My good friend, fellow gamer, neighbor, and coworker tatterdamelion is also a novelist. (I know, I know, how talented can one guy be?? Ladies! Pay attention here!)

His novels Greetings from Buena Rosa and Ride Like the Devil are available at Lulu.com, and he has several others that aren't currently posted.

One of his ongoing projects is a series of novels inspired by a Mutants & Masterminds game he used to run for our group of friends.

In that game I played "Worm Queen," a sardonic scientist by day, costumed crime-fighter by night, who has the mysterious ability to summon all kinds of paranormal worms to do her bidding. (dimensional worms, force worms, heat worms, teleporting worms, etc.)

* * * * *

* * * * *
In any case! A Worm Queen-centered story arc is the focus of tatterdamelion's most recent novel, and he's thinking of asking dendacien to photograph a real live model for the cover, and he asked me to pose!

Let me tell you, even 10 years ago no one was asking me to pose for the cover of his novel.

Any more of this and a girl could get too full of herself. :-)

I always figured that people in the future would find innovative ways to deal with all the problems we're creating today -- problems like landfills, for instance. Someone in the future is going to mine the hell out of those for their valuable components.

Looks like someone figured out a way to decompose a plastic bag. You have to grind up the bags into powder first, and there's a specific temperature range and type of microbe involved, but it's possible.

Hooray for science in the news!

I'm still wondering why the Kremlin's elite guard ordered 3,200 female mice back in March. So weird.

We hosted a session of "Mutants & Masterminds" today,  starting around 10 AM and ending around 2:00, right before Andrew had to head off to work. Andrew GMed this time -- he's taking turns with tatterdamelion. Also in attendance: 3countylaugh, brighids_own, limbsmith, tatterdamelion's high-school age son who is visiting for several weeks, Tom & Mandy, aawhitewood, and juniperjournal. A full house!



3countylaugh and brighids_own had just returned from a workshop at which they learned all about building cob houses and earth ovens out of clay, sand, and straw. I'm doing a bit more research to find out about it. The whole concept is very interesting, and it seems you could do a whole lot with an earth oven...

They offered to build us one, and it was a serious offer, not merely a fanciful whim that wouldn't work out. I have to say that part of me thinks "Hmmm. That could be really neat."

Why does this appeal to me?

• Because I like the idea of doing massive amounts of baking over a two-day period, and probably making an event out of it -- "Come one, come all, to the annual summer firing of the Warren earth oven!"
  

• Because anything that gives me the power to nourish or protect my family "off the grid" appeals to a very paranoid part of me that's pretty sure civilization will be falling in a few years and I'll be protecting my garden and earth oven with a makeshift militia composed of family and friends.

• And also because I have some ceramic tiles I brought back from China, where decorative tiles from roofs often fall off older buildings and are discarded. I would like to embed those tiles in something, someday. A mosaic, a fireplace surround, something. They are too neat to do nothing with.

I even have a potential site in mind: the raised terrace currently completely dominated by a monstrously large cherry laurel. Getting that thing out would open up dozens of square feet of usable space. Of course, getting that cherry laurel out would also be a monstrously large job. It's really huge. Then again, Tom owns a chainsaw...

Hmmmm...

I was glancing through a recent issue of "Real Simple" while in a doctor's waiting room recently, and found myself staring at a full-page spread of vintage forks with specialized uses. Lemon forks, pickle forks, oyster forks, fruit forks -- forks of all kinds. Forks I'd never seen before.

And then today's Miss Manners column contains the acerbic commentary:

"[I]t is unfortunately true that there was a nasty time during the 19th-century Industrial Revolution when guessing the uses of peculiar flatware served as an entrance test for moving up into the middle class.

This is no longer the case. The table has become simplified, to put it delicately -- possibly because so few people sit at it. But the sting of the old days has a peculiar afterlife. People still speak with mysterious pride of "not knowing which fork to use" as if nearly all those specialized Victorian pieces hadn't been melted down to finance World War I, and now they would be lucky to get a metal fork instead of a plastic one."

