMYN LORD: I am so angry and celibate! It has something to do with my psychic powers.
HIS DAD: Cry moar. You are going to be a warrior and awesome and give me millions of awesome grandchildren because I have inadequacy issues.
COMYN LORD: I hate you, father! I fantasize about killing you with such eerie vividness that I must flee the room to rest my burning forehead against the cool stones of the corridor wall, terrified by how near I have come to patricide this day.
HIS DAD: (That is normal on Darkover.)
COMYN LADY: HI I’M HERE FOR THE ARRANGED MARRIAGE
Continue reading “TODAY I AM A DARKOVER BOOK”
4 cups water
2 tsp instant hon dashi powder
4 tbsp miso (red/akadashi)
3 tsp olive oil
1/2 tsp chili powder
1 tsp minced garlic
1 tsp minced/ground/powdered ginger
2 slices bacon, sliced up into squares
1 scallion
2-6 packets instant ramen (depending on how much broth you feel like using with each block of noodles)
Continue reading “Miso Ramen”
I googled “Scribblenauts walkthrough.”
It strikes me as unfair that you can only summon Judeo-Christian and Egyptian religious figures. There are all sorts of situations in the game which I think Thor’s presence would improve.
What Mee and Conan (’s Parents) Sent Me
Continue reading “Photo Essay”
You cuss at Game Maker for having no mechanism for stepping through your code when something goes horrifically wrong with a script containing multiple layers of nested loops.
AND OH WAIT I THINK I KNOW WHAT’S WRONG HANG ON
(this is what the blog is for)
ETA: HAHAHAHA YES I am in charge of A* pathfinding!
“what the blog is for” = getting my brain into critical mode and out of “my code isn’t wrong yours is” mode. See, that’s why I mostly only post about books I didn’t like! It’s not just because I’m a jerk!
In general, it is not constructive when I convince myself that my code is perfect and there is clearly something wrong with the interpreter/compiler. I am sure that people have existed who have found that there was a bug in the interpreter/compiler, which just happened to affect the long piece of code they’d written in one inspired sprint without any testing. However, given my habits, the odds that that will be the source of my problems are not high.
Putting a cup of water and a few teaspoons of Dr. Bronner’s in the steam cleaner soap reservoir kinda works, at least on recent stains. Though to test this properly, I should probably try filling the soap reservoir with just water.
