the Jack's Journal

9:21pm: "He's not heavy, he's my brother"; or, Worf is a white woman
So earlier this evening, in my travels through the internet, I came across a link to the site MyHeritage.com where, among other (mostly less interesting) things, visitors can generate a collage of celebrities to whom they look most similar.

I tried using photos of myself, but the facial-recognition software at MyHeritage can apparently only recognise faces turned directly into the camera, and I tend to have mostly photos of myself in profile or with something in front of my head. Happily, I also had this photo of my brother wearing the uniform costume I got for him when I went to the Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas a few years ago¹.

Now, I'd already been underwhelmed by the power of MyHeritage's facial-recognition software; what can I say, I watch Law & Order (all three flavours), Criminal Minds, Dexter and a half-dozen-odd other crime dramas², and they have led me to believe that facial-recognition software is only slightly less awesome than God.

The program recognised my brother's face. It also recognised the face of the cardboard Lietenant Worf my brother was posed beside... and because Worf was on the left, it ignored the other face, even though the other face was in the centre of the photo and an actual human and stuff.

But I figured, what the hell -- let's see what celebrities Michael Dorn looks like when he's in Worf makeup. ( Disturbing information behind cut. Also, video. )

So, there you have it: If you were traumatised⁴, I refer you to thete1 and petronelle for redress.

( Footnotes )

9:31pm: Good news and bad news...
The good news: After months of fruitlessly searching for an apartment in Waterbury which meets Section 8 guidelines (as opposed to claiming to welcome voucher-holders yet asking a higher rent amount for the size of the apartment than HUD guidelines allow) *and* is wheelchair accessible, we've found...

...an apartment which isn't accessible yet, but where the landlord says he's willing to put in a ramp, at his expense, so that we can live there!

Many details are still up in the air, but this is very exciting. We really like the apartment (and, not shockingly, the landlord) and are hoping everything will work out.

The bad news: Well, we're going to need to put up 2 *full* months' rent (security deposit + last month's rent) *plus* our share of the first month's rent, because the section 8 voucher program *brilliantly* does not include any help with security deposits (other than forbidding landlords from charging a security deposit amount so high that it's actually illegal under relevant state law). We're also going to go from all of our utilities other than phone, TV and internet being included in our rent to paying separate heating oil and electric bills. We need to tighten our belts, so to speak, and cut down on any unnecessary spending.

So, we won't be going into NYC tomorrow for the Delany reading. Those of you who are planning to go, enjoy! And hopefully next year we'll be able to get into the city for some sort of fan-friendly event.

12:17pm: Delany reading and/or fannish gathering in NYC?
So Samuel R. Delany is doing a reading at the South Street Seaport Museum two weeks from now.

( *Details!* )

Cross-posted to my LJ, but comments go here so I can keep track. I've set anonymous comments to screen to keep your addresses, phone numbers, etc. from the phishing eyes of spambots (I believe OpenID logins count as anonymous comments for screening purposes) -- just remember to tell me who you are if you comment anonymously *without* an OpenID!

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11:12am: Geeky fun with maths (with extra comics-geekiness)
Why yes, another post! And I still haven't got round to posting my belated report on Friday's delightful adventure -- possibly I am constitutionally incapable of reporting on fangatherings until well after the fact.

So, today's xkcd:

Gosh, I love reposting things that are under Creative Commons license.
Like pretty much all xkcd strips, it's awesomely, geektastically funny. But I'd like to draw your attention to the little visual aid in panel two which reads 'Standard Creepiness Rule: Don't date under (age/2 + 7)'.

This rule explains rather a lot about Batman/Robin and Superman/Robin pairings ...if you take into account the way many people have trouble remembering mathematical formulae correctly. (Don't believe me? What's the formula for the circumference of a circle?¹ How about for the area of a right triangle?²) Here's what I think happened.

In Bruce's head, it's 'Don't date under (age/7 + 2)'; so, if he's 35 -- and canonically, he's always 35 except when otherwise specified such as in Batman: Year One or 'The Lesson' -- this yields a don't-date-under age of seven years old. Perfect for Bruce, who in ever so many ways is still an eight-year-old boy in a man's body.

In Clark's head, the Standard Creepiness Rule is 'Don't date under (age/2 - 7)'; so, if his default canon age is 30 -- which, officially, it's either 29 or 30, but I don't want to clutter up this post with tedious remainders -- this yields a don't-date-under age of eight. Perfect for ...Clark's tendency to fixate on Robins from the moment he first lays eyes on them in uniform. Especially when one takes into consideration that, while modern canon has adjusted Dick Grayson's age at the time of his parents' death to thirteen, in the Golden Age Dick went to live with Bruce and fight crime in short pants before he was even ten years old (the number of birthday candles on the cake in this issue was frighteningly small, but unfortunately the internets failed to provide me with any scans showing the post-spanking panels).

See? It ALL MAKES SENSE NOW.
___
1. Hint: *not* πr².
2. Hint: *not* A²+B²=C².

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1:23am: I'm pretty sure this is a better example of what you're referring to
I've seen but not been involved in the controversy in bandom over whether stagegay is good or bad -- not been involved in because bandom is not my fandom. Yes, some of those boys are pretty and look good on each other, yes I've heard the music and like some of it (and know what "This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race" means) ...I'm just not fannish about it. All of you who love it are welcome to it.

I haven't read all the posts; I haven't even read all the posts which showed up on my flist. In other words, it's nearly certain I'm missing a lot of the nuances of the arguments on each side.

