The Concrete Tomb of Hradzka

First tweet: Italian aristocrat romantically linked to duchess of York killed during boar hunt http://bit.ly/azyCCp

Second tweet: Correction: Italian aristocrat killed at boar hunt was uncle of man romantically linked to duchess of York

All sympathies to his family, but what a wonderful headline. I like aristocrats who do aristocratic pursuits; there should be more attention paid them than the clubhoppers. (A friend mistook him for the boar. Rule Four, folks: know your target and what is beyond it. Never shoot at anything you have not positively identified.)

I have a lot of friends who shoot IDPA. That's "International Defensive Pistol Association," which is basically LARPing for tactical shooters. Instead of just setting up a target and shooting at it, you get an array of targets set up in such a manner as to present you with a tactical problem. Each such problem is called a stage. In a given stage, you have to engage (read: shoot) each of the targets. This involves complex activity, such as 1) identifying targets 2) distinguishing hostiles from friendlies 3) running from one part of the stage to another and 4) reloading. As you might imagine, it is a hell of a lot of fun, and people who shoot IDPA tend to tell their gunny friends who don't shoot IDPA that they really ought to.

Case in point: my friend Vince, who has been nagging me to try IDPA for ages, and so I finally said YES FINE OKAY.

So this past weekend I did my first IDPA shoot, and discovered not only that it is a lot of fun, but if you twitter about running around shooting multiple threats your friends will tweet back asking you what the hell you are getting up to.

( Read more... )

I am Excited. New machine is a MacBook Pro 13-inch, four gigs of RAM and a 500 Gb hard drive. This means I actually have space for pictures of Charlize Theron the 3d art stuff I keep working on. I should post some of that, shouldn't I? I will at some point.

I seem to get a new computer about every five years. This new acquisition does not seem like as much of a quantum jump as the previous -- yes, it runs a good bit quicker, yes, it's got an amount of hard drive space that would have seemed insane to me a few years ago, yes, it's got some useful bells and whistles, but it's not going from sloooooooooow to "Hi! I'm iTunes! Let me introduce myself to you." We'll see how the rendering procedures go on it.

Hey, remember when I did that post about the Yuletide stories that got the most hits? Yeah. Something interesting happened: both BoingBoing and the official WAIT WAIT DON'T TELL ME blog both linked Nestra's WAIT WAIT zombie fanfic, "Wait Wait Don't Eat Me."

It goes to show you: no matter how big Yuletide is (and it is freakin' huge), there is no comparison to outside attention. The most-read stories in my previous post were those from AMERICAN IDOL fandom, and they had a hugely out-of-whack hit-to-comment ratio because most people reading were from oupenskayas (ie, not werewolves; they didn't have AOOO accounts so couldn't comment readily). "Wait Wait Don't Eat Me" wasn't up there. Today, it is the most-read story in Yuletide. It's not even close. It *literally* has twice as many hits as the #2 story. I don't know where it was before BoingBoing and WAIT WAIT linked, but 1500 or more hits gets your story on the penultimate and ultimate "most hits" lists. 2000 hits would be really good. As of this writing, "Wait Wait Don't Eat Me" has over *eleven thousand* hits. That outside exposure was probably worth between nine and ten thousand of them. It's not the only story discovered after the reveal, but it's probably the most extreme example of it.

A question for y'all: how can one successfully solve the following problem with automation in Photoshop?

The GF has hundreds of sample photos that require resizing and, ideally, labelling (with editable caption box containing some default text and possibly the filename), before being saved to a different directory. We've automated the resizing, but is it possible to add an editable caption box with labels in photoshop? I've found directions for doing it in other programs, but not Photoshop...

ETA: Thanks for all advice!

Folks on my flist are really interested in diversity activism (see the recent fan-casting of Ken Watanabe as Magneto and Andre Braugher as Professor X), so I figured you guys might be interested in the trailer for PUMZI, a Kenyan science fiction flick that's playing at Sundance.

( If nothing else, it's beautiful. )

A lot of films have done similar stuff before, so I don't expect PUMZI to be wildly innovative as science fiction -- WALL-E, in particular, covered similar ground most recently, and the "anti-dream medication" gimmick is as subtle as a sledgehammer (and can be boring, as it was in EQUILIBRIUM, a dull flick wholly redeemed by its awesome gunfights) -- but it's got an very cool feel to it, and based on the trailer it's well-executed and gorgeously shot. The costuming, in particular, combines an African vibe with echoes of THX-1138, and the production design is very nice. I think it's produced by one of the guys who produced the short film that served as the basis for DISTRICT 9, so maybe they'll put a few new bells and whistles on somewhere.

I have to confess, though, that right after "Huh!" and "Pretty!" and "Looks interesting," my reaction was *"Holy cow, will this ever hit my flist's ticky-boxes."* 1) Female protagonist! 2) Of color! 3) Who gets dismissed by authority and goes forth on her own quest! So I'm posting it here for y'all.

I don't know if PUMZI combined with DISTRICT 9 means that we're going to be seeing a wave of African SF, but it would be cool to see African filmmakers get some spotlight time.

ETA: rydra_wong found a WIRED article about writer/director Wanuri Kahiu and her film. Lots of interesting stuff; movies shoot in Kenya all the time, so it has experienced crews, but its indigenous film industry is kind of in a position like Australia back in the day. Except sort of mirror-image, because while Australia had internal distribution but no moviemakers they do have moviemakers but no distribution system whatsoever. Kahiu picked up some grants from various organizations, including Focus Features, which is how she met ALIVE IN JOBURG's Simon Hansen. They provided advice and funding and left her alone to make the movie, because she's an experienced filmmaker who knows what she's doing -- her feature FROM A WHISPER won five African Academy Movie Awards. She hopes to get backing to expand PUMZI, which is a short, to feature length.

( Here's another pic, which gives you an idea of the aesthetic. )

I've owed Harry Connolly a review of his CHILD OF FIRE, the first novel in his Twenty Palaces series, for a while now. Full disclosure: Harry and I have known each other online for several years and pop up in each other's comments sections fairly often. That said, his book sucked. -- no, I'm just kidding; it's really pretty damn awesome, and its characters are so engaging and its pace so relentless that I tore through it in an afternoon, which makes the delay in this review a little embarrassing.

( Read more... )

It was pointed out to me in comments that, what I had remembered as the most horrifying thing Piers Anthony had ever written was, in fact, totally not the most horrifying thing Piers Anthony had ever written.

If you want to see more information, go check the original post (or here, on Dreamwidth), to which I made an addendum. Jesus fucking Christ on a tequila bender.

Some of you folks may recall that a while ago I mentioned that the curious thing about Piers Anthony, to me, is that while people often dump on Anthony for being weird, skeevy, disturbing, and that sort of thing, nobody doing so ever mentions the stuff that *I* find to be really disturbing. (And remember, when we say "Piers Anthony" we're talking about the guy who wrote protoplasmic sex scenes and a story with a dude boinking a mentally retarded woman who was hooked up to a milking machine.) This is odd as hell, because I remember glancing at the book when it first came out, doing a massive double-take on reading that passage, and thinking, "Holy dogshit, this'll get him run out of town on a rail." Curiously, that never happened.

I'm referring to TATHAM MOUND, in which Piers Anthony's hero boinks a ten-year-old girl, using honey for lube.

( OH PIERS ANTHONY NO. )

If you're a gun nut, this is the funniest DOWNFALL vid ever. The humor is not especially translatable, which I think makes for the best DOWNFALL vids -- Hitler's ranting is funnier and funnier the more important the subject isn't, which means he's absolutely perfect for representing entitled fandom.

( Video embedded below cut. )