So it’s been a hectic month, with a crash coding project for darling @Hell_On_Wheelz hubby’s work. Been a while since I was that deeply into a code project, so it was kind of scary to realize just how far behind SotA I’ve become spending so much time on art projects.

Now it’s all over bar trying to clean up the fragment code into one cohesive application, making a pretty (and absolutely kick-ass Section 508 compliant) front end, before The Worst Part Of The Job: Commenting the damned thing so I can run a *Doc generator through it so lesser mortals can read the code.

I mean, for decades the refrain has been “Real Programmers never comment their code. if it was hard to write, it should be hard to read” – a perspective I can understand. Not that I follow it myself though, I always comment my code.

Comments about the weather.

What I had for dinner that day.

Observations about the nature of Pope on Falling Skies.

You know, real comments, a snapshot in time of the mindset of the coder. *I* think that makes much more sense to add as comments than dull, dreary, boring @param string comments, don’t you?

But I digress. I shed the mantle of the coding project and jumped right into stating a new art project for Ken St Andre and Tunnels & Trolls, so it’s back to my neglected tablet

The past month was good for me on a couple of levels though.  A big part was it put my mind to rest (to a large degree) that I still have the brain power to get handed a complex coding project, hit the ground running, and get creative finding solutions.  It also involved having to immerse myself into new technologies to showcase, including accessible AJAX, WAI-ARIA tagging, JQuery, the works – all stuff that was in its infancy the last time I looked.

So why, you might ask, does that make it good for me?  It’s kind of simple, really.  It’s been so long since I had to think on that kind of level, structured but creative, and force-learn new stuff, that I wasn’t sure if I was still capable of doing it, or at least as well as I could.  Remember, I follow the “trial and terror” method of learning, so it’s important to have confidence in my ability to think and process information – confidence that has been shaken over the past few years knowing my Multiple Sclerosis is waging war on the structures of my brain.

So this was a test of a lot of things, not only my coding skills, and ability to solve the problem Pat handed to me, but also a test for myself to see if I still have it.  It’s been, perhaps, a little harder than it was in the past, but I’m also no spring chicken any more, any degradation in ability to think can be chalked up to just getting older, or being code-rusty, not everything is related to my being brain-dead

It’s the little things that sometimes give you the extra leg-up, that you never expected.

Now I just have to wait and see if the application is well received by those its intended for … I do wonder how many of them are going to wonder just why the preamble of the docs are in 5-Para Op Order format … some things are never forgotten

As an aside, I’ll be at the Baltimore Book Fair at the end of this month, already hoping to see @NightwolfWriter there – anyone else want to say hi?

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So it’s all big space news this weekend, with MSL Curiosity making her much-anticipated landing on Mars.  It’s got the entire Interwebs abuzz, and NASA’s got an entire set of @NASASocial events lined up spanning 7 different facilities.

But … with all the new fangled tech and social media and everything else, I want to also remember a somewhat older, and less-remembered NASA robotic explorer – The Voyager probes, 1 and 2.

These two puppies were launched in 1977! That’s right, they’ve been speeding away from Earth in near-opposite directions for just under 35 years now.  They’re so far away that signals from @NASAVoyager2 take almost 13 hours and 40 minutes to reach Earth – at the blazingly fast speed of around 160 bits a second.

And you thought your connectivity sucked

So while we can all sit on the edge of our chairs waiting with breathless anticipation for news of @MarsCuriosity’s landing, and the first images once she gets warmed up and things sprout out of their housings on the Red Planet’s surface, let’s try to also remember that these two probes, a testament to a time when Government contracting did work (obviously), on their lonely way out into interstellar space.

It’s estimated that the RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generators) on board Voyager 2 will fail some time around 2025, so at their current speeds there’s still good data about a part of our solar system we have no clue about coming in.  Even once their power source is drained completely, they’ll continue outwards, carrying the famous “golden records“, so I thought I’d do a quick render to celebrate their longevity and future.

The Voyagers

Long after Curiosity has become an immovable object on the surface of Mars, these two veterans of space flight will still be going, and going, and going …

Good luck NASA, JPL, and everyone else with Curiosity’s landing – hurry up and get us some imagery afterwards!

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One of the things this weekend has driven home to me is how much @Comic_Con has turned into the US version of Cannes – it’s all media now.

