ahawk

divalea @ 06:13 pm: SAN DIEGO: Boycotting the Hyatt: A Modest Proposal from Lisa Jonte
It's that San Diego Manchester Hyatt thing. Doug Manchester made a $125,000. donation to Prop. 8, which limits California marriage to between a man and a woman.
The Hyatt, in spite of its lousy, surly, painfully slow service is actually a place Comic-Con goers meet en masse. Chris Butcher's stance, the only one so far that make any sense, is to not go to the damn Hyatt.
No "flying your freak flag high," (and spending at the Hyatt which'll show Doug Manchester how much money he'll lose...next year), no rationalizing that you're hurting the Hyatt waitstaff so you can be socially conscious and still drink at the Hyatt. (Mmmm, that bread sure is good when it's buttered on both sides.)

You don't go. You don't put your ass in a chair and do nothing. That does hurt the waitstaff. You. Just. Don't. Go.

And you do this, as suggested by GirlAMatic.com editor Lisa Jonte (arcana_j):

If you are boycotting the Hyatt:

1. Drink anywhere other than the Hyatt

2. Save your bar tab(s)

3. Scan or photo your tab with the total amount spent. (Include tips and food.)

4. email it to me lrjonte at gmail dot com

 

I will post the convention total on a public website."

You're saving those receipts and bar tabs anyway, folks.
Want to show Doug Manchester something that hurts, show him you spent his next $150,000. phobia money someplace besides his hotel's bar.

ETA: I love Tom Spurgeon for his post about making an easy decision stupidly hard.. He says everything I want to say, only better.

slg_news @ 11:55 am: Comic-Con Signing Schedule
Hi, everyone! Comic-Con is now perilously close, and there are already amusing controversies, mental breakdowns, and giddy anticipation! Me, I am fully of steely determination (and irritability; I've snapped at like 200 people in the last five days -- sorry!). I've finished our signing schedule, and it's now ready to share with you.

First, a couple of announcements. Serena Valentino will not be able to attend after all, and she sends her regrets. Roman Dirge is not sure which days he will be able to be at the convention; mostly likely he will be there only one or two days. If I learn anything new, I'll post it here or on the SLG Twitter, which will be our lifeline during Comic-Con.

The schedule is super-long, so it's under a cut. It's also subject to change without notice, not because we want to confuse you, but because it involves nearly thirty people, and any number of contingencies can arise.

makinglight @ 06:05 am: The “aye” in God’s mote

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010435.html

I’ve been thinking about the paradox of the stone. You know, Could God make a rock so big he couldn’t lift it?

(This is the ANSI-standard Abrahamic monodeity I’m talking about here. One of the ones I don’t believe in. Advertised as “omnipotent” on the label.)

CS Lewis’s take on it was that it’s a nonsense question, which I suppose is what you get when you ask a technical question of a non-technical person. I mean, it’s not obviously nonsense. If you swap a person in for God — Can a person make a rock so big that he himself can’t lift it? — the answer becomes obvious: Yes, of course. Sedimentary rock would probably be the easiest. Blackboard chalk is made of artificially compressed gypsum powder; it shouldn’t be impossible for a person of typical strength to make a huge chunk of it, too big for a person of typical strength to lift. The question is well-formed, except for the word “God”, which isn’t well defined.

(People trying to resolve this paradox have come up with various different definitions for the word “omnipotent”. Aquinas seems to have thought that God can do anything logically possible, while Descartes figured that God transcended the merely possible. It’s pretty tough to talk rationally about Descartes’s version of God, so I’m going with the Aquinas model.)

Looked at from a mathematical angle, this seems like it might be another example from the family of paradoxes related to Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. The key terms in the paradox are never formally defined, which keeps us from being certain that the question is an example of Gödel-type incompleteness. Still, it shares the most obvious family traits: It’s got an element of self-reference (God’s power is being asked to act on God’s power), and negation (we’re speculating about God’s inability to lift the stone — to keep himself from being able to do something).

(Areas for further speculation: For Christians, could Jesus’s dual nature as wholly man and wholly God be described as a reconciliation of the use-mention distinction? For Jews, if the Torah is the blueprint used to create the universe, then the universe contains its own formal description, and must therefore also be subject to Gödel-type incompleteness.)

