I Am Completely Serious

I’M READING ANNE BISHOP AGAIN apparently I suffer from masochistic tendencies.

So I’m about 3/4 through this book. And there’s this guy Lucivar, and he’s explaining evil magical roofies to his zombie-vampire father, Saetan SaDiablo, the High Lord of Hell. And this is the third time he’s talked about the evil magical roofies, and Saetan SaDiablo is shocked by the cruelty of mortals and has to sit down on his dark throne, and Saetan SaDiablo has been shocked by the cruelty of mortals and had to sit down in every single scene he’s been in. Except for the one where he was pretending to be a pedophile serial killer to trick the other pedophile serial killer into coming into his bedroom so he could kill him.

Not his bedroom in Hell, his bedroom in the Shadow Realm. The Shadow Realm’s someplace else.

Lucivar spent 2/3 of the book enslaved to a rapist, and his father Saetan SaDiablo (third-most powerful male wizard in the world) and his teenaged adopted sister Jaenelle Angelline (most powerful wizard in the world) know that, and stuff, but they kinda don’t do anything about it. I guess it’s not that important? So there are all these scenes where Lucivar’s being tortured, and then there’s a scene where Jaenelle shows up at Saetan SaDiablo’s grim palace with a unicorn or an adorable telepathic wolf cub and Saetan SaDiablo goes “OH MAN IT IS A UNICORN AND/OR TELEPATHIC WOLF CUB AND THAT IS NOT OKAY FOR MY IMAGE” and people smile and offer him a drink, and he’s sitting down in his dark throne again I mean I don’t know why he bothers to stand up. And then Lucivar escapes by himself and shows up, and they say, “Oh, hey! You made it!” And Lucivar hangs out with the unicorns and things are basically fine. He isn’t mad about how, you know, they didn’t rescue him! He knows they were real busy.

(I came up with a new way to describe Anne Bishop today: “Laurell K. Hamilton writes licensed Disney Princesses books.”)

It is because Anne Bishop is not good at remembering what the plot is. She also forgot how Lucivar has a brother named Daemon Sadi - alias, The Sadist, other alias, Hayll’s Whore - and Hayll is also a different place from Hell - who is a 1700-year-old Warlord Prince sex slave with the second-strongest magic powers in the world, and is impotent (and random people just up and start talking about his impotence because everyone knows - stuff gets around in 1700 years, it’s just a thing - even though people periodically forget that he generally kills the women he sleeps with), and who was the protagonist of the first book and spent half of it being sad that he was an impotent sex slave unworthy of the woman he loves (Jaenelle, his then-twelve-year-old adopted sister), and the other half being angry about the same issue, and killing people in many ways.

Anyway, she forgot Daemon was there. This book he went insane in a way that makes him weep all the time and occasionally refer to himself in the third person, mainly to keep him out of the way so we can get this big important The Unicorns And Telepathic Wolf Cubs Move In With Saetan And Wacky Antics Ensue thing established. There are also some scenes where Jaenelle goes clothes shopping and doesn’t get along with the other kids.

I totally forgot about how, in this book, there is an evil queen named Dorothea who wants Daemon to father her children. There’s also an evil priestess named Hekatah who used to be married to Saetan and wants to kill him. I think sometimes Bishop forgets which one of the two has which set of motivations.

I like how it’s possible to forget about things like that in this series.

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Unrelated note to the internet: Nobody buy a Samsung Magnet, please. Dad bought one and I just spent three hours trying to get the drivers installed so I could sync up his address book. At least for Vista, there are no working drivers for this phone.

I looked at the JLPT website Monday night, saw I needed to register by Friday, and saw that all the test sites were at least seven hours away. I thought, “I’ll figure out which site’s best in the morning.”

GUESS WHAT I DID

I wasn’t too late to register for the Canadian test, so I went ahead and did that. So now I’m registered at Toronto, which is eleven hours away. Way to go, me. I have no idea if it’ll even be possible for me to get up there.

