No, Shawn, not THAT kind of T-shirt contest. The shirts are not (necessarily) wet. No, you see, Viridian Pope Bruce Sterling has another design contest on, this time a T-shirt design contest. The deadline is March 2nd, which leaves only a little time, but I’m sure some of you out there can do up some really nice designs. The prize is pretty cool, though for me, the process of designing it was fun in itself. The shirt is supposed to convey not the dark image of how absolutely screwed up the world is ecologically, because anyone who’s honest and intelligent …
Category: PERSONAL
A New Experiment
I’ve decided to do something a little different for a month or two, with my digital camera. I’ve decided to always take pictures on the manual setting, and with the color set to “Black-and-White”. I figure this is as good a way to learn about composition and about how to use light and shadow as any method. If nothing else, it will be a change in the kinds of pictures I take, and will make me a better photographer, so that if I ever do get around to using better equipment, I’ll have some inkling of how to use it …
Foiled, But I Can Point You In The Right Direction
I was going through my bloglines subscriptions again—must cull, must cull—and ran across a buttload of wonderful links of interest at Weird is Relative. I was about halfway through a post enumerating the best and funniest bits when Mozilla crashed. Apparently my installation doesn’t like playing certain video files. Gaa. But anyway, no point in reproducing the links… you should just go browse at the original page, linked above. I guarantee you’ll at least find one thing that makes you guffaw. I guarantee!
How Many Petals Around the Rose?
Adrian Hon recently posted about a mind-bending little dice puzzle called Petals Around the Rose. It’s a damned brain-melter, for some people: he figured it out in a few minutes, but as I mentioned in the comments on his site, I gave up after half an hour and looked up a cheat. Bad me, but when I saw the cheat I knew I wouldn’t have thought of the solution for weeks, if ever, at least not using dice online. (Don’t be fooled, the straight line pattern you see on the simulators is not necesary or important.) If you want to …
Promoted, A Few Days Early
Huh? Well, I can’t complain, really. I got an email today saying that after all, there won’t be promotional interviews. The interviews were waivered, and all current staff members were awarded the promotion. This is not extremely surprising, given that all our schedules were made ahead of time, and that the interviews were slated for only a few days before the beginning of the semester. Still, it’s nice news. I bought a suit so I’d have something to wear, but hey, I can’t complain too much about having a nice new suit on hand, even if I don’t wear such …
Oh Book, For Now, I Abjure Thee As Mine Alone
That’s right, I finished the 2nd draft of the novel I’ve been writing since, what was it, November? I think it was November. I had to make some serious adjustments, as I realized the novel was epistolary—a letter from the protagonist/narrator to one of the other characters—only about 30 pages from the end. Until then, he’d been addressing her as “she” and by her name in the 3rd person, but then I realized that “she” is really a “you” that the narrayor is supposed to be addressing. That took a lot of searching out, basically rereading the whole thing and …
New Cabbie, and Human Goodness
Tonight I wanted to take the bus home but the screen at the bus stop didn’t display anything, on any of its three pages of digital information, about any bus coming to my area of town, even though it was giving info about buses that were due for the next pass in 80 or 90 minutes. So I gave up and decided to catch a cab home. I hailed one right in front of the bus stop and got in to find a very young man driving. He seemed confident enough when I told him the neighborhood, but after a …
Nerd? Me?
Here’s a snippet from a phone conversation I had in the taxi home tonight: Me: What are you doing, honey?Lime: E.R. DVD 보고 있어요. (I’m watching a DVD of [the TV show] E.R.)…Me: I just want to warn you, honey. I hope you’re not planning on me for Dr. Green. Lime: Actually, Dr. Green reminds you of… remind me of…Me: I remind you of Dr. Green?Lime: Yes, he reminds me of… Dr. Green reminds me of you. Me: Uh-huh… why?Lime: He’s a nerd. Ah well, since it’s coming from an even bigger nerd than me, I’ll take it as a …
Reasons to Read The Flying Yangban
Not the least of them is that when you hear someone from Seoul talking about the 피맛골, you can ask if they know what that means. When they say blood-flavoured alley, you can tell them with a smile that it ain’t so. Yes, this really happened, and the barmaids were quite pleased to discover what it means. Then they asked me how Toronto got its name, and I had to admit I didn’t know at all. I managed to find this explanation of that little bit of trivia, by the way: Toronto was named after the Huron Indian word for …
Old Poll. New Poll. Vote.
People are weird. In my last poll, the fictional characters they wanted to eat most were Napoleon, the pig from Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, and Ellen Brody, the cop’s wife from the movie Jaws. These results each got 21% of the total votes. If you want to see the full results, check out the extended section by clicking the link below, and scrolling down a little after the new page loads… The new poll should be up by the time you see this, is slightly more serious, and you can vote in the usual way.