They need 300 people to help with an ancient reinactment.

Singing a Happy Birthday song for wordweaverlynn!!!

I can has RSI? Maybe! I've not got it looked at by a doctor[*] yet, but there's this vague pain-line feeling along my right forearm, and a bit above the elbow as well, which turns out to look an awful lot like descriptions of Radial Tunnel Syndrome. I started noticing this yesterday, and it's currently only at the mild irritation level.

On the bright side, I think my insurance will actually cover countermeasures for such a thing, should that become necessary.

It definitely will not cover the other health thing that's been on my mind lately: a couple weeks ago I noticed that my eyes weren't handling the task of focusing on distant objects (especially stuff like text) as well as they really ought, in some cases. Perhaps countless years of staring at screens and books have finally taken their toll. It's hard to tell, and I'm vaguely wondering if I can at least get tested without paying through the nose and an eternity of red tape. Probably not.



[*] Which would require getting a doctor-like entity first. I have a bit of trepidation about this; not the outright phobia that some people I know have, I don't think, but something. But I have to do something of the sort pretty soon anyway; there was stuff I was supposed to do in January, and never got to, and the administrative powers don't seem to have noticed, yet.

Hmmm.... Hard to say for sure, since my version of God is omniscient, and I'm not.

If I had the power to do it (and my version of God is actually not omnipotent, so that's more of a question), and assuming (1) my interest is focused on Terra, and (2) the aforementioned omniscience doesn't make it seem like a bad idea after all...

I'm disinclined to mess with the existence of death; it seems to much an innate part of how the universe works for me to be entirely comfortable eliminating it -- it would be a very complicated endeavor.

But I think I'd work on eliminating mental illness; I don't really see a benefit to that. Keep variety, mind you, but... I know too many people who suffer from physical or biochemical mind-affecting illnesses, from life-threatening depression, from PTSD, and from related ways-the-mind-tries-to-save-itself-in-traumatic-circumstances. I'm totally not seeing the win in that.

I like housepet's idea of cleaning things up a bit -- give human beings back a fighting chance of undoing some of the damage we've done to the environment we're dependant on -- but if I did do that, I think it'd be important either to be so subtle that no one noticed, or make it so blatantly a literal "act of God" that no one could argue it was All Better Now, No Need To Worry About It Any More.

snort It would be tempting to amend all scriptures, everywhere, simultaneously, by adding a preface reading "Not to be taken literally. Signed, -- God." I suspect, however, it wouldn't work.

I think perhaps in the end I have to go with the conclusion of Fredric Brown's short story (the name of which I can't remember) in which the Devil grans a just-barely-bad-enough-to-go-to-hell man a single wish before he begins his eternal punishment. After a great deal of thought, the man says (something like) "I wish that with no change whatsoever in myself, I should be the most evil, vile, terrible person ever to have lived in all of history through to the future."

OK, I'm going on a vacation with a lot of downtime, so I was hoping to get a lot of drawing in. I usually just travel with a small sketchbook and regular pens, but because of all the free time I'll have on this one, I want to bring some bristol board and my nib pens/ink...

Question: has anyone had problems with bringing ink and/or metal pen nibs on an airplane? I've checked the TSA requirements, and I don't see ink or nibs mentioned anywhere (either as allowed or prohibited). The ink I'd be bringing is in a 1 oz bottle, so the size isn't an issue. The nib holders are plastic and shouldn't pose a problem; I'm concerned about the nibs themselves.

I solemnly swear that I will not blow up an airplane with my illustration gear. I just have this vision of some security guard thinking the nibs are tiny knives or something...

And so this is not just boring textual question bollocks, have some beetle baseball cards I made as part of my senior thesis project. Kind of crafty, in an insane way?



They did indeed have stats and everything on the backs.

The Mario Scarf.

She's knitting the entire first level. As a scarf.

SO COOL.

Mater has her proper cast, but apparently needs to go back to the Fracture Clinic on Tuesday - she doesn't remember why. Also, she's still refusing to eat more than one snack each day.

Except that she wants to back to the cinema on Saturday to see the rest of Mamma Mia!, and to the cafe for the lunch she missed, to make up for last Saturday.

I'm confused ...

Not dead. Just Twittering

21:07 fuck! Now they want the drug test. So I cant start until I get the form in the mail, get the pee test, and they get my result back. #

21:07 I don't mind the test, since thats pretty much standard. But I really could've done all this earlier in the week. #

22:00 @KitiaraTomsen Its supposed to be coming in the mail. *sigh* #

14:49 @foulbastard Adorable! #

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For the past few week, I've been, for the lack of a better term, numb. Not much of a libido, not much of an interest in things, feeling withdrawn, tired, and just generally uninterested in things. I'm not sure why. It might be from social pressures, or from the last few months of stress finally catching up to me, because I remember being actually pretty happy mostly (unless you count the stress of getting mugged, which I think I mostly recovered from).

