I Am Completely Serious

I had seen this picture before, but I hadn't realize it was official art. Please note the reference photo Edgeworth's got there.



This quote about Lang is also great:

Originally the designer wanted him to be shirtless, but was told no. So he gave Lang a feather boa, figuring that if his nipples were covered that would make it okay, but it didn't. He even tried to justify it by saying Lang was in astronomy club in high school, and he wanted to show off the 7 scars on his chest that make up the constellation Orion. The director did not buy that either.

How many of the Phoenix Wright people just wandered over from some kind of bara game studio? (Bara game studios do exist, right?)

I can't do anything about it, so I decided to get anxious about internet privacy instead, because of this sort of stuff. So I installed Ghostery and Do Not Track Plus, and switched my default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo. Then I laid my bloody palm across my face and tore Google CEO Eric Schmidt to pieces with my bare hands, unless I in fact merely watched more Baccano! and subsequently confused it with real life. I'm worried that my personal metaphors may be getting too violent recently.

So I read the Hairpin regularly, and stuff that is on its brother-blog the Awl frequently gets cross-posted to it without it being entirely obvious that is a crosspost.

This is fine! But I need to remember to look at the header to make sure it's not an Awl post before I look at the comments. Because I mean geez.

Maybe somehow marking your blog as being Girl repels a certain class of creep? I should throw up some pictures of pink shoes, or whatever you do.

I did poorly on the vocab section, I think okay on the grammar, and fine on the listening. (Is the listening always really easy compared to the other sections, or have my two tries at the test been anomalous? It's not just my troubled relationship with kanji; it seems to use less complex vocab and grammatical structures than the other sections.

Relatedly, people laughed at some of the wrong answers in the listening section. I feel like it's a design flaw in the test that this happens.)

This is the first time that I've taken it that there has not been snow, and the first time that I've actually made to the test site in which I have not wrecked the car. (Which is to say, it is the second time that I've actually made it to the test site.) It is also the first time that my car battery has ever died for reasons that were not my fault. It chose to do this in an expensive hotel garage.

I fortunately was staying at the hotel on the campus where the test was being held, so my morning plans weren't dependent upon having a working car. Also, I discovered the problem several hours before the test, not immediately afterwards. I thus had plenty of time to stop panicking before my attempt drive out of Washington, DC in the dark (for the first time, obviously). I meditated, ate oatmeal, etc.

After the test, I talked to the garage attendant, who asked a campus security officer to jump the battery for me. This took a while, and it was the security officer's opinion that I needed to get the engine checked. I left about an hour later than I'd wanted to, but I made it out of the DC traffic without dying, which was my real goal for the evening. At one point three deer nearly ran out in front of me, which was not what I expected my obligatory near-accident to be. DC's geography is very weird.

While I was there, I went over to Dupont Circle and gloated over the destruction of the world's most unpleasant tea shop, which has been replaced by both 1) a shoestore identical to another shoestore that's just across the street, and 2) a much nicer tea shop which was nonetheless still wayyy too expensive.

I took the drive in two stages, and thus slept Friday and Sunday nights on thegeekgene's couch, conveniently located almost precisely at the midpoint between home and DC. I don't know how she managed to do that. Good job on college selection, thegeekgene.

On Friday night, I mentioned my plans to cut all my hair off in the hearing of one of her roommates, who promptly asked if she could have the clippings. She performs in burlesque drag shows, and had apparently been wanting to make some facial hair out of actual hair; my hair's nearly the same color as hers. I told her I'd ask the stylist about this, which I did, but the stylist didn't like the idea, feeling that my hair was not long enough for it to be practical for her to try and save all the scraps.

So, I did not help someone prepare for their drag act on Saturday, making Saturday pretty much like every day.

Today after I left thegeekgene headed off to DC herself, to Occupy Washington for a bit. Dad blames this on me, presence in DC evidently being contagious. She called a while ago to explain that she has found a place to sleep, is aware of tomorrow's weather forecast (bad), and has her blanket, coat, etc. She doesn't have a placard yet. Mom told her not to get wet and to remember to use her emergency credit card if necessary. (Is it entirely appropriate to bring your emergency credit card to an Occupation, I wonder?)

From a long essay about Google and Amazon by a guy who's worked for both:

But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.

Though the article's more about why Google's APIs are mostly crap. Now I know!

"Apparently there is an old forgotten Danish law that nobody cared to remove, that says that if the Öresund sea freeze, and a Swede walks over to Denmark, Danes are allowed to hit him with sticks. The law doesn’t mention Norwegians, so they are free to visit."

