Number12's webcomic picks - Live!
Dec. 10th, 2009
07:26 pm - Happy Belated Birthday ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
frost_knight!
Hope you had a good one and had lots of sushi!
Hope nobody's tired of these Sesame Street clips, cause here's another one:
With apologies for the clip's title which misspells "Capital". This one popped into my memory when T was playing with an alphabet toy the other day, and now I know that I just have to look for it on You Tube. It was probably my favorite Sesame Street video ever, and the funny thing is that I remember it as being far more epic sounding than it actually was. This was mind-blowing to a kid, yet now I find it's just a couple of guys singing harmony and one guitar plinking away. I guess that's the great thing about music, it needs only suggest the emotion and the mind fills in the rest. Anyhow, searching for this brought me to another spine-chilling rediscovery, "lower-case n", which probably influenced my dating expectations for the following decades (lonely and waiting for a spaceship to deliver a weird, robotic soul mate). And thank you information age, we can now look up information about anybody, including the guy who wrote both of these songs, because there's a muppet wiki of course. Also, some wag completely reanimated the video with a different letter, apparently to get pagefuls of confused comments.
Dec. 8th, 2009
11:30 pm - Sleep? What's that?
Thanks all for the birthday wishes!
I had a fascinating demonstration of how much our little mute toddlers understand our speech the other day. T was playing in her room and I was on the other side of the room watching over her. She often bangs herself up throughout the day, and this time she was sitting down playing with something and rocked backwards and hit her head on the wall, a loud thump but nothing serious. While she was rubbing the back of her head, I said to her from where I was, "Do you want me to kiss it and make it better?", and she got to her feet, walked over to me, and bowed her head down so I could kiss it where she hit it. Very impressive.
Not that anybody here's buying, but it's a milestone: I finally got that schoolbus of mine up on eBay. (link). Wish me luck finding a buyer. If I can get rid of that, I'll be 5000 pounds lighter.
Nov. 29th, 2009
07:45 am - Best space station viewing ever
Now that I've finally figured out the magnitude scale (negative is brighter, who could have guessed that), I've been getting better at catching viewable space station passes tracked by heavens-above (handy link). On Wednesday was going to be a nice bright one, but it was overcast and rainy all day. But all that miraculously cleared away at the right time, and I went outside to see... not one but two cut-loose planets ascend the sky. It was the space station and the shuttle, which had recently undocked and was coming home. Way cool, and not a sight we'll get a chance to see much longer.
Here's another sesame street youtube link, or rather 11 of them since this guy stitched the whole related series together (from crappy youtube clips) to make one continuous and surprisingly well-edited video:
Lastly, so you think you're unique? The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club For Scientists overwhelms you with the sheer number of really fascinating people that you'd really like to meet and have a conversation with.
Nov. 26th, 2009
06:14 am - Okay so far
Haven't posted much. Life is just a little too full when "do an LJ entry" is on your lists of things to do, way too full when you never get down the list that far day after day. But I've been concentrating mostly on the important things and letting the LJ entries flow under the bridge. I may back-fill a few some day. Here is one of the important things, posted to hopefully give you the same level of enjoyment that it has me.:
You see, T and I have been watching a few videos on the computer, this being one of our favorites. There's a lot of good Sesame Street clips out there, including several different copies of this one that have better frame rates and so forth if you want to search for them.
T is awesome as usual, now walking and talking very confidently. We always have a lot of fun together. Every day she says some amazing new word, and is beginning to use words to communicate with us.
Some other things that happened over the past couple of months: The Lunar Lander Challenge concluded with dramatic results; my boyz Unreasonable Rocket didn't do so well. I saw a really great space station pass that was so bright that Lisa and I saw it from College Park while standing under a streetlight. We had the usual really fun time dancing with y'all at Renee's. We went to a slew of really fun birthday parties in the past month. I completed one of my greatest feats of engineering at my job yet, my escape from it; I'm down to half-time on my old job and started a new one half-time down the hall from my old one. I hope to whittle that proportion down in favor of the new over time.
More posts later hopefully.
