Take that, architectural injustice!

It boggles the mind, it really does. I've known that Islamophobia is alive and well in much of Europe, but there are just these moments that make me wonder.

"No, clearly we are not trying to suppress Muslims! Or even all Islamic culture, really! We just hate the parts that are *oppressive* and restrict the *freedom, rights and well-being* of others. If you're not doing that, it's fine! So, clearly you can see why we have to arbitrarily ban the constructions of an architectural feature in respect to the context of your religion only."

At least anti-burqa sentiment has some semblance of reason to it, since you can at make an argument that it's an instrument of objectifying and controlling women (though I won't weigh in on whether or not it is *always* so). It's hard to explain how a little tower with a balcony can oppress anyone. Oh, my goodness, historically it was used to call people to prayer! Almost like...I don't know...church bells would tell people what time it was, or call people to church. Hmn.

So just admit it. This had nothing to do with fighting an oppressive culture to protect the weak and vulnerable, because even the most progressive, egalitarianism-loving mosque could still want a minaret. This was just xenophobia and suppression of a minority.

Addressing the elephant in the room is difficult enough, given the difficulties of removing said elephant, but even more so when there is a strict cultural taboo concerning even mentioning it. And so, every time the general environmental crisis humanity has brought upon itself and the earth is brought up, every possible means of reducing this difficulty is mentioned except the obvious - make fewer humans.

Don't get me wrong, a lower birth rate alone won't fix everything (the US has a relatively small population but still manages to consume resources and cause pollution at a disproportionate and impressive rate), and certainly I don't think it's easy. People are driven to reproduce, and current economic and retirement systems have long been built on the assumption that more people will be around in the future. Nevertheless, discussion is the first step to improvement no matter how large the problem.

But man oh man, people who just of their own volition choose to not have children are branded as freakish, selfish (oh man, that one just gets me!), deviant and God only knows what else. Daring to even suggest other people *consider* having fewer children for such petty reasons as the welfare of all life on earth (including, as it turns out, many humans present and future, children included!) would be pissing all over the third rail.

Man, good job humanity. Because the existing motivators to reproduce weren't daunting enough; you've gotta' make having children a moral imperative as well.

Oh *crap*.

So, I guess when every other little girl was learning how to put on makeup by reading magazines, going to sleep-overs and pestering their family and friends, I was being a *fantastic* nerd, playing video games, reading fantasy novels and drawing dragons.

This is all well and good! Until I'm an adult and I realize that the entire world perceives my appearance as a reflection as my worth as a person, i.e. looking clean and dressing appropriately isn't good enough. Then it's something of a problem.

And, oh crap! Turns out there's like, *no ways* to learn how to do this as an adult. Crap crap crap!

I've been suffering through this macroeconomics course something terrible. And part of it is how boring I've found it. *Insufferably* boring. But talking to my fictive aunt Tricia, she made me realize that this doesn't quite smell right.

I've struggled with classes before, but it's always been because of some part of the classwork. I've never met a subject that I didn't find at least *somewhat* interesting. English, Literature, Art History, Music Appreciation, Biology, Earth Science, Calculus, Accounting, Anthropology, History? Why yes. Yes I found them all interesting and have integrated all of them into my understanding of the world. Even Interpersonal Communication proved more interesting than this, and as silly and artificial as it may have seemed at the time I did pull away some interesting concepts that I think are genuinely useful. I feel enlightened from all of those courses.

That something as vastly important as the way the economy acts on a national and international scale *cannot be made interesting* to me suggests a problem with the class, not the subject. That is, the teacher's style is completely failing to engage me, and the textbook is almost made irrelevant seeing as how he uses notes that jump all over the blasted thing and uses radically different terms than the book, thus making it impossible to follow along. Which does lead to the question of "why did I have to pay $130 for this doorstop with minimal resale value?"

Also I've really, *really* got to remember that night courses do not agree with me. They ruin my nutrition, my exercise schedules and my sleep schedules. Plus I just cannot absorb the information properly in that context. Also, 3.5 hours of *anything* when you have ADD is just not good.