That said,

...You want to talk about boys kissing and feeling each other up in public but refusing to state publicly that they're gay, queer, bi or what have you? Have a look here. Not the same rugby players who keep posing for those notoriously homoerotic and borderline-pornographic calendars (that's a French rugby team) but, well, rugby players do have something of an international reputation for this sort of thing. To the point where homoerotic rugby images have been used in tourism billboards.

Apparently someone also compared stagegay to blackface. I'm not going to comment on that beyond "Um, *NO*," but coincidentally, over the weekend katarik and I were discussing some actual blackface worn to this year's Dragon*con, which she attended and I ...found the website with the official costume-contest photos from. Those of you who plan to ever attend a comics and/or sci-fi and/or fantasy con in costume, take note:
This is okay.
This is *really NOT* okay.
(For the benefit of those who need to google who the geeks in those photos are meant to be dressed as, the former is probably Drizzt Do'Urden, a character from a series of tie-in novels for Dungeons & Dragons -- certainly he's a drow elf -- and the three in the latter are Zoe Reynolds, Hoban "Wash" Washburne, and Mal Reynolds from Firefly and later Serenity; in both the television series and the subsequent film, Zoe was played by Gina Torres.)

Here's a better-quality photo of two completely different people in drow costumes who apparently missed the official hallway contest. And, for contrast, here's one of several white women who managed to be recognisable in their Zoe costumes without blackface makeup; there were also several different women of colour dressed as Zoe. Mind you, when I say "recognisable" I'm speaking as someone who is not and never was a fan of Firefly/Serenity -- I watched one episode and parts of a few others to see if I could get into it, and I couldn't. (I am a Gina Torres fan, but that's beside the point.) And actually, I'm reasonably sure there were a number of women (and maybe even a man or three) in Zoe costumes at the con other than the handful I've seen, but I didn't look further than what came up in searches on Flickr, since I was already there viewing the "official" photos.

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3:18am: several diversions, and a number of people named Jack
(Diversion in the sense of a pleasant entertainment, rather than the sense of shifting attention from one subject to another.)

First of all, last week petronelle came to visit me and Te. She is quite diverting on her own! Delectable foods were delected, fancuddles occurred, and I won at making fangirls squeal, hands down. (In fairness, I must admit most of the squealing was in response to my sandbagging them with puns or cracked-out ideas like 'what if Jason had been adopted by Ollie?')

Petra also inflicted introduced me to 5.75 wonderful and diverting things during her visit... ( The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Singin' in the Rain, ) ( Doctor Who, ) ( Good Omens, ) ( the Doctor Who recaps at TWoP, ) ( and Sweeney Todd ).

Unrelated except chronologically: In between finishing Good Omens and reading anything else, I devoured the entire Canopus in Argos series by Doris Lessing. (Well, okay, I skimmed past large chunks of The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. Which, considering that it's only a ~120-page novella, and that I actually enjoy reading Herman Melville, should tell you something about how overly expository those long unbroken paragraphs are. It was an aberration, and should not detract from anyone's enjoyment of the four full-length novels in the series.) Um... we didn't have any other Gaiman I hadn't already read, or any Pratchett in printed-book form, and Te did have the omnibus edition. I don't know, it made sense at the time.

I don't even know where to start describing these books. I will say that they don't necessarily need to be read in order of publication, but that if you're starting with Shikasta (aka Re: Colonised Planet 5 Shikasta) you should NOT read Wiki articles, reviews or anything else, because there's an enormous spoiler which nearly every source mentions right off when talking about the book despite it not being revealed until hundreds of pages into the book itself. They're challenging books, both because Lessing doesn't explain some of the concepts she came up with for the series until long after they're first introduced (if at all) and because the main themes of the series are all advanced philosophical (and theosophical, and sociological, and cosmological) questions. They do, however (with the exception noted) manage to be page-turners as well, an impressive balance. So long as the punctuation of this sentence, which is indicative of Lessing's habitual punctuation -- doesn't make you want to punch things then you should be fine. (It makes me want to punch things, actually; but I still got through all five installments, didn't I?)

ETA: And today I shall be having my first root canal ever. Hopefully this will suck less than it might. Feel free to share tales of your own nightmarish root canal experiences, though -- forewarned is forearmed, and all that..

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( Footnote )

9:21pm: Hold that 'yay' -- everything is NOT suddenly okay.
Yays, LiveJournal/SixApart are being reasonable again! -- or are they?

Let's have a look.

( A new, unified and easy-to-find policy document -- yay, right? Right...? )

( Yay, they're not lumping together fandom and child pornographers anymore! They say they don't -- right...? )

( No more witch-hunts for objectionable material in fandom journals -- can we say yay yet...? )

( Well, at least nobody is going to be banned without warning anymore... right? Yay...? )

( Right, well, a three-strikes rule would have been nice, but two-strikes seems fair enough. Ya-- what now...? )

( And they clarified their policy on links to content on other sites, and pretty soon after we asked! Yay, right...? )

( But haven't the suspensions been rescinded? Can't we at least celebrate the return of the two artists to their LJ community? )

( Yay, it's the end of the post! That was stressful. One last thing -- let's break down exactly what message LJ sent its users last night... )

( Notes )

ETA: Note to fellow Firefox users on IJ: if autofill is keeping you from accessing the choose userpic drop-down when posting a new entry via the web interface, you can change to a non-default icon by editing the entry after you post.

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