But if we move from mathematics to the realm of physics, the question actually becomes answerable, although we’ll have to change it slightly. What does the word lift mean? To raise something from a lower to a higher position, to move it away from the local center of gravity. And since the Abrahamic God has the power to create universes to spec, there’s our answer: God can create a universe in which there’s no force of gravity. No gravity, no lifting, by definition, though the size of the rock is irrelevant.

There’s a problem with this solution, though. A universe without gravity would be very different from our own universe. It’s possible that the laws of physics would be such that no substance we’d recognize as rock would be possible. So let’s assume a universe with the same physics as ours, but only one material object — the rock. As the only piece of matter in this universe, the center of gravity of the rock would always be the lowest point in the universe, no matter how it was moved. The rock would therefore be unliftable.

There still remains a quibble: What if God breaks the rock? That would make the smaller pieces of rock liftable, and open my solution up to all sorts of arguments about whether a piece of the rock constitutes the original rock. So, another change. Let’s assume that God makes a universe empty of matter except for the smallest piece of matter that could be considered a rock. There we have it! This tiny speck of rock would be, by definition, unliftable, even by an omnipotent (in Aquinas’s sense) deity, though this unliftability is not a property of the rock’s bigness, but its smallness. Yes, God can create a rock that he himself cannot lift. </p

hangingfire @ 10:35 pm: LOLWATCHMEN
Alan Moore forgive me. I ... offer no explanation or good reason for this, except that after we watched the Watchmen trailer (in shiny HD), Bruce thought it would be a good idea. And I guess I thought it was a good enough one to, you know, actually do it.

(Should you actually want a bigger size, click on the images; it'll take you to our flickr account where you can gank whatever size you want.)

( Watchmen Image Macros. Oh yes. )

Tags: comics, internet folk art, movies

divalea @ 05:40 pm: I Ain't Yer Mother
"I'm not your mother, and if you keep on calling me 'Mother!' I am going to TREAT you like I'm your mother."

More later.

hangingfire @ 04:04 pm: O_O
So, uh. Wow.

Watchmen Trailer.
(Or, if the YouTube video at the Beat is down, grab yourself an .flv player. You might find it here, for the next 7 days or 100 downloads. ETA: And thanks to drelmo, somewhat better quality here.)

Dang.

I gotta give Zac Snyder credit. I can't tell from this trailer if his approach has depth (and I confess my expectations are not high, all the better to be pleasantly surprised if it does), but it certainly has gloss. Lots and lots of it. (Although I don't know what the heck he's up to with Sally Laurie Jupiter there; I didn't think she was really supposed to look like quite that much of a dominatrix sex-bomb, at least not in the comic that I read.)

(Oh, and the song in the trailer sucks, unfortunately.)

Well then. I guess this thing is actually happening, huh?

ETA again: All this being said, watching this trailer three or four times washed the nasty, nasty taste of that corpse-violating Spirit trailer right out of my brain. Watch that thing at yer own risk.

ETA the third: And now, super-shiny versions up at Apple, including HD.

Tags: movies, video

divalea @ 12:25 pm: COMIC BOOK TATTOO: Article on The Pulse with ART!
Y'all can FINALLY see a page of my story from Comic Book Tattoo! For recent arrivals, CBT is an anthology of comics inspired by the music of Tori Amos.
An interview with Rantz Hoseley was posted to The Pulse along with more preview art. Click on the picture to read the article and see a larger version of this page from my CBT story, "Ribbons Undone."

theljstaff, posting in news @ 07:10 am: Basic Accounts and X-Men
Account Structure Update
Back by popular demand, Basic Accounts will be available to all users again by the end of the (northern hemisphere) summer. More information on the decision-making process and proposals relating to the future of Basic Accounts are in lj_2008.

New Themes
Two attractive and all-new Flexible Squares themes, "Circular" and "Circular Brown" are now available.


