Although it's still the Age of Irony, I tell you this sincerely, authentically, truthfully, from the deepest recesses of my soul. These three things currently happening in my life have me thrilled all out of proportion, all out of compass, all out of... out of... out of sensible superlatives ( Read more... )

"Follow the North Star" was the title of a movie about the Underground Railroad which I saw at such a young age that I thought it was, well, an underground railroad ( Read more... )

Built the wall. Amazing!

Many of you know I don't read books.  I look things up in books, and read parts of books, but "Reading a book" is typically a task that defeats me.

"Oh,"  says that bit of the soul which is connected to that bit of the brain.  "I see where this is going."  And that's that.  The pleasure's just gone.  Of course I don't believe in souls separate from ( Read more... )

The coming Saturday, the resurrected CHARLIE machine will serve as the substrate for a resuscitation simulation the likes of which the World Has Never Seen-- or, at least, that the world's simulation people have not yet published anywhere in the peer-reviewed press.

I don't remember where I first heard this little rhyme, but it's how I'm feeling ( Read more... )

So when I sketched my latest thing from work for Our Brother canadian_worm, he sorta said, Oh there's a thing that does that off-the-shelf-- you'll just burn out components, trying to build it from scratch!

That explains why I released so much of the Sacred Blue Smoke, the week before vacation started.  All hail the h-bridge.  Everybody else apparently knew ( Read more... )

People tut-tut and shake their heads about how hard it is for families to live with a crazy person.  I feel for them, I really do.  But if you suffered because you lived with a crazy person, I'll just take it as read.  No need to convince me.  There's compassion fatigue, and then there's compassion anaphylaxis.

Gone on another library binge, from ( Read more... )

Haven't sewn a garment from fabric and a pattern before, but there's a point when flat-felled seams have to go somewhere other than fragment's you're practicing on.  You can only repair so many things until all of everybody's clothes are mended and you have to start out into clearing off the whole damned kitchen table.

I'm going to make a torch ( Read more... )

I think that nightmares are the only worthwhile predictive dreams-- by worthwhile, I guess I'm referring in part to the well-examined idea of, "If you can predict the future and act to change things, is it still the future? Can we do that?"  According to the speculative fiction I used to read, there's always something there to stop you.

Dreams (I ( Read more... )

My experience point totals in that game, Papers and Paychecks, is really getting me down.  Keeping your job is the new Getting a raise, and Not getting kicked out is the new Doing well in Grad School.

I sort of miss the killing floor, because I always used to go home knowing how lucky I was not to be in a plastic bag or a diaper.  Wept that I had no ( Read more... )