(Thanks to the mods for sorting out a strange blip! The original post went missing, and they've graciously allowed me to repost :) )


Ladies, Gentlemen, and Everything In Between in the General Area of the City of New York:

You are hereby invited to an afternoon of tea and snacks on the Great Lawn of Central Park on August the Second. While somewhat in honor of my birthday, the invite is open to all and nothing in the way of presents is required (or even requested!) as the picnic is in no way a party simply for that reason.

Your hosts, liu_xing and I, simply want the enjoyment of your company. We understand that jaborwhalky is holding a wondrous event on the same day, and in no way want to take away from that! Think of us more as there for those of you who can't make the commute. We'd hate to think we're making anybody reconsider or change their plans. :)

Following are the details of the day:

Date: August 2nd
Time: 2 PM - ?
Location: We shall meet up on the steps of the Natural History Museum (Central Park West between 81st and 79th street) before walking to Central Park itself.


We would very much appreciate an RSVP, though if you decide the day of that yes, you can make it, we will quite gladly still accept you!

All we ask is that you make your best attempt to bring something, even if just some cookies or cheese and crackers. It will be a picnic tea to remember, if all goes well.

If you plan on attending, please respond to this post so we can have a good idea of the number of people attending. Closer to the date we will post the details of the day again, as well as a list of those hopefully in attendance.


In case of rain, we will still hold the meet up on the same day, but will instead rendezvous and dine at Alice's Teacup. Closer to the date, if rain is forecasted, we will make sure everybody involved knows exactly where to meet and how much tea will cost, at a rough estimate. So as not to confuse anybody, however, we'll leave that information out for now.

I have a terrible habit, which I dare say that I share with the rest of the known world. If someone raves and raves about a piece of media (TV show, movie, comic) to me, then I'm much less likely to enjoy it.

If I don't share this, then it's possible that I'm just a jerk. But I've seen it in other people, so I'm fairly sure it's not Peter-exclusive. People who desperately try to fit in will quite often not suffer from this affliction; it's more common among people who try not to fit in. I try not to try not to fit in, but I quite often end up doing so anyway.

Anyway, the example I always jump to is the TV show Firefly. See, I'd just finished watching through Buffy, and Serenity was about to come out. I was trying to get my hands on a copy of the show, but it was tricky; because the movie was coming out, everyone had sold out of the series. I ended up seeing the movie without having seen the show (that link contains my slightly confused review), and then an acquantince (I wouldn't call her a friend - we only spoke about 10 times, and one of those times was her lending me the DVD) loaned me the full series.

Interestingly, that post has four comments - all from people who no longer read this journal, and whose journals are no longer read by me. Crazy.

My sister and I sat down and watched right through the series, loved it, and then we went and saw the movie again. I enjoyed the movie a lot more having seen the series; it was both much better, and much sadder.

Anyway, my point is, before everyone was watching Firefly, I was recommending it like everyone else who had seen it. I should also point out that I'm not one of those people who hates it when something small becomes popular and everyone's heard of it - I think that's great! It means people who I obviously admire have now become commercially successful, and as someone who would like to become commercially successful myself, I think it's a bit odd when people get annoyed at them for that fact.

But the turning point for me, for Firefly was about 6 months ago. My cousin, my ex-girlfriend, and my ex-housemate Sonia (she was my housemate at the time) were discussing what to watch, and when Sonia revealed that she had no idea what Firefly was, she was told that she had to watch it.

By the way, there are few things as annoying as being told that you have to watch something. I'm fairly sure that I'm guilty of this myself, but with the exception of about 20 "Must-watch" films in the world, just because you like something doesn't mean that you have to inflict it on everyone you meet. Honestly, few things are going to put me off more than having a show or movie forced down my throat.

So we put Firefly on, and every time anyone said any line, both my cousin and my ex gasped, cheered, and wouldn't shut up. I like Firefly, okay? I think it's good for what it is. And what it is is 14 episodes of a show that could have been great. I was discussing it with my sister the other day, and she loves it as much as everyone else, but she doesn't think that it could have been great. She said that in the first 14 episodes, they'd already done several "gimmicky" episodes - how long could that have lasted?

After that day, it started to irk me when people constantly raved about Firefly as the zenith of all television. It's good, don't get me wrong. I like it. But as long as people are raving about it, I'm just not going to be able to enjoy it as much as I used to.

