This Ought To Be A T-Shirt

by on April 13, 2013 at 9:31 am
Posted In: Test

I’ve been enjoying the I fucking love science page on Facebook for some time courtesy of the brilliant Elise Andrew. She always has some really great informative tidbits that really make my day. But this… this has got to go viral!

If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s when someone says that someone sticking to their views no matter what the new information says is a form of integrity. No. It’s a form of denial and unwillingness to take the next step.

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Printer Problems

by on April 12, 2013 at 11:12 am
Posted In: Test

MalwareYou may have noticed I don’t have a museum sketch today.

There are two reasons for that the first is I was kind of scraping the barrel for material today where the only thing I hadn’t shared yet was something from the Seattle Art Museum’s Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough exhibit. It was one of those sketches,  while not technically bad, was one I had really screwed the pooch on. I’d gotten the scale of the figures completely out of whack. In my defense the gallery was packed and I really have trouble getting into my zone if there are more than five people in the room.

The other, more pertinent, reason was my old scanner finally died. It had a good run but finally after nearly ten years it gave up. It was kind of annoying technically it started its long decline a couple of months ago when it stopped acknowledging the existence of some of the ink cartridges in it’s printer side when I had replaced another cartridge and unfortunately as one of the tech support guys said “Pixma doesn’t multitask” translation the printer doesn’t work the scanner doesn’t work.

I’d managed to make do by keeping the old empty cartridge in place which allowed the scanner to work but since the cartridge was empty I didn’t have a printer anymore and had to make do by either saving important documents as PDFs or going to the library to print. While this worked after an annoying fashion it was still the technical equivalent of stopping a leak with a wad of bubblegum.

Well yesterday the metephorical gum came loose and couldn’t be put back on. And I was forced to get a new printer scanner. Cannon had a “loyal user” discount but that means I have to wait a week until I get it delivered to me. In the mean time the only images that get into my system are the ones I create from scratch.

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Translation Headaches

by on April 10, 2013 at 11:48 am
Posted In: Test

I love playing with Google Translate. It’s very useful though I only use it sparingly since I’m never completely sure just how on the mark it really is. One thing I like to do is to run popular quotes through it. I especially like to do this with it’s Latin translator, Roman history being one of my favorite areas of focus as well as having enjoyed Latin in high school. I have this idea for a long term project to do illuminated manuscripts with Pratchett and Gaiman dialogue.

Anyway for today I was trying something simple; Robert Heinlein‘s “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch” TANSTAFAL Mostly to see what new acronym I could get… perhaps for a deliberately pretentious T-shirt or something. The interesting thing with translating I find is that it teaches you a whole lot about your own language. To be sure the translating software works properly you have to clean up the original material, remove contractions and make sure everything is as literal as possible. So after tweaking the original phrasing the best I got was “Tale Convivium Non Est Liber“ The biggest problem with it with this  was that “Liber”, meaning free, does not mean free meaning no payment necessary. I didn’t for the life of me know what the right word and when I looked for it the closest words really didn’t grasp the concept.

I read a great book on Roman Humor once that began by explaining how Cicero would not have understood the “We are all individuals” joke from “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” By the same token I wonder if a Roman would have understood Heinlein’s point that nothing is truly free and even charity is conditional?

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Cleopatra

by on April 8, 2013 at 1:25 pm
Posted In: Test

For a while I’ve been a fan of the webpage, Racebending, their blog and their Tumblir account. Occasionally there are times I wonder if they are overreacting about some of the subjects they bring up but then I remind myself that I’m thinking as a sheltered white boy who wouldn’t even notice the worst of these things.

Last week they had a link to a list of famous examples of minority characters being “whitefaced” in Hollywood. Most were in the list were the ones you would expect most notably John Wayne as Genghis Khan, Charlton Heston as the Mexican Detective Mike Vargas in A Touch of Evil and many more. The one item on their list that surprised me was Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra it went into some detail about how this was an example of having a white woman playing one of the most famous women of color in history.

Immediately I went into history Nazi mode. “Hey wait a minute,” I said, “Cleopatra was Macedonian! The Ptolemys virtually invented apartheid…”  In other words she shouldn’t be on the list.

But then it hit me. The creators of the film probably didn’t know this either. This was the story of the exotic oriental Queen who seduced both Ceaser and Mark Anthony from the Shakespeare play not Cleopatra VII last of the Ptolemy Dynasty.  So based on this, the article’s criticism holds and is very, very valid.

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Game of Thrones… oh and Vikings.

by on April 8, 2013 at 9:25 am
Posted In: Test

Last night continued my viewing of the third season of Game of Thrones and my first viewing of the History Channel’s Vikings.

Episode two of Game of Thrones show the high standards set by the first episode have not gone away.  Once again I found myself focusing on all of the things that made it different from the book. I had mentioned more than once that I was interested in the way all of the changes from the first two seasons were beginning to snowball and this episode was an excellent example of this. The most notable thing about this was the introduction of the Reeds who appear far later than they do in the book. The other is the first appearance of Sandor Clagane, the Hound who appears much earlier than he does in the book and serves the purpose of outing Arya to the Brothers without Banners instead of a former Stark retainer. Also while the book has a cast of thousands HBO can only afford hundreds because of this many minor characters are removed or merged together. The biggest example of this was mixing the Brave Companions with House Bolton (a side note on that one; whoever designed the Bolton’s flayed man banner for the show was brilliant!)

The list goes on. Not in a bad way… Just interesting.

Other interesting scenes abound most notably the interplay between Margery Tyrell and King Joffrey  (considering I had to have nearly half of the ways she played him I have to pray I never fall in love with a woman like her.)

Vikings was a case of letting my interest in history, especially an era of history I was familiar with, took away from my enjoyment of the show. While the story was good this show was about Vikings the way Xena: Warrior Princess was about ancient Greece. There were so many details they were getting wrong that I couldn’t focus on it. (To the producer’s credit there were no horned helmets but unfortunately that didn’t help them)

All in all Vikings was enjoyable as a fantasy piece, which is being passed off as historical fiction. But if I wanted televised fantasy I’ll stick to Game of Thrones.

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