Oct. 29th, 2009
06:43 am - Go Ares 1-X
Whoo-hoo! Watched the launch live from work yesterday. From the vernerable KSC launch pad to the fuzzy tracking camera, it had some of the thrill of an Apollo-era event, coupled with the rocketcam footage we've come to expect in the NewSpace era. I brushed up on the flight plan ahead of time, so I knew that it was a first-stage only test with no orbital capability, but I found the uncontrolled stage separatation at the end of the flight as unnerving as nearly everybody else.
John Allison's new comic Bad Machinery is a straightforward continuation of the win that dominated scarygoround at it's termination. The details in today's comic are a case in point. John seems intimately familiar with the seconds and minutes of childhood, from being warm and dry in school on a gray, rainy morning, to the generational divide as measured on an everyday basis (thankfully, I can say that I do know how to "make an MP3").
I was sad that we couldn't make it out to pupkin carving last night, but T was tired at around 7pm, and these days if there's any chance that missing her regular bedtime will be a bad idea, we don't dare budge from the house.
Oct. 26th, 2009
10:24 pm - Best Halloween Ever (for T)
T had the time of her life at the dance last night. She was so tired afterwords that when we had her in the car and were getting her ready to be put in her car seat, she just crawled herself into the seat! She danced just about every minute that we let her; I'm so proud.
Our orignal plan for costumes was to recycle our pirate costumes (with T as a parrot) yet again for the dance, but then we discovered that T had a hand-me-down princess costume in her closet, and trying it on her sealed the deal. So Lisa switched to ren to match, and I took the opportunity to activate my mutant powers of Costume Ideas That Nobody Gets and go as "Bad Boyfriend" from my new favorite webcomic The Princess Planet (see, because T was a princess...). Read more about Bad Boyfriend here and the following comics.
Oct. 22nd, 2009
06:10 am - Scuba Cat!
So, is this so last month? I don't care!
Click on the photo to go to the page at ICanHasCheezburger, then watch the youtube videos in the comments for explanation.
Oct. 16th, 2009
11:28 pm - Wild Things Picoreview
Get A Tripod!
Nano version: I mean seriously, this was some serious Blair Witch stuff, I had to watch it through my fingers, not because it was so scary but to keep from throwing up. Other than that, this movie was Pure Genius. Also, believe everything the reviewers will say about it not being The Book and not for kids.
Found a couple of nice comics. First off, Cross Hare looks like a delightful spinoff from Tweep, or at least what such a spinoff would be. Based on finding the new comic, I caught up with Tweep again. ...'Sokay. Secondly, for, well, most of my flist, Knit Princess needs no explanation. For the rest of you, it has knitting, cats, and a tiara. I like how the artist gets so much expression out of a single wide black line, except what's the deal with the noses?
Saw the Space Station again on Wednesday, which has lent an extremely pleasant otherworldly sheen to the rest of my week.
Just a few days until the final week of the Lunar Lander Challenge. Masten appears to have simply scaled up their tankage to fly the 180 second Level 2 (as well as gotten rid of the absurd external framework of their Level 1 entry). Hurmorously, their bird looks practically the same as Armadillo's Mod (damn you, physics!), but assuming that a vehicle which has never flown before will contain no explosive surprizes, you can expect it to win the Level with the same pinpoint accuracy that characterized their Level 1 entry. Unreasonable Rocket's chances are a more fascinating gamble. Paul Breed is fielding his first-generation design for the 90 second challenge and a more advanced design for the 180; he's pretty much done working on the first bird but still has some control issues to work out on the more complicated beast...:) I can't get over this story though, here's a guy turning out rocket engines on his own shop equipment with only his son helping him, posting the details out there for all of us to see. BonNovA, don't know what their story is; Jon Goff thinks they're competent but will they be able to pull anything together by their deadline?
Oct. 12th, 2009
01:03 pm - The latest
T walks all around the house now, usually with very intent expressions on her face. It makes you want to follow her around and see what she's going to do. This weekend we took her to the Laurel City Riverfest on Saturday, and then Butler's Orchard on Sunday. She had a blast at each. The weekend before that we took her in her parrot costume to the Team Greykell rest stop. We had hopes of helping out, but most of the team who showed up had things well under control, and then when T got tired we had to leave just before the much-anticipated flood of walkers (which must have also included Grey who we're sad to have missed). But it was a lot of fun.