Intrigued, today I Googled "vintage flatware," and found a vast panoply of specialized, archaic forks, knives, spoons, and other paraphernalia from SilverQueen in Florida.

I'm used to seeing some of these. Tongs? Sure. An ice scoop? Not unusual. The cheese graters, the cheese plane, the gravy ladles and punch ladles and butter knives and suchlike implements are all familiar to me. I own a sugar spoon or two.

But ah, the other exotic things on this page. Check it out!

( Flatware Fun )

I want to take classes in Historic Cookery now. Unfortunately it appears that I might have to go to the UK to do it.

Check out the "Catherine basket" partway down the page!

[EDIT] Just stole the Catherine basket for a new icon. Mwahahahaha. *rubs hands together evilly*

Went to Best Buy this afternoon with Andrew and the baby, to get a new power cable for my old Dell laptop. The woman next to us in line at the Geek Squad desk was asking for help retrieving files from her old Dell laptop, which had recently died, and she was almost certain her power cable was the same as ours. So she's going to mail it to us.

Problem (potentially) solved (if she mails it to us; if it's the right cable). Cost: $0.

It really pays to have a cute baby. People do things for you.

We also browsed new laptops, upon the seeing of which I had to fan myself and lie down, because you can get something 100 times as good as the monster clunky thing I've been struggling with all this time, for only a few hundred bucks. Seriously, I saw laptops there that were $500, $600. TOTAL.

When we bought this laptop it cost us $2,000. Now I can get something so much better and faster and also cheaper.

I was always taught the "Good Cheap Fast" triangle -- you can have two of the three, but not all three.
Good and fast? Sure, but it won't come cheap.
Good and cheap? Yes, you can find that, but it won't be fast.
Cheap and fast? Sure thing. It will be no good.

But now it seems I can have good, cheap, and fast, at least in laptop-ville.

Who sold whose soul to the Devil to make this possible?

From Wikipedia, here's a list of the 64 Kalas (art forms), according to "various Hindu shastra":

"Kalā (Sanskrit: कला) refers to art forms, attributes or virtues.

1. Histrionic Talents, Drama, story telling techniques, mnemonics etc.,
2. Making musical Instruments, simple mechanical devices etc.,
( But wait, there's more! )

So very much to comment on.

Here are a few things, just off the top of my head --

Gamers, you will notice that #9 ("Playing games like dice") leads seemingly inevitably to #10 ("Mastering eroticism as per Vatsyayana, erotic devices and sexual arts"). Woo hoo!

Parents, you will notice that #53 ("Child rearing & Pediatrics") leads, also seemingly inevitably, to #54 ("Punishing guilty appropriately by Law and Order").

#45, "Managing Oil Resources," leads to #46, "Having control over others' minds, spells, charms ,Omens." That explains Haliburton quite neatly.

And finally, what the heck is up with #20, "Making ICBM"? Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles are part of ancient Hindu texts??

I am getting all my good links from 3countylaugh recently. This one came to me from her via tatterdamelion.

"Arguments" -- towers and other structures made out of books by artist Tom Bendtsen.

I especially like this little chapel-esque building. This was done over 10 years ago, but I'm just finding out about it now. Hooray for the relative permanency of easily reproducible media like photographs and, er, books!

This is neat. The New York Times made a pretty graph showing how movies have fared at the box office over a 21-year period, after adjusting for inflation.

They've charted the amounts out in a very pretty format that looks like something organic, like an umbilical cord, or a dreamscape mountain range that goes down as well as up.

There's a scroll bar, so you can scroll left and right and explore.

Our DVD player, which we bought in 2000 for $220 or so, finally died the other day. Nowadays we use it mostly to watch DVDs of "The Wiggles" and "Blue's Clues." As such, it is a vital part of our household. VITAL!!

