Oh, hey, the Perseid's should be fabulous this year. They should be at peak tonight and tomorrow night, but there's a shoulder of a few more days. :: checks NE Ohio weather to see which night would be best to watch :: Oh, look, rain, rain, rain, rain, and some more rain until Monday. I really gotta move to a better part of the US.
The hero's journey with plots and subplots explained. (Grokked from Deborah Beale)
Not good at generating maps? How about a free fantasy map generator? That's do.
Diversity in publishing isn't just about getting a writers of color and gender, but it also has to do with where the marketing focus goes. Or in other words, if you come at the problem from a "POC/queer authors don't sell well" and so then you don't do anything to help market books by those authors you're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"Archaeologists are trying to decipher magic spells etched onto tiny rolls of gold and silver that they found alongside skeletons of humans buried almost 2,000 years ago… They are the first such items discovered in Serbia but resemble amulets of 'binding magic' found in other countries…" Spiritual postal delivery of messages to god and demons. Although there is a tradition of burying the dead with letters to them, a way of unburdening the living or saying goodbye. (Grokked from Xeni Jardin)
"The discovery of a 3,000-year-old skeleton in Greece has excited archeologists, who believe that the finding may confirm one of the darkest legends (human sacrifice to the Greek pantheon of gods) of antiquity." Humans, what can you do with them. (Grokked from Dr Caitlin Green)
Need to get away form it all? How about faking your own death? (Note, this rarely works)
"In states with the most coal jobs, many workers could be retrained for the growing solar PV industry -- some at a cost of just a few thousand dollars. For many coal companies, even those filing for bankruptcy, the cost of retraining all employees would be less than a year’s pay for the CEO." Yeah, but it's all about those evil liberals and their climate change hoax that's putting coal miners out of jobs, you know. Not like poor fucking business decisions and the price of natural gas being so low that it's cheaper to build new NG power plants than to keep old coal plants running. It has nothing to do with "drill, baby, drill". And pay no attention to how much those at the top are making (sometimes getting million dollar bonuses during bankruptcy). Nope, nothing about those things. (Grokked from Paolo Bacigalupi)
"Large employers expect health costs to continue rising by about 6 percent in 2017, a moderate increase compared with historical trends that nevertheless far outpaces growth in the economy (and your pay), two new surveys show." Six percent, pah! Let me tell you kiddies of years of 15 to 18% increases during the 90s and the aughts. But there's lots in there about how employers are adjusting plans and switching up what they're doing to lower costs. Mostly it's screwing the employee over (high-deductible plans, smaller networks, changing where you get your care, etc). So how's that single-payor option looking now?
"You may have heard about Nauru… the tiny Pacific island that was stripped of all vegetation and made virtually uninhabitable by phosphate mining, then turned into an international pariah by its desperate practice of selling citizenship to crooks, now an offshore detention centre for people seeking asylum in Australia, where cruelty and abuse are legendary." Ah, the legendary hospitality and humanity of Western Civilization.
"'The older you are, the worse the hospital is for you,' says Dr. Ken Covinsky, a physician and researcher at the University of California, San Francisco's division of geriatrics. 'A lot of the stuff we do in medicine does more harm than good. And sometimes with the care of older people, less is more.'"
Life finds a way. In this case, with Guinea Worm infection in humans dropping to single digits, the worm has found other hosts. Mostly dogs, but now there is a fear the dogs are getting them from frogs.
Ted Strickland makes an ass of himself, proving it doesn't take a conservative. However I will note his apology was an actual apology (ie. not being sorry for how someone may take the comment, but acknowledging the comment was wrong and saying sorry). (Grokked from John Scalzi)
With concerns about vote rigging, how about a little comparison between slot machines and voting machines. Yep, that's about it. (Grokked from Ferrett Steinmetz)
"That deposition — 170 transcribed pages — offers extraordinary insights into Trump’s relationship with the truth. Trump’s falsehoods were unstrategic — needless, highly specific, easy to disprove. When caught, Trump sometimes blamed others for the error or explained that the untrue thing really was true, in his mind, because he saw the situation more positively than others did." An article about a 2007 deposition of the Trumpster in a lawsuit he brought. The defense lawyers easily dismantled his claims. Don't worry, his supporters don't believe in the truth. (Grokked from Xeni Jardin)
I guess the only thing that surprised me here, was how far back it went. "On August 6, artist Todd Vaziri observed that all of Trump's angry tweets come from the Twitter client for Android, while the more presidential, less batshit ones come from an Iphone; Vaziri speculated that the latter were sent by a staffer… Now, David Robinson's textual analysis of the two different corpuses show that different people are behind each client's tweets – they tweet at different times, using different syntax and vocabulary, and they use different hashtags and use them differently." (Grokked form John Scalzi)
"A Secret Service official reportedly confirmed that the agency has spoken to the Trump campaign regarding the candidate's Tuesday remark about how 'Second Amendment people' could take action against a Clinton presidency." So, if it came to an actual gun battle between the candidates, which side would the Secret Service come down on?
And now for some humor, Billy West reads Trumpster quotes as Zapp Brannigan (from Futurama). (Grokked from John)
So I guess Sean Hannity is peddling a story that the Trumpster, seeing Marines stranded at Camp Lejeune after the first Operation Desert Storm, sent his personal plane down to ferry the Marines back to their Florida home. Only, that's probably not how it really happened. "Trump Shuttle had a contract with the military and this flight home was part of that contract. Simple as that… The Trump campaign… earns Four Pinocchios for confirming a story that is easily debunked." Remember when a news anchor lost his position when he "enhanced" a story? Also, this is mostly likely a case of false attribution, that is the Marines, having been delayed, get on a plane with Trump's name on it and think that he came to save them. Instead of the more likely story that the Trump Shuttle was supposed to take them home all along and was just late in arriving. (Grokked from Xopher Halftounge)
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