I read many of the webcomics that have t-shirts over at TopatoCo, and I enjoy a great many of the t-shirt designs there. Some of them are even on colors besides black! OMG!

But I have to wonder about the designs sometimes. I'm not talking about them being weird or obtuse. I'm talking about t-shirts that have the following on them:

1. Curse words.
2. Images of violence that owe less to the sort you'd see in Looney Tunes and more likely to involve, say, blood and severed heads.
3. Images, however cartoony, of male genitalia.
4. I'll even include images of guns on here, because that does tend to make some people nervous. Obviously this is considerably *less* of an issue than the ones above, but whatever.

I guess my question is - where are you supposed to wear these shirts? I mean, they're inappropriate to wear when you're out and about given that all sorts of people can see them (children, grandparents, employers, clients, people who decide whether or not to give you a hassle, etc.), so it seems to me that it comes down to "when you're at home" or "among geeks". And, maybe I'm less dedicated a geek than others, but I don't see the point of buying a shirt that I can only wear at home or on rare convention trips.

Maybe it's just me? I dunno'. But, for instance, I'd totally dig having the MS Paint Adventures Pose as a Team t-shirt if only they'd substituted a less profane word in there. Even the fact that there's guns in there wouldn't bother me too much in this case, given the stick-figure nature of the people wielding them. I feel it'd be disarming. Well, actually, the black color of the t-shirt might be disconcerting in combination with that. Hmn. But the curse words! It's not that *I'm* that sensitive about swearing, it's just that I know a lot of people are, so I don't want to subject them unnecessarily to that stuff, and I'd like to avoid hassles from people who seriously take offense.

Like a waking nightmare, I saw an unholy marriage of monkey and raccoon. In that it was somewhat like a lemur and somewhat like a ringtail, but more burly, with thicker hair and an ability to withstand winters. It was as agile and skilled in climbing as one would expect, with excellent senses of touch from both sides; it seemed (impossibly) to be as visually capable as a monkey during the day, but with similar capabilities to a raccoon at night. More sensitive ears and noses, claws, thumbs, fangs, a rabies vector as well as a potential vector for primate diseases. Highly social, clever and adaptable. No lock, no barrier could withstand them.

Needless to say, this waking nightmare brought an end to human society in the continental US  and southern Canada. I live in fear of the hypothetical monkoon!

After many years of watching animal documentaries and some rather obsessive watching Big Cat Diary every time it's on ever, I've somehow gotten this impression. It would appear that their well-honed set of instincts and a set of physical traits that are useful in most territories don't particularly lead them to be the brightest bulbs. Why waste all that energy? They're hammers in a world of *mostly* nails. It works enough to get by anyway! Lions particularly seem to suggest this, but it may be that it's easier to tell with them. Other cats are often too secretive to observe such behavior in, or so just so damn nervous and jumpy that they just outright run every time something unusual happens that would give us an idea (I'm looking at you, cheetahs!).

Maybe I'm taking it too far, but after watching lions lounging around on a fallen tree that a very perturbed hive of bees calls home while enduring many painful stings and taking roughly forever to get the the hint and shuffle off to one of the ten other sources of shade nearby, I wonder. After watching a lion jogging back and forth between two kills about 100 feet apart to scare the vultures away for the better part of a day instead of just pulling one corpse to the other, I wonder. There seems to be something a little lacking there.

A slightly less glowing review. Best to just list the game's vices and virtues in some order.

