For all the angst about the religious Right in the US, it takes enlightened Europeans to ban blasphemous speech: http://ping.fm/9PLXN

Kat posts this on the board, ""Thanks to everyone for their prayers. God is good! Bill is doing well and his heart is healing well!" and drops a bag on the bar. "You folx do Good Work™"

Well not quite. I mean nature will never come up with monsters as stupid as some of the stuff in the Monstrous Compendium or the Fiend Folio. But it sure is capable of producing some oddities.

Like the armadillo-crocodile. Make it giant size, give it a flame breath, and maybe even some INT and spells and you have the perfect challenge for your next session.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/bigphotos/26923726.html

Anyone else have a favourite real-world creature that serves as an interesting and exotic fantasy critter?

(I am also quite fond of the Demon Duck of Doom - go on, google it).

First to City Hall, to pick up a set of We're Celebrating buttons, then the double-decker bus (after waiting forever for it to show up) to the hub.

Lunch at Pizza Port. I revisited the question of why they didn't name it Pizza Planet, to which ariel10575 came up with a number of ideas: lack of Chuck E. Cheese style games within the restaurant, licensing concerns pre-dating the Disney/Pixar buyout, potential restaurant chain with less hemmed-in locations.

Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blaster. Alex got a much higher score than usual; the bonus targets refused to give me or ariel10575 any points, I guess they were working triple overtime for him for whatever reason.

ariel10575 took Victoria to get a princess makeover and see Small World. The makeover turned out to consist of her existing Cinderella dress, a sash, a hair bow and glitter, and some light makeup.

Meanwhile, I took the boys to Innoventions, Honey I Shrunk the Audience, and rides on the railroad and Mark Twain. Innoventions promised Asimo, but that area was apparently closed that day; instead, we mostly indulged in modern-day Zeerust in the form of a model home with several dozen Microsoft Surfaces, each with a different clunky interface.

We met up again, I took Matthew and Victoria on the tea cups, then we headed over to California Adventure for dinner (Ariel's Grotto; everyone who shouts "woo!" while singing Happy Birthday needs to die in a fire) and the Electrical Parade (minor changes to the music which I found muddled or otherwise annoying; minor changes to the float lineup which I was neutral about, apart from Pete's Dragon which I still wish they'd ditch). By then, the kids were tired, so we took the tram back to the parking garage and watched fireworks through the trees (Fantasmic will be better anyway after they finish debugging the new Maleficent prop).

Okay, let me start by saying that guys don't get nearly enough credit.

Seriously. When it comes to sex, we really don't get the props. It's surprisingly hard work propping yourself up and doing the grunt-n-thrust, and any woman who's ever tried a strap-on for the first time will probably discover muscle aches in muscles she didn't know she had.

Now, I'm a big fan of strap-on sex. Receiving or watching (hey, I am a guy; watching two--or more!--girls get it on never gets old. I swear it's genetic.) And, fortunately, I've been graced with a number of partners who dig strap-on play too. The biggest problem, at least from a strictly physical perspective, is that it's generally not as much fun for the giver as it is for the receiver, which is why this thing exists:



This is the Tantus Feeldoe. If it doesn't look like an ordinary dildo, that's because it's not. It's the Ferrari-frikkin'-Formula-One race car of dildos. This thing has a patent on it, and seriously, who patents a dildo?

The "strapons are more fun to receive than to give" engineering challenge has been tackled before, of course. The old-fashioned double-ender was an early attempt to design around this problem, and today modern science has given us other specialized strap-ons that try to work the same way (like the Nexus and the Share, or if you're a mutant extra-terrestrial creature whose ideas of Earthly delights come from watching tentacle hentai beamed into space from Japanese network television, and perhaps had had a female vagina described to you but had never seen one up close, the Tango), but none are as successful as the Feeldoe, at least from the point of view of your humble recipient.

