Subtle, as intended. I was worried it would be too subtle, but I think this works well. I don’t want it to jump in your face, but I want it to be there.
There’s a duplicate on the other side, in the opposite window. Now if the callsign frame (RAPTOR 312 LIGHT) would just get here…
What with The Thrilling Adventure Hour going away to my great sadness – the Sparks Nevada: Marshal on Mars theme makes me happy every time I hear it – I want suggestions for anything like it as a replacement podcast. No, not Welcome to Night Vale, I’ve been on that since about six months after it started. Something else.
I mean, I’ve got Big Finish Audio Doctor Who, and I suppose I really could fill in with that, but… it’s just not the same.
Wow, I will miss Thrilling Adventure Hour. Goddamn I am so sad they’re wrapping things up. Ah, well, I can’t blame them, it has been ten years. But still.
Recommendations, anyone?
Oh yeah, and as a reminder, as part of the big NIWA sales event, Bone Walker’s digital download is on 40% Bandcamp discount – enter “NIWA” as your discount code at checkout. It won’t be this cheap again unless somebody pays me, so now’s the time. 😀
From an article in Scientific American on Pluto’s moons:
Pluto’s biggest moon, Charon, weighs in at a hefty 11% of the mass of Pluto itself. It may have formed during a cosmic collision early in the Solar System’s history, billions of years ago. Debris from that smash may have coalesced into the much smaller moons Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra.
Pluto’s no longer officially a planet. Fine. Don’t care.
One of the questions about extra-terran biospheres (and regenerating atmospheres) is the importance of meaningful tidal stresses. Those pretty much require moons which are an appreciable percentage of the primary in mass. And as far as I know, we don’t know how likely that is.
But let’s look at the small planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars), and the previously-a-planet Pluto, and the would’ve-been-a-planet Eris, which is roughly the same size as Pluto. There are more probable dwarf planets, but they’re all substantially smaller than either – Makemake and Haumea have less than two-thirds the diameters of Eris and Pluto, which is a lot less mass, both all things equal and as measured so far. (About 70% less.)
Two of these six planet- and near-planets have moons big enough for meaningful tides: Earth and Pluto. And both of them have moons thought to have been formed by early collision in solar system formation.
A third is a pretty healthy percentage. Now, I don’t know how critical this is thought to be at this point, because I’m not real current in my solar-system-formation and xenobiology theory. But it used to be thought that tides helped prevent carbon dioxide buildup (see: Venus) and a quick check online seems to imply that’s still the case.
If all these ideas about atmospheric regeneration and the like haven’t been discredited, this is a pretty interesting result. From the data we have, large moons around small planets (and, yes, dwarf planets) are not unlikely things.
And that’s pretty neat.
I’m making something. Effects test here. Everything has to fit inside a 9mm tube. Here’s a closeup of this component’s mounting hardware:
When it’s done it’s going to look like a little metal penlight and that’s all. That’s not bragging, that’s kind of wondering at myself why all the effort. But I’ll finish it anyway. Thank you, sunk cost fallacy – today, you’re working for me.
George has been legit hugging me today. I am trapped by the computer. I will be here forever, send food and cider. Also, he is making little kitty noises and occasionally snoring.
It’s a good time to spread the word around again: nwcMUSIC needs new personnel!
nwcMUSIC is the geekmusic festival I built at Norwescon; I ran it for five years (six, really, but the first year wasn’t the real thing yet) and it’s become a thing, which is awesome. But after six years at it it’s time for someone else to till that helm (that’s a phrase, right? I think so) and there are several jobs available.
So please, I know most of you have heard this before, but I want this thing I built to keep going, so if you haven’t passed it along already, please do so now, and ask your friends to as well. Or, hell, even if you have, do it again. Particularly on Facebook, you have no way of knowing what your friends will and will not see.
And for the record, I will help. With data, with knowledge, with everything but actually running it. I have a lot of institutional knowledge to pass along and I want to hand it over.
More details and breakdowns are at the original post, here:
https://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/blog/2015/04/back-from-nwc2015/
Spread the word!
