Synova

I finally got my orchids all repotted.  Poor neglected things.  It's been too long. Remember my Phals?  This is what they looked like last winter.  This is a good window for them.  It's north facing so I've got a four tube fluorescent shop light above them.  It's really hard to find the sweet spot for sunlight in windows anyway, so this is ideal.  It also gets really chilly next to the glass once it starts getting cold out.  This says "Hey, bloom now!" You can see that they're growing right out of the pots.  My friend gave me this phal because she didn't know what to do with it.  Phalanopsis sometimes grow keikis (babies) on the bloom stem.  These had roots so I just cut them apart.  I considered putting them together in a pot with the parent plant, but changed my mind.  The next three pictures show how badly my phalanopsis needed to be repotted.  After I took this one out of the pot I decided  t...

"Dave Freer is a former Ichthyologist (Fisheries Biologist) who turned author because he heard the spelling requirements were easier. They lied. He is happily married, with two great sons, two lovely daughters-in-law, and now is bracing himself for grandchildren. He and his wife Barbara live on remote Flinders Island, off the coast of Tasmania. He dives, fishes rock climbs, lives a chaotic experiment into self-sufficiency, including making his own bacon, from his own pigs, and writes novels. Some have even blundered onto best-seller lists before being kicked out by respectable literature." (Bio from Amazon.) Dave Freer is one of my pretend internet author friends and exceptionally skilled writer. He recently moved from South Africa to Flinders Island, about as near the back side of beyond it's possible to manage and still be on Earth, and has written this book and is dedicating all proceeds from it to his new little parish church. Many of his books are science fict...

Growth rings in an exposed CaCO3 outcrop. The whole thing looked a bit like a stump. Actively forming rock.  The spikes are about 1cm across. The source of the dissolved CaCO3 is the Madera Formation. Another view of the first rock.  The whole thing was full of funnels or tubes, from these big ones to about 2mm in diameter.

 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.

  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-vo...

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...

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.

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

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 Sta...

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.

I'd say, yes, actually. That's with a whole bunch of caveats and recourse to definitions. Still, I think that most of what this guy says is both very right and very wrong.  First, he claims that men = violence is entirely cultural... that it's trained into boys from their youngest years.  Part of that is true, but it's also not true.  We know that higher testosterone is associated with higher aggression in both men and women and men tend to have more testosterone. Violence is actually essentially human. We don't train it into ourselves, we train it OUT.*

There are T-shirts over the seat covers. My dad has had this hot rod since he was a "rebel" in the 50's.  When I was a teenager he started to fix it up again, rebuild from the bottom up.

I'm starting to consider that I might be a novella writer.  Short stories don't seem to fit.  My ideas for novels seem to just peter out, even when I know how I want the story to conclude, because there doesn't seem to be enough going on. But novellas Do Not Sell. I learned this impermeable Truth about the same time I cut my milk-teeth learning about writing and publishing in the early 1990s.  Novellas do not sell.  It's a Short Story or the Game of Thrones.  Choose wisely, young one. Novels, you see, are no longer 50,000 words (no matter what NaNoWriMo tells you), a novel begins at a nice meaty 80,000 words or It Will Not Sell.   It doesn't matter how many Golden Age space operas or Louis L'Amour novels you've loved nearly to the point of disintegration.  Novels start at 80,000 words.  I knew this with all my heart. And then, as Grue from "Despicable Me" would say, "Light bulb!" My expectations are stuck in the old paradigm, th...

Definitely need to get my butt in gear!   But at least my artist is hard working and prompt! I'm intending this for the back cover art.  The  front art has her asleep and the cherry blossoms are small buds.

Prickly Pear growing by the road.  A cactus I bought, bloom for the very first time TODAY. Cholla cactus.  Not a good picture of the flower. Wild claret cup somewhere south of Belen. Claret cup in my garden. A local claret cup I moved two yards to my garden. "Single spined" claret cup I bought, blooming for the very first time. Tiny pink blooms on a wild cactus. Small local cactus with green-yellow flowers.

I heard a rumor this collection of novellas by John C. Wright was going to be FREE tomorrow... It looks like something my husband would probably like.

I just put up a review for this on Amazon.   Was it the best, most amazing book ever?  No.  But I started reading it, not *meaning* to read it but just meaning to look at it and read it later, at bed time and finished the book at 3:30 AM.   It's over the top adventure with Space Marines.   I wasn't quite expecting what I got but the price was right ($2.99) and there's that 3:30 AM thing...  at the point that a story keeps you up all night reading it, it counts as a success in all ways that matter.   Fun, adventure, intrigue, a looming threat, and Space Marines.

So... this seems to be a thing.  I'd assume it couldn't be a thing, only a strange aberration, a case of "tweeting before thinking"... but I'm not sure. The "thing" is Ms. USA... she's apparently pro-rape. She answered a question about rape in a pro-rapey sort of way.  So, is this a "thing" or just a couple of accidental tweets, like when you've eaten beans and aren't paying attention and they just sort of sneak out there and make a stink way way out of proportion? In any case... this is the horrible horrible pro-rapey answer given by the woman who eventually wins Ms. USA. She just makes the one statement, I think that the video repeats it a few time... so once she says it you can stop... there really isn't something more pro-rapey coming at the end. Ace of Spades HQ had this *promptly* and included one of the offended tweets.   Larry Correia has a very nice run down of all (all?) of them.   A sample: ’I'm sor...