Reading the Huffington Post thing about the census worker story, I got to this line:

“I don’t think distrust of government is any more or less here than anywhere else in the country,” said Silver, a sociology professor at Southeast Community College.

My first thought was, “I bet the guy doesn’t have tenure.” My second one was, “Well, maybe he’s just kind of sheltered.” My brain was not being snippy or anything! It didn’t have time to be snippy.

You seriously do have to be pretty out-of-it to think that. I also note that this happened two frigging weeks ago, and I have no recollection of WYMT (local news station) covering it at the time. This place is just two hours away, and it’s not exactly a normal crime. This should have been on TV. There’s an article on their website as of today, and the comments are so far unusually short on the right-type craziness and long on the left-type - there’s only one person in there saying stuff about ACORN. I guess the strategy is to ignore it and hope it goes away.

That’s what I’m going to do.

Whitewashed casting again wheeee.

Today I make a solemn vow before my patron saint, the internet: on the remote chance that I ever sell a book, and then get an offer to have it optioned it for a movie/TV show/etc, I will allow it only if there is clear language in the contract stating that,

1) the characters be cast the same races they are in the books,

and 2) that the non-white ones’ roles will not be minimized in favor of the white ones.

There will also be language stating that they have to remain the same gender and sexual orientation. And that there won’t be any un-called-for rapes or rapping or suchlike. (Called-for rapes and rapping and suchlike are fine, they just can’t be applied to female and black characters for whom it would be inappropriate. For instance, the deaf psychometrist pro gymnast raised by a former Chan Buddhist monk whose long-lost father is, like, somehow Longinus.

If that were an actual character, rapes and rapping would not be appropriate there.)

Should I break this vow, may my very soul be forfeit, and may the internet dogpile me in whatever manner seems reasonable given the technology of the future. Like, I’m assuming that by this time HTTP protocols will support physically slapping you for things like a particularly bad YouTube comment. Presumably the technique will be applied to my own situation in sort of the era’s equivalent of a Rickroll. Also people can refrain from buying my book.

Shortly after I made this post theorizing that Dad might have caught swine flu at a legal conference, Papaw got a call from Uncle Tall. Uncle Tall told him that two people had died of swine flu in the town where the legal conference had been.

Languishing pathetically in bed, Dad told me, “Now, when I die of swine flu, you’re going to have to go to law school and take over my firm, so there’ll still be a Pin in “Pin, Fork and Spoon Law Offices.”"

Me: “You’re not going to die, you’re not even in a high-risk group. And I’m not going to law school. And it would be “Fork, Spoon and Pin,” because I wouldn’t be the senior partner.”

Dad frowned.

Some time later, he called me back into the sickroom. “Sarah! When I die, they don’t have to change the name. A lot of firms leave the name of a dead attorney in there. I can still be in there even when I die.”

“You’re not going to die, Dad -”

“So it’ll be Pin, Fork, Spoon, and Pin. Except you need to fire Fork, because he’s pissing me off, so it’ll just be Pin, Spoon and Pin.”

“I’m not going to law school, and I can’t fire Fork. He’d have seniority over me. And that’s not how law firms work anyway.”

Dad frowned again. But he could not come up with any way out of this quandary. He had the same conversation again later when thegeekgene called.

But he got better within two days, so, probably not swine flu.

This is the best manga ever you guys. The title means Alexander the Great - The Kingdom of Heaven! The exclamation point is strongly implied.

It’s all froofy angsty old-school-style shoujo manga where Alexander and Hephaistion look like twelve-year-old girls. Alexander gets ambushed and clutches his sword and thinks “Hephaistion!” And Hephaistion is twenty miles away and goes “The Prince - the Prince is calling me!” “Prince - whenever you need me, only say my name in your heart, and I will be there… to protect you!” Hephaistion is also telekinetic.

And Alexander flies into sudden violent rages and kills his own men, and Hephaistion looks fearfully into the distance, his hair blowing in the wind, narrating about how he is feeling a sense of deep forboding.

