Unsolicited Advice

Let leftover season begin! The critters have been enjoying such traditional rat holiday recipes as, "stuffing mix crumbs drizzled with last of eggnog," "wilted vegetable salad," "bowl of turkey parts (misc)," and the coveted dessert item, "food-paper from chocolate cupcake." They are filled with scavenger-ly joy. And sleep. Mainly sleep. They spend most of the day snoozing in an amorphous wad of rat fur, with the occasional tail poking out. But when they're awake, they're thrilled. I have been faring less well. I haven't posted much because I've spent the past couple of months cycling between being in a phlegmy coma and being in a state I can only describe as "annoyingly high". I caught some kind of respiratory something in early October, and every time I start to get over it, I catch another thing. Or relapse, I'm not sure. I keep wobbling between able to medicate myself back to stupid but otherwise normal, and ha...

Just so's y'all know how my night is going: I finally found someone who could repair my Wintel machine for a price within my budget ("Would you accept payment in baked goods?"), so Natasha is back in my custody, and charges once again. Since she's been gone, I've been working alternately on an Ubuntu 12 laptop (Maleficent, pictured at left) and a Macbook on loan from Circlet (Nekomata, pictured at right). Maleficent is fine for web browsing and she does technically run the software I use for work -- I switched entirely to using GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, Neo/Open Office, and Chrome/Chromium specifically so that everything would work the same across all machines, in fact -- but she is elderly and slow, and does not like my graphics tablet. Nekomata works dandy but is a Mac, therefore not my favorite, and also not technically mine, so I daren't touch most of the stuff on the HDD. Now that I have Natasha back, I have the unenviable task of migrating all ...

I don't know if you've ever run into it, but there's a thing on YouTube called the "accent tag". It's a list of vocabulary words and questions that you're supposed to answer on camera in whatever your native accent is, basically to show people on other parts of the planet how you talk. Most of them are pretty ordinary, but occasionally you get a fantastic mashup. This young lady here popped up when I was searching for "transatlantic accent". She has not actually got one -- it's a specific regionless accent, popular among actors and some of the American upper classes prior to and during WWII -- but she dubbed hers this, as she picked it up accompanying her father on a lot of ocean crossings as a kid. The word list is really just a collection of shibboleths, and it's very heavily biased towards American regional accents. "Wash" turns into "warsh" in Missouri; "caramel", "New Orleans", "may...

Something which is often overlooked when studying media history is the history of individual pieces -- you can find a history of "silent film" or "Charlie Chaplin's silent films" or "Charlie Chaplin's last silent film", but rarely if ever do you find an investigation of one particular copy of that work. Most media historians I've met don't even know how to do this sort of archaeological excavation of a image. Some A/V engineers I've met have, but they don't; they're more concerned with observing the various tell-tale aberrations and eliminating them from the signal chain. The closest thing I know of would probably be a forensics position of some kind, dedicated to identifying sources and forgery. Watching the picture -- not the contents of the picture, necessarily, but the raw unprocessed image -- can tell you a lot. In 1914, a man named Winsor McCay made a short animated film called "Gertie the Dinosaur". It was u...