The Feeldoe comes in four sizes, which Tantus calls "Slim," "Original," "Stout," and "More." People who use them for girl-on-girl vaginal fun might call them "small(ish)," "medium," "large(ish)," and "large;" for teh mad analz, they might more reasonably be described as "big," "really big," "really really big," and "holy mother of God!" They're conveniently color-coded, so you can avoid those awkward after-sex "are you sure that was the size you intended to use?" conversations.

And did I mention they vibrate? Seriously. There's a cunning little slot in the base for a small but remarkably powerful little vibrating device.

Plus, silicone! You can wash it in the dishwasher! I don't actually know anyone who washes silicone sex toys in the dishwasher, but everything I've ever read about silicone always mentions that you can, so...you can wash it in the dishwasher! I don't recommend it if your mother or your aunt Mildred lives within easy driving distance and has the habit of popping over without warning; "Hey, Mildred! Come look at what I found in the dishwasher! It's...it looks like...Oh my God!" But you can. If, y'know, that appeals to you. Or you have a dishwasher fetish. Or something.

So, yeah. Good for the giver as well as the receiver; that's the general engineering notion here. There is actually a downside (and I don't just mean with the "Holy mother of God!" model) and that's the fact that it isn't a strap-on for beginners.

Any hands-free, harness-free design, no matter how clever, takes some work to learn how to use, which is probably another of those places where we guys really don't get near enough credit. Granted, you can use this dildo with a harness; you get one of the harnesses that uses rings to hold the dildo in place, you take out the panel behind the ring, you put on the dildo, you put the harness on over it, and it ain't goin' nowhere, so you end up with the best of a harness design and the "oh my God it gets me off to give it to you!" benefits of the hands-free design, and that's all well and good.

Gets a bit spendy, though. This toy won't be the cheapest thing on your shelf to begin with (though I happen to believe it's more than worth the cost), and a high-quality harness is going to double the price, so it...

Well, now that I think about it, it's like anything else. Spend the money to do it the easy way or spend the time to learn how to do it the hard way, I suppose.

As for the rest, it's pretty much what you expect from a well-designed sex toy. Yes, awesome G-spot stimulation (for both the giver and, if the receiver is a woman, the receiver). Yes, Incredible, mind-blowing orgasms, of the kind apt if they are not well-regulated, to have you waking up some hours later with a chunk of missing time and a "what the hell just happened?" expression. The state of sex toy design being what it is, these should be baseline givens in any good toy, and the Feeldoe meets those expectations admirably.

And it has a bit of that "mad scientist's lair" look to it. I'm always partial to things that look at home in a mad scientist's lair.

I have two of these, in the "big" and "really really big" sizes. If you prefer the "holy mother of God!" size, then you're a far better man, or woman, than I.

I don't usually ask, but today I gotta. I just looked at both of our accounts. My son, the responsible one even though he's 13, got a cell phone & was told he could only play free games. No problem... except for the fact that his 'free games' were hooking into the internet and he didn't know this. Okay. I call AT&T and we work out a add free internet for him & backdate it for the $200someodd bill that he'd run up last month. I thought that it would be off of the amount that would be automatically withdrawn at the front end of this month. No go. Over $400 got taken out of our main account. (breathe, Kathryn, breathe)

So, at this point, I will have about $16 after the next bill goes through until my next child support comes through... probably about the 18th or an invoice comes through from Discovery (God knows when because I sure don't... they haven't paid me for the next to last one and I haven't gotten a reply to my email asking why... about to email again). I did talk to AT&T yesterday and they have put in for a refund to my account but it might not get in in time because my next billing cycle is the 13th an it takes 3-5 days to come through. My next bill comes out of the account on the 15th for ~$62. And that doesn't take into account food, meds, dr. appt. etc etc etc.

So... if folx could spare any energy for the AT&T refund and/or the invoices coming through I would really really really appreciate it. No, really!! Hugs are also very, very much appreciated!!

Oh! This won't help but situation bit I've now had three sales on my cafepress store which has been an egoboo... even though that is just ~$10 profit that I won't see for 90 days (they give folx time to send stuff back if there is something wrong etc).

