not falling down

Kid on the Bus 1: Just spell it.

Kid on the Bus 2: I am!

KOB1: You’re going too slow.

KOB2: You spell something, you spell… “visitation.”

KOB1: “Visitation.” V-I-S-T-I… Shut up! V-I-S-I-T-I-O-N. “Visitation.”

She’s got a shining future in spam.

Rob Thomas has been invited to my birthday party since 1998, of course, but I’m a little surprised myself that Jason Dohring is the first actor from Veronica Mars to be invited. Okay, that’s all. I’m done! I promise not to post about Veronica Mars anymore, even though it’s ALL I THINK ABOUT WHERE ARE THE NEW EPISODES WHERE WHERE

Also, added “my birthday party” to the War on Clarity.

Reading Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun, finally, I came across this sentence:

“Beauty is found in the tension between our expectations and reality.”

Which contrasts interestingly with Rebecca Borgstrom’s assertion that suffering is the disconnect between desire and reality (which, as I vaguely understand it, is derived from viparinama-dukkha and sankhara-dukkha).

That’s not to say that together, they imply that suffering is beauty; in fact, Borgstrom (who I think would not disagree with Koster’s statement) has specifically denied as much. Whatever I’m fumbling at here is more subtle than that. So why not crush the subtletly beneath our old friend proof-by-analogy?

According to our premises, beauty is derived from expectations and suffering is derived from desire. Sumana has said that hope leads to expectations, secret or otherwise; I believe that. I also believe that desire invariably produces hope. So desire leads to suffering and hope; hope leads to expectations; expectations lead to beauty; beauty leads to desire. Insert ASCII diagram here. Suffering is the byproduct of the desire-hope-expectations-beauty loop.

Or make up your own better diagram, and tell us about it.

Volscian made picture of Rita! And it’s awesome! So awesome that I blew up!

I really like the idea that Rita has tired eyes and a kind of round face–no Carrie-Anne Moss here. I hesitate to pronounce the picture canon only because I’m pretty careful about when and how I state that any given character is of a particular race; it’s perfectly valid to assume Rita is white, but also valid to assume she isn’t. Still, if I were ever to print out the Rita stories or anything, that would make a pretty great cover.

Yeah, you can tell I’m not famous because I obsess over fanstuff.

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I just finished The Book of the New Sun and I’m not going to talk about it for a while; I learned my lesson when I tried to write up The Blind Assassin a few years ago and came off like a blatherskite. (Search for it if you want, but I warned you.)

I’m not sure if The Book of the New Sun was good, but it was amazing.

Since I arrived here, our IT department has used XStop software to filter the naughty bits out of our workday. The only way it really bothered me was that it blocked the Onion (but left the AV Club unfiltered). I got used to it.

This morning we got an email informing us that they’d switched to WebSense, which has already proven to block nearly all my favorite webcomics, the Onion and the AV Club, IMDB and basically anything they categorize as “Entertainment.”

Awesome!

I assume the guys who installed this software (at the behest of the legal department–liability, you know) have passwords that will let them read Megatokyo; I’m sure they also know that getting around this kind of thing is startlingly easy when one has one’s own website. Then again, xorph.com is still listed as a webcomic in plenty of places. I wonder how long I’ll be able to keep tunneling out?

Update 1317 hrs: Oh, “Entertainment” has been unblocked. Cancel jihad, cancel jihad.

Kelly Link describes her stories as “kitchen-sink magic realism,” which I can understand, because the moment you say “fantasy” people think Robert Jordan and their ears shut down. Conversely, in her own words, “people hear ‘magic realism’ and they think ‘oh, like those Gabriel Garcia Marquez stories where people fly.’” (Everybody read exactly one magic realism story in high school, and that was it.)

Anyway, if I thought I could get away with it, I’d call Anacrusis “Kelly Link magic realism.” Look, it almost rhymes.

So uh STEAMPUNK TRANSFORMERS.

I think the last time I bought a Transformers comic book was in 1987, but I think now that it’s been almost two decades, I HOLY CRAP I’M OLD