L to R: Circular and Brown

New V-Gifts
Give someone you care about the gift of enticement. With the new Chocolate Ice Cream, Vanilla Ice Cream, Tea, Coffee, Curry and Sushi v-gifts, all the significant people in your life will be able to share in the longing for the tasty edibles below. Plus, it reminds loved ones you think they're really sweet, really savory or just plain satisfying.


L to R: Chocolate Ice Cream, Vanilla Ice Cream, Tea, Coffee, Curry and Sushi

Ж-Men...but not the ones you might expect!
This week LJ Russia launched Ж-Men, a new comedy series about superheroes, inspired by the LJ communities dedicated to superheros, comics and cartoons. The title's "Ж" comes from ЖЖ, the nickname for LiveJournal in Russia.

Ж-Men's script is written by a group of LJ enthusiasts who also happen to be television professionals. Who knew? Following the premiere, five more episodes will be broadcast over the next two weeks. We hope you find the series fresh and enjoyable.

This is, of course, an experiment for LiveJournal. As always, we'd love to hear what you think!

immlass @ 01:10 am: Recent Twitterings

• 13:44 Tripping on a cord and falling over and twisting your ankle is extremely indignifying, even if you don't hurt yourself badly. #

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immlass @ 09:57 pm: As Bruce says, MobileMess
If you get dumped off my gtalk list, please don't think I'm mad at you! I'm having an argument with my MobileMe syncing, which is how mcroft and I keep our address book synced, and I'm getting a lot of duplicate entries, and apparently they're not all getting fixed properly.

Sorry to anybody and everybody who gets dumped or their contact information lost while Apple gets its ducks in a row.

Tags: mac geekery, psa

makinglight @ 10:39 pm: Trauma and You: Final Exam Pt. Two

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009258.html

Teresa, don't look.

A more complex scene: Car crash. (Another copy here.)

What the video shows:

The scene is at the corner of West Third and Edwin C. Moses in Dayton, OH. 23 May 2004, 12:40 pm. A traffic camera looking at the intersection has the light red for the lanes entering from the bottom of the screen. One car is in the left-turn lane at a complete stop. Oncoming traffic, two lanes, is slowing to a stop. A pedestrian is in the intersection moving from bottom of screen toward the top, on the left side of the intersection, against a red Don't Walk sign.

A PT Cruiser enters the intersection from the bottom of the screen against the light. The PT Cruiser strikes a Subaru SUV that has entered the intersection from the right, hitting it about level with the driver's door. The PT Cruiser rotates around its vertical axis and comes to a stop. The Subaru rolls over twice, coming to rest on its roof. The Subaru rolls over the pedestrian.

You're a witness to this collision. Okay, what do you do?

Discussion below the cut.

First, fast: Get help rolling. Instruct a bystander to call 9-1-1. If no bystander is handy, do it yourself.

Second: This scene is not safe. Make it safe. Most obvious hazard is other traffic. Grab a couple of bystanders and have them stop traffic. If you have flares (reflective triangles, traffic cones, flags...) available, hand them to a bystander and instruct him to flare out the intersection. If no bystanders are available, do it yourself.

Third: There are at least three patients: the two drivers and the pedestrian. You are in a multiple-casualty incident (MCI). Being mindful of hazards on scene (leaking fluids, broken glass, sharp metal, loaded bumpers, airbags) do a rapid triage.

Fourth: Assign bystanders to hold c-spine on all patients. Pick a red tag and start working on him/her following the ABCs. Airway, breathing, circulation, treat for shock. You know the drill. If no red tags, pick a yellow tag. If no yellow tags, pick a green tag.

Fifth: When professional help arrives, report what you have to the senior person and hand over your written notes. Request an assignment. Carry it out.

Sixth: Go somewhere and sit down until you stop shaking.

Followup: The pedestrian's name is Scott Tegtmeyer, age 42 at the time of the incident. He was critically injured, but, thanks to fast and efficient Emergency Medical Services, survived. The two drivers had minor injuries thanks to seatbelts. There were no passengers.

Y'see? Trauma is easy!

---

Oh look! A hamster!

makinglight @ 11:31 pm: Trinity

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010432.html

The sixteenth of July, 1945, fell on a Monday.

That was sixty-three years ago today. And sixty-three years ago today, with the Trinity test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, the nuclear age began.

