The Way The Future Wasn't

Tempe Town Puddle

Tuesday night, a portion of the dam that creates Tempe Town Lake, a recreational spot in the normally dry Salt River riverbed bordering on Tempe, Arizona, burst and released about 750 million square feet of water into the riverbed, creating flash flood conditions downstream for a considerable distance. The Salt River bed is mostly undeveloped, so damages have been light, though there's some fear homeless people who ocasionally set up camp in the riverbed might have been washed away. (Hard to tell yet.)

The dam in question isn't a normal concrete dam, but one that uses a number of extremely large inflatable rubber barriers to hold back the water. The barriers can be inflated or deflated to control the lake's volume.

The barrier section that burst ("exploded" was the word used by some witnesses) was one that had been supposed to be replaced earlier this year. Since the dam was first built about ten years ago, that particular portion had been riding higher than other sections, and it's top edge had been out in the open sunlight, rather than slightly underwater like it was supposed to be.

Take a piece of rubber. Leave it out in the Arizona heat and sunshine for ten years. What do you expect to happen? Duh.

The replacement didn't happen when it should have, apparently for budgetary concerns on the part of the Tempe city council. Double-Duh.

The company that built and installed the rubber barriers is named Bridgestone. I wonder if this is the same Bridgestone that had to recall about six million defective auto tires about ten years ago when the tires began blowing out much faster than would have been expected? Triple-Duh.

Shorter Tempe Town Lake Dam Debacle: "Oh no, the rubber broke!"

(note on the photo shown above: According to the New Times article, the photo and several others were taken from the seventh floor of the old Hayden Flour Mills building. This explains why there was no photographer's credit given; the Hayden building has been empty and boarded up for years, so anyone photographing from there would be doing so illegally. I've seen other photos of the insides of the Hayden building, and it's pretty decrepit, so it was probably dangerous for the photographer as well.)

My Life As A Superstar Cheezburgerer

A couple of the captioned photos I've done for Pundit Kitchen, the news-photo wing of the Evil I Can Haz Cheezburger Empire, recently made it to the front page, to gain notoriety, acclaim, and votes. This first one has gotten over 800 votes:





























And this one just got front-paged a few days ago, and has gotten nearly 240 votes so far:

I thought that was pretty cool. Go, me. And then I had to read the comments posted to the photo, and realized that a lot of people were voting for and favoriting the picture not because of my witty, ingenious caption, but rather because Look at those awesome abs! Those guys are HOT!

Urrrmm....

Back in the old days, I knew a guy who had abs that chiselled and defined. I happened to see him nude from the rear one time (don't ask) and not only did he have those rippling abs, he had a rippling butt. Did you know there's a specific term to describe guys with that kind of physique? Yeah, really: Bastards!

*ahem* Where was I?

Bonus LOL below. This one I find rather odd, because it only got one vote on the "Voting" page (from where LOLs are picked to go to the front page), but it's been Favorited by over two dozen people. Huh. I think it's funny:

God, I Hope These Aren't For Real Books

In the spirit of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, artist Oleg Medvedev has produced some covers for Italian variations on the theme.





















(by Oleg Medvedev, CC-licensed, attribution, no derivatives)

Any resemblance between the Yeti and Chewbacca is strictly coincidental, and should not be taken as encouragement to make Classics/Star-Wars mashups the next literary fad.

Big Beetle

This is a beetle I snapped at work the other night. Actual size about two inches long.

I used the built-in camera on my new Droid cellphone, and I have to say I'm impressed that it was able to focus and capture that much detail at a distance of several inches away.

A Few Links

Moscow 2050 -- like Steampunk without the steam. (Gearpunk?) (by Valdimir Shelest, CC licensed -- attribution/noncommerical.)

TILT -- offering a slanted perspective on life. (Click "Project Info" at the top of the page for rights information.)

Both the above come from the BeHance Network, a website for artists to display their portfolios and projects. Great stuff there.