Oh! And Queen Olympias is draped in snakes all the time.

This manga is fabulous.

A mercenary captain with one of those special manga helmets that covers your whole face but still apparently allows you to see to whup somebody shows up and challenges Alexander to a duel, but it’s only to test Alexander to see if he is fit to be King of Rhodes! He offers Alexander his sword, and takes off his helmet, and he’s a girl! Who looks like Hephaistion but with curly hair and eyelashes, and she spends a whole flowery-screentone-bedecked page declaring herself “Saanu of Rhodes.”

Alexander is immediately enamored of her; Hephaistion feels a deep forboding. Later Alexander and Saanu will wear matching helmets, except his is white and hers is black, and they consummate their union with sprays of blood out of their enemies’ shoulders and rainbows, though unfortunately not simultaneously.

In short, this manga is so great and I wish I’d bought more than just the first volume.

This cutscene right here.

It’s probably better to watch it with the sound turned off - Aramis’s VA is not going to be anywhere near as good as what you’re imagining.

(The Power Rangers one is good, too.)

In last night’s dream the demon biologist who was driving me to the session of the Dark Congress pulled over so she could look at the hummingbirds. They were the size of swans, flying in repetitive formation over a small suburban house. They were constructed from bits of old brooms, with no legs and long sharpened beaks. Their wings whirred steadily, except for one that thumped sometimes from something broken.

The pattern in which they flew and the way they turned was extremely unsettling in the dream. I wonder if this is something I could reproduce in Maya, or if it’s one of those dream-things that exists without real pictorial form, only the impression of eeriness that it left on me.

The rest of it was a Disgaea dream. Apparently I ship Laharl/Flonne, which is possibly wrong-headed of me. While they were blushing and stammering at each other, Etna found the higher-level version of herself with the different color scheme and beat her down.

Dad just got back from a legal conference, and he’s really sick. I wonder what the odds are that, if it doesn’t clear up, he can be convinced to either 1) stay home, or 2) go to the doctor.

(I’m also sick, but it started while he was gone, so I cannot blame the lawyers for my problems. I have no idea where I caught whatever it is - I barely went out the past couple of days, and I had the house to myself. Perhaps I have evolved to the point that I am capable of contracting disease via the internet.)

I just bought a Kindle 2. But it was a refurbished one for $250, so it’s like I’m saving money.

(The moment I get it I’m buying this, as it is the lesbian Cinderella book and there is no help for it. It’s $2 cheaper in Kindle version than in dead-tree! Saving money.)

How To Make Picasa Index All Of Your Frigging Images, Rather Than Merely The Ones Of Which It Approves

Picasa by default does not index PNGs, GIFs, or TGAs. It indexes, but does not display, pictures of under 250×250 pixels in size. The problem with this is not that this is the default setting - this set-up makes sense for people using the software mainly for photo management, who probably make up most of its user base, and who don’t want Picasa indexing all the GIFs in every piece of software on their machine’s UIs.

The problem is that failures that this causes happen silently. In Windows, when one right-clicks a PNG, GIF, or TGA and selects “Open in Picasa,” Picasa opens, but the image doesn’t. There’s no pop-up to explain this. When one attempts to add such a file to the Picasa index through the “File >> Add file to Picasa…” menu option, it scrolls down to the appropriate folder and behaves as if the file was added. There is no pop-up explaining that it wasn’t.

One can open an undersize image in Picasa by clicking on it in Windows Explorer, but it won’t show up in the directory view. It also won’t upload with the rest of the folder if one attempts to publish to Google Photos.

So, if one (today, one is me) finds that not all the files in a folder are showing up, one doesn’t know why, and assumes the problem to be a bug in Picasa’s indexing. (I would bet that some of the people in this thread are actually having this problem.)

So, to make Picasa recognize PNGs, GIFs, and TGAs:

1) Open Picasa. Go to “Tools >> Options…”

2) Click on the “File Types” tab.

3) Check the boxes for the filetypes you want it to index and click “OK”.