You really just have to look at the panels and previews and GetGlue stickers, and the attention by tech people like Harry McCracken from CNN to see what I mean.

I think the same thing has happened to @DragonCon … they’ve become “super conventions”, where there’s so much programmed into them it’s a race sometimes to make it to all the panels, all the contests available – and let’s not even go into the signings!

I keep thinking back many many years and my first conventions, which were much smaller and more … I dunno, more intimate? I wonder if the super convention phenomena isn’t commercializing this side of fandom far more than could healthy for it.

So for me, there’s a feeling that the super conventions, whilst a great showcase for so much great stuff, and to get a handle on things to come (Speculative Fiction doesn’t have to be a hundred years in the future – it can be a hundred hours from now ), but when the convention becomes a huge commercial operation, it feels like something of the energy that is unique to fandom is left to one side, or lost.

My first convention, many years ago, was called “Enterprise One”.  I was this wide eyed girl trying to figure out what was going on.  At the time, I believe (thinking back with a child’s memories) that it was one of the biggest conventions in the UK at the time.  I don’t remember anything specific except for two things: Meeting Dorothy Fontana of Star Trek fame in the lounge and spending many hours actually being listened to by these adults as we discussed perceptions of the future, and a bunch of space suits from Alien being dragged in through the front doors.

But as time went on, and I attended more conventions, they felt the same way – close, friendly, open.  In some ways, my perception of conventions, and fandom, was on a level of almost a counter-culture.  So for me, the super conventions phenomenon ”feels” out of place.

There is a shadowed sad part to my reminiscing and regrets about these super conventions too.

In some ways these super conventions are not entirely “comfortable” to try to attend as a wheelie. The sheer crowds of people, and the inevitable crush for elevators, can be somewhat overwhelming.

There are always tons of goodies at cons on tables, but it’s kinda difficult to maneuver a chair up to the tables through the crowds already picking it clean like a horde of geeked-out vultures and reach for things, and it gets to the stage where I wonder if it’s even worth trying to get through such things.

For me, these super conventions aren’t as much fun – they’re like Day-after-Thanksgiving sales mob scenes.

I’m not saying fandom itself isn’t welcoming to wheelies, or that fen aren’t – fen tend to some of the best human beings out there.  But the environment of the super convention itself by its nature can sometimes be a barrier, both physically and mentally – at least for me.

I think it’s great that there are super conventions out there, especially thinking back on how small and shoestring conventions tend to have begun life as.  I think it’s great that the conventions have managed to capture people’s imaginations and desires to be part of fandom, of whatever form, that they’ll make the pilgrimage to their favorite conventions just for that one chance that year to be where they want to be.  I just don’t know if they’re the same conventions, the same desires, the same energies within them that they had at the beginning.  There’s a difference between watching VHS recordings of your favorite shows on a big screen in a small hotel room and getting a full-scale movie-theater screening of the latest upcoming version of x movie direct from the distributors, y’know?

I asked @RichardWhite on Twitter earlier if he could tell me of local cons, because thinking of all the reasons why the super conventions don’t feel as welcoming and social as they used to be (before they got supersized) reminded me that there still are the smaller cons, where the 4′ tall wheelie isn’t reduced to only really getting to see people’s asses and crotches and have to be guarding their chair controller with a hand to prevent people sitting on top of it as they fall from the crush around them.

Hopefully I can reach some of them (there are other accessibility issues to deal with, but none of them are nearly as involved as trying to get a chair down to Atlanta on rumored-but-not-confirmed-accessible Amtrak, or as risky as watching baggage handlers driving your chair across the apron) and go back to that “intimate” convention feeling I’ve missed for a while now.

Maybe I’m just getting old?  Please, jump in below and let me know your thoughts – have super conventions strayed from the things that made them so attractive to begin with, have they become too commercialized, too involved with the “producers”, or are they fulfilling the goal of all conventions to spread the word and energy of fandom out to the widest possible audience?

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I caught a tweet a little while ago, retweeted by @WolfsonLiterary

Facebook just changed your email without permission. Here's how to get it back: http://t.co/kMnwZR9X

June 25, 2012 12:02 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@BookRiot

Book Riot

So I go check out the website, and given how many times there have been scam email campaigns trying to fool people into thinking their Facebook username etc have been changed to get you to visit a fake site, check Google.