Alamogordo means "Fat Cottonwood" in Spanish. (See also: Los Alamos, the Alamo.) The place lies along the Jornada del Muerto (the Trail of the Dead--so called because it runs 100 miles without any available water). It was chosen for its remoteness, so that a nuclear weapon of unknown strength (Enrico Fermi was taking bets on whether it would set the atmosphere on fire) could be detonated without attracting attention.

It was observed anyway, but quickly explained away.

The Socorro Chieftain:

An explosives magazine at the Alamogordo air base blew up on Monday morning, and the flash, sound and shock was seen, heard and felt in Socorro, more than 100 miles away....

The explosion, as we now know, created a nest of giant ants that terrorized Los Angeles, a giant octopus that terrorized San Francisco, and a giant lizard that destroyed most of metropolitan Tokyo. A giant tarantula had also been reported although, like the initial bomb blast, the government has denied its existence.

makinglight @ 10:38 pm: Trauma and You: Final Exam Pt. One

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009259.html

Teresa, don't look.

A simple scene. Skateboard accident.

What the video shows: A skateboarder tries to do a trick and fails. He falls, catching himself with his hand. His left forearm shows obvious deformity and he is in pain. No bleeding.

You are a witness to this event. Okay, what do you do?

Discussion below the cut.

First, fast, get help rolling. Instruct a bystander to call 9-1-1. If no bystander, do it yourself.

The scene is safe (unless it looks like the patient's friends are going to get ugly on you). Approach the patient, introduce yourself, and ask if he wants help.

Assuming he says "yes." Instruct a bystander to take and hold normal inline stabilization of the patient's c-spine. (That is, hold his head steady. All trauma patients have broken necks until proved otherwise.)

ABCs. Patient is talking; airway and breathing are okay. No obvious bleeding, and patient's skin color is normal. Circulation appears okay.

The patient has an isolated injury of the left forearm. Check motion, sensation, and pulse in his left hand/wrist. Check for pain, tenderness, swelling in left wrist, elbow, and shoulder.

Splint the left forearm in normal anatomical position, from wrist to elbow, with the hand in position of function (i.e. curled partly closed).

Apply sling and swathe.

Check circulation, motion, and sensation in the left hand. There should be no change from your earlier check.

While you're doing all this keep up a flow of light banter, during which you hope to learn the if the patient has any allergies, whether he takes any medication, what his medical history is, the last time he had anything to eat or drink, whether he hit his head or lost consciousness. Remember, you may be the last person who can get coherent answers out of the patient, so ask, and write the answers down. Count his pulse and respirations. Write them down (with the time when you checked them).

Check for other injuries, then reassess the ones you've already found. When professional help arrives report to the senior person; request further assignment.

divalea @ 02:59 pm: DIVALEA SHOW: Moved to Friday
Not feeling so hot today and very tired. I have an evening engagement tomorrow, so I'll be recording Friday.

My schedule for the next month is as so:

7. 23 OFF for San Diego
7.30, ON for San Diego recap and Q&A
8.6 OFF for speaking engagement in San Francisco
8.13 and on, weekly again

divalea @ 09:49 am: ZERO KITTEN: Saved from Gravity Failure
Kitten Zero fell asleep on my chest. Heavily. Sometime while she was napping gravity failed, but I was saved from drifting away into space.

Good kitty.

divalea @ 09:45 am: SAN DIEGO Sponsorships: THANK YOU!
Did it! The SDCC Sponsorship drive is concluded!
Thanks to my MIGHTY FINE Sponsors:

Cartoon Frolics (NSFW)
Lene Taylor's I Read Comics podcast
Milky Way and the Galaxy Girls (Lauren Faust's awesome girl team!)
Christy Marx
InternetsCelebrities.com  (see their social hack parody Ghetto Big Mac)
Pam Noles, We Shall March! (Freaking badass blogger.)
Kat Kan (bookiekat here on LJ)

You will mostly find me (aside from the Tori Amos panel from 11:30-12:30 Saturday in ROOM 6B) in Alphabet City, across the back of the Main Hall, hanging with the Cool Kids. (Helpful Map HERE.)


