Battlestar Galactica - Review (probably spoilers)

Amazing. It did not suck. In fact - it was actually good. Quite good.The show moves a little slowly in the first half, IMO but it does nicely set up just what was lost in the Cylon attack - everything. We get snapshots of the colony worlds and, of course, the Cylon activity.I had feared the 'fembots' - the human looking Cylons but the concept was handled surprisingly well. Clearly the creatures obey their directives but are capable of having their own adjenda. They were more than T&A appeal. Clearly the one that was implanted in Gais has some conflicts of interests and it was also clear they had some capacity for feeling. It was odd too, the Cylons seemed to feel some threat from the humans - which seemed to be their motiviation for the attack.I loved seeing the hard choices made by everyone who survived - from abandoning the non-FTL capable ships to the lottery for limited room on Boomer's ship. The desperation from the abandoned colonists wasn't shoved off-screen to avoid the pain and the struggle and grief of the survivors was clear as well. The conflict between the military mindset and the civilian authority was also well handled - and neither side was shown to be 'stupid'.I also have to say I was very impressed with the way they explain the reasons for the various 'retro' technologies in the ships (non-intergrated computers, a lot of manual doors etc) and colonies (fear of Cylon attack and cultural refusal to create anymore AI type computers). Then they showed why all that retro stuff was important. It wasn't just window dressing.I found myself sympathetic towards Gais, even though he's a pretty reprehensible person. I must say I loved the whole relevation of what was going to happen with him and his Cylon lover - how he reacted. And I did like his line 'the last time we saw a Cylon, they looked like walking chrome toasters!'There's been griping about the fact that the show does not slavishly follow the original series and you know - that's not neccesarily a bad thing. The orgianal series was cheesy as hell. Which doesn't mean they abandon all refrents to the orginal. Names remain, certian aspects of the uniform details remain - and the speical effects of the guns was just as the orgianl was. Oooh! And the special effects. They might have had budget constraints but they worked with them and - the battle sequences (in space) were very good.The only thing I disliked was the clear heterosexim of the moive. There is not a *single* referent to a homosexual character in the entire movie and I belive that *every* character with a speaking part is paired up with someone of the opposite gender by the end. My suspicious kink-mind wonders if they didn't change the gender of Starbuck to avoid the original series close same sex freindship between Apollo and Starbuck - and the slash potential it had.Clearly, the intent of this 'mini-series' is to whet our tastes for a series, which I certainly hope gets made.x

Heh - because I've been neglecting my journal

Someday I'll actually write something for my journal again, until them - a quiz!Millionaire playboy by day, dark knight by night.You are the world's greatest detective. You areBatman, and you are feared and respected byboth hero and villian. Which DC Super Hero Are You? brought to you by QuizillaW

Tarot

HERMIT"the meditator, philosopher, sage, wiseman"You can not and will not compromise your values andhave a desire to complete past things beforebegining the new (you value completion,perfection, and introspection highly). You area natural way-shower, sage, and seeker. Youhave an appreciation of the body and the wisdomof the earth and its natural process. You havea deep love for beauty, harmony, and order. which major arcana of the thoth tarot deck are you? short, with pictures and detailed results brought to you by QuizillaDon't usually do these things but I like Tarot stuff.

Bald Idealists (Iconography of Popular Culture 3)