Also, after the movie, walking out, I was making “it’s FuriOsa, not FurioSAR” jokes and wondering why I hadn’t seen that yet on Tumblr. Minion Paul was like OH MY GOD YOU HAVE TO DO IT. But:
It was already on Tumblr. I just hadn’t seen it yet. I had to search it out! Weird. Normally that kind of dumb joke flashes across my dash the very first day. XD
We went out to see Mad Max: Fury Road over the weekend. It’s really quite good, and spectacularly choreographed. But while I had a fun time, I wasn’t as over-the-moon about it as a lot of people have been, despite the whole ‘hey look, I’m not being treated with contempt!’ factor. Perhaps my expectations were set a little too high by the time I got there. I certainly agree that it is the most metal movie ever made – that’s not even really debatable. It’s just a fact. And that aspect of it, I loved.
The single biggest thing I walked away with, though, was that the realisation that its philosophical assumption that women shouldn’t be sex slaves is what really caused the the misogynist/”manosphere”/return-of-kings crowd to explode. And I’m serious about that. I mean, if you read the most forwarded-around rant, they don’t even mention all the women being used as slaves. That’s apparently okay. They’re okay with the Mother’s Milk women, being harvested very much like cows. That’s fine too. That’s all suitably manly, it seems.
But the idea that a woman character should fall outside that category, and be a driving character? Unacceptable. That’s what constitutes “a feminist piece of propaganda posing as a guy flick.” That’s is what’s “ruining women for men” – being a woman while not being property and/or a sex-slave. Underneath that, the implicit declaration that you aren’t a man if you aren’t subjugating and raping women.
Pretty fuckin’ creepy, bro.
I mean, the degree of raw hatred for women that’s in all this sort of thing ought to be obvious. But a lot of people still gloss it over, and they shouldn’t, because it’s not just these jokers. They’re the Westboro Baptist Church we’re-not-like-them-we’re-okay misogyny, the version that’s easy to laugh at. They’re the sideshow clowns.
But versions of it show up other places, too, like in questions about why there are so many women are in a ‘man’s movie’ at places like Cannes. I mean, seriously, the reporter’s question boils down to, “Ick, women, why?” with the “Ick, women who aren’t sex toys for men, why?” kind of implied. (That specific codicil is somehow always okay – even when it’s Disney comedies with writers going around ranking underage actresses by “fuckability.” Ew.)
Thankfully, in this case, Tom Hardy treated the question with the kind of casual contempt it deserved. But that’s an anomaly. The idea was still sitting out there – “ick, women I don’t get to fuck, why?” Why should they even exist?
Which is the same hate – or at least, a contempt close enough to make no difference. It’s just socially modulated. Less explicit. Every so slightly less crude.
But still pretty fuckin’ creepy, bro. Even though you generally get to skate on it. Pretty. Fuckin’. Creepy.
There’s a Northwest Independent Writers’ Association event going on, so Anna has put two of the Free Court of Seattle works on sale – Faerie Blood, the novel, and “Blood of the Land,” the newest story. This is the series that Bone Walker accompanies as soundtrack, so it’s a good time to get a toe in if you’re on the budget.
And as part of that, I’m putting the digital download of Bone Walker for 40% off, if you use the discount code “niwa” – so if you don’t have the newest album yet? Now is a good time to get it.
Novel and short story details here, Bone Walker the album here, don’t forget “niwa” discount code.
Have a good weekend, everybody!
A couple of days ago, John Scalzi signed a 13-book deal worth 3.4 million dollars. That’s pretty good for somebody that the Sad Puppies like to claim nobody really wants to read, and pretty good for someone the puppies like to say writes only the sorts of things that nobody wants to read. Basically, they’ve been accusing “SJW” writers of driving readers out of fandom, and he’s a really poorly-chosen poster boy.
So that’s pretty funny, but not funny enough yet, because you know white supremacist and oberpuppyführer Vox Day would come up with some way to spin this, right? Of course he would. The thing is, there’s no way to do it which is not unintentionally hilarious, and Vox delivers. Seriously, this is some always-at-war-with-Eurasia spinning, wherein the new line is that Real Men Self-Publish, and that’s what’s Real Writing now, not this multi-million-dollar major-publishing-house bullshit. Self-pub is the only true pub.
NO, REALLY, THAT’S THE NEW PARTY LINE. That’s a We Hunted the Mammoth link, because I’m not in the mood to link to Vox under the best of circumstances, which I suppose really, these are. But there are extensive quotes at the link. Go look, it’s a riot.
Confused? Lots more on the Hugo Awards/Sad Puppies mess here.
THE NEW SINGLE
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