It's a Monday

Well, it's back-to-work week. The situation isn't nearly as bad as I had feared; all of the stopper bugs turned out to be fixable after all and the minor bug list looks manageable although long. There were 780 emails waiting for me, about a third of which were spam. (This is a remarkable turnaround from my personal account, which gets some 30 spams/phishes/infection attempts an hour.)

I wrote about 500 words, getting some progress on a minor erotica piece. I'm trying to set up three points of pressure with the characters, but the setting which seemed so rich at the beginning is kinda lacking now. I'm hoping that's not a failure of imagination.

I also finished Diplomatic Immunity. I agree with others; there are moments where Bujold's usual crystalline clockwork plot falls apart. Bel Thorne's girlfriend is very badly managed, and the real resolution of the story is handled off-screen. Her usual ability to foreshadow without telegraphing is overwhelmed by her desire to get certain points across, leading the reader to suspicions that turn out to be unwarranted and somewhat disappointing. On the other hand, her characterization is much stronger this time; Roic and Bel especially come across as more personable than in previous novels.

Omaha made a delicious tuna noodle casserole, and then we settled down to an epic game of Sorry!. Kouryou-chan gave up after about 15 minutes, and I think I've figured out why. Sorry! is not a strategically interesting game, not even for a four year old. When it's not your turn, you have nothing to do but wait on the other players and watch your fate play out. When it is your turn, unless you have more than one piece in play-- not always or often a sure thing-- you have only one move anyway. Kouryou-chan can maintain her interest in Sequence or Go Fish because those are games where her hands-- and her plans-- are occupied for the entirety of the game. When it's not her turn, she can look at the cards in her hand and think about what to do next, preparing to play the next round. Not so in Sorry!, where the player's hands and brain are freed to wander. And in Kouryou-chan's case, her feet too.

Oh, and I transferred my old fansubs of FLCL onto DVD but, dammit, the stutter is still there. This sucks. I have to figure out a way to get the lanczos 24:29 framerate handler into the data stream. I'm afraid that may mean taking all of mkdvd apart to figure out what it does (Use the Source, Luke) and re-implementing it with the frame fix filter.

Violent Young Men

On the way home yesterday, while I sat on the bus and read my Bujold, two young men, early twentys, Causcasian or perhaps Hispanic, got onto the bus. They were big men, muscles rippling under tight and torn t-shirts, their bodies where exposed showing crude tattoos of the sort that one endures in prison. They came in the classic twosome of noisy leader and quiet follower.

( Parental advisory. Contains rough language. )

Amazing, I thought, a wired little punk with a foot fetish. On the other hand, that opening salvo of violence about knives and girls put me on edge for the rest of the bus ride home, even though they had long left the bus.

Now, for four years I was the senior (and only) webmaster at The National Centers for Missing and Exploited Children. I know that stranger danger is overblown and the "Amber Alert" level nightmares make up less than one percent of all missing children alerts; most of them are more mundane, like non-custodial parents taking the kids and runaways.

On the other hand, there are animals like those two who wafted past me, unpleasant little odors in a usually ordinary life. And some of them are more than talk. "Stranger danger" may be statistically unmoved over the past fifty years, but that doesn't make it irrelevant. And having worked at missingkids.org, the first and most basic idea is that if you do talk about your kids on-line, don't use their real names. Give them the anonymity they deserve.

Which leads me to this point: I don't use my kids' real names in print. It's simple as that. They know that if someone uses the on-line names I've given them without clarification, without knowing their real names, that's not someone to trust. I discuss a lot of personal details here, and this LJ can be read by two billion people. Think about that: if you shook hands with one person every second for the next year without pausing to bathe, eat, sleep, pee, or wipe your nose you could meet about 1.5% of the people who can read these words.

I have no intention of making my kids easy targets. So here's the deal: don't use my kids' real names in my LJ. Or your LJ, if you give a damn. I avoid as much as possible using any minor's real name in print; adults, I assume, can take care of themselves. I can delete the offenders from here-- and I have, without prejudice for the content. They deserve a little anonymity.

Holy Moley, "It's Inappropriate!"

Just go read this post from mephron. I don't know who he is, but you have to read it.

Un-F'ing-believable.

( This is what's inappropriate. )

Actually, she's kinda hot. (I believe that's the point.)