There are some powerful thematic elements in the Marvel X-men universe - discrimination, acceptance, the feeling of being different and what that can mean. Many of the characters in the comics represent various aspects of these themes; lets start with the Bald Guy, Charles Xavier - the dreamer behind the Dream.There's been a lot of comment on the differences between the movies and the comics - everything from clothing styles (or lack thereof) to canon history, behavior and morality. Several people have been much more satisfied with the movie incarnation of Professor X rather than the seemingly blindly naïve professor from the older comics. Marvel too, has observed the change in readership and in Ultimate X-Men and New X-men both, Charles has become much more ambiguous in behavior and motive than his origins suggest. Most people call him more realistic and approve of his willingness to mentally manipulate or control others under the pressure of necessity. I seem to be in the minority in that I quite disagree with that choice.This is because I believe that Professor X has to be the idealistic, determinedly naïve character of the earliest comics. The one who did not allow his students to kill while sending them into life threatening situations, the one who refuses to read people's minds casually or violate their free will.Charles Xavier represents, and voices an ideal. Like all ideals, it's fit in the real world is less than perfect. He also represents the hope that people can be motivated to do good and remain good. The professor is an idealist, just as Magneto accuses, but idealism does not have to mean ignorance of the 'real world'. I do not see the professor as naïve but determined, in the face of harsh choices, to not yield to the temptation of expedience.He has asked himself some excruciatingly difficult questions: If it's wrong to invade someone's mind and bend them to my will, is it ever right?If I chose to manipulate someone's will with my powers in one circumstance, what about the next? And the next?Is it right to manipulate the minds of people, even if it will save lives? How many lives would make it worthwhile?If it's immoral to break into someone's home to gain illicit information or blackmail materiel, is it right for me to use such information I gain accidentally through my powers?I'm one of the most powerful people in the world, what should I do with that power? People manipulate and control each other in all kinds of ways, is using my telepathy any different?Does power corrupt?How will I know when I've gone to far and who could stop me if I did?And he came up with answers, very difficult answers. The professor did not chose the path of expedience, he chose to adhere to his morality, even when that morality cost him friends, followers, lives.It's perfectly true that people chose to harm others all the time and telepathy is - at least - not physically damaging. Is going in and erasing people's memories or altering their personality any worse than imprisonment or drugs? That's a question everyone has a different answer for and I think that the professor has decided that if it is not right to drug someone into compliance it isn't anymore right to screw with their memories or personality either.Professor X isn't portrayed as a stupid man, or an ignorant one and with those assumptions I can't believe that he doesn't recognize that his refusal to take certain kinds of actions makes live harder and more dangerous for everyone. I think he recognizes that his rigid adherence to his morality has costs and chooses to pay them.He's an idealist but not a naïve one.I think this is important because Professor X and Magneto represent two poles on the same issue; what to do when faced with fear, hatred and persecution. Do you become like your persecutors and answer violence with violence? If your attackers are disregarding law, mercy, justice and common humanity do they deserve anything better?Magneto has his answer and he has become like the enemies he despises. The Professor has chosen his answer as well. He believes in mercy, justice, law and fellowship and extends this belief to friends and enemies alike. He will not allow the cruelty of others to make him cruel.By making the professor more realistic, and more in line with 21st century morality (which is more comfortable with killing or manipulating the 'bad' guys than the morality of the 1960's) of the movies and more recent comics, I believe he looses much of his strength as a character. He simply becomes a 'good guy' because he's drawn with the white hat rather than through any of his actions. He's good in comparison to the 'bad guys' but being better is not the same thing as being good.The professor was never intended to be a morally gray character, he was originally defined as a good guy and - as I've mentioned before - the artists chose to portray him with ambiguous imagery as a contrast to his actions. In a world where he is hated and feared because he is a mutant, Professor X was meant to be the last person in the world to be afraid of.Professor X chooses to represent good, in its most idealized form, despite all wisdom to the contrary.

How was your day at work?

## is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana. He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an e-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio station in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, which was sponsoring a worst job experience contest. Needless to say, she won. Hi ##, Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you've been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it's not so bad after all. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It's a wetsuit. This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea It heats it to a delightful temperature. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I've used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wetsuit. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It's like working in a Jacuzzi. Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my butt started to itch. So of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my butt started to burn. I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened. The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now, since I don't have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn't stick to it. However, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my butt. I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the >communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically. Needless to say, I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression. When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet. As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn't poop for two days because my butt was swollen shut. So, next time you're having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your butt. Now repeat to yourself, "I love my job, I love my job, I love my job!"

Helpful Spam defenses (Tips)

