Dr. Memnus Lagbane Soultooth the Mad

Oh, and? I'm amazed there can be something as spammy as thequestionclub. I have a bad habit of checking friendsfriends, and it's reached the point where it's hard to find anything else there. I'm seriously seeing sixteen thequestionclub posts as opposed to four not.

One of you wades through all that on your friends list?

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Depressing symptom of Utah #whoknows: Ever tried buying condoms in a Utah grocery store? Any other state, they're generally stuck innocuously between the tampons and the baby food, giving shoppers all their reproductive options in one place. But around here - at least at Smith's, the one store I'm familiar with - they're brought out to the pharmacy section of the store. Ok, makes sense I guess. But it's worse than that. They're kept in a glass case, generally right under the prescription counter, the kind you generally need to flag down an employee to get into. Once, I saw a sign on the case declaring it to be unlocked, but that doesn't change the fact that you have to single yourself out to get to them - and that scared kids are going to be that much less likely to use them. Worse, if you go in after pharmacy hours, the gate that blocks off the prescription counter (which DOES get locked) blocks off the condom case as well! That emergency midnight condom run might as well be foiled. Ok, yes, you can go across the street to Walgreen's, but there's no self-checkout there. A teenager buying condoms still has to look someone in the eye and, if not verbally so, say "I'm headed off to have sex soon." Combine that with an unhealthy dose of cultural shame about that fact, and you have plenty for LDS Family Services to do.

In today's news, Big Brother is watching Second Life (BBC News). Do they really think that ter'rists are going to set up a Bomb-Making Island? What, exactly, constitutes "suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world"? What virtual world or MMO actually has the backend available to do that kind of data mining?

I only wish this were in the Onion: U.S. Military makes purchasing decision on value of product instead of lobbyists; Congress vows to find out what went wrong. I sincerly hope that someone in the DoD has the balls to stand up for this decision. Ok, first I hope there was an honest decision process behind it. Since I can't be pissed that it had to be a decision in the first place, I have to start somewhere... right?

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I think one of the most disorienting things about the U, after Mudd, is coming into a computer lab at 9 in the morning and having it pretty much full. After all this time, it still weirds me out.

It's getting really warm, for February. I'm trying not to get too used to it, because I know there's going to be a massive turnaround in a week or two. It's not over until June, and I need to remember this.

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So I ordered four books from Amazon this week. About 4:30 today I got an email saying that three had shipped: the last one, the one I'd be cracking first given my druthers, was the odd one out. It had an estimated ship time of sometime next week.

Twenty minutes later, I get another email letting me know that one shipped. I gotta say I appreciate the change of heart. Now I'll have plenty to read on the plane next weekend.

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What can I do with a MacBook Pro that I couldn't do with a Thinkpad T61? Coverflow and everything related don't make a difference to me.

The airport motif is starting to show up in my dreams again. I don't usually put much stock in dreams, but some things I can't deny to myself. My airport dreams are portents of change, my subconscious acknowledging that things are not going to stay as they are. Not that I need them to tell me this! Last night I also dreamed that someone gave me a motorcycle. It was yellow, and had different sets of brakes for different speeds.

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Re voice acting: I have Bob's Kerri's voice recorded (thanks katmerlin!), any takers on a second? I'll probably have the lip-syncing done on what I have by, uh, Friday. I'd like to have a Mark by then - anyone interested?

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I find myself in a position where I can write Turrent / Weighted Companion Cube slash.

And animate it.

For homework.

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Linked from QC: a tablet/screen that I'm severely drooling over. I was just looking at tablet PCs today and lamenting the fact that not a single one of them has a decent graphics card, ergo none of them would be good for flying Maya. But this, this would be so much hotness, with the 8800 GTX driving the graphics, an interface in which I could actually do honest-to-god detail work, and a full-sized monitor next door for close-ups. Blarglerearghotttness. Ok, so optimally that'd be my third monitor, but so far I've only got two video outs.

So if you buy me a tablet, I'll make a model of you. Any takers? Anyone?

What if I throw in a pizza?

Um, I suppose if I starting doing modeling for profit as well as fun I'd actually want to have legal copies of Maya and Photoshop. Or get off my ass and actually learn Blender, and stop caring about how much GIMP sucks.

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The lights swirled about his eyes as the world rose, impossibly slowly. Even as he landed flat on his back, only barely cushioned by the carpet, the motion didn't stop: turning, turning, brilliant wide circles. Each one kept dancing through its prescribed pirouettes and spins, tumbling back down toward him as if to lift him up into their midst, more alive than the shell on the floor ever was. The lights were freed from their fixtures just as he was, and eager for his company.

Too eager?

As they encircled him, twisting lines solidified into bars, wending and weaving closer and closer. He withdrew from one, and recoiled as it snapped into crimson snarls. The lights about him - serpents, he saw, writhing with rage - turned to regard him. They saw no escape from their hunger, and he saw only what they saw, painted in strokes of his fear.

Hands. He felt his hands, then, solid against a forgotten world, but they were slow to grip and pull. Fingers tangled in the earth, the earth grew into the carpet, and he dragged, dragged himself toward his abandoned body. Hands, then arms and shoulders; feet and knees and more. There was pain as he returned but he did not cry out, did nothing that the snakes might hold. His sides burned, his chest was heavy and stiff as metal. He crawled for miles up his neck, desperate, into the cavern of his own head.

The lights winked out - his eyes were closed.

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(4:30 pm) "When I came in here at 8:30 this morning, didn't you have that same window open?"

"That looks mind-numbingly boring."

"You really are anal."

I'm trying to get Fleck's UV coordinates all laid out nicely. For those outside the graphics loop, the UV coordinates are the mapping from vertices on a 3-D model (I can't believe I had to teach Firefox the word 'vertices') to points on a 2-D texture. Basically, laying them out is finding the optimal way to peel the skin off and lay it flat within a square. Try to use as much of the square as possible, don't distort any face any more than you have to, and put seams in easily-hidden place. Oh, and did I mention that the model has 12,606 individual quads? It's extremely fiddly and precise work, with the exact amount of everything-coming-together that enables me to fall into a trance and work on it for hours on end, forgetting things like eating.

Actually putting a texture under those coordinates is going to be another matter entirely.

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