Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.
Here’s a fun little read — someone’s made a list of the top 40 gay themes, compiled not (necessarily) by popularity, but by the songs themselves and their relationship to the gay world. More interesting and less campy than I expected at first.
(via MeFi)
Dad loaned me St. Patrick’s Gargoyle last time I was in Anchorage, and it was exactly what he described it to me as being — an enjoyable little piece of fluff, basically. Using the concept that some of the Gargoyles we see on churches and buildings are actually angels assigned to Earth, Katherine Kurtz creates an entertaining little mystery story with a touch of light theology thrown in here and there. Not a lot to it — I read the entire thing between Anchorage and Seattle — but a fun little read.
I just found the Blogger’s Manifesto through a link on Doc’s blog. As one of the many people across the ‘net who are blogging, it’s both interesting and amusing — however, for various reasons, I don’t think I’ll be adopting it.
Ow.
Ow ow ow.
My brain hurts.
It’s a good kind of hurt, though. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is an exploration of everything from mathematics to the mechanics of thought and reasoning to Artificial Intelligence, all tied together and interrelated to each other. Fascinating, fascinating stuff.
My big difficulty is that I am really not a math person, so whenever the chapters moved into that realm, I had to muddle my way through as best I could until he moved on to something else that I could comprehend more easily. I haven’t had to work this hard to read and understand a book in a long, long time — and I’ve got to say, I enjoyed it (though I did need to let my brain relax with a bit more light reading afterwards).
Some of the concepts are a bit dated, especially in the areas of AI — the book was first published in 1979, and there’s been a lot of progress since then — but the core concepts that he deals with are most likely the same that we’re dealing with today, just from more advanced positions.
Anyway, neat stuff — definite brain food.
Here’s something interesting — a group called the Experimental Interaction Unit has created what they’re calling an “I-Bomb” (I’m assuming that the ‘I’ stands for ‘Information’). When activated, this I-Bomb creates an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) that destroys all electronic equipment, yet is physically harmless to structures or living beings.
Were units like these set to a high enough power output in the right locations, they could cause incredible amounts of damage, without having to physically harm anyone. Hints of terrorism to come?
It’s been a while since I did this, but two DVDs have come out recently that I knew I had to get, so I went ahead and splurged a bit before heading off to work. My most recent additions to my movie library are….
Legend: the last of the ‘three ‘L”s’ of fantasy from my childhood (the other two being Labyrinth and Ladyhawke) that I needed to pick up. While it doesn’t seem to be for everyone (I think that, like Star Wars, you need to have grown up with it to be as obsessed about it as I am, and seeing it for the first time as an adult doesn’t work as well), it has always ranked as one of my favorite films. Tom Cruise before he got mega-superstar-cocky, the gorgeous Mia Sara, and my all-time favorite Tim Curry role as Darkness, together with the visual splendor that Ridley Scott is so well known for (assisted by what must be a record for “most amount of glitter used in a motion picture”). Too cool.
Real Genius: one of my all-time favorite comedies of all-time — quite possibly my single all-time favorite comedy, in fact. A script that seems to be almost entirely a series of one-liners, all strung together with just enough plot to make it work. I really don’t know how many times I’ve seen this movie — and I’m always willing to watch it again. In the words of Chris Knight: “It’s a moral imperative.”
Incidentally, each of these movies has the distinction of having one of my first “movie star crushes” — Mia Sara in Legend, especially in the black dress given to her by Darkness, and Michelle Meyrink as Jordan in Real Genius. No real point to that fact — it just popped in my head.
Listen to the radio much? I don’t — it seems there’s rarely anything worth listening to anymore. Why? Easy answer — ClearChannel owns a ridiculous amount of the radio stations in this country, and seems intent on driving them all down into blandness and mediocrity. The obvious conclusion: ClearChannel sucks.
(via DayPop)
After a short hiatus to regroup, the Web Standards Project is back up and running. These are the people that I tend to turn to when doing any major redesign on my site, and were instrumental in my decision to re-code my site to be entirely CSS-based and W3-compliant. Good place to start if you’re at all interested in web design.
I first read about Norton I, Emperor of the United States of America in one of the Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman. He was also mentioned in the book I’m reading now, The Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy, by Robert A. Wilson. Quite the interesting — and very real — character, he declared himself Emperor of the United States in 1859. Lots more information about him in his archives — could make for some very interesting reading.
(via MeFi)