Information I didn't know and figured I'm not the only stone age mind/21st century toys person out there.Some general spam tips: 1) never, go through a spam mail's 'opt out' process. That's just another way to try to get confirmation that your address is valid.(and I always wondered why I got more spam mail *after* I did that...) 2) never get mad and write them damning messages that demand they leave you alone. Same result-- they know yours is a valid email address that they can sell. 3) either don't accept html messages, or go offline when you view html messages that are from an unknown source. The spammers put images in their html messages that are actually located on their own machines. When you open a message that's in html, and they have an image of theirs in it, they know exactly when you opened that message and that they had a successful delivery. You're permanently on spam lists after that. (bummer - and I thought I was getting some free porn pics with those messages!)4) If you use a service like spamcop.net, don't report yourself. I know, it sounds silly to actually say it, but it's easy to do. When you use a service like that, it often takes URLs that are within the message, because the URLs often reference a web site connected to the spammer. But sometimes, the message contains your own URL, where they scanned to harvest your email address in the first place. Also, check the headers carefully to be sure the spammer didn't try to spoof your domain. When you go submit a spam report, be sure that you don't have any abuse addreses checked that are actually our own network. If you aren't 100% sure, don't submit the report, because it's not worth the hassle of proving you aren't actually the spammer. 5) if you forward your mail from one account to another, then likely you will be unable to report spam, because the headers you submit will be from your own email account and not the spammer. Use spam reporting services with caution! 6) watch out for spam that pretends to be an undeliverable message from a server post office or impersonates services you might use. For example, some spammers use Citibank, Sprint, Paypal and various credit card company logos within their html messsages, but the message is actually from a spammer who stole images to pull off the impersonation. Check headers *carefully* to make sure the email actually came from the company it says it came from. Be wary of following links with instructions to update account information or to opt out of future 'informational emails'. (Isn't this fraud?)7) be careful about putting your email address on stories that you have archived elsewhere, or of anyplace where your email address might be public, such as discussion boards. You don't know what other people are doing (or not doing) to protect content that includes your info.

Not so Funny - Plagarism in fanfiction (opinion)

So, here's the common scenario….Someone writes a piece of fiction that they cannot make a profit on, for the pleasure of writing and sharing their work with others interested in that fandom. Then someone else steals the work and re-publishes the piece under their name, also unable to make a profit on the stolen work and they then publish in the same fandom where they are almost guaranteed to be discovered because most fanfiction groups are small enough that everyone is reading all work available. Why do some people plagiarize fandoms? The reason escapes me. No one can make a profit on fanfiction. Fanfiction readers are voracious - they'll read almost everything in their fandom so a plagiarized work is pretty much guaranteed to be discovered sooner or later. Fanfiction members are also very vocal and getting a reputation of plagiarizing among a group of writers is pretty much guaranteed to get you (this is a generic you, if you please) ostracized.I haven't had a piece plagiarized yet (that I know of) but the concept of plagiarizing an amateur work in a venue that doesn't bring you any profit but can still give you a sour reputation that will last for years (the Internet never forgets) strikes me as so odd that I have to comment.Are people unclear on what plagiarism is? Plagiarism is taking another person's work, written, spoken or drawn/painted and claiming that you are the creator of that work. Plagiarism includes extensive 'quoting' from another person's work and 'forgetting' to footnote or endnote the source. During the long dark years of junior high, learning how to properly footnote work was one of the challenges of my English classes.I wonder sometimes, with the proliferation of Internet term paper mills out there, that students nowadays don't realize what it means when they pay their $20 bucks to a mill then turn the paper in for a grade. That's plagiarism. When I was a student, plagiarism was grounds for failure of the entire class. It was the one thing, of all the crap students pulled in school that was never tolerated.I seem to recall a story (that may be apocryphal) about a teacher who had no less than six students in his class turn in the identical essay bought from a term paper mill. As he'd stated at the beginning of the course, plagiarism was grounds for failure in the class. When he failed the students, the parents pressured the school to reinstate all the kids and remove the failed grade. Perhaps examples like that are the reasons why some people plagiarize. It doesn't seem like the big deal it was when I was a kid.Do plagiarists really think they won't be discovered?Well, like I said - all fandoms are relatively small. Sooner or later someone is going to notice. Is it worth it?This is pure, non-profit entertainment! All any author in fanfiction gets is praise and notoriety. Really, is there enough satisfaction in getting praise for a piece of stolen work to make the risk of discovery and humiliation worthwhile? Is it worth making other authors hesitate before posting their work for fear if it being stolen?Plagiarism in fanfiction strikes me as one of the most ugly of 'harmless' crimes. There's no good for anyone in it. No matter how terrible your own writing is, it's certainly better than being branded a plagiarist.There are relatively few resources out there for fanfiction - you can't hire a lawyer to sue someone who plagiarizes work that is illegal in the first place. There is an overworked group of volunteers:Plagiarism Police Patrol (anime only)AndPlagiarism Police Patrol 2 (non-anime)They will investigate to the best of their ability and publicize their findings - either naming the guilty party or clearing someone who has been wrongfully accused.