In comics, I missed both the Small Press Expo and the Baltimore Comic-Con, despite there being attendees at both events that I would have loved to see and may never get a chance to see again. Oh well. The Man Who Hates Fun started up again recently, still as subversive as ever.
In newspace news, Masten completed their run for the Level 1 2nd place prize in the Lunar Lander Challenge. Their machine looks like a pile of junk but flies with a precision and grace that reveals Armadillo for the amateurs they are. At the end of October, Masten goes for the Level 2 first place, battling it out in the last week of the competition against father-and-son team Unreasonable Rocket and dark-horse unknowns BonNovA.
Oct. 1st, 2009
04:45 pm - Yayyy!
The title of this post is what I heard T say this morning for the first time; joyteam and T were hanging out in the living room listening to a CD which had live music. When the song ended and you heard the audience applaud, T got all happy applauding along with them, and cried out "Yayyyy!" in her tiny cute voice. BTW, it is a really awesome CD, one of a few children's folk music CDs that Lisa picked up at a library sale recently. I'll try to update this post with the album info later.
Nice misdirection today at sluggy. But we all know that it has to be the Minion Master, otherwise why did Pete spend so much time setting his character up earlier in the chapter?
Sep. 25th, 2009
01:24 pm - What's up
It's been a pretty busy several weeks at my job so I haven't been posting much. T continues to keep growing and growing. She had a really fun time about two weeks ago coming to Renee's for dancing. Last week, Lisa and I and T went for a weekend at Big Meadows Lodge on Skyline drive for mine and Lisa's anniversary. We took T on a short hike which she enjoyed; she walked some of it and rode some of it in a kid-carrier backpack. We'd been getting her used to it for a few weeks beforehand. T's vocabulary continues to expand, she's up to something like 60 words and signs that she either makes or recognizes. This week she says "book!" and "star!" It's so much fun watching her get new ideas and capabilites. We're working more on trying to even out her sleep schedule, although on days when she's tired she messes it up by taking extra naps. Lisa and I both experience the problem that we get to do one activity a day with T; she just takes a while to get through meals, dressed, and out the door. We're used to packing a lot into each day so it's a constant adjustment for us to plan for T's level.
Sep. 11th, 2009
09:40 am - Wow!
The Japanese unmanned cargo HTV launched yesterday for the Space Station. I watched it live from my desk. It was very impressive and beautiful; for some reason the Japanese rockets always seem to have a lot of muscle and blast off like a bat out of hell. The cargo ship made it to orbit safely, has been contacted, and is underway to its destination. The ISS is beginning to pay back dividends, not so much in that nebulous research that is of course also going on, but in providing spacefaring countries someplace to go. First the Europeans (ATV), now the Japanese have sent cargo ships to the station; if we can just keep from deorbiting the station, manned missions by all our allies will eventually follow. ETA: Aside from the coolness factor for Japan, another significance of this vehicle, pointed out on a comment to NASAWATCH, is that it is the same size as the cargo cannisters carried up by the shuttle such as the one just delivered by Discovery. It's essentially a shuttle cargo bay without the shuttle! The idea of scaling back our launch capabilty to capsules only may not be as risky as long as the HTV capabililty exists. The pieces are really falling together this year.
Since I don't get these LJ posts out much anymore, here's another comic link. The Devil Bear is a weekly strip that started recently. The central conceit of a devil teddy bear is supposedly an avenue for storylines in which famous teddy bears go to Hell and get tortured for all eternity (first story line, Winnie the Pooh), and associated puns, but in fact the real reason for the comic seems to be drawing (cartoony) cheesecake, in the form of the Bear's demon "Divias", female demons representing the various sins.
