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Showing posts from 2016

THE "AT LEAST HE'S HONEST" FALLACY

Whenever someone says about a person, "at least he's honest", that's very handy, because then you know right away that they're talking about a terrible person. Terrible people love to use "honesty" as an excuse to say horrible, nasty things right to your face. They imply thereby that everyone else would say it, but they're all just pretending not to be terrible (they don't explain why, if everyone is so terrible, why we all pretend not to be). Abusers love to make you feel that everyone is really horrible, when actually it's just them. This is the mirror of the whole "hypocrisy is worse than anything else, even genocide" thing I discussed in a previous post .  It's all so adolescent. You catch your parents doing something less than great, and all of a sudden they are EVIL INCARNATE. It's time to grow up and differentiate between failing to live up to your ideals and outright evil actions. Let's try to do that in 20

I MADE YOU A POEM

Photograph by Dimitar Denev .  I've been trying to write an essay about Generation X and popular culture since I saw School of Rock in 2003, but it always eluded me. Then in a fit of insomnia, it came to me as a poem for some strange reason (I'm an English major, but I'm very picky about poetry and don't like most of it). So here it is, enjoy.  Song of the Aging Gen X-er I'm old and I'm tired Of defending what I like. Once it was too odd Now it's too popular, Yet still weird somehow. But why wouldn't I like it? We put weird on the map. We gave you the "graphic novel", I'm not gonna see the movie version? Once it was "Psychotronic" -- King Fu, Horror, Post-Apocalyptic. Now they get awards. And why ever not? Some of us are mad. 1 We had to work so hard to find it. Scour second-hand stores, send away by mail. Self-addressed envelopes. Ask for a ride to the city. "Is the new L & R in yet?&quo

CONVERGENCE 2016 REPORT & CON TIPS

Once again, I had a great Convergence with J, as well as friends T, L, M, & B, even though I had to wear my unfashionable cam boot for tendinitis (J was great about bringing me food, and I commiserated with other Booted-Americans). It actually went pretty well with my Post-Apoc look (I added black mask makeup in tribute to both Furiosa and Lexa from The 100 ). This year, J and I swore to avoid eating out too much, especially the overdone, overpriced horror that is TGIFriday's. We ate all our meals in the Con Suite , except for one trip to Burger King. I also avoided all news except for that trip, a lovely break from the agony of 2016 current events (RIP Prince).  Thursday: 3:30 Crafty Geek Meetup . We hung out a bit and worked on geeky coloring pages.  7:00 Sci Fi TV Year in Review. I'm always wanting to learn about good shows to watch. This was OK, they mostly talked about shows I already knew about, except one guy was weirdly obsessed with Galavant .   I don

I MADE A LASER ENGRAVING & ALSO A 3-D PRINT

So my place of work has a Makerspace now, which means I get to make stuff at work, which is pretty cool. To get ready for Con , I thought I'd make some stuff to add to my steampunk costume. The watch is a pattern I downloaded from Thingiverse . The hands didn't come out, but it still looks cool. The hardest part was scraping out the "raft" - the temporary support part - out of everything. I found I'm not good at scraping the inside of a circle with a utility knife without getting my fingers cut, but luckily I didn't lose any. The cameo was based on a project I saw on Instructables , but unfortunately it wasn't complete, because they were waiting on a Kickstarter or something which never happened. So, I just found a clip art of a Victorian-looking cameo and imported it into CorelDraw, which is what we use with our laser engraver (you can create the designs in other programs and import it as a JPG or PDF into Corel, but I needed the practice). Corel

TAX REFUND POST & BEST AND WORST TECHNOLOGY PURCHASES

So, I just got my tax refund, which means it's time for a big-ticket-item purchase. Usually, it's either technology or home improvement. Last year was both, as I bought a new bigger TV, wire shelving and CD storage. This year, I'm finally replacing Big Iron, my 2007 MacPro tower, with a new iMac. Big Iron was starting not to play nice with current software, not to mention he blows his fan at me sometimes for no good goddamn reason.  Of course, one purchase often leads to others, so I might also try to update my "home office" set-up, maybe a new little table for peripherals, since I won't have a hard drive tower to keep them on, possibly the kind that the Google calls "C" . I have this fantasy of getting selected for Lifehacker's Workspace Show & Tell even though I don't have 6 monitors and a desk made out of a plank from Blackbeard's pirate ship. In honor of tax refund time, here are some of my best (beyond the obvious one

JFRO'S 2015

PIZZA RAT/ CIGARETTE CRAB 2016: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN https://twitter.com/peter_fries/status/646062337833627648 Format once again ripped off shamelessly from the Librarian in Black :  Books -- Station Eleven, The Incident Report , The Haunting of Hill House, Tipping the Velvet, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Wolf in White Van, Dread Journey. Comics -- Museum of Mistakes, New Lone Wolf and Cub, Order of the Stick: Blood Runs in the Family, The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality & the Financial Crisis. Movies -- Snowpiercer, Chappie, Mad Max: Fury Road, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Babadook, Ant-Man, Ex Machina, Tangerine, What We Do in the Shadows  TV Shows -- The Americans, Archer, The Killing (US), Black Sails, The Bridge (US), Danger 5, Silicon Valley, Ray Donovan, Broad City, Sons of Anarchy, Veep, The Blacklist, Nurse Jackie, Mad Men, Brooklyn 9-9, Agents of SHIELD, The Code, Halt & Catch Fire, RuPaul's Drag Race, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, C