Unsolicited plug: One of our own favorite artists is Sandra SanTara, from whom we've bought a lot of prints and t-shirts, both for ourselves and as gifts for friends & family. Her website is Windwolf Studio. (Image use restricted, or I'd include a sample here.)


And moving from the sublime to the ridiculous: Fellowship of the Vuvuzelas

Adventures In Catspeak

Some guy that looks like me comes into the bedroom after washing his hands, and sees our cat Bastet on the bed.

SGTLLM: "Hey, Bastet, wants some pets?" [proceeds to pet cat]

Bastet: "Mrrrr, mrrrr, mrr--AROWWW, ROWWW, ROWWW!" [translation: "Sure, thanks a lo--HEY, YOUR HANDS ARE WET!"

SGTLLM: "Relax, cat." [continues petting]

Bastet: "ROWWW! ROWWWW! ROWWWWWW!!!" [trans: "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?"

SGTLLM: "My hands are dry now, what's the problem?"

Bastet: "ARROWWW! ROWWW!" [trans: "CHRIST, WHAT AN ASSHOLE."]

How To Draw Sharks

From the treasure hoard of ConceptArt, a brief guide to "How To Draw Sharks" by Waterbird.

I'm linking to this not from an overwhelming desire to draw sharks (though God knows, sharks are Friggin' Cool, Man!), but because I found it an exceptionally well-done combo of art and writing. Waterbird's authorial "voice" is engaging and informal, but the guidance is informative, succinct, and easy-to-follow.

This is how to "how-to" a subject.

I've Been . . .

. . . in a funk lately.

Not as bad a funk as the guy pictured over there. but still a significant funk. Feeling overwhelmed, overstressed, underslept, etc.

Various factors have been playing into this. Sick friends, sick relatives, sick family, sick cats, sick me. Current and upcoming (and uncertain) changes at work. Too many things that can't be punted to some other time. Way too many things that have been punted to some other time, but that time is now, or last week, or last month, or even earlier.

I realized about a month ago that I was showing signs of major depression (Thanks, Will!), which has actually helped. Being aware of that has helped me cope rather better -- got a long-standing problem with our 2007 taxes hopefully resolved, for one, which should actually mean we get a slightly larger refund than we did, rather than owing the IRS over a thousand dollars. Better progress on other fronts as well, though it would certainly help more if I could just skip that "sleeping" thing altogether.

So one of the things I wanted to start doing again was posting here. (Hopefully more often than every three months -- did I really let it go that long?)

Robert McCall has died

Artist Robert McCall, known worldwide for space art and portrayals of an optimistic future technology, has died. He was 90.

His poster art for the film 2001 is probably his most widely known work, but he also did many, many pieces for and in support of the NASA space program.

The piece of his I'm personally most familiar with is "Icarus Triumphant", a mural McCall did for the main branch of my local Glendale, AZ library. There doesn't seem to be a full image of the mural online, but here's a detail from the painting:

















Among the comments to the news at collectSPACE.com was a note from "KSCartist" who shared some advice McCall had given in correspondence. Worth sharing, and it's advice McCall clearly followed in his own career:

To Achieve Success:
1) Evaluate your talents honestly
2) Set your goals realistically
3) Work tirelessly at your art and love every minute of the work.
4) Study the great art of the past
5) Come back from inevitable failures and diappointments with courage
6) Work relentlessly

Sweet!

Over at DerekMDesign, I found some wowser photos and an interview with John Learner, maker of some of the best damn gingerbread houses I've ever seen. Learn abut the maleability of Pop-Tarts, and why you should never vacuum chocolate dust!

The Future of Used E-Books

The recent Amazon-MacMillan brouhaha made one thing clear: people who read e-books don't want to pay a lot for that muffler!

Now if they read regular books, like most people, they could always go down to the local used-book store to browse for cheap books. But if you want to go down to the local used e-book store... umm, well there's a bit of a problem there, since the most popular e-books tend to have DRM protection on them, and you're not supposed to be able to transfer that data to another reader.