Vices:
1. Huge chunks of the game are just ludicrously boring. When you are fleeing from a military unit out for your blood *INSIDE  A  VOLCANO* and you are bored out of your skull, something is wrong. More than anything, this is what I hold against the game. The game is just bad in general, but even that can be excused if it's *fun*. This didn't really seem that fun to me.
2. The whole adults vs. kids theme can eat me. It's not just that "kids are awesome, adults are terrible!" doesn't appeal to me, because I get that I'm not always the target audience. It's that it's played out in the most ridiculous of ways. People use the term "adults" in situations that nobody would. Adults don't perceive themselves as adults, they perceive themselves as *people* - that is, they perceive adulthood as the normal state of human existence, childhood being a weird aberration that you endure at the beginning. You only specify "adult"  when it's absolutely necessary to understanding, and in this game, it rarely was. Also, listening to Gawn go on about how he's such an old-timer and needs to step aside for the younger generation was outright hilarious and insane, given that the man was *in his 30s*. Also, capable of taking down eleven missiles in mid-air with nothing but two six-shooters and finally his own fists.
3. Oh wow, war is bad! NOVEL.
4. Yulie and Jude, arguably the main characters, both wound up disgusting me. Jude largely because he is the living vehicles for the themes mentioned in 2 and 3, Yulie because she is absolutely without personality.
5. Yulie spending the first part of the game lacking in confidence and a sense of self-worth, only for her to gain such things at roughly the same time as her summons stop scaling properly and she can no longer do enough damage to remain as useful.
6. The setting is abysmally weak. Every opportunity the game has to expand on the setting it completely disregards. NPCs you chat up never tell you anything to give you a greater sense of the world - they talk about mundane, normal stuff. More realistic perhaps, but so would having to endure a character taking a bathroom break every hour or so of gameplay. There's no books to read either, and every time you walk through an incredibly interesting dungeon that begs to be explained in detail, the game refuses to give you any explanation as to why you're there, how the place came to be, its relevance to the world's history and the power inherent in it.
7. EVOLUTION  DOES  NOT  WORK  THAT  WAY  DAMMIT.

Virtues:
1. When it embraces the cheese and the camp, WA4 actually picks up and becomes enjoyable. When Kresnick comes blasting through a skylight on his motorcycle to aim a gun dramatically, things are awesome. When villains show up and are over-the-top, things are awesome. When Lambda shows up dressed like an admiral from 1980s space opera anime and cries manly tears for humanity, things are awesome. Sadly, none of these things last long enough.
2. Actually, all of Brionac is pretty damn fun to watch. Anti-tank chainsaws! Shooting churches apart with a railgun out of spite! Dual-wielding teleportation fights! Augst, just Augst!
3. Also, this game's own Ball With a Bunch of Faces on It, the High Council, is also super cheesy awesome. Watching ancient guys dressed up like VR Troopers talking evil plots and denouncing democracy in their hidden chamber of evil while laughing maniacally was uplifting every time it happened. Suddenly I was having fun with the game again! 
4. Wait, why are all the cool parts of this game related to the antagonists?

One day, Black and  White Morality and Gray and Gray Morality were fighting viciously, as usual. From stage left emerged the Ending to Wild Arms 2, casually moon-walking over to drop into a dramatic split between the two and simultaneously punch them both in the crotch. Before leaving the stage, WA2's Ending also casually punches all manner of Cultural Taboos across the damn room. Surveying the damage, WA2's Ending casually dusts its hands off and wanders off, whistling a jaunty tune.

Oh. Also, translation issues aside, one of the greatest RPGs I've ever had the pleasure to witness. Crowning Moments of Heartwarming and Badassery abound. Characters are likable and interesting. Luceid goes from "evil wolf for no apparent reason"  in Wild Arms 1 to being the embodiment of Filgaia's desire, and all that encompasses - needs and wants, goals and dreams, the will to live and the drive to push forward. Ashley and Marina have the most adorable damn relationship possible.

Okay, some parts are terrible, like any part with Liz and Ard, but largely the game is incredible. So glad I got to play it through.

I decided to start eating healthy, to make exercising easier. As it turns out, if you keep the body properly hydrated and nourished, it does better at the physical exertion thing. So processed foods are all but gone. Here is what my daily diet consists of nowadays:

1. Kashi GoLean cereal. Chock full of fiber and protein and an awful lot of nutrients. Tastes like cardboard, but that's what a bit of cinnamon and fruit is for.
2. Banana!
3. 2.5-3.0 cups of milk.
4. Baked potato with minimal fats added.
5. Big salad full of leafy greens.
6. 100g of chickpeas.
7. 1 or 2 large eggs, prepared in various ways (typically poached).
8. The rest is filled in through various means, changing from day to day. Usually fruits and vegetables (fresh, frozen and canned are all employed!). Also oatmeal (non-instant), occasional small amounts of nuts.