I discovered, to my extreme annoyance, that it appears to be true – my email address on my Timelines page had been changed, without me getting any warning or being asked to do it.

I’ve checked a few friends’ pages as well, and they’ve got the same shift of their “primary” email to @facebook.com

It looks like, right now, it only affects users who have been forced to use Timelines, and is being done incrementally as well – I guess Facebook hoped no-one would notice before it was fait accomplit.

Thankfully the fix is simple – go to your Timelines page, click About to see if your email address listed has been hijacked to point to <your username>@facebook.com, and if it has click the “Edit” button on your About box.  Facebook didn’t delete your existing email address(es), they just set them all to be hidden, and added the @facebook.com one and set that to be visible.  Just change the preferences to unhide your original email address(es) and hide the @facebook.com one if you want to – it only redirects to your Facebook messages inbox anyways.

This is yet another straw pushing me to just dump using Facebook. The only reason I’m still there is because of 2 groups I participate in, but at this rate not even that’s going to keep me using the nanny state of the internet.

Edit: I’m wondering if this is related to this article 2 months ago Zemanta dug out: Facebook plans to sync user email with Timeline (digitaltrends.com)

If it is, then I guess the same people that rolled out their hideously over-hyped IPO decided to roll out this hideously under-hyped profile hijack.

More Reading:

Facebook just changed your email address without asking – here’s how to fix it (Gizmodo.com)

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Carrie Clevenger (@texistential on Twitter) has been telling everyone about a photoshoot she has planned for July

July 7th I get to figure out how to wear a blue ESP bass guitar, maybe some shoes and nothing else.

June 23, 2012 8:22 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@texistential

Scary Θ Carrie

Here's my costume for the photo shoot. Well some. I might do a dress thing too. http://t.co/rzskdjmQ

June 23, 2012 8:44 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@texistential

Scary Θ Carrie

So, being the helpful soul that I am, I decided to come up with some pre-visualizations of how the photoshoot might go.  After the shoot, if she posts the pics, I’ll link to them here so you can compare my ideas with her reality

@Texistential Photoshoot Pre-vis One

I have to say though, my visualizations of her aren’t nearly as beautiful as her novels and her protagonist Xan (@CrookedFang).  I mean, OK, so he’s a bass player and a vampire, but we can’t all be drummers now can we?

So I strongly suggest you run, don’t walk, to get her novels and enjoy them as much as you enjoy my pre-visualizations – I’ll be updating this page with more as I get more ideas on how best she can display her … guitar at the photoshoot

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Got two new pieces out in circulation online to announce today.

Vampire

The first one is, I’m always happy to say, sitting on @trollgodfather’s Trollhalla web site: a vampire illustration to go with his explanation of Vampires in Trollworld, the Tunnels and Trolls universe.

You can see it and read the amazing insights of Ken St Andre into another facet of his amazing role playing game right here: http://trollhalla.com/outer-sanctum/2012/06/11/trollworld-vampires/

Mario

The second one is a little more … risque than usual, a portrait of one of Romance Author @OliviaBrynn’s protagonists in her latest short story, “Ripped”.  This one was fun, and I’m happy to have provided a visualization of Mario that does him justice!

You can see the pic over at http://oliviabrynn.com/2012/06/19/sexy-summer-solstice-blog-hop-2/, which also happens to be one of the blog posts participating in the JustRomance.me inaugural blog hop.

There’s more on my schedule, with next up being another one for @trollgodfather, so stay tuned!

~miika

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Before I begin, I’d just like to mention that you’re not going to find any spoilers in this post.

I suppose I could claim that this is because of some outdated sense of honor, and that I just want you all to be able to wait with baited breath for as long as possible in the lead-up to tonight’s Season 2 premiere of Falling Skies on TNT – but to be perfectly honest, if I tried to pick out parts of the 2 hours of television you’re going to see, I’d still be trying to put together a list by the time we get a “To Be Continued” S2E10 season finale.

What I will say is that Season 2 is not going to disappoint those of you who found yourselves hooked on the struggles of the 2nd Mass during its first season.

