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Gitmo the Hell Out of Here [May. 17th, 2008|11:10 pm]

stevegreen
[Tags|]


Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay?

What's next, Carry on Waterboarding?

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Ooh, Canada! [May. 17th, 2008|06:08 pm]

papersky
We've just come back from the trip down to the border to actually do the "landing" bit of being landed immigrants. Some of us were a bit worried that they'd change their minds at the last minute, but they didn't. We left Z's girlfriend in our apartment with instructions to post all the books if they wouldn't let us in again... but they did. We are home! We are as Canadian as possible under the circumstances!

We've been working towards this for a long time.
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Short Review: Wolf's Rain (no Spoilers) [May. 17th, 2008|05:29 pm]

jeriendhal
[Tags|]

Summary: In an alternate world where wolves have been all but rendered extinct, the few remaining hide in the human cities, cloaked by magic in human guises. A band of four wolves flee from the city to seek Paradise, the wolves' original home. But their quest may end the world, for no wolf may enter Paradise while Humanity still lives.

Review: A nice, tight little one season series, marred only by an inexplicable four episode recap in the middle.

Oh, and if you've seen it and think the ending is either a bummer or makes no sense? You need to brush up on your Norse Mythology.
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A mother’s pride [May. 17th, 2008|05:29 pm]

deannahoak
[Tags|]

Originally published at Deanna Hoak. Please leave any comments there.

Evan’s school photo came this year with a note attached saying that the school was sure I’d want the photo retaken, because it hadn’t come out well.

Here it is:

So…yeah, the photographer didn’t do the best job cropping; and yeah, Evan is squinting in the sun. But all I can think of when I look at that photo is, “Damn, my son is gorgeous!”

I kept it. :-)

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The Unicorn and the Wasp [May. 17th, 2008|10:02 pm]

thewhiteowl
[Tags|]
[mood | full]
[music |Coldplay - Shiver]

Spoilerzzzzz )
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34 years ago today [May. 17th, 2008|09:23 pm]

xnamkrad
[Tags|]
[mood | sad]

One of my brothers Jimmy had just finished work, and was getting ready to go home. He left the office and walked thru a garage to get his motor bike, saying hi to a young man working on the forecourt. The bike was in a shed, and while Jimmy was unlocking his bike he heard a 'thump' sound, nothing too loud. In fact he though it was a tyre that had burst.
Turning around, the first thing he saw was the young man - dead.
Three car bombs had just exploded in Dublin city center, and another one in Monaghan. In all 34 people were murdered that day, making it the worse loss of life in the 'Troubles'.

It took a long time before Jimmy didn't react badly to loud noises. 

We reckon that it was the fact he was in the shed saved his life as that protected him from the blast wave - he was within 50 yards of one of the bombs. Had the bomb exploded a few seconds earlier or later he would have been another one of the victims.
 

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Post processing an IR augmented photo [May. 17th, 2008|01:28 pm]

lrc
I made a post here: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1036&thread=27959016

But in short, I'm curious how people would process this raw file:
http://red4est.com/lrc/pix/rawfiles/imgp5239.pef


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[May. 17th, 2008|09:04 pm]

dakegra
bollocks. Just uploaded the 125 photos I took at EB's birthday party. Most of them blurred, most of them with my 50mm prime lens.

stupid thing. I took a few with the 18-55mm kit lens, and they've come out just fine. That said, I used the flash on quite a few of those.

note to self: do not use 50mm lens with no flash when taking photos of kids enjoying themselves. It puts a right dampener on an otherwise great day.


[edit] of course, I suspect User Error - the room was reasonably well lit, and I was shooting at f/2 in aperture priority mode, so it was about 1/30s to 1/40s exposure, at ISO400, no flash.

where am I going wrong, photographer types? Is it me? Is it the lens? Couple of the 50mm photos came out really well, and I've had a few great ones, but not as many as I'd like, and I don't see that it's particularly sharper than my 18-55mm kit lens. It does great bokeh...
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Doctor Who 4.07 The Unicorn And The Wasp [May. 17th, 2008|08:15 pm]

pickwick
[Tags|]

Ha. As many people have pointed out, that was utter crack, but I liked it anyway. Probably because I was a HUGE Christie fan in my teenage years.

Comments )
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Light Note # 2 [May. 17th, 2008|03:46 pm]

ebenstone
[Tags|, ]
[mood | amused]

Watching the Subway Series game with the daughter....Bobby Abreu hit a HR and Jeter hit a double off Santana to make it 6-4 Mets....she threw up! That's my girl!
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Sale: 50% off all in-stock and forthcoming Night Shade titles [May. 17th, 2008|12:41 pm]

jlassen

t’s sale time again at Night Shade Books. We’ve got a few big titles coming in, and we need to clear space in a big way! So until midnight on Sunday, May 25th, we’re offering 50% off all in-stock and forthcoming Night Shade books. Use the coupon code 50NSB2008, and there is a four book minimum order.