So on Saturday morning after I got back from grocery shopping, Andrew and I packed up the girls and headed to Best Buy. The wren's first time at Best Buy! (Awwww, the rites of passage in modern society.)

I was figuring that a replacement DVD player would be in the $150 - $300 range, considering that the technology has probably improved since 2000.

I was absolutely floored to find that we could buy a DVD player for $23.95. Apparently the technology has gotten much, much, much, much cheaper and more easily available since then.

See, maybe inflation is up, but our standard of living is up too, because we can get all these crazy-cheap things now. When I was a kid, my mom made Play-Dough for me to play with. Nowadays I could do that, or I could spend half an hour's wages and get a four-tier gift basket of Play-Dough complete with different colored doughs, a little pizza cutter, a little rolling pin, and on and on and on.

Science! Mad science!

As PostSecret.com explains: "PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard."

tatterdamelion told me a few weeks ago about another wrinkle in this phenomenon. People go into bookstores and tuck slips of paper holding a secret between the leaves of a book. When someone buys that book, that book -- unbeknownst to the purchaser -- will come with a one-of-a-kind, unique secret.

I've now experienced this for myself. For Christmas, Tom and Mandy gave the hypermuffin a book: The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, by Neil Gaiman. It's an odd, unsettling, creepy little book. From Neil Gaiman, I would expect no less.

It's too old for her, so I left it on the shelf. The other week at Harmonium, Mandy suggested I read it, so I took it down and started in. And what did I find but my very own Post Secret.

It's in orange ink on a half-sheet of lined paper. Four spiky orange stars with different patterns inside, and fanciful curlicues, surround the sentence, which was lovingly handwritten in Gothic-inspired font. The back of the paper reads: "www.postsecret.com"

The secret itself:

"I wish    I had
one great idea that
would take people's
breath away,
especially
my
own."

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab sells perfume oils, esters, and essences.

They sell them with black-and-white, sorta-kinda-creepy Charles Addams-inspired art, Gothic lettering, eccentric names for scent lines -- "Picnic in Arkham," anyone? -- but most importantly, they sell them with words. Lots and lots of beautiful, dark, creepy, spine-tingling words.

I am feeling the urge to shell out money to get 6 samples mailed to me. But what to choose? I could navigate this site for hours reading and imagining the scents that go with these descriptions.

Words -- the ultimate seduction.

(I just wish the font on their site were a bit larger. But that's what Control + is for.)

Anyway -- come with me, if you will, and sink into the following descriptions' pillowy verbiage... and this is just one category of 25 or so!...

( Somnium )

I feel like going to bed and dreaming dark dreams. And I haven't even bought a thing.

There's a Really Really Free Market coming up in Seattle, this Saturday, January 19 from 9 - 2.

From the LJ entry where I found this info: "A Really Free Market is an event put on by the community for the community to share resources. No money, no barter, no trade, only free. Bring usable items, food, skills, services and talents to give for the sake of giving."

I want to go! What a great antidote to the Church of Consumerism that is our society.

(At the same time, I can see why these experiments have to be short-term, human nature being what it is. Collectivism works well for a few hours when everyone's needs are mostly already met and we're just playing, or when you have a small, dedicated group of unusually self-sacrificing individuals who have a shared goal that's greater than themselves -- monasteries and convents are great examples of collectivism/communism in action. But anything bigger, anything institutionalized, anything imposed by force from the top down, and you are creating serious problems.)

Anyway. Anyone want to go with me? We can pretend we're at Burning Man.   :-)

As I was walking out of One Union Square today, the little old security guard said "Leaving already?"

I explained that I now leave at noon on Mondays and Wednesdays so I can get home and take the girls by 1:00, but that I can now stay later on Thursdays and Fridays, polytrypos's new "weekend."