But, hey, I once donated five bucks to the National Association for the Advancement of Smart People, which makes me an honorary genius.

So here's what we need to do to make a used e-book store possible: Rather than the current DRM model, e-books need to be coded to follow the natural life-cycle of a regular book.

What gave me this idea was the sad fact of JPEG degradation: every time you change and save a JPEG image, the image degrades, eventually becoming illegible after enough cycles. I figure e-books can be deliberately encoded to do something similar. ("I have this great idea. If you do the programming, we can split the money fifty-fifty!")

So, the original e-book is pristine and spotless. Done with the book, you transfer your copy to an online used-e-book store.

For that copy, the style-commands of the book get changed, and the new buyer finds himself reading a book set in Aged Book Worn font. Any color contents fade slightly, like a poster that gets direct sunlight on it.

The next reader down will notice the pages on the screen starting to yellow. Some of the pages will have coffee-cup circles on them. If previous owners have bookmarked any pages, those pages are now actually dog-earred, with the page corners breaking off and falling down the screen at unpredictable intervals. Color fading continues to worsen.

Next reader: mildew stains.

Next reader: scorch marks

We get serious with the next reader in line: silverfish and bookworms start crawling across your screen, eating holes in the pages.

And finally: the binding comes undone, and whole pages and entire signatures rip loose from the left edge of the screen and fall down below the bottom edge.

And that's how you'll get used e-book stores.

[wild applause from the Internet]

Thank you, thank you. It was nothing. Next week, I solve global warming.

A Few Links

As promised, a few links of interest:







Good art, good sex, and a good cause: Endangered Species Condoms (SFW)






Our smart and charming niece, Lea, has spent the last year and a half in South Korea, helping Korean schoolchildren learn English and learning Korean in return. She has an occasional blog, A Geek's Eye View, writing about her experiences and travels.









Over at ConceptArt.org, the latest Team Chow contest (#3; collect them all!) had a Tarot theme. Lots of interesting entries there. The entire thread can be found here. (Page down past the polling area to find individual posts by each team, with larger images; most are on page 1, with a few more on page 2.)

I Did Not Mean . . .

. . . to let more than a month pass between posts here.

In fact, one of my New Year's resolutions was to post more frequently. It hasn't happened, for a lot of reasons. Some unavoidable, others that could have been with a little planning and forethought.

I'll try and do better. There may be more short fluffy posts, and links to other sites, rather than long rambling pieces of writing, but I'll try to maintain at least a presence, if not a personality, here.

Fame, No Fortune

I have, over time, captioned quite a few LoLs over at the I Can Haz Cheezburger? site. Generally this is for my own amusement. Occasionally, some of them get seen by others and get chosen to go on the viewer's list of favorite

One of my Lols recently got posted to the front page of ICHC's celebrity captions site, ROFLrazzi. The front page is where you want to be, because that's where you get lots of votes and even, hey!, comments. The groupies and the cash come later, I guess.

Here's the LOL, in all its glory:


















This has actually gotten over a thousand votes so far. More proof that puns may be the lowest form of humor, but they're also the second-most popular, right after seeing some guy get hit in the crotch.

Here's a link to my LOLz page on ICHC, where you can view my other low puns, smartass remarks, and twisted interpretations and captionings of various photos. Some of them are actually funny, once you get past the sullen, bitter misanthropy. (I should probably put a link to that page in the sidebar.)

Christmas

The late Steve Gilliard, of The News Blog fame, once noted that he had been involved for most of his life with "strange, bright people".

What a perfect turn of phrase, I thought.

So... Merry Christmas and best wishes to all the strange, bright people in my own life!

Thanksgiving

Usually we host a large dinner for family and friends on Thanksgiving. This year, though, we're going over to my cousin Hal's. This is mostly going to be my side of the family, who I don't see that often. (Most of them live on the other side of the Phoenix metro area, which is an hour's drive, one way.) Tuesday next week, my next day off work, we'll have a smaller TG dinner with Hilde's relatives, some friends, and the rest of the household.