Not only do we have some great books, including Harry Turtledove’s After the Downfall, Tim Lebbon’s Bar None, Jay Lake’s Madness of Flowers, Graham Joyce’s How to Make Friends with Demons, and Glen Cook’s An Empire Unacquainted with Defeat, coming in the next few months, but we’ve also added, for the first time, the infamous Night Shade Books Posse T-Shirts. These are printed on American Apparel sweat shop-free high quality shirts and Made in the U.S.A., and will feature a clever quote from a well-known genre personality (T-Shirts will be shipping on approximately June 15, 2008). We’ve also uncovered a handful of slip cases, for our Lord Dunsany and Manly Wade Wellman collections, that we’re making available on a first-come, first-serve basis.

And don’t forget our forthcoming anthologies: The Living Dead, Fast Ships, Black Sails, and Eclipse 2.

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Dear Hive Mind, [May. 17th, 2008|12:21 pm]

kijjohnson
Just as last year, I am teaching the Novel Writers Workshop this summer, which involves a lot of reading and preparation. However, I am insane, so (also as last year), I am planning on also taking Jim Gunn's short fiction Writers Workshop.

I find myself once more in the position of writing three stories in a limited time. Last year, I only had an idea for one of them, so I asked [info]athenais to pick two topics from my LJ interests list. She selected macaques and gazing into the abyss, and I wrote "26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss," which is in this year's July Asimov's.

For the third story, I posted a poll, intending to use the top two ideas to get going. In the end, I used the top four: extinct birds, sex, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and a chatty fool to write "Wife reincarnated as a solitaire—Exposition on the flaws in my spouse's character—The nature of the bird—The possible causes—Her final disposition." I sent this precisely one place before I decided that the world probably wasn't interested in my Tristram Shandy pastiche, however successful I think it.

Both the poll and the LJ interests thing worked rather well, so I am going to see what happens this time. A few of these are leftover from last year, but that doesn't mean they're any more intriguing to me than the rest on the list. You don't have to pick four, though you're certainly welcome to.

Poll #1189521 What do you think? 2008 edition
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

What should the stories include?

View Answers

Skeletons
9 (30.0%)

Non-climbing sport (which one?)
2 (6.7%)

Self-delusion
9 (30.0%)

Pre-1960 technology (which one?)
0 (0.0%)

A specific work of art as a metaphor or model (link?)
2 (6.7%)

Nonhuman narrator (not a cat, canid, or monkey; what then?)
4 (13.3%)

Revisionist history
11 (36.7%)

Barley
8 (26.7%)

Page of Pentacles
8 (26.7%)

Unpleasant realizations
7 (23.3%)

The Bardo
5 (16.7%)

The element carbon
1 (3.3%)

River rocks
17 (56.7%)

Driving
3 (10.0%)

Exquisite confusion
14 (46.7%)

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I know you planned it, I can't understand it* [May. 17th, 2008|07:53 pm]

ajr
Spoilers for Doctor Who 4.07 )
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Flying with Leo [May. 17th, 2008|01:43 pm]

shunn
[Tags|, ]
[Current Location |Chicago, IL]
[music |CNN babble about Ted Kennedy's seizure]

Here waiting at O'Hare in International Departures. Our Alitalia plane just landed. I'm watching it pull up at the jetway outside the windows. The plane has a name. We are flying the Leonardo Da Vinci.
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Lurve, lurve, lurve. [May. 17th, 2008|06:14 pm]

maetang
[Tags|]

Based on the TWoP recaps of BSG Season 4, my latest theory of how it's all going to end is...

Rocks fall; everybody dies.

***

Tony Head is giggling on ITV now, with his partner, Sarah Fisher, on All Star Mr and Mrs. They are very cute together. :^)

(I am eating stir fry with udon noodles in homemade satay sauce with extra chili, as I watch. It tastes better than it looks.)

She's down to earth, and he's full of helium. It's a good combination.

Aw, man! They are cute! It's delightful. :^D
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Daily quota of obsession [May. 17th, 2008|06:35 pm]

thette
Am I the only one who noticed Lucy Saxon's black eye in Last of the Time Lords?

And again, David Tennant plays the Doctor as if he were Miles Vorkosigan. I mean, really, an analyst's salute.