Sep. 5th, 2009
09:11 pm - "We are going to have so much fun together"
So, we took T to her first rave today. It was a "family friendly" event which I'd heard about on NPR called "Electronica Fest 2009" at the National Electronics Museum in Linthicum, Maryland. They had various forms of electronica played live in the museum parking lot on a small stage from about 10am to 8pm, various geeky demos by local clubs, including benches where you could build your own theremin or some other very low budget electronic "instruments". Some of the music was awesome, some not so much, all of it produced by locals. T liked the good stuff, and danced a lot. We were not alone in bringing a 1-year old, there were at least five other families there with similarly aged kids! It was actually a pretty relaxed event, the audience rarely broke 20 people, but the musicians played bravely anyhow. The museum was incredible; if I had known it existed when I was in high school (apparently it did), you could not have gotten me to leave after closing. Lots of cool exhibits from the basics to a lot of military electronics history, with tons of historic hardware.
Tonight was my night for getting T to sleep while Lisa went to bed early. Despite her being pretty tired, and trying to fall asleep, it wasn't working for the DD, so we went to the office, I put on an Avalanches album, and we had a late night dance party that seemed to do the trick, she is now fast asleep in her own room. As she fell asleep, I couldn't help saying to her my prediction for the future.
Recent developments with T: She has more and more new words, some of which are pretty surprising. Last night's: "rabbit," while we were reading through one of our many picture books. Imagine that coming out pretty mushy, but it was clear enough when she let it drop right before we turned the page. She had a pretty bad day for falling down yesterday also, getting her first scrape on the forehead, but no serious injuries. She loves to help Lisa with gardening, following her around with her own bucket and putting her own "clippings" into it, or helping water the plants with a tiny watering can. She's getting better at stacking blocks now, getting about 4 high before either it topples or she topples it for fun.
Comic, do I still read those? Yes, and I'm still finding new ones of exceptional value. The following link is my gift to you: The Princess Planet, which has colored my week pleasantly. Also "family friendly", the idea behind this well-drawn, funny comic is: A fantasy setting where all of the main characters are princess, and the jokes are as if written by really erudite 5th graders.
NewSpace news: Just one week until John Carmack tries for the Level 2 Lunar Lander Challenge prize, followed a week later by Masten, and if there's anything left to win then Unreasonable Rocket will give it a try the week after that. The new rules for the challenge no longer mandate a single, festival-like competition as in past years, which sucks, but I expect to see lots of live coverage through the spacevidcast team (warning: don't click that last link unless you have bandwidth and CPU power coming out of your ears).
Sep. 2nd, 2009
08:48 pm - Happiness is...
seeing the Space Station pass overhead. I've been trying to catch a pass for the past couple of years, on and off. I probably saw it once before, but wasn't sure. This time, armed with very specific data from Heavens-Above, I parked in a pitch-black graveyard (the one where Mom's buried) at 5:15am and waited for the designated time. It was probably as incredible as I'd hoped it would be, although the binoculars I'd brought weren't enough to make any details visible. At 5:32 am a new star appeared in the sky, about as big and bright as a planet, climbed with blazing speed up and overhead, disappearing on the opposite horizon in just three minutes. It moved with celestial smoothness, although it seemed clear that it was much closer than any other body. It was like seeing a comet go by, but knowing that about a dozen people were living on that comet, probably sleeping or eating or doing something else mundane. This was probably what it was like when people stepped off their back porches fifty years ago to watch Sputnik (in that pre-computer era, it was probably limited to the 200 or so who could do the math) pass overhead. Or rather the sustainer stage of the rocket that had launched Sputnik.
Aug. 25th, 2009
12:38 pm - Shuttle Launch Fail. Sleep Fail.
My scheming to stay up and watch the shuttle launch last night was epic, perhaps some day bards will sing the tale. My friend whose cat I'm stopping in to feed this week lives in a 6-story apartment with open roof access. A clear sky over Maryland, a galvanizing rarity. T waking up around midnight and wanting to play all night, a problem. Got her to sleep for just enough time to try to sneak off, but they scrubbed the launch and then she woke up again and stayed awake for another two hours. She's not intentionally being difficult or even unpleasant about the whole thing, she just wants to play and be busy. She really doesn't understand what our problem is. Lisa is still under the weather and needs sleep, but she ended up taking over for the last two hours of trying to get T back to sleep. We both ended up very sleep deprived tonight.
