The Life Experience ~ Summer '14

[bloodyrosemccoy]

What I Learned Since The Summer Solstice:

• childthursday really exists! AND SHE IS AWESOME


• SO IS HER WIFE


• Piano dissassembly is an undertaking fraught with peril, what with the large number of wires under high tension.


• African wild dogs have gorgeous coats.


• The cilantro wars are a bit one-sided: 90% of people can't taste the particular aldehydes that mimic bleach (read: POISON)


• Fifty Shades of Grey is even more awful than I thought, so that not even a good sporking can make me an antifan.


• The first regular African-American character in a Saturday morning cartoon show was Valerie from Josie and the Pussycats.


• While I love watching horror movies, playing horror games is apparently one degree too close for my fragile amygdala.


• But, as it turns out, I love watching horror game playthroughs by other people.


• It is upsetting when the deserts of Southern Utah have a layer of green over them.


• There is a Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago!


• Even if they have much higher mass, sub-brown dwarf stars are generally roughly the same radius as Jupiter, due to complicated interactions of various pressure factors.


• THERE IS SUCH A THING AS A CANDY BAR STUFFED WITH CAKE MIX


• Astronauts do drop stuff all over the place when they come back from a stint in space. (As somebody said, "NOBODY GIVE HIM A BABY.")


• T-rex's puny arms were still attached to tons of muscle and could probably take you apart pretty easily.


• Amercan police departments have somehow turned into terrifying supervillain organizations.


• Terrifying, racist supervillain organizations.


• It's important to get the correct generic brand of your Fukitol unless you want to enjoy days of simulating life on a pirate ship.


• The Tinker Bell movies actually might have better messages than the books, what with the way Tinker Bell herself is a straight-up mechanical engineer in the movies, rather than a "pots-and-pans-talent fairy" of the books. Dude, she can be girly AND an engineer!


• I apparently do very well teaching toward gifted kids, and less well teaching toward other kids. I tend to forget that not everyone can keep up. STORY OF MY LIFE.


• There are varying categories of anemia depending on how the shortage of hemoglobin comes about--either impaired production, increased destruction, or straight blood loss.


• The water level of the Chicago River is lower than that of Lake Michigan and has to be kept that way with harbor locks, because of some big engineering stunt to reverse the flow of the river back in the day. THE TRIUMPH OF MAN!


• I still love point'n'click games.


• There are tons of extremely interesting methods of alternative construction available if one wants to, say, build a cost-effective eco-friendly hobbit hole at some point.


• The most intriguing of which seems to be earth-sheltered building at the moment.  HMMMM ...

Comments

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I've been looking forward to this all week. Always love these quarterly batches of random cool facts.

The way that points 3 and 4 got mashed together is quite amusing ;)

I was getting worried that I was having trouble when they changed the brand of my generic fukitol, but it turned out that it was just because we got a heat wave right at the same time and I couldn't really sleep for like a week. Once the weather cooled down and I got some decent sleep, everything got back on track again. Which is really fortunate, because I'm not sure I was up to having that conversation.

I hadn't heard that about anemia, but I'm not surprised, given that I know similar differences matter with other body systems. Now I want to somehow work this into a story about vampires, where some doctor stumbles on to the existence of vampires when she realizes that most of her anemic patients actually have blood loss-related anemia, despite no injuries that explain the blood loss.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

GRAH. There's always one formatting error in these. Thanks.

The figuring out of anemia types is a Plot Point in a Doctors! storyline. But I like the idea of using it for vampires, too!

[daiq.livejournal.com]

Regular qualified teachers have very strong opinions when it comes to Gifted kids - love em or HATE em! Seriously. My mum and I are both teachers and she adores special ed, loves working with struggling kids, hates G&T kids with a burning passion (Gifted and Talented, not Gin and Toniced), me, i loved G&T kids, they are the bomb! And just about every teacher i know swings one way or the other. So i wouldn't worry too much about the forgetting that not everyone keeps up, someone else will catch that bunch!

[beccastareyes]

Brown dwarfs are awesome. We actually had the 103 students do a homework problem involving brown dwarf masses and sizes. (Basically we wanted them to realize that the density inside was changing and that more massive brown dwarfs had to be denser.)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they're a lot of fun. I'm using one in my sci-fi story!

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Having been through the Chicago River >> Lake Michigan locks, I can attest that they are really cool. The Army Corps of Engineers basically reversed the flow OF THE ENTIRE RIVER so that it flows away from the lake rather than into the lake.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I went on a river tour while I was there, and it was pretty interesting to watch.

[sofish-sasha.livejournal.com]

While I love watching horror movies, playing horror games is apparently one degree too close for my fragile amygdala.

I can read about all kinds of creepy, horrifying things - ghosts, serial killers, body horror (that's a favourite) - but I'm an utter wimp when it comes to horror films. I recently read The Woman in Black, and found it quite creepy, in a cosy cuddle up with a blanket and a cup of tea kind of way. Then I watched the film, and I did make it all the way through, but not without plenty of flailing, jumping, and exclamating at the screen. I read Silence of the Lambs in my early teens, without being terribly affected, but I've never seen the film. I started watching it once, but I got to the bit where I knew they'd find a severed head in a jar, and then I found something else to do.

Amercan police departments have somehow turned into terrifying supervillain organizations.
Terrifying, racist supervillain organizations.

Hail HYDRA... :(

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Funny how different media can affect us differently. I mostly laugh through horror movies, myself. And I don't currently read a lot of horror books ... maybe I'll try those next.

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

I am Angry about Fifty Shades. About 1/4 of that is because of the awful writing. The remainder of that is half because of the continuing romanticization of controlling, abusive relationships, and half because it purports to be about BDSM but is actually a Tame-Your-Wild-Man fantasy and the practices it presents are bad and unsafe BDSM. It is NOT safe, sane or consensual, which are the watchwords of safe BDSM.

Ahem. I got some opinions on your post. I'll just wipe that up.

In less spittle-filled opinions: I love horror, cannot watch horror movies, but love to watch people play horror games. I think the user interface of the game helps me place a layer of separation between me and the story. I'm also much more okay with Japanese horror than Western horror, and I think that's because of the setting. With Western horror, the visual setting is much like where I live, and I can all too easily imagine similar events happening way too close for comfort; Japanese horror is set in the architecture and culture of Japan, which is sufficiently far away to be comfortable yet still scary.

Have you watched the Fatal Frame games, or Siren? I have some great links for you if you want 'em. :D

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much what it looked like from the recap, too--Fifty Shades is not even GOOD BDSM. The recapper spends a lot of time cussing out--well, pretty much everything about it, but specifically about the portrayal of "BDSM."

I would be interested in the links! Fatal Frame's premise sounds pretty fascinating on its own, but I haven't gotten to a playthrough of it yet.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

I started playing Fatal Frame, but haven't gotten very far (it was late and I wasn't really in the right mindset, hit the first real puzzle and got frustrated). It is impressively creepy.