My sister thinks this is a little sad. "You used to love it. Now you love it - 'but'."

A similar situation occurred with Scrubs. I first heard about Scrubs in 2003, when my "girlfriend" (or whatever the term is) Emily recommended it to me. "IT IS THE BEST SHOW EVER", she said, and so I deliberately avoided it.

About two years after we "broke up" (or whatever the term is), I was working at a nursing home, and I saw an episode on TV. I only saw a small segment, and it remains one of my favourite Scrubs quotes:

Janitor: So you can do my stuff, but I can't do yours.
Doctor: YES!
Janitor: Okay, hotshot, what would you use to get a coffee stain up off a tile floor?
Doctor: I don't know, the...rough side of a sponge?
Janitor: Damn it.

From that small piece of dialogue, I was intrigued, and so the next time I went to Brisbane, when I saw Scrubs on sale for $20/season, I picked the first 3 series up, show unseen. (I did this with Buffy as well, and more recently The West Wing. I believe in taking risks, and they tend to pay off for me.)

My sister and I sat down and devoured the first three seasons in about a day or two. We really enjoyed the show - the flashback-style heavily influenced Robbie and Peter, and the writing was tight, the acting was good, etc etc.

Last year, readers may remember, I had a crush on a girl I nicknamed "Sylvia" (for the sake of writing about her on this journal.)

She loved the show. She thought that Scrubs was possibly the zenith of all human accomplishment, and that no TV show would ever accomplish the dizzying heights that this show had managed. When she read the script for Robbie and Peter, the comparison to Scrubs that she made was not a compliment - she essentially said that just by trying to be this perfect show, I had doomed myself to failure, because nothing could ever touch Scrubs, sent from the heavens as it was.

Needless to say, this put me off Scrubs a little.

I haven't spoken to her in about 3 or 4 months now (my crush evaporated, and as is quite often the case, I worked out that behind the crush lay a person that I didn't really want to know) and so when Gavin mentioned that he still hadn't watched past season 3 of Scrubs, we put it on, and I was impressed.

I learned to love Scrubs again. Not as much as I did the first time, and certainly not as much as Sylvia did, but I could see that it was a well put-together show. It's certainly not perfect, and I could list the faults for you, but that was no longer what immediately sprung to mind when the show was mentioned. Rather, I could enjoy the show for what it was, without feeling compelled to "dis" it.

The last example that I'm going to talk about is xkcd - "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language." I like xkcd, I found it around the same time as the rest of the internet, I read through the archives, and I laughed appropriately.

What xkcd does better than making people laugh, however, and the reason behind its success, is that it makes people link to it. For instance, when I read number 85, "paths", my first instinct was to post it and say "OMG I DO THAT." Because I do. And he's managed to condense the whole experience into a simple comic.

I like xkcd. I'd say it's among the better webcomics out there. It would make my top 10. I say that reluctantly, because there are so many people who say "OMG xkcd IS THE ULTIMATE WEBCOMIC THAT WAS EVER WRITTEN I LOVE IT SO MUCH HOW CAN YOU NOT BE GIVING RANDALL MUNROE ORAL SEX RIGHT NOW AS WE SPEAK".

To begin with, ever since I saw his speech to the google employees, Randall has stopped being the god-like creator of webcomics to me, and become...well, a human being. Just another guy, with a hobby that took off. I'm a better speaker than him, which helped, but seriously, seeing that your hero is a human really helps. It's like hearing that Eddie Izzard was a failure for the first 15 years of his career, or seeing Demetri Martin's "If", and learning exactly how he became a stand-up comedian.

But xkcd is in an interesting position. You see, Randall Munroe could upload essentially anything these days, and people would laud it as genius. I used to spend time on the xkcd feed - xkcd_rss, but the comments just annoy me far too much these days. You can read the comments on any given day, and find almost exactly the same remarks:

"genius."
"best comic yet"
"this comic jumped the shark a long time ago"
"first!"
"haha, genius"
"brilliant"
"hilarious"
and until recently, "BOOBIES!!". (what happened to jassalol, anyway?)

Now, the comic is quite frequently clever. Take this strip here - Binary Heart. I assumed those 1s and 0s were just randomly placed, but I tested them today, and if you convert them to ASCII, it comes out as "loveyOuilOveyouiloveyOuilOveyO" (that's as far as I got.) I assume that the "O"s are randomly capitalised, but if the capitalised Os were a separate message in binary, I really wouldn't be surprised.

