I saw this movie when it came out. I really love Banderas. We bought the movie, but I only re-watched it a time or two. Now comes Tor's electronic newsletter, with an amusing skewering of inaccuracies and a love letter to the film craft, particularly regarding language barriers. Now I want to watch it again! (And of course I adore The Hunt for Red ( Read more... )

I am currently a backer for the Kickstarter magazine WOMEN DESTROY SCIENCE FICTION. As a part of the reward to backers, Lightspeed magazine is publishing essays to the Kickstarter community by various authors about discovering more-than-male-gender in speculative fiction, and how, and why. Compliments of the ever-prolific Seanan McGuire, I ( Read more... )

My Dad was not the extrovert in the crowd. Yeah, I got most of this from Mom. But what I got from Dad is that it's not your voice that matters nearly as much as your presence. ( Show up and be counted... on. )

My Dad is - ahem! - was a classic nerd. As a child, he took apart clocks to see what made them tick - literally - and built radios out of spare parts. As a college student at Berkeley, Dad was far more interested in the chemistry lab than in the anti-war/social-based protests going on right outside of the building ( Read more... )

On Monday, Achaosofkittens and I played hooky from work to spend the day together. Not only did the goats do us the courtesy of not kidding on Monday, but the weather and traffic also conspired with us. We spent a somewhat leisurely morning at home, then went downtown to visit the new-to-us National Museum of the American Indian ( Read more... )

I adore today's xkcd. It makes me squee and squirm in Science Made Stupid kinds of ways.

Also, I am enjoying a reposting of last year's Calamities of Nature, in which Linus explains the true meaning of Christmas to Charlie Brown. As we discussed yesterday while making Christmas cookies, fish and seals are just as legitimate as camels and ( Read more... )

Overhead compartments are being massively overloaded by passengers trying to avoid the fee for checked baggage. Now, consider that airplanes are mostly older than this recent change in airline fees. They are designed to carry most of the baggage in the hold, underneath of the middle line of the aircraft. And when airlines check baggage into the ( Read more... )

While "failure is not an option" is often the motto, don't forget that mistakes are permissible. Mistakes are a valid way to learn.

I earned some karma points today, though I'm not sure that I really wanted that much work for them. On my way home from Berryville, I saw an SUV pulled off of the road into a corn field, and a dejected girl walking away from it. I stopped and asked what was wrong, and if she needed a ride. She had run out of gas. Oh, no problem, I'm not in a ( Read more... )

As I was growing up, I was on the receiving end of a lot of lectures on the meaning of adulthood, and goals for adulthood, and who and what I was going to be when I reached that magical transformation point of self-reliance and independence ( Read more... )