To make it recognize small images, go to “View” and click the menu item “Small Pictures”.

Something else to keep in mind, if you find Picasa still isn’t showing all of your images after doing this, is that it is by default set to detect duplicate photos and only load one - which seems to apply to thumbnails and their larger versions. I found that with duplicate detection turned on, Picasa (version 3.1.0) would about half the time index my thumbnails and then skip over the original version. (The other half it would index the original and skip the thumbnails, which I think is a more desirable behavior.) This, I would label definitively as a bug - it’s just not something you want your image management software doing in any circumstance. The only solution I could find for this was to switch duplicate detection off entirely. To do this,

1) Open Picasa. Go to “Tools >> Options…”

2) Click on the “General” tab.

3) Uncheck the box for “Automatically detect duplicate files while importing.”

Finally, if you were for any reason to want Picasa to show transparent placeholder images of the type used in web design, you’re probably out of luck - I haven’t been able to find any way to accomplish this.

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How To Make Your Elderly Breadmaker Blend The Dough Properly So There Aren’t Big Clumps Of Dry Flour Left In There

1) Remember to actually screw the kneading paddle in there. (Not that I have ever made this mistake more than twice.)

2) Put all the ingredients except the yeast into the basin, and mix them up with a spoon just enough that all the flour is at least damp. Then add the yeast and start the machine.

(This is a Welbilt Baker’s Select ABM6200. If the internet is to believed, it doesn’t even exist.)

An Exchange of Hostages, Susan R. Matthews

Didn’t somebody want a Magical Sadist book, to go along with the Magical Masochist Kushiel books? Here you go!

Andrej Koscuisko, a brilliant young neurosurgeon fresh out of medical school, is ordered by his father to join the military and enter training to become a Ship’s Surgeon. But a Ship’s Surgeon’s primary occupation is not to heal the sick - it is to torture confessions out of prisoners. The idealistic Koscuisko is initially disgusted by this, as well as his discovery, upon entering training, that he has been assigned a slave, the stoic warrior Joslire, whose obedience to him is enforced via a cybernetic implant. However, as he gets deeper into his training, he discovers in himself a less-than-wholesome fascination for his work.

This book is an exercise in the clinical deconstruction of a fetish. While Koscuisko and Joslire’s relationship is a big ball of angsty UST, most of the book takes place in decidely non-sexy, and frequently worrying, debates about the ethics of the book’s government’s legal system. They’re worrying because the book wants there to be more moral gray here than there actually is.

The debates mostly take the form of conversations in the Torture Class classroom, between Koscuisko and his tutor Chonis and fellow student Mergau Noycannir, explaining the legal system’s justifications for what it does, and outside of it, in their internal monologues either accepting it (mostly Noycannir) or arguing against it (mostly Koscuisko and Joslire).

These aren’t simple shouty discussions. They’re very long, sometimes giving the sense that Matthews is trying to drown what’s actually happening in a sea of irrelevant detail. And they’re very serious, and pay a fair amount of attention to what kind of the social environment makes plausible an ethical system that permits torture and slavery. It’s kinda like The Brothers Karamazov, if The Brothers Karamazov was about BDSM spaceships.

I would say that the book doesn’t actually want to justify torture and slavery as a general practice. It’s funny how I can’t say that for sure! But I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. What it does want to do, however, is justify Koscuisko’s use of torture and slavery. The narrative spends a lot of time establishing why he feels he has to do as his father tells him, and his motivations make sense psychologically.

But the fact that his personal system of honor requires that he hurt undeserving people does not make him a good person. The “Your right to swing your arm ends at my nose” rule is not difficult to apply here - it’s pretty clear where Koscuisko’s arm ends and his victims’ noses start.

The book seems to agree that a person who behaves the way Koscuisko does is not exactly a hero - but the story requires him to be a hero. So, it turns out that Koscuisko a Magical Special Torturer, the bestest Torturer ever, who never extracts false confessions and always uses the minimum force necessary, and whose victims love him after. What he does is okay, because if he didn’t do it, some other crappier Torturer would! And all the slaves on the ship are in love with him by the end of the book.

