Thorns

Because I'm an idiot I didn't get my camera until the last full day of the con so have almost not photos. But what I did get was Rob and Lise's awesome Molecular Gastronomy Hour. It reminded me a bit of Kitchen Chemistry.

The main star was Sodium Alginate. That post has the main gist, so briefly:
Sodium alginate is a flavourless gelling agent which forms a harder gel in contact with calcium.
We put a mix of cream and yogurt into unflavoured sodium alginate gel and got, well...a mushy mess. But in theory the gel covered milk balls sound cool :)

We then got a syringe of coke gel and dripped it into calcium chloride and made teeny little salty sweet balls. They needed more rinsing than we could manage so looked better than they tasted but again, the idea is cool :)

(The panel also included a comparison of banana smoothies with and without xanthum gum, but since I can't eat any of the ingredients but the banana and it just looked like banana smoothies didn't record that bit)

No, not in advance,distantcam is just very late :)

Swancon 2008 Photos

A particular shout-out to my cosplay buddies:
N and EE as Kaname Chidori and Sousuke Sagara from "Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu"
OC and Pax as Agatha and Zeetha from Girl Genius
and most importantly
Me as Yumiko Readman from "Read or Die" (here's a reference shot. She has a magical power over books, I had to dress as her :D)

SGA cancelled
20th Century fox sues to keep Watchmen out of cinemas

(I'm only upset about the second one but that's me)

I've been posting a lot recently haven't I? This is what happens when I get stuck at home sick for too long :)

I keep seeing posts like this and then losing them again, so a (currently pretty sparse) compilation of all the useful-looking (to me) social-advice-for-geeks I've seen and can think of right now. I'll add more stuff if I think of it/am linked it.

Not all of these are explicitely "advice", but I think the important factors are (a) Talking about issues of social interaction and (b)largely being aimed at the people they're complaining about, ie not a woman ranting to her female friends about a particular male behaviour.

Also, note that I don't neccesarily agree with everything in all of these, but they are least thought provoking.
( Read more... )

Have had an utterly awesome day abut am very sleepy. First day's worth of photos are up including the terrible, dark, unzoomy shots I got of the cosplay comp. And here they are with commentary...
( Read more... )

Cam has put the photos up at our gallery and Flickr.

I was going to post highlights, but there's Just So Many (really, the masquerade was amazing) So, not so much highlights as stuff involving me or that you might not realise was awesome till you had it pointed out to you. Go look at them all!

Me as Cheery Littlebottom (a dwarf exploring her femininity, pity he missed my awseome boots). Me, Phlebas and Pav as Cheery, Sally and Angua out on the town (from "Thud" by Terry Pratchett) Note Pav's beautifully made badge. I just printed mine off the internet :)
Unfortunately I don't have any shots of Cam as Otto the vampire photographer.

Elizabeth Moon in my costume!! Well, bits of it anyway.

The cast of Firefly plus their tiny evil twins (really, that's stomach bacteria behind them).

Liz in her award winning costume.

Also, I didn't end up going to it but Dance Dance Revolution looks like it was interesting.

Ok, all the recent talk about gen on metafandom has inspired me to go through what gen means to me and why I like it. This will be of absolutely no interest to anyone who doesn't read fanfic (and possibly not even then), sorry to the majority of my flist but I had to post it somewhere and my lj seems the best place for self indulgent ranting :) Though you will get to "see" me say the words 'sex' and 'porn" more than I probably have in all my other blog/lj posts combined.
( Eww, is this a kissing book? )

So, there you go. Sorry I rambled on so much, it's the only way I know how to communicate! Feel free to tell me what I'm saying makes no sense or is deeply offensive, chances are I'll realise at least half of it is wrong. Also, I apologise to anyone who thought this was going to be about why I like Jen(*), but that's so self evident it doesn't need a livejournal post :)

(*)Or Genevieve, who none of you know and doesn't read this. She's pretty cool too.

I've been thinking about the separation of ones real life from online and fandom lives, and how I just don't do it. This is partly inspired by a couple of posts on metafandom (I got around to actually typing it out as a comment on this post then realised it was Way Long).
( Don't tell anyone I'm here! )

People who didn't attend are allowed to read these too :)

From the "rant for five minutes on your favorite book" panel. I've definitely forgotten some, tell me in the comments and I'll add them. It's worth keeping in mind that someone loves each of these books, and just becuase I didn't doesn't mean you won't.

• A fire upon the deep Bubbles with ideas.
  
• The Vorkosigan saga Possibly my favourite series in the whole world
  
• Kil'n People I normally find David Brin annoying but this was heaps of fun.
  
• Lord of Light Really interesting
  
• Guns Germs and Steel (also Collapse) Changed the way I think about the world, worth slogging through the sometimes dense text.
  
• Bridge of Birds These are good but a little twee.
  
• First two Damiano books Personally I prefer "Tea with the black dragon". Just saying :)
  
• Use of Weapons Opinions vary on whether this is one of the better or worse "Culture" books, personally I prefer "Excession", "Consider Phlebas" and "Player of Games".
  
• Vurt I didn't like this book all that much but I'm not big on low-science psychedelic cyberpunk
  
• The Borribles
  
• Ex Machina
  
• The Princess Diaries
  
• Fables
  
• Nylon Angel
  
• Short fiction of Ted Chiang
  
• Honor Harrington
  
• The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse
  
• Bimbos of the death sun
  
• Freedom and Necessity
  
• Echoes of the Fourth Magic
  
• Agent of Change
  
• Altered Carbon
  

Also, Atomic rocket.com (seems to be down, possibly wrong url) from the science panel, and on the off chance Kylie Ding reads this, Sierpinski crochet, googling finds better examples, unfortunately I can't remember where I got the pattern.

Ok, I'm a big old nerd. I love conventions, and fannish discussions, and all that. But one thing that has seemed to separate me from many of my fellow big ol' nerdish brethren (especially many of the ones most involved in conventions and discussions) is the fact that, well, I just don't like fanfic. On the one hand this has made me a little sad, and a little out of place since I still find myself interested in the sort of discussions going on at metafandom etc, but on the other hand deep down I get to feel ever-so-slightly-less-patheticly-nerdy.

But no more. I have found my nerdy weakness, and it is fanvids.

nico_wolfwood first introduced me to them (in fact she makes her own(*)) but for some reason the anime stuff just doesn't do it for me. And then I saw a fanvid of all seven seasons of Buffy to "The William Tell overture"(**) and had to see more.

Except I didn't know where to find it, so after some fitfully fruitful googling gave up. And then I read this post on metafandom, and then I discovered...the_reel. And then my fate was sealed.

So, as inspired by said post, here are all the fanvids I have seen that I really, really liked (hmm..turns out I do like some amvs after all).

• Tainted Donuts A very clever melding of Cowboy Bebop and Trigun.
  
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer (abridged) The one that started it all...
  
• Failed experiments in video editing
  
• "Spirderman" and "Oh Fortuna", both very amusing Buffy vids from Mr Monkeybottoms
  
• Deja Vu Maybe I just like this becuase I'm big pathetic Veronica Mars fangirl. Hey, at least I didn't link one of the ones I'm fairly sure I just like because they're about Logan :P
  
• Seven Nation Army Lord of the rings, the music is very effectively synced with the action
  

Also, yes, still sick but less grumpy. Have compiled a list of suggested activities for work, not as good as I could have done were I well but hopefully good enough.

(*)Ooh! She's using my design! *ponders turning it into an lj-icon* EDIT: done!
(**)Also, looking for this I found the original unaired Buffy pilot, yay!