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Showing posts from August, 2014

Book cover art.

 This is meant to be a wrap-around so imagine it folded in half.   I put my name in the lower block but don't have anything in the back cover block yet.  It's pretty neat, I think.   It's slightly cartoony but  I don't think so much so that it won't work.  The story itself is plenty appropriate for younger readers anyway.

Rocks...

  Guadeloupita Mesa. The orange layers (starting at the bottom) are the Abo Formation, Lower Yeso, a little bit of the remaining Upper Yeso which has been eroded and topped over by the Bandolier Tuff which is all of the buff colored rocks. The other side of Guadeloupita Mesa. Starting at the bottom is the orange Lower Yeso (the Abo doesn't show at all) a complete Upper Yeso which is the fine layers of darker red.  The Glorieta sandstone is the light and dark, relatively chunky layer about half the thickness of the Upper Yeso.   Above the Glorieta sandstone is layer that is eroded and looks like a bit of a slope with vegetation, that's the Moenkopi formation. (I looked up how to spell that.  The last dark sandstone/conglomerate layer is the Chinle Group.  Above that is the Bandolier Tuff.  In between the two pictures is fault displacement of maybe a 100 meters.  On the left everything above the Upper Yeso is gone, eroded away before the mega-volcano covered it all.

Why the movie Transcendence Sucked....

Transcendence is a 2014 movie starring Johnny Depp, who was incredible as always.  Rebecca Hall also did a great job, as did Paul Bettany. I note that on IMDb it lists "Warner Brothers" after "written by".   Frankly, "written by committee" explains a whole heck of a lot. The idea of "transcendence" is relatively standard in science fiction.  In essence the "essence" of humanity is uploaded to the cloud and we leave our physical limitations behind.  Sometimes this is expressed as the "singularity".  I'm not at all fond of this particular sub-genre, though my husband prefers it to other science fiction sub-genres.  He agrees with me about this movie, which he should have loved. The movie opens with the aftermath... there is an implication of a police state, food shortages, and the absence of technology, even refrigeration.  This situation would be utterly horrific and involve the death of millions... or so I would assu

Caught in the Act...

I caught the last caterpillar in the act of turning into a chrysalis.  (Video in the post the follows this one.)  The last picture is a bunch of the older chrysalises.  About half of those have already hatched.

Black Swallowtail Butterflies

Nine butterflies so far.  I should have at least this many more before they're all hatched.

Larry Correia lays some smack-down on NPR

I do so appreciate some Larry Correia snark.  I don't think he could fail to be entertaining if he tried.  However, his smack down of NPR " looking to manufacture some outrage"  over the under-representation of Hispanics in film is not precisely *funny* which makes me think that Correia just might be slightly, actually...  annoyed.  "When NPR says that some of the Latin actors aren’t “easily recognizable” that means that they aren’t conforming to accepted liberal suburban Ivy League stereotypes. NPR wants Latinos to play beaners in sombreros, hotel maids, or gang bangers… " When NPR bases their argument on the fact that Jennifer Lopez is not easily recognizable as Hispanic in a movie, you know they've thoroughly jumped the shark.   OTOH, you probably already knew that, seeing as we're talking about NPR here. Larry Correia fisks NPR. Especially mindboggling... the part where NPR complains that Zoe Saldana played the part of a black person in Star

Bubonicon

No dear, you weren't talking too much about yourself.  You weren't going on and on and boorishly promoting your latest book.  You were, in fact, talking about other people. Loudly. Mockingly. In the foyer.