hoshizora

My favorite fantasy books in recent memory are the Gentleman Bastard series, which currently stand at 2 books (The Lies of Locke Lamora and Red Seas under Red Skes). Until recently the author, Scott Lynch, had taken a long hiatus from (evidently) any kind of online activity, and the tentative publication date for the third book had slipped and slipped again, and nobody knew what was going on.

Now! I do not begrudge the man his delay one iota—He doesn't owe me a damn thing. Mostly I was just concerned that he was himself physically okay, and secondarily I hoped his third novel would one day be finished so I could be a giant nerd about it. But I'm a patient man. I can wait.

My waiting has been rewarded! Recently he's revived his online presence, which includes his livejournal (scott_lynch) and twitter account (scottlynch78), and hinted that revisions to the third book are coming along well. He seems to be back among the living, which comes as news of the most welcome kind.

BUT LAST NIGHT, the dude decides that as a favor to his readers who have stuck with him through the delays and so on, he's going to post, chapter-by-chapter, a FREE SERIAL NOVEL about A BADASS LADY PILOT ON MARS.

...IT DOES NOT GET MORE RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS THAN THAT.

So Charlie Stross and Paul Krugman had a conversation about The Future.

And the whole thing is very interesting, but the part where Stross talks about robots cars (one of my favorite subjects, in case you've never seen me go off on the rant) is especially so, because he oh-by-the-way points out the obvious solution to one of the big problems I've been trying to get around w/r/t driverless cars.

Clearly robotic cars are going to be vastly safer for both the occupants and the surrounding traffic, and past a certain point of adoption a lot of people are going to wondering why we let humans drive at all. I assumed that there would be some kind of backlash when the first anti-driving legislation came around, but Stross makes the point that the lower insurance rates for people who choose not to drive are going to be what motivates the transition.

My concern is that the ratfucker insurance companies are going to want to avoid huge swaths of the population paying way less for car insurance because their odds of being at fault in an accident have dropped to nearly zero, and there will (I assume) be a whole class of lawyers just waiting for the first robotic car failure and its resultant lawsuits. My hope is that instead of anti-driving legislation, there will be laws against overcharging robotic car owners for insurance. I have no idea what kind of precedent there is for such legislation, only that it seems like insurance companies tend to have lawmakers in their pockets. We'll see.

Anyway. I still cannot wait to have a car that I can call for a ride. A medium-to-large life goal of mine is to be able to afford such a car when it becomes available, which assuming we don't fuck up monumentally as a species, I expect I will live to see.

(I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff. Don't judge me.)

You guys. You guys. I just got a digital copy of Fast Food Freedom Fighters.

Fast Food Freedom Fighters

*is transported back to 1996*

"They're from the National Institute for Mealtime Health! NIMH! Those rats!"

Thank you endotoxin! You have salvaged a shitty week.

I accidentally the whooooooole thing

So! I've been working on and off on an Avatar FST for months. I'm pretty much never going to top the ones I've seen various friends come up with (yeah, EK and Ali, you know who you are) but it's been bugging me for a long time, so I'm finally calling it finished and uploading it.

You can download linked tracks individually or the whole thing as a zip! ENJOY.

( Read on for the tracks, snippets of lyrics, and what passes for exegesis around here. )

I was certain that nobody would want my pretty old and soon-to-be-entirely-obsolete television.

Then it occurred to me that maybe I should tell the ridiculous and nerdy story of how I came to own it.

( Ad reproduced here by popular demand )

It was gone within 12 hours! Hooray for Craigslist! I AM A HUGE NERD

An enterprising fan has recorded a reading of a review I wrote for PiQ.

Thanks, random fan! I feel like a big-time magazine editor now!

I just want to say that the new Macross TV series is pretty great so far, and if you are or were a Macross or Robotech fan, you should probably check it out.

BECAUSE OF HOLY SHIT

( Highlights so far )

ETA: Here's the op.

Based on the fun we had coming up with a show last night, I'm prepared to call Primetime Adventures the best 12 bucks I've ever spent on a roleplaying game.

Anybody that reads ANN already saw this, but there's a great Publisher's Weekly interview with Kio Shimoku, creator of Genshiken, one of my all-time favorite manga.

His answers to the questions are not at all what I'd expect. He sounds like a fascinating guy, one I'd love to get to know better.

For perhaps obvious reasons, I've been thinking a lot about nerd shame recently. Sigh.

So a prominent milblogger had a post ready to go in case he was killed. He was.

The post is peppered with Babylon 5 quotes, and just wait until you get to the end.

Somehow the idea of a fellow nerd getting cut down out there in the shit struck me in a way that I hadn't been before.

I'm glad you're back home, wsr.

I was already on board with Sayonara Zetsubo-sensei, despite their visibly dwindling animation budget (you were right, Hunter, and it only gets worse) but with the Harumi Fujiyoshi episode, I am really on board -- and I'm going to have to rewatch like the whole thing looking for Meiji/Taisho literary references now.

The show desperately needs a Shena Ringo soundtrack.

Unrelatedly: Ugh.

I was playing around in GarageBand and realized that what I was doing was making an Avatar Season Three/Fire Nation Something. It is just over a minute long, but what do you want from one evening's noodling?

Kind of unsequenced and messy and lame and ugh that poor D minor fifth. I am beating it to death and it didn't do anything to deserve this kind of hamfingered treatment.

But at least I have my studio back. HUZZAH.

Listen/Download here.

I forgot how good Watchmen was, but having reread it, I am unconvinced that a movie, by any director and with any cast, is a good idea.

Maybe an HBO series. (Which, incidentally, is what they should do with Preacher, too.)

As opposed to when I watched the first two episodes a year ago and was unamused, I am intruged and will polish off the show.

Two factors have changed: I have seen Gunbuster 2, same director and staff (mostly), which started terribly and ended wonderfully, and also the Avatar guys are always going on about how monumentally great FLCL is, so I consider it sort of required viewing as an Avatard.

We'll see how I feel about it in four episodes. I will say this: this "Ultimate Edition" box set has some of the nicest packaging I've seen for an anime box set.

Got a new wireless router, got it flashed with dd-wrt; so far so good. Expect to still have connection problems despite AT&T's insistence that there's nothing wrong -- does anybody know about DSL routers? Can you just buy a new one and swap it out, or is there some kind of magic AT&T smoke in the provided gear?

Have discovered a new and fairly guilty pleasure in The Story of Saiunkoku, and an only slightly less guilty pleasure in Nodame Cantabile.

Want to have an Avatar Season Three party on September 21st, but oh yeah I don't know anybody here. @whee.

tenebris got me more userpics. Man I am a nerd.

It's been a Helvetica kind of night.

Did I mention I'm a nerd? Augh.

Got my Planetes box set today after ordering it like three months ago.

Watched the first two episodes. Already worth the wait. Plus I need something to fill the Avatar-shaped hole in my heart.