It was surprisingly easy to switch to this. Furthermore, it is a surprisingly *tasty* diet. My mind sometimes rebels against the whole thing in strange ways. I don't really feel any urge to eat processed foods, but I'll be damned if my mind doesn't think the whole thing is fishy somehow.

Current Mood: hopeful

Mom's doing stuff for the Literacy Volunteers around here, and her own student, a Chinese woman named Ling, has *totally* asked for the inevitable - a list of coarse and vulgar words from English. The essential list of naughty words. Mom has naturally passed this task on to Thomas and me.

...HOLY BALLS THIS IS INVOLVED.

Today, accounting proved somewhat sad. A current concept we are learning is the High-Low Method of separating mixed costs into their fixed and variable components by choosing the situation with the highest level of activities and costs and the lowest level of activities and costs within a period and using the differences between them to determine the two variables - the variable cost per unit of activity, and the fixed cost that's constant between the two.

Even if you don't get the accounting nonsense, all you really need to know is that you end up with the makings for two equations:

M1x + b = C1
M2x + b = C2

Where M1, M2, C1 and C2 are all constants supplied by the data you pull from. Now, basic algebraic principals give us happy news here - if you have two different variables and two different equations in which they are involved (and there are no other variables, of course), you can solve for them, like so:

M1x + b = C1
b = C1 - M1x

Then, plug b defined in terms of x into the other equation:

M2x + b = C2
M2x + C1 - M1x = C2
M2x - M1x = C2 - C1
x(M2-M1) = C2 - C1
x = (C2-C1)/(M2-M1)

Tada! The difference in costs over the difference in activity levels equals the variable cost per unit of activity. That's awesome. Then you just plug that back into either of the equations you started from to figure out what the fixed cost (b) is. Awesome.

Not the hardest proof, right? This is basic algebra. I learned this stuff back in fifth and sixth grade. I put this up on the white board during class and although a couple people got it, most of the class would've been as enlightened if I'd put it up on the board in hieroglyphic form.

I place the blame on two things, I suppose. First, the tendency of students to roll their eyes at math and go, "when am I ever going to use this?" Second, I imagine that in normal math courses (I was always in advanced classes, you see) the idea is more about plugging numbers into equations and getting past the standardized tests, not about actually understanding what the Hell is going on. So if information is presented in any manner but some arbitrary standard, the students flounder and wonder what's going on.

Either way, I'm fairly disappointed. I imagine this'll happen a lot, because compared to earlier chapters in accounting, this one's gonna' involve an awful lot of algebraic goodness.

Well, there were a lot of dreams about David this morning, but one dream was one of those vista dreams, where *you're* not really in the dream, you're just panning about and observing some crazy shit going on. And today, it was a good one.


The subject - a floating magical city. A grand old staple of fantasy-inclined novels, comics and video games for some time now. Usually they're centered around architectural styles from the following list: Classical, Islamic, Gothic, or Bullshit Elven*. Yet, that was not this city.

This city was a bizarre mishmash of Viking longhouse, Viking longboat and old Nordic architectures. And it became increasingly clear that in addition to being a place of magical awesome, that this floating city was a damned invasion force. And populated by a race of northmen giants, hellbent on victory.

Clearly, in spite of quitting WoW, my brain needed to take Dalaran and the Vrykul, and combine them into something far, far cooler than either alone.


*Easily recognized by its ridiculous adherence to aesthetics without any regard to functionality or the need to shield precious books, artifacts and old wizards from the elements. "Magic" is often the explanation, because somehow diverting magical energy from more important things is preferable to just FINISHING THE DAMNED WALL.

You work at an accounting office. You do geeky things like play video games and read books for fun.

A recipe for disaster reads as follows:

Step 1: Realize you haven't done a push-up since public school.
Step 2: Wonder, "how many could I do now?"
Step 3: Decide to find out.