"Even our nature is ridiculously safe. We have no nature catastrophes like hurricanes, earthquakes or big forest fires. No mountains to fall from. Our biggest predator is the fox, and our only poisonous snake is only sort of lethal if your old or sick. So when a moose swam from Sweden to Denmark, we freaked out! Because what if it stepped on someone!?"

If someone asked me to list Kentucky's primary natural dangers, I'd probably say deer in the road, copperheads, flash floods, getting lost in a cave, Gatewood Galbraith, and bobcats. That's in descending order of the physical threat that they tend to present.

Please see cleolinda's timeline for a description of this situation, if you're not familiar with it. Disclaimer: I'm a fan of both Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown's work, have been reading Brown's blog for years, and know nothing about Joanna Stampfel-Volpe and Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation.

swan_tower says something close to what I have been thinking about the situation involving rachelmanija and sartorias's YA book:

But even without the evidence I've seen and you haven't: one side was careful not to make this personal, and the other side was not.

It is armchair psychology time. Armchair psychology time comes in the evening after I've had some tea but before I've given the cats their pills.

The law firm I work for does a lot of plaintiff's work, which means that we represent people who have decided to sue other people (or corporations). Some of them call bewildered with fury over the awful things that have happened to them. Some of them lie.

These groups overlap. It has been my observation that they overlap very heavily.

We like to believe that we're the Good Guys. To do that, we also need to believe that we have enemies, who are the Bad Guys. We tell stories about this to ourselves constantly, even though we know better; they're comforting, and usually harmless. I mean, our private conclusion that our ex was born with horns, one hoof, and a dog-eared copy of The Fountainhead is not really going to do him or her much damage. The friends to whom we impart this knowledge at 9:42 PM know better than to act upon it materially. Mostly, so do we.

( Read more... )

Regardless of all of this, due in large part to Stampfel-Volpe's comments, you can now find a lot of people saying, whew, there's no homophobia in YA publishing after all! How nice.

Again, take a look at cleolinda's timeline: after Brown and Smith's announcement went up, twelve other authors, many of whom also used their real names, showed up to say that exactly the same thing had happened to them.

I think that that indicates a problem, people.

Mom has been teaching thegeekgene how to quilt. I think she should make a quilt like this.

1) On Monday there was a little pageant about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Some slightly anachronistic terminology was used. Apparently the colonies seceded, in part, due to regulation creating a hostile environment for business.

Guess who was in the pageant, reading all his lines with a bizarre inflection that he insists is a British accent, but in fact bears no similarity to any dialect known to mankind? Also, kept waving at us in the crowd and making faces while the other actors were talking?

2) Read George R. R. Martin's Dying of the Light. If he sticks to the narrative pattern presented by this book, then Song of Ice and Fire will end with everybody either dead or desirous of that state.

3) The puppy has chewed up all the things. There are no things left.

4) And I don't actually think this is related, but I can't find the elastic strap that holds my bento set together. My life is pretty harrowing.

5) Some idol group put a CG girl into an ad without telling anyone beforehand that she was CG. Some fans of the group apparently worked out that she wasn't real, not because of any evidence in the commercial itself, but because of some hints in the biographical information the group released about her.

Because the animation in the ad is very good; the only giveaway, I think, is that she's a little too close to the Japanese ideal of beauty. If they'd made her a little heavier or her skin a little rougher, I wouldn't have been able to tell which one wasn't real. She's basically a comp of the facial features and movements of several of the other actresses. They just made models of the features in question, then attached little sensors to their faces and recorded them talking.

The comments on that article are pretty hilarious:

Her mouth and head movements were a dead giveaway… looks extremely artificial.

Uh-huh. Again, if I understand the video correctly, the mouth movements were essentially copied directly from one of the other group members.

In the third video, she blinks oddly at the beginning and her head movement looks a little jerky (the wave at the end too, but that could be attributed to nervousness if she were human).

I think an awful lot of people must fail this individual's Turing test. Seriously, I doubt anyone who wasn't alert to the possibility would even suspect that CG had been used there. (And the wave is just how Japanese teenaged girls wave when they're trying to be cute. I can't see anything at all weird about it.)

What's interesting about this to me is that, judging by the making-of video, what was done was about 75% an engineering thing. As in, it looks like the input from artists was mainly just in assembling the comp. Which probably means that in six years, the hardware and software used to make the facial meshes and capture the expressions will be available to consumers for $79.95 at the six-years-from-now-equivalent of Best Buy, for use in rendering your six-years-from-now-equivalent of WoW avatar more expressive. (Six-years-from-now-equivalent of Second Life will still be four years behind.) Teleconferencing may get pretty weird in the future.