If You Question Your Manic Phase, You Are Not Actually Bipolar

[ase]

Hypochondriac and prone to TMI, maybe, but probably not suffering from chemical imbalance.

How long does it take to eat a pound of strawberries? If you're me, about 18 hours from arrival in kitchen.

The week-long search for the DVD remote unearthed a missing chain and pendant that disappeared right after Thanksgiving. I'll be wearing it this weekend. For the record, midnight is not the time to suddenly wonder if hostels carry 1.) towels, 2.) bedsheets, and realize 3.) your overnight kit does not commonly include soap.

I offloaded my first batch of pics from the new camera, from Friday night's party, and - wait, what party? The party I thought was Saturday night, until I got home from work, and thought to check the address on the evite. I persevered in the face of tragedy, called a cab to meet me at the metro, called the hostess twice to get directions when the cab driver got lost, and got to the party, where I had a really great time, but the pictures that looked fine on a 3" LCD are unacceptably grainy on the laptop's 15.4" screen. So the ISO 800 and 1600 settings are right out except in times of crisis. (I guess I'm going to have to get past that flash hate. Way to destroy the sneaky party picture-taking.)

Also, my camera's movie mode has no audio. Since this is supposed to be my all-purpose camera, this is a big problem for parties. But hey, cheap camera today, expensive bells and whistles with flourishes camera in 2010.

I object to academic writing. Fine, your discipline has no useful vocabulary, so stop repeating the same words with different emphasis and invent some vocabulary. I encourage the lit-studying crowd to make like science and steal words from dead languages. If you have to, make portmanteaus and other mashups, though I will mock you in the margins. (Science has its own problems, like the linguistic path that gave us metabolome, or like when the syndrome and the gene and the protein are all named different things, and you wind up with equals-this tables on stickies peeling off the sides of your screen, but I digress.) I guess I fail at academic writing, because I am entertained to a certain point by interrogating the narrative, and then I say, "So, feminism, activism, other isms, but do you know what would be awesome? What if there was an accident with an alien device, and Johnnie Rico and the rest of his platoon grew wings?" and I'm back in popcorn-throwing mode.

(For the record, if Johnnie Rico grew wings, you be out of Starship Troopers aca-mode and into Gundam Wing fanfic. 'Tis a far, far better thing I do in anime fandom than I have ever done in the Western SF canon.)

Off to catch a bus, or try to. I will have my cell phone but no internet access until Monday night.

Comments

Since we're interrogating the narrative...

[(Anonymous)]

The Verhoeven version of "Starship Troopers" is:

A.: A legitimate satire of a so-called classic.

B.: The uncomprehending massacre of a legitimate classic.

C.: Just stupid.

GRS from WSFA

Re: Since we're interrogating the narrative...

[ase.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen it, because many of the reviews I was exposed to leaned toward the B/C end of the spectrum.

Re: Since we're interrogating the narrative...

[(Anonymous)]

I could say make a drinking game out of watching it, but you'd probably get alcohol poisoning in the process. It is very high on my so-bad-it's-funny list.

GRS from WSFA

[limnrix.livejournal.com]

Academic writing wants to be objected to. I appreciate the sentiment.
I think the relationship between humanities and sciences has been too unequal lately, with the former borrowing a lot from the latter but the latter not as interestingly from the former. Except maybe quantum physics and psychology. And computer science? Anyway. More hybrids!

[ase.livejournal.com]

Mash 'em! Smash 'em! I think biology is beautiful, and more people should do art showing this. Unfortunately, electron microscopes are kind of expensive artists' tools.

How would you see the sciences and humanities interacting? I tend to think of history and ethics of science first, but I have trouble seeing a direct interaction for the lit-crit crowd and science.

[limnrix.livejournal.com]

Think of science fiction as a gateway drug. All the best parts of litcrit and culturalcrit have been appropriating science. Maybe what I'd like to see more of is scientists taking advantage of access to electron microscopes and knowing the art topics they address.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Haha - this weekend I was reading Asimov's biography and how he strenuously objected to having to do academic writing (for his Ph.D., academic papers, etc.) because it was so awful.

Yeah... non-SLR cameras, you seriously can't go very high in ISO in general. The G10 might have helped a stop or so but would still be basically unusable without flash in a dark party environment (just in case you are having buyer's remorse :) )

[ase.livejournal.com]

Science papers are boring, but are less likely to intentionally violate the rules of the English language. (Adrienne Rich, I am looking at you! Excellence in poetry doesn't mean you get to use adjectives as nouns in prose!)

A little buyer's remorse, but not enough to stop me from keeping the camera. What I would actually need is a huge, fast lens, but like you said, that's not really a non-dSLR option. If the ISO algorithms had better signal-not-noise sensitivity, faster ISO settings might be less grainy, but that's pure speculation on my part. I know nothing about the math that goes into the software (though possibly I need to learn).

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

I think the limiting factor to the signal-to-noise ratio is physics and not algorithms - the sensor size is smaller in a non-dSLR and that limits the possible light sensitivity no matter how good your algorithms are.

Though you could probably get pics that look a little better to the human eye, if admittedly with no more actual informational content or better SNR, if you ran your high-ISO pics through a smoother (e.g. NeatImage... I think it still has a freeware component) and then did selective sharpening.

[ase.livejournal.com]

I think the limiting factor to the signal-to-noise ratio is physics and not algorithms

That math, yeah. Interacting with Real Life andall.

I've got Photoshop for image editing, but there's limits to the noise removal and unsharp mask options. I know, whine whine whine like a little mosquito. :-)

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Try http://www.neatimage.com/index-ni32.html for noise removal. I seem to remember it making things look somewhat better, and they still have a freeware demo version available.

If you do a search for "bruce fraser sharpening" he had a lot to say on the subject, but I've never really tried out his tricks so I can't say how well they work.