Categories
Uncategorized

10 things

I miss about home: 

  1. My husband, cats, parents, and friends. (Duh.)
  2. Sweating actually meaning something.
  3. The drivers. No, really. Colorado, I learned that I was so wrong to think you have terrible drivers. Compared to Houston, you’re like angels on four wheels. I suppose my standards were just far too high, or I had no idea just what sort of mental deficients they’ll allow to drive in other states.
  4. Tokyo Joe’s. I’m once again fighting to keep my meat intake from going through the roof because I lack a decent source of vegetarian lunch food. I also miss it as a gathering of tattooed freaks. And I miss Sam, the awesome manager at the store in Boulder, because he’s just too cute.
  5. Not being constantly covered with bug bites. The mosquitoes here are like fucking ninja.
  6. Landscape relief. Though I suppose once I’m back in Colorado and biking, I’ll probably change my mind about that. I’ve been telling everyone here that hills are Good For You and a Character Building Exercise, but we all know that I’m lying. I do, however, honestly miss how a topographically wrinkly landscape looks. Mountains. Yeah, those things.
  7. My bookshelves. I brought some books with me to Houston, but of course, they’re not the ones I want to read now. Because that’s never how it works. That would be way too convenient.
  8. Desert sunrises and sunsets. Being able to actually look at the sun when it’s low on the horizon without burning out my retinas still freaks my shit out. It’s just not natural.
  9. Trivia night. I want my beer, sammich, and bitching about the awfulness of the audio round.
  10. My hair not looking like an orange fright wig. That was an awesome time in my life.
I will miss about Houston: 
  1. Those awesome comedy road signs that urge people to drive friendly because it’s the Texas way… wait, those aren’t supposed to be funny? Shit.
  2. The really awesome people from Come Ride With Us! They got me out and biking in the sweltering heat and I had a heck of a lot of fun. 
  3. My skin not trying to peel off constantly. I was able to almost stop using lotion entirely. It’s crazy. Unheard of. Normally in Colorado I’m like a snake trying to molt.
  4. Chuy’s. I love that place. Maybe too much. They know me by name. And the host has started asking me about the different books I read. 
  5. Road biking on easy mode. Hills? What are those?
  6. My coworkers from the URC. I got to work with Tim Demko, Kevin Bohacs, and Joe Macquaker. If you don’t know who they are, that’s probably because you’re not a sedimentary geologist. I just about crapped my pants when I found out who I’d be working for because I’ve read so many of their papers in class. And they’re all really amazing, nice people. 
  7. The awesome bowties that Kevin Bohacs wears. 
  8. Everyone saying “y’all” even more than I do.
  9. Not having a car. I know that’s strange to say, but it actually helped me a lot to be compelled to ride my bike everywhere. I’m kind of worried that when I get back to Colorado I’m going to settle very quickly back into being lazy and driving all over. 
  10. The millipedes. So many adorable little millipedes.
Categories
politics Uncategorized

Paul Ryan. Whee.

Whee?

Me, this morning on Twitter: Gosh, I am at the edge of my seat over which anti-gay white guy who thinks women aren’t really people Mitt Romney will pick.

And thus, Paul Ryan. Whee. He’s got the standard Republican anti-gay stuff going. He thinks women aren’t grownups who should be allowed bodily autonomy. He’s a climate-change denier. As far as I can tell, that’s basically the standard at the moment.

All that’s made him stick out to me is that he apparently does P90X. Which let me tell you, I would pay some good money to see him drag Mitt Romney on some of those workouts. (And then presumably Mitt Romney would hire an undocumented worker from Mexico to do the workouts for him. Zing!) I’ve done P90X and then I stopped because I just didn’t hate myself that much. So good on Paul Ryan for being kind of a badass there.

He’s also got the economics cray-crays in a big way. His proposed budget has reduced my husband (reminder: Masters in math with economics) into sputtering incoherence on three separate occasions, which is a fairly impressive feat when you consider Mike’s normal attitude can be fairly characterized as somewhere between phlegmatic and maybe I should check and see if he still has a pulse. For added hilarity, Paul Ryan seems to have a total schoolboy crush on Ayn Rand, except for that gross part where she’s an atheist.

Ultimately it makes no difference to me, because there are not enough drugs or brain trauma in this world of ours to get me to vote for Mitt Romney, who I consider a solid gold lying shitbag who stands out even in the kingdom of the lying shitbags. (The part where he hates gay people and has no respect for the agency of women also doesn’t help, obviously.) I just plan on watching with mild interest to see how this effects the campaign going forward.

