mindstalk: (Homura)
Lightly microwaved cherry tomatoes explode in warm sweetness when you eat them with pasta.

El Goonish Shive is a good webcomic.

A Miracle of Science is still a good webcomic, and unlike EGS it's long over.

A Borrowed Voice is a surprisingly good crack-premise Tolkien fanfic.

A bunch of new Madoka AMVs, which I've added to my list. I'll link to just one. Warning: spoilers for series and Rebellion.

Years ago, I proved the sin(A+B) identity from first principles while lying in bed. I think it took 40 minutes. The impressive part is that I'm usually more of a symbolic/numerical thinker than a visual one, I still slide my fingers to manipulate supply and demand curves, so doing finicky geometry in my head, no paper, was pretty impressive. Last night I thought about it again (and again in bed), and solved it much faster; I think I found a simpler solution, though I can't be sure. Alas, the margins of this blog post... or rather, I've never invested effort in learning how to make pictures on line.

The Renaissance art hallway at the MFA was more interesting than I expected, especially in the half that's largely maiolica.
mindstalk: (Mami)
Some articles on democracy (pluralist and feminist) among Syrian Kurds: NYTimes, FT, scribd copy of FT.

If we kept DST all year, or got rid of it.

A Madoka fanfic I'm reading. It's like Starship Troopers or Old Man's War crossed with Madoka crossed with transhumanism and Culture ship Minds. Kyubey said we'd go to the stars, and we did. Many fans think magical girls are potentially immortal, and here they are. I've been enjoying it a lot. Could have used some more editing passes, but generally fun to read, often funny, I'm engaged with the show characters and the original one. Downside: it's longer than Lord of the Rings and still ongoing, last update Oct 6.  I've read 34 chapters out of 44 and am thinking I should pace myself, maybe go read Ancillary Mercy while I still sort of remember what happened in Ancillary Sword.

Funny panel from the Fate/zero manga.

Japan is actually doing quite well per capita: low unemployment, very high employment to working-age-population ratio, inflation is back.  Abenomics, and Keynesianism, works.  GDP is shriking... because the population is, especially the working-age population.

James notes that Heinlein's first story is closer to Dickens' last novel than it is to us.  This will be more interesting when his *last* book is closer to Dickens than to us, but still.

Polio is judged to be even closer to eradication.

Portugal's Left Bloc, a party run by women.

Secret gardens and numinous fantasy

SF written in 1666 by Margaret Cavendish

mindstalk: (Homura)
Saturday I met up with [livejournal.com profile] thomasyan and after some insufficiently filling Bluefin restaurant sushi, went to his place to marathon Madoka.
1) He and his girlfriend liked it. He and I were both crying at the end; she wasn't, which prompted discussion.
2) If you want to watch people speculate, you probably *shouldn't* marathon it; you need a day or more between episodes, not minutes, to let the creative and pattern-finding juices work.
3) We watched the Chihiro sub, which had some differences with whatever the commonly used streaming site offered, I think to the slight disadvantage of Chihiro.
4) The other subs I downloaded turned out to be Italian. Curse shoddy labeling!
5) Lots of early stuff is either hilarious or poignant the second time around.

Thoughts after a second watching:
Which are totally massive spoilers so if you haven't watched it go away and do so )

Conclusion: still an awesome series. Has minor blemishes from perfection.

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