I'm sure it'll probably pass, but it's interesting to note it while it's going on. If I were unhappy about anything, I'd say I as depressed. But... I don't think so. I'm just feeling worn out.

Anyhow, I have a potential gaming session this Saturday. It'll be interesting to see how that goes in terms of bringing my my mood back up. I'm hoping to use it as a launch for my own Dresden Files game.

i have a few ideas for images to be etched onto metal flasks. i've seen the etching cream for glass on the martha stewart show can't really get any answers on google and i'm wondering if any etching creams would work on metal? i might try that stuff that makes things look frosted but i'm not sure how permanent that would be against wear & tear. i appreciate any help or suggestions :)

Posted on behalf of William Baird. Note that the odd formating around "an"
and "offical" seems to be my fault but I can't get it to come out right and
I cannot see what I am doing wrong.

This is something of a guest post, a truly rare and honored act by
James. Some of you probably recognize me from the occasional taunting
and snarkiness that I visit upon James here. This time I am not
writing to harass James about He3 or some such. I am writing to ask
the uberlarge group of readers of James' LJ for some help.

I am leading up a team of individuals that are entering into the Northrop
Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. Yes, we are an
official team and even have a blog, if an infant one. This is a demonstration
step for an even bigger challenge that we will do next: we're planning on
tackling the Google Lunar X Prize. Our sponsors want to see if we can
tackle something smaller first.

We have been on track, if a little delayed, to do just that. However,
on Monday, the FAA added a whole new set of requirements for tethered
flights and it forces a compression of our testing schedule as we work
to get the paperwork (and it is almost purely paperwork) done.
Because there will be time lost from coding and small scale testing,
we are being forced to test more frequently on our testing grounds in
the SF Bay Area. This means more dinero. Dinero we just don't have.

I will be pounding pavement with our big backers, so to speak, but
that again takes away time from working on our rocket, The Wind at
Dawn. it also takes these companies a looooong time to make
decisions with respect to shelling out money. It's understandable.
It's also not time we have anymore.

Therefore, I am asking for help from the wider net of, well, The Net
and the friendly Denizens there-in.

I have a paypal drive up and running in the hopes that there are
enough interested people that we can raise enough money for three
tests. That's a really nontrivial amount of money, but I can hope.
If 10% of James' readers would be willing to donate $10, we would
probably go a long way towards getting that goal. I would be
delighted if people gave more, btw.

Those that give will be acknowledged on the team blog. Those that put
up a post spreading the word for the paypal drive will get a link
(assuming that your site is not scary) from the blog. Those that
donate substantially more than the $10 will get their name on one of
the fuel tanks.

To donate, please, go to the team website and click on the
donate button.

Any and all help is deeply appreciated.

Thank you for the time spent reading this.

Here go:

Words: 4,060
Total words: 63,080
Reason for stopping: finished chapter twenty-four.
Music: whatever happened to be playing at the time.
Lilly: asleep in my tank top drawer. Again.

I managed to find a) my additional word count, and b) Jason without his shirt on. I basically win at writing. I have defeated all those who might oppose me, and I have returned home with the finest spoils of battle. Said spoils are going to require whacking with a machete before they really qualify as 'awesome,' rather than just 'potentially so awesome it makes my teeth hurt,' but that's why I have a machete. Without a machete, there's so very much that you just can't do.

Almost everything that I have left in this book is wham-wham-wham-action-adventure-wham, which is always fun (and fast) to write. Especially when I'm dealing with Clady, who's seen every horror movie ever made, and is thus immune to many of the stupid horror movie girl cliches. She still makes mistakes. It's just that they're very different mistakes, full of unexpected badness. Putting a horror movie savvy character into a horror movie world is just so much fun. I should have done it years ago. Except that, had I done it years ago, it wouldn't have been Clady. So I suppose there's a reason that everything happens in its own time.

This book has, at most, 10,000 words left to go. And I am loving every single one of 'em. Whee!

What vegetables would you plant now, for a bay area fall/winter garden? As I harvest, I'm freeing up space that I'd love to use.

Life is weird.

Good.

But weird.

Happy 40th to black_pearl_10! May the next few weeks be full of the kind of surprises you like best.

My mom told me when she was in the army and needed comfort food, she would mix milk and root beer for a kind of root beer float. I just remembered this, and tried it. DO IT. NOW. I put some whole milk and a little bit of sugar in the bottom of a glass, and poured in the root beer. After mixing lightly, I took a sip. Almost exactly like the soda from a root beer float after some of the ice cream has melted, which as far as I'm concerned is the only reason to order one. I suppose I could add a tiny dash of vanilla extract, but I'll try that a little later today, I just got done with my lunch (ranch dressing with a little bit of salad and bacos), and my stomach is a bit unhappy with the combination.

I defended my doctoral thesis this past Monday and I wanted to share my fun outfit.  For those of you who care, it's a Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology from U Penn and the topic was interactions between mouse hepatitis virus and the type I IFN response.