From a plot arc side, every time I thought I finally had a handle on the direction the plot was taking, I was proven either wrong or wildly wrong.  This is only the first two episodes of the season and the plot dangles itself tauntingly in front of you.  You’re going to turn your TV off tonight with more questions than you thought you had at the beginning

The production seems to have really ramped up their CG offerings for this season.  The Mechs and the Skitters both look to have been given a major sharpening, with the blending of CG and live-action being nearly seamless.  Falling Skies also uses puppetry for the Skitter creatures, but you’ll be hard pressed to tell when it’s real or when it’s Memorex, as the saying goes.

TNT has a couple of interviews with the guys heading up those responsible for the visual wonders of the show, Andrew Orloff (@VFXHack) of ZOIC Studios who’s the VFX Supervisor, and Todd Masters (@ToddMasters) of MastersFX (@MonsterMasters) that’s responsible for the physical skitters, animatronics puppets and people in skitter suits.

Both of these guys I’d love to just spend time watching at work.  Between them they’re powerhouses of effects, and TNT has done a kick-ass job bringing their respective houses on board Falling Skies!  As I keep mentioning to @elizabethKarr, it’s the VFX crews that do all the work, the cast is simply there to support them! (Disclaimer: I’m biased )

You’re going to see some amazing CG work tonight, I think some amazing mattes of the inside of skitter ships and one kick ass new look at the mysterious “greys”, the tall skinny aliens introduced at the end of last season.

The best part about tonights episodes, I think, will be that all the factors that made Falling Skies riveting watching last season are still there but doubled down.

This is a show whose basic premise involves aliens and technology, but managed deftly to use those things as a vehicle to drive the central conflict: What does it mean to be humans?

We’re going to get that tonight, and in Season Two in general I think – and it’s going to take us into some darker places of that question we might not be entirely comfortable.  Tonight is going to light the fuse on some of those dark arcs, and going by what Colin Cunningham (@CunninghamColin,  who plays unapologetic functional psychopath John Pope in the series) tweeted not so long ago it’s going to get ugly:

@ccsnumbr1fan @kajalilly The rivalry between Tom and Pope comes to a pretty bad ass 'scene' in episode 3. I think you'll like it.

June 15, 2012 8:02 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@CunninghamColin

Colin Cunningham

The old arcs from Season One are still there in the back of everyone’s minds, with Connor Jessup‘s (@connorjessup) character Ben Mason coming right back into play as the effects of being harnessed by the aliens progresses.  Given the Pope/Tom Mason (played by Noah Wyle) conflict, I think the “Rescue Ben from the aliens” driving premise behind Season One is just going to morph into a different angle in Season Two and start making us, the viewers, ask a lot of questions of our own attitudes.

You’re also going to see Luciana Carro (@LucianaCarro), who played Kat in the SFC Battlestar Galactica series on your screens again, as Crazy Lee.

TNT has a large cast on screen – the whole situation is, after all, surrounding a bunch of survivors.  That gives them a lot of potential elements to fold in, then out, shallow or deep, into the arcs as the season continues.  Going by trailers of episodes beyond tonight’s, it looks like we’re going to get to see inside the shadowy elements that give the plucky resistance fighters of the 2nd Mass. their marching orders too somewhere down the line.

I’ve mentioned the way studios seem to not be able to balance costs of doing technologically challenging episodic science fiction series before, lamenting how so many good shows have been killed after a short time even as audience share built up because of production costs.  I’m more than happy that Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks production company and TNT are working so well together to produce what is rapidly becoming one of a select few surviving science-fiction based TV shows!

So in short – WATCH the show tonight.  You won;t be disappointed.  Even if you don’t usually “like” science fiction, this show is science fiction but isn’t about the science fiction.  It’s well worth the watch!

Disclaimer/Disclosure: I received a preview DVD copy of the Falling Skies Season 2 premiere through Klout, which seems to think I’m an “influencer” on the topic.

I was under no obligation to receive it, or to talk about it, and I don’t get any additional benefits for talking about it.

They don’t even ask I say anything nice about it!  I received what looks like a standard screener package, with a little booklet explaining the show’s backstory, the DVD with 2 episodes, sans commercials or trailers, and a card about Klout and them asking to make sure I add this sort of disclaimer if I wrote anything about the show.

Images courtesy of TNT’s Falling Skies Promo Site.

Footnote: Please don’t consider my enthusiasm for Falling Skies in any way to detract from my philosophy that the aliens always get a bad rap and are simply misunderstood – that still applies in “kill the aliens” shows, I haven’t been replaced by a human pod person

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WMATA, the local transit authority, has had a pretty bad rep over time for their interactions with passengers on Twitter.  This week, however, there has been an amazing, nay shocking, development – The @WMATA twitter feed has not only had the usual automated alerts of system issues, but whoever is driving it has been actively responding to tweets, and giving more details than just the bare bones of the past.