"I got something for ya!" he said, and ducked around to a side door. Inside were several unearthed flowers lying on their sides on the floor, dirt clinging to their exposed bulbs. Apparently they'd just changed the floral display, and the old flowers were no longer wanted. "You want one?" he asked. "You'll have to get a vase for it." I said that wouldn't be a problem -- I was excited! Fresh flowers! For me! Just because I'm nice and chat with him as I go by!

So, here's what my dining room table looks like now:

If you have a personalized Google homepage -- the so-called "iGoogle," although I don't know what's "i" about it -- you can apparently choose a "theme" for the top bar. And among the selection of 8 or so themes is one called "Teahouse." On a 24-hour cycle, a cute little cartoon fox in a Japanese hat paddles a boat across a small lake, picks oranges, does laundry, plays a lute, sits on the dock gazing at the stars, or sleeps. And according to hearsay, if you stay up until 3 AM, you can see a demon sneaking into the scene and stealing the fox's cream puffs. Just like a fairy tale!

Here is a hilarious "ode to teahouse fox," written from the perspective of a cubicle dweller who first envies, then grows to disdain, the fox's simple, pastoral, never-changing lifestyle. http://accismus.wordpress.com/2007/07/03/ode-to-igoogles-teahouse-theme/

Thanks to Jen for telling me about all of this -- the theme, the ode, the cream-puff-stealing demon. I've added this "theme" to my personalized Google page, and my world is now better.

Here's Make Magazine telling us how to make your own Rubik's Cube out of dice.

This is awesome! Andrew would love a Rubik's Cube made out of casino dice.

Tres cool.

Here are some beautiful wooden pieces from Kokuyo. Each one spells out the name of an animal: Bear, Bird, Fish, Tiger, Horse, Monkey, or Rabbit. And then the letters break apart and can be re-formed into both the same word in Japanese/Chinese, and into a stylized picture of the same animal.

The website is hypnotic. I love watching the letters break apart and re-form into the next shape.

Links ahoy!

Products

• The Solar Slow Cooker! (This is a cheap-o $18 version of the SunOven, which, at $259, seems a bit pricey to me. Although the SunOven seems to offer more. But still, that's quite a price differential.)

• This "Lighten My Labor" spa set to get you through the different phases of childbirth would have come in handy a few weeks ago!... um, actually NOT! This is a huge waste of money!

Content

• The Cleaner Plate Club -- a site about slow food. Current post is against high fructose corn syrup, which -- I think we can all agree -- is the work of the Devil.

• For the gaming geek in your life: How to make a 12-sided calendar... a big paper D12 with a month on each face.

• FreeStuff4Kids.com. 'Nuff said.

As seen in Discover Magazine (thanks, aawhitewood!):

• Scientists correlated which scholarly papers referred to which other scholarly papers, and came up with a family tree of all the sciences -- which sciences are more closely related to which other sciences. It's interesting, and pretty to look at all by itself.

• And finally, this. This is just beautiful. ....
  

"The World's Most Complex Structure

Abstract 248-dimensional map may unify the laws of nature.

After 120 years of puzzling, mathematicians have mapped out the most complex abstract structure ever conceived, a 248-dimensional representation called the Lie group E8, first predicted in 1887 by Norwegian math genius Sophus Lie. A major theoretical triumph, the result may also hold the key to a unified theory of physics.

The full E8 map is a monster, with almost 100 times as much data as the Human Genome Project. It took a team of 18 mathematicians four years to produce the results, which they finally did with the aid of supercomputers...."

Rest of the article here.

Close-up picture of this gorgeous structure, which NEEDS to be on a very large poster. Or on t-shirts. Or coasters! This would rock on a set of coasters!

autumnbottom already knew about this phenomenon, but I did not.

Now I know too, and my world is better.

http://maliavale.com/?p=726

The Library of Congress has an amazingly detailed map of "Fairyland," drawn by Bernard Sleigh in 1872.

The full thing must be huge. Using this online tool, you can zoom way in and examine it square by square...

fascinating!

Thanks to Tom for the tip.