Today I met a cross-section of the "creative class"... which was fun and interesting. It's also interesting to look at the culture that arises in such environments. Our highest value is openness #opendata. Not only do we want data to be free, but we want to produce lots of it, rather indiscriminately. It's no surprise that Twitter is their icon... and we are living up to Herb Simon's prediction. Although there's an element of trendiness and geek-chic to this, most people seem to be the real thing.

Experiencing this sort of thing was one of my main reasons for visiting the Bay Area.

Also: I got WiFi at the BART, and in a moving car in downtown Palo Alto (though neither worked very well)

The whole idea of an unconference is that it's a dynamic event, in which the audience decides which events take place. Today this involved making proposals in A5-sized pieces of paper containing a number of bubbles, and "voting" by filling in a bubble. This information is used for room assignment.

Here's something about the people I met today:
* I met at least 3 transhumanist types
* One lady works for Nature Magazine, Second Life division (she's just 1 out of 2.5).
* Dawei Lin, Director of Bioinformatics Core at UC Davis, has made Lego models of a virus at the Maker Faire
* 23andMe, a personal genomics company, has a representative
* PLoS has a representative
* Melanie Swan
* Tantek, who is just "t" on Twitter, and gets annoyed at n00b twitterers (migrating from MySpace) who write "at" as "@t".
* Naomi Most, science radio show host, who took my picture with simonfunk

I'm at SciBarCamp, my first unconference. Lots of compbio!

Dinner at Miyake. Added 3 people on twitter, many of whom have been tweeting as it happens.

http://twitpic.com/9qlwj

MA is filing suit to challenge the Defense of Marriage Act. I'm not certain how I feel about this, but it is definitely Big News either way! And, also, a giant thumbed nose to the President, as rax points out...

**Me**

Okay, so I'm finally getting a chance to read through some of the Free RPG Day swag.

I've only got a few of the books I picked up with me, so I'm gonna go through them.

Generally from Free RPG Days materials, I expect a few things.

I want it to give me a taste for the game, flavour and mechanics both. Generally, I expect a sample adventure, with a few pre-gen characters. I don't mind if the system is dumbed down a bit, since we only need to get the flavour of the game.

But there's one thing that's a bit of a game breaker for me.

The books are designed to be ready to go games. One of the elements there should be ease of preperation, particularly in getting the players their characters.

Of the handfull of books I got on FRPGD, I think only Mongoose's playtest guide for Corporation had PCs who were laid out as two page characters, ready to be removed from the centre of the book and handed out. I can't figure out why that's so important to me, but I really want to be able to just pull out the centre fold or two and just hand them off to players and go.

Geist seems to be particularly opposed to making the PCs easy to get to; The PCs are put in the back of the book over multiple pages. Getting them to the playes would require either everyone having a copy of the quickstart booklet, or enthusiastic photocopying.

It would have been easy enough to edit them so they were a set of two page characters in mid book, ready to be ripped and distributed, with a character sheet on one page, and rules explanation and background on the other (or the character sheet can be shrunk down to give more space for background and rules info). The key motif used in the borders is kind of nice.

Rogue Trader does a good job of making the PCs one page sheets, but they are in the beginning of the book. That means that there'll be either photocopying or two players sharing a sheet ripped out from an inconvenient place. It also makes me think it should be about bankers who get in over their heads and end up bringing down national institutions.

Admittedly, both of them look good, and their presentation and layout are pretty good other than the character quibble. Both of them interest me, although Warhammer 40K's aesthetic and world just don't grab me. Geist I'm interested in, although I look at it and my lizard brain says "You aren't my mommy, Wraith is my mommy!"

Dragon Warriors and Paranoia, which are also both from Mongoose, really drop the ball in terms of getting the players PCs.