This change in interaction on Twitter has bemused regular watchers of the #WMATA and @WMATA feeds, but I think I’ve finally discovered the deep dark truth about what has happened!

A few weeks ago, WMATA claimed to be engaged in track maintenance at one end of a busy Metrorail line, taking multiple stations of out service the entire Memorial Day weekend.  They said it was for track work, but now we know the truth!

Unnamed sources have made available exclusively to me (as @StyxRiverGynoid) the following picture, purportedly taken by the workers after they finally broke through the seals deep beneath the Greenbelt Metro Station.

Meet The New WMATA Twitter Crew

According to the same source, WMATA was unsure how to handle this situation, and so replaced their entire PR department with these new arrivals – where else would you stick a bunch of nightmarish creatures, after all?

It comes as no surprise to regular riders of the system to discover Cthulhu is involved in this entire thing somewhere along the line – it’s the only plausible explanation for much of the commuting experience

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I have decided, after many years of not actually knowing what a blog hop was, to bite the bullet and actually participate in one.  Any suggestions that my decision may be based on never having found out about them in time before are just baseless scurrilous rumors and I deny them all!

So what blog hop, you may ask, have I decided to lose my hop virginity with?  I’m glad you asked! It is the wonderful Romance@Random Diamond Jubilee Blog Hop!

Diamond Jubilee Blog Hop!

The hop is set to push the upcoming release of @RuthieKnox’ novel “About Last Night“, published by Random House (due 6/11/2012), as well as celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of HRH Queen Elizabeth II – 60 years of trying to herd the totally dysfunctional cats that are successive British Governments with both hands and one leg tied behind her back deserves celebration (or commiserations, either/or)!

But, you know, I think this is a good time too for me to highlight another Queen who rarely gets any press coverage, and even when she does it’s usually bad – a sad situation as she is so totally misunderstood!  She really is kind, friendly, sweet, honest, family oriented, dedicated, and cuddly.  Best of all, with Prometheus being released in only a few weeks, I thought people should be reminded of this wonderful Matriarch.

She Is So Not Amused

OK, OK! So it’s also an excuse for me to do more Alien art.  Where does it say in the rules I can’t be responsive and timely to current events??

But I digress – as you’ve noticed in the past I have a tendency to do that – so back to the Blog Hop for @RuthieKnox’s “About Last Night”.

Romance@Random, helmed by @SueGrimshaw, in their wisdom and munificence (is that actually even a word?) are arranging to donate a ton of goodies to go with the blog hop, so here’s the juicy details.

Enter the hop using the Rafflecopter below then visit all of the participating sites to increase your chances – winners will be randomly chosen (US only, sorry *sob*)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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For the lucky winners, Romance@Random has put together this incredible pile of prizes:

• 1 winner, 1 copy – Born To Darkness by Suzanne Brockmann
• 1 winner, 1 copy – The Proposal by Mary Balogh
• 1 winner, 1 copy – Darker After Midnight by Lara Adrian
• 3 winners, 1 copy of WITCHFUL THINKING by HP Mallory
• 10 winners, 1 copy of a PREVIEW from Net Galley of ABOUT LAST NIGHT by Ruthie Knox
• 10 winners, 1 copy of PREVIEW from Net Galley of DEEP AUTUMN HEAT by Elisabeth Barrett

That’s 26 frakking prizes at stake here guys – count ‘em, 26!  And all you have to do for a chance to win one of them is to go click on that Rafflecopter thingie above and sign up, with extra chances of winning being added if you go visit all the other participating sites!

Oh wait – the other participating sites.  Damn, I knew I forgot to mention those – because I’m nice and friendly and helpful, I’ll be kind and add this wonderful list of the other sites here:

[javascript src="http://www.simply-linked.com/listwidget.aspx?l=5cb5ec2c-11bb-46a5-88e2-f8b819e0fa19"]

See? Told you I was nice!  And I didn’t even ask anyone tell @GiniKoch that Giger’s aliens are not fugly!

I’ll keep that in reserve

So sign up, click away, and the best of luck to you all!

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