Produces two mangled noodle arms, serves one.




PS: Five of the sissified variety.

Little thing driving me nuts since heading to Northrend in WoW:

Who the heck did up the turkey model, seen here, here and here?

Have you ever *seen* a turkey outside of insipid banners for Thanksgiving bought at the dollar store? It would appear all turkeys are male, massively obese and in a constant state of sexual arousal.

I know this doesn't matter at all to most people, but it just rips me right out of the game since I've seen wild turkey. They're lean, sharp-looking things, alert and able to fly with far greater finesse than one might think.

(Note: Some of these turkeys are seen around settlements in Northrend, so they may be semi-domesticated in those situations, but given the low level of protection they seem to be receiving from the elements and predators, it's more likely they resemble wild turkeys in conformation and behavior than the modern domestic turkeys of our world).

Yes, yes I am a bit crazed. It's true!

EDIT:

Oh, and what is with the new worg model in Northrend, as seen here? I mean, I'm all for skinny saber-toothed canids, but that crouching posture it has in that picture there? That is what it does *all the time*. Its limbs are never even remotely straight beneath it. This is absolutely ridiculous to look at. It's not just wrong for canids, it's wrong for just about any mammal - keeping the limbs fairly straight beneath you is just the most efficient way of standing and moving. I would really like this new model if it weren't for the abysmal posture.

WTB t-shirt of a geeky persuasion in anything but BLACK, BLACK OR MORE BLACK.

No, super-dark navy isn't good enough.

Seriously, what the hell?

I hold all the geeks and their monochromatic fashion sense responsible.

There's something about these two months. My mood just goes downhill. Maybe it's the reduced hours of sunlight, a bit of the SAD at work. Can't say.

I don't enjoy anything much anymore. Drawing, reading, writing, video games, World of Warcraft, talking to people - none of it. I feel slightly better when I'm occupied, but it tends to be busy-work and the like. Things that are fun take effort, and I have none of that. Being at work is actually when I'm least unhappy, assuming there's enough for me to do. No time to think or dwell on what I feel like (or don't feel like).

I'm reluctant to go home when work is over. Worse yet, I'm reluctant to go to bed at night. I'm trying to unravel why that is - it has something to do with ill feelings toward myself and...dread, I think. Dread that once I go to bed I'll soon be waking up and have to face another day. Dread of that time I spend awake in bed, *thinking*, typically thoughts full of regret. But there's also some component of not liking myself, and I'm not sure how not going to sleep fits into that. Is it a punishment? A means of mitigating suffering? I'm not sure.

Yeah. Screw you, October and November.

Dear Tea:

I admit it. I'd just come off a long-time relationship with Mountain Dew, and it just wasn't good for me. I was looking for a simpler, easy-going relationship when I met you. I didn't want to get so involved again.

And yet here I find myself, just as in love as before. And it scares me, as I consider buying 520 tea bag samplers from Stash.

Why do I do this to myself, I wonder?



(Seriously. I'm fairly sure the mugs of tea count for yesterday was *nine*. Nine! Fortunately not all of them were caffeinated but...)

WAIT A MINUTE.

Let's review the facts.

1. Anthropomorphic means having a form resembling that of a human.
2. Humans presumably have forms resembling those of humans.
3. Humans are animals.

We can only deduce that humans are *anthropomorphic animals*.

Every day we are surrounded by people dressed up like *anthropomorphic animals*. Men, women, children! In public and private! The furry invasion is all around us.


Note: This may all be the result of an argument I was writing on a forum concerning why arbitrarily applying the term "furry" to some anthropomorphic beings and not to others (particularly in a fantasy setting) is questionable. In fantasy settings in particular the humanoid shape seems to be unusually common (which admittedly betrays an ignorance of anthropology, anatomy and evolutionary biology, but whatever) so it's rather silly to place divisions between some humanoids and others based on how closely they resemble *one* humanoid race.

Feeling very gassy.

About to go to the gynecologist.

Can they share a New York apartment?

Current Mood: oh dear