Genetics are weird. My niece doesn't have her mother's hands, she has mine. Slightly scaled-down version of the same basic shape, long fingers, long palm. Also, the weird double-jointed ring fingers which bend slightly backwards when straightened. And the baby fingers which curve inward slightly too much, and used to drive my piano teachers crazy, ( Read more... )

It's definitely the apocalypse, I was in the supermarket yesterday and they hit me amidships with the first Christmas carol of the year, "Silent Night" sung in what appeared, for some reason, to be Dutch. This was cruel and unusual in itself, since normally the Geneva convention requires that it be November before Christmas carols are permitted to ( Read more... )

Well, that was odd. I've just had the Protester Ringleader in my office again, to make the course drop we discussed a few weeks back. It was a weirdly cordial interchange, where he apologised for disrupting my lecture and assured me it was just politics, nothing personal. And that he does not in any way endorse the bus-burning and throwing-things- ( Read more... )

I am up unseasonably early as my sister and niece are arriving back from the UK at an unseasonal hour and I have undertaken to collect them from the airport. I confidently predict that the driving experience will give me flashbacks to playing Fallout, i.e. apocalyptic wastelands devoid of people. A tinsel tumbleweed may roll by occasionally. I ( Read more... )

I am incautiously excited for the new Star Wars movies, and open to having my heart, once more, broken if it comes to that, which it very well might given JJ. (Current favourite anecdote: John Boyega being hailed by Samuel L. Jackson at a party, with the salutation "Hey, black Jedi! you my SON ( Read more... )

I love my cat, really I do. Hobbit is a feline of character and authority, as well as being ridiculously fluffy and frequently cute. It's sometimes difficult to remember this, though, when dealing with his post-removals state of miff, because he's completely hideous to live with. He has every reason to be insecure and angsty given the sudden, ( Read more... )

This picture came over my Tumblr feed today, and is making me subtly happy. The artist is Brenoch Adams, whose site repays a browse, lots of lovely and slightly quirky sf and computer game concept art. I love that the tall, gangling, slightly threatening robot in this portrait is so utterly subordinated to the little black girl. And I love that she ( Read more... )

My niece is seven years old. I am sickened and reeling to hear about the elementary school massacre, and I can't even imagine what parents of children must be feeling, let alone the particular parents of those particular kids. I am also moved to admiration of the Harper's Weekly Review response, which is to start their monthly summary paragraph ( Read more... )

Mental Floss has just given me the word I always knew I needed. "Petrichor: The clean, pleasant smell that accompanies rain falling on dry ground. It’s from the Greek petra (stone) and ichor (the blood of Greek gods and goddesses). The term was coined by two Australian researchers in 1964 ( Read more... )

smoczek, being a lady of infinite resource and sagacity, has recently acquired the Fiasco! role-playing system, and five of us spent a somewhat enjoyable few hours in narrative construction yesterday. It's a lovely system: the point is character interactions rather than stats or exploring a world, and the whole thing progresses as a series of highly ( Read more... )