And I think he’ll be a much bigger challenge to good ol’ Joe in the VP debate than Sarah Palin was. I have no idea what kind of drinking game we’ll need to craft this time around.

Additonal reading which is much, much more informative than my contempt-filled sarcasm: Fussbudget – Paul Ryan’s influence on the GOP from the New Yorker. The author of that article did an interview with Fresh Air on August 1 that was an interesting listen.

Categories
tv

My guilty pleasure

It’s August. It must be time to resume my weird, shameful love affair with Project Runway.

I still can’t figure out why I love this show so much, but I do. It’s definitely not the bitchy cat fights, since those make me want to hide my head under a pillow in shared human shame. I think it’s the fashion, as strange as that sounds. Because I don’t understand fashion. I never have, and I think at this point I just never will.

The part I like most about the show is watching the designers make art, and talk about it, and feeling utterly mystified because I have no idea how any of it works. I’m one of those people who really just needs a personal retainer of to tell me what clothes I should and should not wear.

Justine Larbalestier recently wrote a blog post about writers and our obsession with process porn. Writers really like talking about how we write rather than necessarily what we’re writing (because that’s a secret). Honestly, I think some writers like to talk about it a little too much, which is why I make a conscious effort to minimize that kind of navel gazing.

Perhaps the reason I like Project Runway so much is that it’s a little slice of process porn for a different kind of art, watching the designers struggle to come up with something and work through it. That’s actually the part of it I enjoy watching the most. Not the runway stuff at the end, or them saying snippy things about each other in interviews, but them scurrying around the work room and building their projects up, tearing them down, and then rebuilding them in search of their idea.

I just wish I understood the art itself. But then I remember I’m both intensely lazy and unable to feel comfortable in any clothes that aren’t specifically intended to be copiously sweated in to and I slink quietly away.

I’m loving all the female designers this season so far, by the way. My favorites are Sonjia and Alicia. I hope they stay in for a long time! (And I wish I looked like Alicia so I could dress like her. Yes. I’m aware this means fundamentally I want to dress like an adorable lesbian. I fail to see the problem with that.)

Categories
geology skepticamp

Have I mentioned that I hate public speaking?

Because I do. I really, really do.

For this internship, I’ve had to give four presentations, in front of rooms filled with people I don’t know that well, many of whom seem to delight in asking really hard questions. I guess it’s one of those sink or swim things. Even better, for three out of the four presentations, I had to go first out of my group since it was my responsibility to set up the background for the larger presentation.

So much anxiety.

I think the secret is acting. As in, acting like I’m not someone who is utterly terrified. It seems to be working for me. To the point that statements like, “You know, I wish I could answer that question but I can’t remember at the moment because I’m scared out of my mind,” get treated as laugh lines rather than a pathetic truth. Or maybe everyone just sympathizes.

Also, ostracods. Why can’t I remember your name when I’m actually trying to give a presentation, yet it comes popping back into my head the instant I sit down? This has happened all three times I’ve given this presentation. Enough is enough.

I’m grateful that at least I’m no longer paralyzed with vomit-inducing terror when it’s time to give a talk. I can fake being a normal human being who can communicate without looking like she’s about to get strapped into the electric chair.

I think Skepticamp’s helped me with this a lot, actually. It’s one of the few places I’ve ever willingly given a talk, and several times at that. Even if I am, as usual, absolutely terrified while I do it. Though I seem to mask my fear well enough with enthusiasm, from what I’ve heard. My desire to nerd out about something geology-related is apparently enough to get me over the pant-shitting prospect of a room full of people I don’t know who might ask me a question for which I have no answer.

Skepticamp is also where I cemented my bad presentation habit of just throwing slides on the screen and bullshitting at them. Everyone else in my team wrote exhaustive notes to themselves on their slides. I… don’t. Ever. I just make my slides, go through them a few times so I can remember the approximate order (even I know it’s a bad, bad thing to be surprised by your own slides), and then figure if I know the subject well enough, I’ll be able to talk through it just fine when the time comes. So far it’s worked out okay for me.

Except the damn ostracods.

Anyway, I’ve survived the intern forum, which means I’m home free! I have another two weeks at work, but no more presentations, thank goodness. I shouldn’t have to stare Powerpoint in its stinky, evil little eye again until it’s time for me to put together a presentation for my Masters thesis and AGU. (Ah, AGU. I will begin dreading you now so I can pace myself.)

At least there are no ostracods in the Bighorn Basin.