The differences between Martha and Rose are all the more obvious on a rewatch. Rose saved the world because she loved the Doctor and she did it through love, while Martha saved the world because she believed in the Doctor and did it through belief. (Tinkerbell!Doctor always makes me laugh.) And the difference between "Stuck with you, that's not so bad." and "We're stuck. All of space and time, he promised me, and now I've got a job in a shop. Got to support him." Martha might have been in love, but she was in love with the glamour of time and space travel. It was rather obvious she'd leave already in Blink.
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Annoying e-mail [May. 17th, 2008|12:21 pm]

redbird
[Tags|, , , ]
[mood | annoyed]

So, on alt.poly someone asked whether the women on the group had gotten email from the resident misogynist troll, Orlando Fiol, I think with the goal of seeing whether zie could come up with any correlation between those who had heard from him and those who hadn't. His pattern appears to be to send a relatively innocuous email to a woman, then push for more intimate correspondence, and eventually blow up and call the woman in question a bitch when she either says explicitly that she doesn't want to have sex with him, or tells him that she doesn't want to spend as much time on the correspondence as he is asking for. On-group, he behaves as though he believes that poly women will have sex with anyone, and therefore it is discrimination when a woman turns him down. This is one reason why I and many other people, not all female, have him kill-filed.

I posted, saying that I'd gotten one message from him, asking an innocuous question, and that I had not answered the email, but posted the information to the newsgroup, because I didn't want to correspond with Orlando, but am generally happy to talk about chocolate. That got me an almost immediate emailed response, demanding to know what my beef with him is, given that he has not come on to me or devalued my intellect. He actually asked "Why am I apparently unworthy of corresponding with you?" This fits his pattern: someone who doesn't want to be his friend, for whatever reason, is accused of thinking s/he's better than he is. (If I offered someone friendship, and was turned down in a way that felt condescending, I would not be inclined to pursue them, because I'd expect that even if I could convince them to spend time with me, they would continue to be rude and condescending.)

I have followed up to myself on alt.poly, explaining why I do not want to correspond with him, and telling him that I will consider any further email from him as harassment. I don't know whether this will make any difference; he has a history of ignoring "do not send me email" requests, demanding to know why he shouldn't send email, and claiming that his right to an explanation trumps other people's right to be left alone.

My post (minus headers and the quoted previous post) says

OK: For the record. My beef with Mr. Fiol is that he has harassed many of my friends, and that he is either incapable of, or unwilling to, consider women as independent people who have desires and agendas that may not fit his. I do not choose to correspond with people, of any gender, who harass my friends. I do not choose to correspond with people who behave as though they have the right to sex with someone, regardless of that person's desires.


Orlando, I know you're reading this. Do not email me again. If you do, I will consider it harassment, and will contact your ISP.



[I had thought about posting this friends-locked so I didn't need to worry about copyright issues, and quoting his entire email, but it is more important to me to make this public, and name the idiots (for those of my friends who aren't on alt.poly), so I've paraphrased instead.]
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Not a good night [May. 17th, 2008|08:09 am]

redbird
[Tags|]

It feels as though I spent most of the night lying flat on my back in bed, awake, with my eyes closed. I am fairly sure this is an exaggeration, and I didn't actually open my eyes to look at the clock. (Part of why I doubt I spent that much time awake is that I never got sufficiently bored or frustrated to get up and read, or even have a glass of milk.) I woke up with a dull pain in my abdomen and the feeling that that, too, had been there a while.

I have taken percocet, and am drinking tea. I may need ibuprofen instead, or in addition. I will likely try to nap this afternoon. The only thing I need do, other than continue to recover from surgery, is go to the post office to pick up a package: Wednesday evening (5/13) I found, lurking in my mailbox, a package slip dated 5/8 (a day when I was home except for a short walk, from which I returned to find the letter carrier at the mailboxes, so it's possible the letter carrier buzzed when he arrived, got no answer, and didn't try again before leaving the building). The slip said "final notice" and that my package, from [info]elisem, will be returned to the sender next Friday. The amount of time from 5/8 to 5/23 is not unreasonable, if the slip was actually in the box all that time; getting a single notice, labeled "final," is annoying.

ETA: The trip to the post office and Greenmarket was basically smooth, though I did take a few minutes to rest on a park bench while [info]cattitude went to the liquor store. And now I am wearing "Of Violets and Electricity," and very glad to have bought them.
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Last night's dream. [May. 17th, 2008|11:57 am]

maetang
[Tags|]

Read more... )
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The worm has turned... [May. 17th, 2008|12:04 am]

jlassen
So, its not like Chris Matthews hasn't spent the last 8 years lambasting liberals and democrats. But proof that he is a showman who easily shifts with the prevailing wind is evidence in the following video. It's really funny. I guess when the president is facing historically low favorability ratings, even a hack like Matthews doesn't need a weatherman...

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