I have a new comic, after a month of procrastination and other things to do.

( full comic behind the cut )

Making this comic taught me a lot about digital comics creation. In particular, the Balloon Tales Layer Method is really cool.

Tags: comics

• 10:50 my new supersweet laptop has shipped -- almost a week early. a relief; i'll have it with me on trip to Berlin. #

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I'm writing a talk about Chinese character encodings. I was investigating whether GBK [one set of encodings] was a superset of Big5 (another encoding). [ETA: looks like it's not.]

So I went to the oracle and I was going to write "is GBK a superset of Big5" but I got this far: "is GB" when Google suggested the following search "is gb bigger than mb" (short answer: yes it is, but somebody asked this on Yahoo Answers).

Wednesday I saw Clay Shirky's video on the Cognitive Surplus (via Warren Ellis). Today, I wonder whether that surplus is worth harvesting....

Current Mood: perhaps i'll try gin instead

[ETA: Unlocked post now (and specifics removed); please feel free to point your Bay-area friends here!]

It's official as of Monday afternoon: we're going to the Bay Area. imtboo has been admitted to a San Francisco school for her chosen field.

School starts August 21 for her, so we'll be moving out of Seattle and down to the Bay Area in that first week of August, more or less.

I will be finishing up my dissertation at a desk in a research lab in Menlo Park. But D's school is downtown -- right by the Civic Center BART stop. Unfortunately, this means that one of us will be commuting a long way on the CalTrain and/or the BART. At the moment, it looks like it might be her, since at at least for the first semester she'll only have classes two (very full) days a week, while I'll be at ResearchLab five days a week.

Any suggestions or comments, from people who live in the Bay Area (or who have lived there) about places to live -- or to avoid? I think the East Bay is out for us -- the commute to Menlo Park is insane -- but we're considering paying more to live in the city, or paying less to live on the Peninsula. Any recommendations?

( Bay Area roll call: )
I'm sure I've missed people in this roll-call. Anybody else?

• 13:16 reminding friends that twitter is not IM #
• 13:32 hoping not to have offended anybody. working today, should turn off IM. #

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• 15:47 A tremendous congrats to @imtboo! We all knew you could but now it's official! #

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One of my pictures got used as an illustration on Seattlest.

ETA: they did ask permission, which I granted.

twilightsm was looking for post- or peri-apocalyptic books, and also dystopias. imtboo pointed me at zir post, and I wrote the following. So I thought I'd share.

Oo, clever thought: look at the post-apocalyptic LibraryThing tag. That's a good start. Off the top of that list, I would especially recommend Canticle for Leibowitz and Riddley Walker as spectacular.

Also the dystopia tag is pretty good. You must read Handmaid's Tale and Parable of the Sower.

Um, glancing at the books near my desk for a start:

Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan; an SF novel about nanotech
A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen. Non-fiction essays about the ongoing human destruction of the planet.
Stand on Zanzibar, by John Brunner. Definitely one of those "as the world is ending" peri-apocalyptic books. Also freakishly prescient.
Pretty much anything by James Morrow.
Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Very funny take on the Apocalypse.
Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. Le Guin: a post-apocalyptic half-novel half-anthropology of a new community after our own.
The Dispossessed, also by Ursula K. Le Guin. A classic pair of dystopian societies in second-wave feminist SF.

Comics and illustrated books:

Baaa by David Macaulay. Also Motel of the Mysteries, by the same. Both satirical with lots of illustrations.
The System, by Peter Kuper. Wordless and beautiful and very very scary. Set in Manhattan, just before the bomb goes off. Written before September 11, also freakishly prescient.
Watchmen by Alan Moore, and Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller; modern classics in their post-apocalyptic re-visionings of the superhero genre. Spoiler: superheroes are the cause and the effects of the apocalypse. (Otherwise stay the heck away from superheroes, as a rule: many of the superhero books thematically deriving from these two have degenerated into thinly veiled snuff and rape porn.)
Give Me Liberty, by Frank Miller. Vaguely Objectivist Dystopian SF. Sequels are not so vague.
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore. The comic is wordier and more subtle but not as pretty as the movie.
DMZ, by Brian Wood; protagonist is a reporter in Manhattan, the DMZ between the Free States (Michigan, Upstate NY) and the New United States Government. Most Manhattanites live in the line of free-fire. Actually, many by Brian Wood: Channel Zero, Couscous Express, The Couriers.
Glacial Period, by Nicolas de Crécy. The Louvre is rediscovered by explorers excavating the Lost Continent of Europa.

phew, that's a lot. Probably more than you need. If this whets your appetite in a particular direction, ask me and I'm happy to go into more detail!

I posted this as a comment to a f-locked post on the jackassery, but I'll repost it here:

my previous opinion of [theferret] theferrett was that he was a smart but emotionally-stunted male nerd (well, we know lots of those) who used polyamory rhetoric to sleaze on lots of women and pretend that he was enlightened by doing so.

Now... well, that's all still true. It just makes me annoyed that he calls it "open source". What a fuckwit. That's dragging both male allies and the open source movement into the scum, providing the anecdotal evidence that is all most people will ever need to complete their stereotype (male poly = "lech", open source = "men who can't get laid"). And then to declare it as a "movement", as if software or SF cons need *more* herds of men objectifying women.

I'm not poly, nor do I wish I were, but I can respect (most of) the people who are serious about it. But poly rhetoric interacts with sexism and male privilege (um, mormon rape camps? in the news now) and so men (or little boys in grownup bodies) need to check themselves. It's awesome that the internet (poly, mono, straight & queer, men & women) rose up to smack him down. But I wish this kind of rhetoric wasn't associated with sexual liberation or with open source movements.

How did that little weasel choose such an appropriate username?

Some of my favorite responses:

• A modest proposal from misia
• Nerd culture promotes this from springheel_jack
• Meanwhile, now I see the whole "open source" element and it further pisses me off. It fucking pollutes the lovely philosophy of open source. from badgerbag
• A lovely roundup at FeministSF.net.

Buh. I don't intend to suggest that I have anything intelligent to add that all these brilliant women (and a few men) haven't already said. But sometimes, the stupid, it burns.

ETA: This made Get Off the Internet, which - though tremendous fun to read even when not on fire like this - has really validated its own existence with this scathing description of the original weaseling.

crap. I think I am getting sick.

I started sneezing last night and imtboo asked me if it was allergies. It sure felt like it was. But today I can't stop sneezing.

I think I may go home and take a shower and a nap.