DAMN YOU OSTRACODS!!!!
Categories
cycling Team Loki

Team Loki at the Buffalo Bicycle Classic

Team Loki is officially registered for the Buffalo Bicycle Classic in Boulder, Colorado on September 9. It’s a charity ride where all the net proceeds (~$60 per person) go to scholarships for students at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Which is, not coincidentally, my school.

Currently we’re a team of two on the 35 mile ride – my brother and I. (We’re only doing 35 miles out of deference for the fact that my bro is insane and only has a single speed bike.)

If you’re in Colorado and would like to join us for the ride, there’s still plenty of time to register. To register as part of the team, click through to the “Select Categories” screen and pick the “Buff Classic Team Rider” button. Team Loki is in the existing team scroll down list. Our password is: hiddlesisourking

The 35 mile start time is 0900, so we’ll be meeting up then to ride together. If you decide to join in let me know so we can make sure to meet up! Should be a fun time, and I’m not just saying that because there is beer at the end!

Categories
olympics

Why you should love synchronized swimming.

These ladies are BAMF. Seriously.

Thanks to the wonders of the BBC, I’ve actually been watching the Olympics, and had things to talk about with my coworkers, though I’ve noticed I don’t really watch the same array of sports as most of them. Sure, everyone gets in to gymnastics. But I’ve been all about track cycling lately, which I’m guessing maybe isn’t a thing unless you already like zooming around on bicycles.

I ran out of cycling events to watch yesterday with the Women’s Omnium finishing (SCREAM LAURA TROTT YOU ARE SO AWESOME) and nothing else was really jumping out at me, so I decided to take a look at synchronized swimming.

I already knew that synchronized swimming is super hard; I’ve got a friend (hi Cam!) who used to do it. I didn’t really need the British announcer lady reminding me constantly that these athletes train for ten hours a day, five days a week. But there’s a certain defensiveness to it, I think.

Because yeah. When you tell people you’ve been watching synchro, I’ve noticed that they smirk at you in a particularly annoying way. Because apparently it’s not a real sport, or something.

(Ever notice that the things that are smirked at over not being Real Sports tend to be the ones that just ladies do? Like rhythmic gymnastics and synchronized swimming. Though I have also heard people dissing trampoline gymnastics.)

So far my standard answer has been to suggest locking said smirker in a room with a synchronized swimming duet and see who comes out with the win from that encounter. That normally ends with an admission that yes, they would get their ass kicked in a most humiliating way. I think anyone in their right mind wouldn’t really want to fuck with a woman who can hold her breath for two minutes with her head pointed straight down as her legs kick through the air so quickly you can’t actually see them. And then she smiles the entire time.

Seriously. Just because it’s pretty doesn’t make it any less of an insanely difficult, bad-ass sport.

Categories
review

Moriarty

For the most part, I’ve really liked the BBC series Sherlock. Benedict Cumberbatch makes an excellent Sherlock Holmes, and Martin Freeman is definitely my favorite Watson ever. The two have great chemistry, and I’ve enjoyed watching the old stories get re-imagined in a modern setting.

Also Lara Pulver as Irene Adler? Oh, be still my beating heart.

Unfortunately, there’s one big bone I have to pick: Moriarty. I’m sure Andrew Scott is just doing his best with the script and the direction he’s gotten, but I just loathe Moriarty as he was played in season 1 and 2. To the point that the two episodes he was involved in, I actually had a difficult time focusing enough to watch.

It’s boring. Annoying. To the point that even Benedict Cumberbatch being awesome isn’t enough to keep me from scrolling through Twitter.

Now, for all Moriarty gets massive lip-service as a villain, he’s really not the most arresting figure in the source material. I’ll admit that. He’s only in two short stories and one of the novels (The Final Problem, The Adventure of the Empty House, and The Valley of Fear) and he also loses a lot of potential oomph just because he’s always being described by someone else rather than being directly observed by Watson. So I suppose you could say there’s maybe a little too much interpretation possible for Moriarty.

Though one thing does come through I think – there’s a sort of cold menace to him. In The Adventure of the Empty House, Holmes speaks of “reading an inexorable purpose in his grey eyes.” Inexorable. That’s the bit that’s supposed to make Moriarty scary. He’s as smart as Holmes, but without the detective’s (at times questionable) morals and an arachnid inhumanity to him. He ought to be terrifying, yes, because he’s so in control of the situation. The man ought to breathe menace from under a veneer of civilization.

Instead, we get shrieking, overtly crazypants Mortiarty.

Steven Moffat said:

We knew what we wanted to do with Moriarty from the very beginning. Moriarty is usually a rather dull, rather posh villain so we thought someone who was genuinely properly frightening. Someone who’s an absolute psycho.