Even more cleverly, the strip Dream Girl has a series of numbers. Fans converted those to a date and coordinates, and when they went to that place on that day, Randall Munroe was there, and said "maybe sometimes wanting something does make it real." - an inversion of the last panel of his strip.

That's quite darned clever.

But honestly, the strip hits what, maybe 50% of the time? Filling a comic with really obscure references - sure, you'll make 1% of your readership laugh, but the rest will just be left wondering. Reading through the archive is the best way of reading xkcd, because whenever you don't get a strip (most of the time) you just skip forward until you find one that you like.

As well as that, I find it ridiculously pretentious at times, and crude and unfunny a lot of the time. I suppose that it's just a case of "you can't please everyone". But seriously, that's fine. I have no problem with a decent hit-and-miss rate - Monty Python (the original show, not the movies) had about a 50/50 hit rate, and I still hold them with a lot of respect. (the movies were much closer to 80/20, or even 90/10, and that's the reason for their legacy. If they had stopped at the show, I don't think anyone today would be talking about them.

But claiming that xkcd is absolute genius all the time makes me notice the misses more than the hits. And that's my point - the more you rave about something, the less I like it.

So what I'm really trying to say here is please, people, shut up about Firefly already. I want to enjoy it again.

In three panels and ten words, Sinister Bedfellows #208 references Stan Lee, L. Frank Baum, J. M. Barrie, Edgar Allan Poe, and Roy Lichtenstein.

Martian soil 'could support life'

A microscopic view of fine-grained material at the tip of the Phoenix Mars Lander's robotic arm scoop, June 2008
Analysis of the soil has surprised and delighted Nasa scientists

Martian soil appears to contain sufficient nutrients to support life - or, at least, asparagus - Nasa scientists believe.

Preliminary analysis by the $420m (£210m) Phoenix Mars Lander mission on the planet's soil found it to be much more alkaline than expected.

Scientists working on the spacecraft project said they were "flabbergasted" by the discovery.

The find has raised hopes conditions on Mars may be favourable for life.

"We basically have found what appears to be the requirements, the nutrients, to support life, whether past, present or future," said Sam Kounaves, the project's lead chemist, from the University of Arizona.

Exciting data

Although he said further tests would have to be conducted, Mr Kounaves said the soil seemed "very friendly… there is nothing about it that is toxic," he said.


We were all flabbergasted at the data we got back
Sam Kounaves
University of Arizona

"It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard - you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well."

As well as being far less acidic than anticipated, the soil was also found to contain traces of magnesium, sodium, potassium and other elements.

"We were all flabbergasted at the data we got back," said Mr Kounaves. "It is very exciting for us."

The analysis is based on a cubic centimetre of soil scooped from 2.5cm (one inch) below Mars' surface by the lander's robotic arm.

The sample was then tested using the "wet chemistry" technique, which involves mixing the soil with water brought from Earth and heating the sample in one of the lander's eight ovens.



Source



Nasa, making aliens pee smell funny one stock of asparagus at a time.

Along the same lines as the pistol shrimp posted a little while ago. These little beasts are ferocious! Not sure if they have been posted before.


here is a link describing the science behind their knock out punch.
http://www.biomechanics.bio.uci.edu/.../puncher.htm

I like this part,"The power of the strike is such that even a casual observer would sit up and take notice. How can such a small animal generate so much force in so little time? Biomechanists have recently discovered the surprising secret of the mantis shrimp: to destroy both prey and rivals, the animal relies on a clever spring and linkage mechanism that makes it the fastest “puncher” in the animal world."

The real WTF for me comes at the end of the article describing a chimp attack where a man's nose, testicles, and foot were chewed off.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/01/chimp.escape.ap/index.html

Ya got to admit he's got some smooth moves.

Love.
Potter.

Sorry if this has been posted, its been around a couple years. I couldn't find it in the tags.

20 years after the nuclear disaster - life returns to Chernobyl

The radiation levels are still far too dangerous for human beings [people do live there, and theyre pissing/shitting/throwing up blood] but the wildlife appears to be recovering, and immune to mutations - except for a rise in albino animals [who died out quickly, as albinos don't often survive long in nature] and a few organisms which once reproduced asexually are now reproducing sexually  [scientists believe this allows these creatures to have a wider genepool, thus making them able to evolve quicker to changes in the environment]

Survival of the fittest works!