Like Corporation, both of the books are half sized, and Paranoia really suffered for it, with cramped, tiny text scrolling down the page in three columns. Dragon Warriors is in two columns, but doesn't even include characters, instead including rules for generating either a Warrior or Barbarian character. Dragon Warriors made me interested in the game in spite of the presentation (although the sample monsters are a bit fey).

Paranoia was a pure mess, and I couldn't even get through the lousy presentation to make it to the game stuff inside. The characters seem to have been mixed into the book wtih a blender.

Corporation is the one game that seems to hew furthest from my interests. It's some kind of posthuman cyberpunk corporate espionage game, and the corporations listed within seem somewhat laughable, especially for 500 years in the future. But the book presents the world and setting well enough

All the books contained interesting elements, of course. Corporation managed to make a book that just was the most useful for me.

xposted to thebitterguy

So k9chick used to be a river guide and has tons and tons of experience fly fishing, so when she heard I was going camping and fishing this weekend, she offered me a free lesson. We made plans to meet at a local park (which has plenty of big grass fields and a pond in which to practice) today at 11:30 for the lesson. For some reason I got weird anxiety about oversleeping and missing it, so I woke up every half hour on the hour from about 6am onward today, which sucked. I even had a dream that my truck battery and cell phone battery both died so I couldn't let her know why I wasn't there. Freaky subconscious.

Anyhow, I did get there on time. She showed up with the equivalent of a stuffed-to-the-brim range bag full of fishing gear as well as rods and reels. First she talked about the "weights" of the rods (and recommended a 5 weight for me as a first timer) and the weights of the line (use one weight higher than the rod rating), then the types of line attachments - visible line, then leader, then tippet to add to the leader as it gets shortened over time. After that, she taught me how to tie on a fly, then how to tie the proper knot for adding tippet.



All the while she made little essential notes on the back of an envelope for me. Next I learned how to cast by tossing the fly into the grass over and over again. She talked about setting the hook and how to properly play the fish in, and stood out there tugging on the line so I could get a feel for how differently it works when the fish is coming toward you versus swimming away. I did learn that the reel is really pretty useless (at least with her style of fishing) except as a place to neatly keep the line coiled up.

Finally, we moved to the pond, where I learned the 'shadow cast' (flopping the line around in the air to dry out the fly so it will float again after it's been waterlogged), normal casting, roll casting, and hauling the line. I think I did okay because by the end I could semi-lightly drop the fly within a foot or three of where I wanted it, although I'd occasionally mess up and my line would smoosh up on the water.

k9chick had cut the hook off my fly to both (a) be legal in the park and (b) allay my fears of losing an eyeball. And still a couple of fish nibbled at my fly in the pond! That was neat. She briefly covered the difference between nymphs and dry flies and sent me home with a handful of each. Then she surprised me by loaning me a pack rod and reel and line for this weekend trip, woot!

The flies look REALLY cool. I plan to take some neat photos of them up close later on so y'all can see how nifty they are.

I think I enjoyed this fly fishing thing more than I expected because it requires a certain amount of skill and concentration that makes the act of the fishing itself nearly as interesting as the idea of actually catching a fish.

Now we'll just have to see if I can actually catch fish. :)

Lots of people I know say that a place "feels like home to me" or "I liked living there, but it really wasn't home" or "I got homesick", and they mean for a specific place.

I don't. I don't know what home really means. At times, I'm at peace with that, but usually reality will uproot me, and I'll end up moving somewhere else, mostly because someone else I'm with says that it's time to go, and I've never had enough attachment to one place to be able to convince them to stay. Most of the time, I don't care too much, but other times I think that it'd be nice to have something permanent in my life, to live in one spot for more than 5 years, which is the longest I think I've ever lived continuously in one spot. But even if I do that, I'll always look at the world as something ceaselessly changing, where I'll always have a good chance of being uprooted and ragged away from any sense of ever having a place I can trust to be mine forever.

It's like I'm yearning for something I have no faith in ever getting. Ceaseless change is scary, but it's reality. Nothing is certain in life. Anything you have can be lost.