Okay, I get wanting to avoid posh and dull. I am completely on board with that. I can’t say I’ve ever really encountered a Moriarty that I felt was properly menacing. But note menace is not necessarily best achieved via hysterics. And if I wanted to feel even vaguely threatened by the caricature of a psychopath, I’d go watch a slasher movie. At least in that, I can find the threat from someone with such obvious impulse control issues a tad more believable as rapid stabbing occurs.

What really bugs me is this isn’t the first time in a BBC series menace has been badly replaced with histrionics. Remember me bitching up and down about The End of Time? Yeah, one of the things that annoyed me to no end was that they took the crazy knob on the Master, turned it up to 11, and gave him a glow-in-the-dark comedic skull for a head. The Master was at one point a wonderful villain, and he actually didn’t start out too bad in the new Doctor Who series. Then it just sort of went off the rails and he spent all of his time mugging and shrieking.

That’s really what Moriarty felt like, except he was never on the rails to begin with. I could not find it in the least bit believable that he’d orchestrated a series of immensely complex crimes whilst frothing at the mouth. And worse, I just found him boring, because he had precisely one villain setting – over the top – and there’s a very limited amount of scenery chewing I’m willing to accept from something unless I’m specifically watching it because it’s bad.

Please, Steven Moffat. Don’t turn into Russell T. Davies on this one.

Spoilers below, even though you should totally already know what happens with Moriarty and if you don’t, go read the short stories already.

At this point I’m hoping that since this was Reichenbach Falls-ish, that means Moriarity is well and truly out and we’ll never see him again. As I said before, he wasn’t in that many of the original Sherlock Holmes stories to begin with.

But oh! This is another thing that bugs the hell out of me about that episode. I actually thought it was interesting that there was the Moriarty framing Holmes as a fraud sub-plot, particularly since one of the scholarly proposals regarding Moriarty’s existence is that he’s actually someone Holmes made up to excuse a series of cases he messed up – among other rather weird and twisty theories. So that was fun. But then Moriarty shoots himself in the head because he’s so utterly crazypants and hates Holmes that much and what was that even. It made absolutely no sense.

And gosh, I hope that it’s not a plot twist that will allow him to be brought back because I really do want to enjoy watching Sherlock and not just using it as enhanced time to read blog posts on my phone. Bring back Irene Adler instead, please. She was much more interesting as a character.

Hm. Thought for another day – parallels between this Irene Adler and Catwoman as seen in The Dark Knight Rises?

Categories
feminism rants writing

You know what else is part of the beautiful spectrum of human experience?

Not having kids.

Articles like this one seem designed to piss me off and make me pound out ranty things on my keyboard.

Yet putting yourself last is one of the best things that can happen to a writer. I make no moral claims for motherhood ­— which can bring out the worst in a person, in the form of vicarious rivalry, bitchiness, envy and even mental illness — but going through the ring of fire does change you and bring about a deeper understanding of human nature.

Well, Mrs. Craig, I’d argue it hasn’t given you a deeper understanding of the human nature of people who aren’t particularly interested in having kids.

I arrived at the essay by way of one of Amanda Marcotte‘s tweets. She made the very excellent point that you don’t see concern trolling of this sort going on about Gore Vidal or any other male author that dies. I would hope that children are a similarly transformational experience for the men who are invested in them, and that does seem to be the case from my own personal observations. A little unfair to the men, hey?

Really, it’s unfair to everyone. From start to finish, once I got past the sound of blood rushing in my ears, the essay reads like a personal justification. Sure, Mrs. Craig has less time to write, but she’s traded it for a deeper understanding of human nature and therefore that choice is superior! Or something! Everyone should do it! Have babies, it makes you more awesome and a better writer!

I am not here to make fun of the choice to have children. It’s obviously been very meaningful for Mrs. Craig, as it is for many people who go that route in their lives. But I am going to challenge this implication of inherent superiority. Having children is one branch in the path a human life can take, a major direction. It leads to one set of unique experiences and feelings.

Not having children is just as major of a path, and diverges from itself even when you consider the question of if it was by choice or not. That leads to a whole different sort of life, a different array of feelings and experiences.

Neither is superior.

The whole point of art, whether it’s painting or writing or interpretive dance or covering yourself with pudding and being an installment piece on the sidewalk for an afternoon is that you are trying to communicate and imagine through the lens of human experience. Frankly, if we all had the same experiences, I think it’d be pretty goddamn dull. It’s about getting out there and living your life to the fullest extent you can and then sharing what you’ve learned and felt and loved and lost and hated with everyone else.