There is a documentary on this called "Chernobyl: Life in the Dead Zone" if you can find it, i suggest watching it.

This is brand new, just showed up in my google-image search for "strange fish". (When in doubt, go with straightforward searches really.) What with the long "eel-like tail" and "leathery fin" on its underside and the fact that it's PINK, it truly is a tiny nightmare. Thanks God, thanks for that.

Here is le url http://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php?article_id=91015267043

I saw this really cool thing on National Geographic's Website. We've had a similar post about about Sea Angels before, but this time I bring you a Sea Butterfly Snail!




And here is a link to other really neat transparent sea critters!

Harlan Ellison turned 74 years of age the other week. And so I dug out my copies of THE GLASS TEAT and THE OTHER GLASS TEAT, the collections of his columns on television written circa 1969-1971, and began to re-read them, as I do every couple of years. The thing you need to know about the GLASS TEAT books is that, for all the wrong reasons, they’re timeless. The states of American network tv, dissent and education have not notably changed since he wrote those columns in his mid-thirties. (I’ve been re-reading those books since I was 20 or so, and it’s a shock to realise I’m finally older than he was when he wrote them. And I don’t want to think about how long it’s been since I first picked up a volume of his short stories in Rayleigh Library. With my dad making approving noises behind me: "Harlan Ellison. Good writer.’’)

I met him once. I’d made a crack somewhere online about Harlan’s heart being held together with garden twine and Lego, I think as part of a larger piece about dealing with anger as a writer. One of his fans — not representative of his constituency as a whole, I think — suffered a major reading comprehension failure, fired a foul note off to me and put it in front of Harlan as a ’’let’s you and him fight’’ kind of deal. From which I received a very nice email from Harlan, assuring me that no gardening supplies were required to hold him together and actually addressing the substance of the piece rather than the misreading placed before him. It was nice, he said, that it turned out we each liked the other’s work.

There’s a peculiar artist’s fear, that rides very low in the gut and mostly goes unspoken. Though few of us would cop to having ’’heroes,’’ debased term that it is, the fear does run along the lines of ’’don’t meet your heroes.’’ The man or woman who wrote the things that helped form you as a creator is not necessarily as loveable as the work. This is something I’ve been lucky in, but I will admit to passing on meeting Hunter Thompson a couple of times, and friends of mine have not had my luck. I know writers who now cannot read their heroes’ work. The books are tainted by the experience.

I met Harlan some months later, at a convention. Our signing tables were side by side. Harlan arrived later than I did (I think the signings were staggered), spotted me and yelled "Warren Ellis! Let me give you a manly hug!’’ So I stood up. Harlan’s about five and a half feet tall. I’m six foot tall barefoot, and I was wearing heavy boots. He looked up at me and exclaimed, "Jesus, you’re HUGE!"

I don’t have "heroes," but there are writers I admire greatly, who were influential in my becoming a writer, and I am grateful to have met Harlan Ellison and remain able to take pleasure in his work. Better: now I can hear his voice, and recall the great personal warmth with which he welcomed me on every occasion we met during that convention.

All of which, wishing him a belated happy birthday and talking about how generations of writers deal with each other and so forth, is really just preface to my discovery last night that the fine ebook purveyor Webscription is now offering eight Harlan Ellison books.

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

A preliminary study of my friend Lenora Claire by Olivia Berardinis:

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

There's a health food store I stopped in with Priya a few weeks ago, and I was thirsty. I went to their drink section and they had peach juice and apple juice and OH WHAT'S THIS? LEMON JUICE. I love citrus!

Anyway long story short it was actually pure lemon juice and by the time I read the label on my sour sour refreshment, I had drunk about half of it. According to the label, that was the equivalent of 40 lemons! I accidentally drank 40 lemons.

It was really sour you guys and yet I have no regrets

Just when I think I can't laugh any harder, someone showed me the best damn blond joke ever.

* Saturday Night Open Mic.

* Lots of people complaining about tonight’s DOCTOR WHO.

* Next Generation Comics Teaching.

* People talking about the first issue of my new X-Men comic.

* And the July edition of The Whitechapel Book Club.

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)