To be honest, it's been a pretty rough year: We lost our close friend Anne, Hilde -- on top of her regular medical problems -- was in the hospital twice, my mother had several mini-strokes (mostly recovered) and her husband Tom had health problems of his own, friends and family members have lost jobs and had hard times finding new ones. Even our Corgi, Madame Mim, has been sick. (Valley Fever, a fungal infection endemic to the Phoenix area; so I'll be putting pills down Mim's throat twice a day for, oh, the next year or so.) And someone we considered a friend stabbed us in the back, financially, for over eight thousand dollars. I'm having difficulty feeling thankful for much.

There are indicators that next year may be better in several regards, particularly financially. (Things actually are better financially already, but the friend responsible for that improvement probably wouldn't want her name mentioned.)

So if I was asked what I'm thankful for, I'd probably say "I'm thankful there's only one more month left in 2009."

LoLiterature

Halloween

Insufficient Information, Drunkards Walks, and Blindfolds

Well, huh.

I have a long, long to-do list, including some pretty urgent stuff... so of course I decided to take a quick look at Undulant Fever instead, maybe make another apologetic post about not posting.

So, browsing the list of old posts, I saw one whose title I didn't remember. But it had more than the usual number of comments. So I click on it, and...

...well, Holy Shit!

A couple years ago, I got into a short dustup on another person's blog. My fault; I should have resisted the impulse to express my surprise that two people I despise and wouldn't trust as dogcatchers had managed to do an adequate job on a major project. Hot blog posts ensued, until the blog's host told all of us to knock it the hell off. Hot e-mails ensued for a while.

What I didn't realize was that in addition to the emails, several of the people involved reacted to the dustup on that other blog by posting comments on this blog.

They posted their comments on the most recent UF entry at that time... which happened to be one of the most frivolous posts I've made, and one I paid little attention to after posting.

My Blogger settings are marked to notify me by email whenever a comment is posted. This sees to work only intermittently. So in this case, I never got the notifications from Blogger, and today's the first time I've seen those comments.

Backtrack to this year's Westercon: One of the people there was someone I had not had a face-to-face conversation with for more than thirty years. That previous conversation hadn't gone so well ("Go to hell" was said, among other things), and I wasn't sure if I was going to slapped, kneed, or presented with a restraining order.

As it turned out, she greeted me warmly, and we had a short but cordial conversation. In the course of which, she said something that surprised me: During that dustup two years ago, one of the people upset with me had sent a copy of an email I'd sent him to this person, I guess to demonstrate what a horrible person I am, and informed me he'd sent it to her and to several other people. (I'd said, in the email, that he was fucked up in the head, needed professional counseling, and was a lousy husband and father. For some reason, he took this personally and got upset.)

I'd never seen a reaction from her about that email and was surprised, when I mentioned it, at what she said: She had no idea what I was talking about. She had never received or read the email in question.

Well, huh.

This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened over the years. Letters sent never get received, emails don't arrive in inboxes, words put on public display are never seen by the person they're meant for or about.

I mention this because I had an uncharitable thought when she told me she'd never read the email: Has she really not read the email, or is she just saying that she never got the email? (Saying that she hadn't, even if she had, would give her a lot more control over the direction of our conversation, something she's always been very good at and at which I have no skill whatsoever.)

Finding those never-read comments on an old, unrelated post sets me back a bit. Perhaps an apology is in order for that uncharitable thought.

I'd like to have a tightly plotted narrative to my life. There's be no loose ends, no missed connections, everyone would know their lines in the script: everything would make sense. I want to be my own omniscient narrator.

[Homer Simpson voice]Mmmmmm... omniscience.[/Homer Simpson voice]

*sigh* Doesn't work that way.

Sometimes life is just a Drunkard's Walk. With blindfolds.

I think I'll just leave those old comments in place, and not make a two-years-later response. You could probably find them if you want to make the effort, tho' I suspect the most likely response would be "WTF is that about?")