STILL WANT TO get a commission delivered on-site, like Christy Marx and fiawol?), I can accommodate you IF you order by FRIDAY. (And, honestly, some extra dosh is a paranoid's best friend.)

Paypal and/or discuss details at divalea @ gmail . com.

immlass @ 01:13 am: Recent Twitterings

• 10:59 Fighting with incompatibilities between Adium and Address Book. I wish iChat supported Yahoo and that Mobile Me didn't screw up my sync. #
• 13:54 Finding out that Asya has a blog and adding it to my feeds. #
• 15:17 Getting the$0.00 bill from the App Store for all the free apps we bought last week. Longest iTunes store delay EVAR. #

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saltypepper @ 07:31 pm: In which acronyms are applied.
K-zilla went to the dentist today (man, that was expensive), and then came with me to Mr. Earl's appointment at the Kennedy Center.  They have the same therapists, and because everyone else was absent, she got to sit in and it was a family affair.  One of the therapists asked me semi-casually how I felt about medication for K-zilla.  For what, specifically? I wanted to know.  There's no medication for Asperger's, per se.  Attention, she said. 

Once upon a time I'd have picked up my babies and marched us all out of there quickfast muttering about the over-medication of our nation's children.

Since then, however, I've given birth to two special needs kids of my own, and seen kids who have been diagnosed correctly and medicated appropriately and, well, it's like night and day.  And if it was diabetes, I wouldn't be screaming about medicating our youth and stopping her from taking insulin if that's what she needed.  Would it help her?  Help her how? 

So I talked to some people a bit and did a little judicious googling.  What I thought was ADD is really ADHD, with that H standing for Hyperactivity.  She's more of an H-free kind of girl, but not entirely.  Apparently the symptoms of ADD look remarkably like what V and I refer to as "sweeps week programing in Asperger's Land."  It's not only an inability to focus one's attention on appropriate stimuli.  It is also an inability to filter out the extraneous, or to switch one's attention appropriately from one thing to another, or to get overly sucked into an inappropriate focal point.  Which would explain a whole lot of what goes on around here, actually.  I laughed so loud I startled the cat on my lap when I read this in Wikipedia:   The most common symptoms of ADHD are distractibility, difficulty with concentration and focus, short term memory loss, procrastination, problems organizing ideas and belongings, tardiness, impulsivity, and weak planning and execution.  Emphasis mine.  Oh, you mean like my little crow girl who is always ready to follow The Shiny instead of instructions?  My girl who lost 3 lunchboxes (and countless articles of clothing) this year despite the obsessive labelling of her belongings and my retracing her footsteps throughout the school every afternoon at pickup time to collect the trail of stuff she left behind her like a little Gretel?  My girl who can forget what the end of her sentence was going to be in the time it takes to say it?  My girl who cannot restrain herself from blurting out every. single. thought. in her head?  My girl who once talked for an entire morning?  Hmmmm.  Could be.  Wikipedia summarizes the DSM-IV criteria and after looking it over carefully, I have to say that despite my lack of love for labels, this shoe really seems to fit my girl's foot.

So.  Now what?  This wasn't any kind of official conversation.  The folks over at Kennedy Center want to do a new evaluation.  Her old one is over 2 3 years old which is a long time at this age.  They rolled their eyes like it was hopeless when I told them who our insurance provider is, but we may be able to get the Department of Education to pay for it as they say they want a new one too.  I am guessing that the DOE is looking to deny her services also, not just her brother, but whatever.  It's a citywide trend, really.  How else could Mayor Bloomberg say that his education program is a huge success--just look at the number of kids that are no longer in Special Ed classes!  God, the fucking stigma around those words!  Because if you're not in a special ed class you must not have any learning problems, right (let's all pause to remember what happened when Reaganomics declared everyone cured and emptied out all the psych wards...)?  Personally, I'm more pragmatic.  I don't give a shit about the label, as long as she gets the services that will give her the tools she needs.  I don't care what KIND of classes as long as they are good quality.  I don't care about much for my kids, as long as they end up knowledgeable, independent adults, who can DO useful things.