Aug. 22nd, 2009
10:24 am - Through the phlegmy veil
Hi all,
Haven't had much time to post in a while, basically still don't so here is a short briefing about what we've been up to.
The end of July was spent trying to get ready for the annual big beach trip, a weeklong reunion of Lisa's family at some rental houses on the Outer Banks. That was a week of packing for Lisa and T, and a week of overtime at work trying to get the simulator that I'm responsible for building all put back together and working.
We went to the beach and it was very nice. We hit cchan8's town's Pirate Weekend on the way and it was very nice. We had put a lot of effort into our costumes, Lisa had regal gear, I stretched my ren garb yet again, and we made T a parrot costume which was a big hit. At the beach it was a week of nothing to do but hang out together, which was for me an enormously pleasant change.
Unfortunately, with all those kids (and adults) crammed together for a week, we've come home rather sick. I went back to work, and managed to stay cheerful for at least a couple of days. Several other family members have reported coming down with strep. T had a fever for a couple of days after we returned but tested negative for strep. Now she's moved on to something else as evidenced by an intermittent cough and Lisa and I are both nursing sore throats. So I guess this weekend will consist of just hanging out together again and avoiding spreading disease ourselves.
Jul. 29th, 2009
02:36 pm
After a day of helping people that I have every right to expect to be way smarter than me to do things that they should be able to do themselves, and worse resisting the urge to help where possible because nothing gets fixed unless certain people believe that there's a problem and they don't believe it unless they are affected by it themselves, I'm going to indulge myself and do an LJ post.
First off, fans of LOST know that the place to get info about the new season was at Comic-Con, and of course you all know that the next best place to be was at darkufo to get all of the videos of the interviews with the creators and actors (not that I'd know cause I haven't had time to view them), links to the great season 6 ARG (same), and aggregations of personal experiences such as this:
Speaking of LOST, I never got around to mentioning that I was a little bit disappointed by the developments in the Season 5 finale, awesome though they were, because it put to rest my favorite fantasy explanation for the events of the show so far, the "just a series of random coincidences, possibly the result of a physics only slightly enhanced from our own, that has produced incredible misinterpretations" theory (perhaps more succinctly "The Island is not a character"). But, it turns out that there was a Hand (or two) guiding things, and that also answers other questions and sets the show off on yet another exciting new direction so good.
Secondly, we're working up to Pirate Weekend, thanks to whimmydiddle for helping my DW with her costume!
Thirdly, an amazing thing happened a couple of weeks ago that deserves mention, joyteam and I saw a movie! In a theater! All thanks to kdsorceress who babysat T for us while we went out to see "Up" at a matinee that we almost had all to ourselves. Thanks to all our friends who recommended it. The start of the movie was almost frightening to me, and probably joyteam; for us "Paradise Falls" is replaced by Arizona (or possibly upstate New York), we have the house that we've become a little more attached to than we expected, and we sure hope that we grow old as happily as the couple in the movie. The lessons of Up seem to be, in order:
1. Don't put off having your big adventure
2. The thing you've been having with the one you love is the big adventure
3. Don't be afraid to have a new big adventure.
I guess all of which boils down to "live for today," pretty much my poorest skill, which I have to constantly work on. The big difference though is having T, which is turning out to be a truly excellent adventure. Things people told us about how kids will help us rediscover the world are coming true; I've spent more time barefoot this summer than I have in the last ten years put together. T continues to develop amazingly each day. Over the past couple of days she's been putting toys in the secret compartments of other toys, and figured out how to pour water between two bath toys. I could go on, but I guess it's back to work.
Jul. 22nd, 2009
11:30 am - A tornado of buck-passing
just a note of the latest antics of my team at work.
Jul. 19th, 2009
08:24 am - Happy Birthday to joyteam
Hi all,
Tomorrow is Lisa's birthday. In celebration, we got her on LJ! In between hanging on to a struggling baby, we're still trying to get the account set up and stuff so it's not quite ready to go yet. In the meantime if you find yourself friended, say hi etc.
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