This is an well-written book, but also a very, very unpleasant one, both because of the material and because of the way it decides to deal with it.

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The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie

This is only the second Agatha Christie book I’ve ever read - I’d heard of it before I read it, forgotten the title, and realized which one it was very quickly. (Shouldn’t have read the back cover blurbs.)

This is another book that feels a lot like an exercise to me. It’s a very tight book, with no real space to develop an emotional attachment to any of the characters. I don’t think my opinion matters here, but for what it is, I think it’s great - there are only a couple of places that don’t feel “fair” to me, and I don’t usually care whether a mystery’s “fair.”

I, uh, can’t talk about this book any more specifically without spoiling it, sorry.

The Jewish stereotype race’s innate skills will include “Best Deals Anywhere” and “Time Is Money.”

The fact that I play this game is giving me, like, complexes.

Had two anxiety dreams last night, then went back to sleep and had a Warcraft dream. I was a Blood Elf attempting to control my demoralized Horde scouting party in the Swamp of Sorrows, where a disaster had taken place, and some sort of level-?? sentient gas creature was stalking the Horde and Alliance in the area.

With the party was a Broken Draenei who was very sad and listless all the time, as well as kind of dumb. But he was the best Mage we had (can Draenei even be Mages?), so I bullied him into doing stuff. His name was “Rosencrantz,” and he had a one-handed mace and nothing in his off-hand. I don’t know.

I should mention that I was a fairly unambiguously evil Blood Elf - I killed some guy for purely character-establishment-related reasons early on - even though I was wearing plate, and so presumably a Paladin. I was also dual-wielding a sword and a polearm. This is clearly badass. I don’t know what a Paladin was doing with Titan’s Grip, maybe I just hit a Warrior so hard it like, fell out.

(Man, I just looked it up and Titan’s Grip doesn’t work on Polearms. Screw that.)

Finally most of my party rebelled against me and ran off to join a party of Dark Iron dwarves nearby, taking Rosencrantz with them, just as the gas creature overwhelmed us. My PoV then switched over to Rosencrantz, and I was feeling guilty about having left the Blood Elf behind, despite the fact that she said mean things to me. I think the dream was setting up to have her come back and sneak into the dwarf encampment and demand I help her with something. But then a dog or something banged into my door and I woke up.

This is not a particularly interesting dream, but it amuses me how clear my subconscious was about everyone’s classes and gear. Also, that it made the Dark Iron dwarves nice and helpful to the defectors - clearly it is impatient with this creepy The Black Dwarves And Tauren Are Evil shit of Blizzard’s. I just wish it had specified whether or not the Blood Elf’s name was Guildenstern.

We got new carpet today, which was very tiring and confusing for everyone involved (me, Mom, the guys installing it, various other animals on the premises (the cats hid and a dog threw up)). So I was pretty distracted when the news came on. There was a story that involved the word “Columbine” and ended with the guy saying that the kids at the middle school all had to sign their names to “Rachel’s Challenge” posted on the wall.

I was staring at my blank computer screen very hard, so it took me a minute to misinterpret this in my usual manner. I misinterpreted it like this: Are they challenging the kids not to murder anybody?

So me and Mom had this conversation:

Me: What was that Columbine challenge thing about?

Mom: Oh. It’s that thing where that girl got shot at Columbine, and they asked her if she was a Christian, and she said -

Me: Oh.

Mom: - but it all turned out to be made up. So it’s a Christian thing they make the kids do.

Me: At the middle school.

Mom: Yeah.

Me: The public middle school with separation of church and state and things going on!

Mom, Exasperated This-Is-Kentucky Voice: Yes, dear.

There was a mandatory Listening To Bible Stories Hour at my public grade school, taught by the same woman who had enforced Listening To Bible Stories Hour for Mom twenty-five years previously. So she has a certain right to roll her eyes at any attempt on my part to act shocked about this.