Also, I was telling K-zilla's Friday appointment therapist about my lovely CPSE experience, and without missing a beat she said, "Document it.  Document everything, so that if you need to you can build a case for them to have to pay for private school for him."  I don't have a school picked out for him or anything, and in fact, despite my own years of private schooling I am a staunch supporter of quality PUBLIC education, but damn, if this is what it's going to take to get my kid what he needs, you can bet I will be writing lots more LJ posts for us all to "enjoy" notes to myself about the fucked up shit that goes down with these people and build a case.  I don't see why my kids need to fall on the sword of the DOE's stupidity.  They will face enough challenges without that.

Since it has long since been established that all knowledge in contained in LJ, and most of it is on my flist, what do you know about ADD and other attention issues, what do you know about the related meds, pros and cons, what alternatives are there, if any, what do I need to know as her mother, and do you have links?  Please, thank you, I love you.


Tags: aspergers, k-zilla, mr. earl, my own personal googlebar, parenting, school

slg_news @ 02:58 pm: Comic-Con 2008 -- Twitter and Panels!
Comic-Con International is official sold out! So, sorry to say, if you haven't registered yet, it is too late for you. But! You might be able to experience a portion of the convention vicariously if our plans for SLG's new Twitter account come to fruition during the week we spend in San Diego. Moments to oneself are very few at Comic-Con, so Twitter's 140-character format will suit our updating needs just fine. We'll try to update from the con floor, so be prepared for such scintillating descriptions as "A stampede of fanboys ended in a pulpy mess as they climbed over the fallen to get a free Batman Lego™ figure at the DC booth."

For those who are attending Comic-Con, here are some SLG-related panels to check out:

Thursday, July 24, 12:00-1:00 How Not to Break into Comics— There have been countless articles and panels on how to break into comics, but very few on how not to. Randal C. Jarrell (managing editor at Oni Press), Jennifer de Guzman (editor-in-chief of SLG Publishing), and other industry insiders discuss the common and often-hilarious mistakes people make when trying to pitch or get work in the comics industry. This unique inside perspective will help any prospective creator learn how to navigate the potential pitfalls that doom far too many in their attempts to break into comics. If you want to work in comics, you do not want to miss this panel! Room 10

Friday, July 25 10:00-11:00 Retail Relevance!— Comic book shops have always been the goldmine of popular culture—even more so as stores exist today. So how do you keep your store the center of excitement, the place to be and be seen? Join the discussion with publisher Dan Vado (Slave Labor Graphics) and retail comic divas Nancy McCann (Comics Unlimited, Westminster, CA) and Mimi Cruz (Night Flight Comics, Salt Lake City, UT) for the inside track of what to look for, how to look for it, and why you should stock it! Room 22

Friday, July 25, 3:30-4:30 Comic Book Heaven: LIVE!— If you've ever wondered which superhero sleeps in his uniform, where the rudest place to shoot a giant space monster can be found, and what you really got when you ordered junk from ads found in old comic books, you'll love Comic Book Heaven: LIVE! Scott Saavedra (Comic Book Heaven, Java Town) shines a bright and affectionate light on some of the strangest stories and most twisted moments found in vintage comic books. Comic Book Heaven: LIVE! is like Scott's Comic Book Heaven blog but without all the tedious pointing and clicking. Room 30AB

Saturday, July 26, 1:30-2:30 SLG Publishing— SLG publisher and president Dan Vado discusses current and upcoming projects from SLG/Amaze Ink. Gargoyles writer Greg Weisman will be on hand to discuss his two new upcoming non-Gargoyles projects. Other creators attending are to be announced. Room 10

alierakieron @ 02:03 pm: owwie.
forgive typos, as thiss is being done 1 handed.
stll in ze hospital.
boooo!
but i get to go home tonight. yaaaayyyy!
no cast, snd lots of painkillers means im more comfortable than i might be otherwise. but i'm still learning how to do the most basic things, like get out of bed. or sitting up.
this morning taking a shower became the hardest thing i have ever done.

this is gonna be quite the adventure!

ETA: i'll be pretty immobile for the next couple of weeks, so i'll def be up for company / rides for mellow activities not in the house.