Because none of us are immortal. We can’t feel every feeling and experience everything that there is in this constantly expanding world of ours. It’s not possible. That’s why there’s art, because it’s one way to share, to help people taste a life they will never otherwise know.

For some of us, living life to the fullest is having children and watching them grow, feeling all that love and pain. For some of us, it’s using the extra time and money to ride a bike along the Great Wall of China and dance until three in the morning and kiss a stranger and then have the worst hangover ever. What matters is that we’re living and creating. Unless the person you’re squaring off with does nothing but pick their belly button and watch Real Housewives, your life path isn’t inherently superior. It’s just different.

And different is good, right? Because I don’t want to live your life, as fulfilling as you find it. I want to live mine.

Categories
politics Uncategorized

Is that the sound of the other shoe?

More people are crying today. A madman went into a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and killed six people before being killed by police.

I’m sure more facts will come out later as once again we struggle to understand how someone could even conceive of doing something like this. The fact that this happened in a Sikh temple hints that this may have more horrifying motivation behind it than the seeming randomness of a movie theater filled with unrelated people. And indeed, it turns out that the shooter was affiliated with white supremacist groups, and may even have had a 9/11-related tattoo.

When something horrible like the Aurora shooting happens, there’s a part of us that waits for the other shoe to drop, because violence like this feels like it happens in clusters, one madman signaling another.

There are so many conversations that we seem to avoid having around incidents like this. The racist element here is pretty apparent. Are we going to have a discussion about right-wing hate groups now? Are we allowed to that? Can we finally talk about guns, and the related violence in America, or do we have to wait for another metaphorical shoe, an avalanche of shoes? Will any attempt at addressing the heavily-armed elephant in the room will be bellowed down as politicization?

Ezra Klein, standing in for Rachel Maddow on July 23, made the point that silencing discussion with shaming about “politicization” is already a political act. I tend to agree.

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Eddie Izzard says it very pointedly in one of his comedy routines – “Guns don’t kill people. But I think the gun helps.”

Mass shootings already feel like they’ve become an accepted thing that happens in America. I don’t want them to be. I don’t want to have to worry that some day it’ll be my niece or my best friend or one of my coworkers caught in a shopping center while someone who has legally purchased weapons that are best used to kill large numbers of people stalks the aisles. Maybe I’m in the minority (and that’s a scary thought in itself) but it’s something that should at least be discussed.

My heart goes out to the people who have been so hurt in Wisconsin. I hope that no one else feels their same pain any time soon. But as with Aurora, a fear I hope in vain.

Categories
astro stuff people don't suck

Curiousity

I should be in bed. I should be in bed. I don’t care. Curiosity is going to land so soon! We’re going to have a science lab on Mars!

If you’re not watching, YOU SHOULD BE.

On a day that’s been marked with tragedy and horror, we still do wonderful things. Humans built an amazing piece of technology and have slung it to another planet where it’ll land, and we’ll learn. Not for profit or posturing or attack, but because we want to know.

We’re going to be okay.

0014: “We’re receiving heartbeat tones, everything looks good.” People are clapping. Curiosity is about to wake up. I know we shouldn’t anthropomorphize, but it’s hard to not.

0017: Everything we’re hearing is out of the past. Darn you 14 minute delay! Darn you light speed, for being too slow!

0023: Two minutes to entry!!!!

0025: Started guided entry, we’re in the atmosphere! More applause!

0026: WE ARE PROCESSING DATA FROM ODYSSEY! Good old satellite!

0029: Parachute has deployed! Curiosity is decelerating!

0030: High fives! Curiosity is down to 90 m/s.

0031: Thank goodness for Odyssey!

0031: POWERED FLIGHT! SHE’S FLYING!

0032: Down to 10m/s, sky crane has started.

0032: TOUCHDOWN ON MARS! CURIOSITY IS ON MARS!

So much cheering, hugging, clapping. I am just CRYING. Humans are fucking awesome. We built an amazing machine and slung it at another planet, and watched it land with another machine we built.

0035: PICTURES!

First picture, a thumbnail, blurry with dust. The dark shadow is Curiosity’s wheel. ON THE SURFACE OF MARS.

0039: Another picture!

High resolution camera! That’s the surface of Mars! She’s landed!

Humans are fucking awesome, guys. We’re awesome.

Here’s the one picture I missed:

Curiosity is casting a shadow in the afternoon sunlight! Go forth, brave little rover!

ETA at 0105: Raw images will be here.