Echoes of the Mind's Eye

I have enabled a new personal filter called: antiDoctor

This filter is everything in my subscription list except

• doctorwho
• ihasatardis
• sjadventures
• tennant_love

I realize the 4th series has completed in UK. I realize that most of my Stateside friends have downloaded it and watched it.

The family is watching it on Fridays as it airs on the Sci-Fi channel. (You can't get captioning on YouTube or less-than-legal downloads)

So, please do me the honour of not spilling the beans to me until the show has run its course on Sci-Fi.

Actually, it's been made clear to me that I must truly suffer. The finale runs on Friday August 1. I will be out of town that weekend and will not be able to see the episode until I return late on the 4th.

So, if you see me that weekend... Don't ask. I'll be stewing in my own Gallifreyan blood.

Thank you for your understanding.

Nothing written using Boost is ever self-documenting.

Anyone in the DC area get to see the Bhutanese temple or any of the performances? It looks like it was pretty great.

Title: Healing Hands
Fandom: Star Wars (AU)
Beta: Thank you cariel for beta reading this for me! =D
Characters: Anakin/Darth Vader and Dormé.
Ratings & Warnings: PG-14 Dark Themes.
Disclaimer: Not mine. None of it.
( Healing Hands. )

 

Ooohhhh, I bet you thought the title of my post was about people kicking kittens across the room (awh, that's horrible!) Actually, Teen Pregnancy was in my yard today and I was feeling the kittens kicks in her tummy. I hope the best for her and her family. Jared wants to kidnap her and put her on the porch so she'll have them in a safe place. I hope she goes to her home to have them.

Teen Pregnancy	Balls

I went inside to make my kitties their dinner:

Kurosawa gets a scoop of Spot Stew, ~4th cup of Vitality, a Glucosamine supplement, and a shake of Prozyme.

Sebastian gets Spot Stew, Prozyme, ~4th cup of Uretic, a Glucosamine supplement, and a shake of Ph- for his bladder crystals.

Simone gets ~4th cup of Vitality and a shake of Prozyme only, because she's still a fatty and young and spry. We even thought about cooking meals for our cats every night.

I compared their lives to Teen Pregnancy's or even worse, Ball's and decided if I came back as a cat, I'd want to come back as my cat. Heh heh.

I hope that this isn't considered spam, but if it is I'll be glad to delete or have it deleted. Besides teaching anthropology at a community college, I do cultural resource management. I have had the same set of questions rolling around in my head for a while so I thought I'd set up an online survey to see how other practitioners around here feel about these things. Questions about the problems inherent in doing CRM, the future of CRM, etc.

It's a quick and dirty survey. I've never used surveymonkey before so I hope it works reasonably well. If I get any kind of response to the survey, I'll post about it on my LJ eventually.

Here's the link to the survey: Click Here to take survey

Thanks!

*Cross posted in a few anthro/archy places.

While galloping around in my little pool on the glorious "perfect for the pool" day, I started thinking about all the things i want to do before we move. It's not like we'll never come back to Florida since my family still lives here, but you know how it is. Much of it has to do with places from my childhood I'd like Jared to see and experience.

ORLANDO AREA

Go to Disney one more time.

Eat at Chef Henry's one more time.

Eat at Ethos one more time.

Eat at Garden Cafe one more time.

See Leu Gardens again.

Ripley's Believe it Or Not museum one more time.

Kite flying at Blue Jacket Park and snow cones at Rainbow Snocone.

See an iMAX movie at City Walk, maybe have dinner at Bubba Gump, always wondered about that place.

National Day.

Oktoberfest.

Springfest.


TAMPA AREA

Visit the Dali Museum again.

Take Jared to the Strawberry Festival and then to Troy's mom's house.

Gasperilla maybe?

The Castle.

The Museum of Science & Industry

Dinosaur World one more time?


GAINESVILLLE AREA

Gold Head.

Ichetucknee.

Manatee one more time.

Devil's Mill Hopper.

Dad's grave.


ANY BEACH, EAST OR WEST COAST (DAYTONA, NEW SMYRNA, COCOA, ST. PETE...):
Send the day swimming and building sandcastles then have dinner at one of those seedy seafood places with the plastic fish hanging from the ceiling sitting out on their dock overlooking the water. And I want hush puppies.


OUT OF THE AREA:

Take a trip to the keys. Maybe we'll go for Jared's birthday in September?

St. Augustine for a 3 day weekend.


More as I think of them.

Tags: moving

My Dharma talk from the temple last week.

You may be able to tell that I was inspired by some buddhists discussions. I'm not meaning to call anyone out through this Dharma talk--I'm actually glad we had some debate over these issues that allowed me to refine and clarify my views on Upright Action and Upright Speech.

As usual, it's below the cut for the MySpace-averse.( I believe in karma, JERKS. )

The Prince received a phonecall last week letting us know that Harry, a bookclub member probably wouldn't live out the week.

Harry and his wife, Caryl had been regular customers when the Prince and I had our bookstore. Harry began coming to the bookgroup and convinced Caryl and their friends to join. Once the store closed, it was in large part because of Harry that we all kept meeting.

Harry was one of the creators of the annual BLOT party. He and Caryl would help grow tomatoes in another member's garden. Then in August or September, bookgroup would enjoy the fruits of their labors by having a bacon, lettuce, onion, and tomato sandwich party. The leftover tomatoes would be turned into sauce and homemade lasagne by another member and we'd feast upon that at our Christmas meeting.

Harry fought off cancer before; his indomitable spirit shining through rounds of chemo and even when his bladder was removed, he reacted with humor and grace. He never lost his sense of humor even as his body grew frailer. I still remember him insisting on reading a passage of Catcher in the Rye full of Holden using 'goddamn' much to Caryl's chagrin. You could tell that part of the fun was teasing her as he relished reading Holden's every utterance.

Sadly, he lost his last battle with cancer on Friday. Farewell, Cap'n Harry. I hope your cartography skills serve you well on your final journey. I'll miss the twinkle in those teasing eyes and your generous heart.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 73 years old,
the complete embodiment of compassion and one of the best examples of Buddhism on this earth.

actors/actresses/tim burton:
edward norton, helena bonham carter/tim burton, james dean, johnny depp (1 with tim burton), kate winslet

movies:
conversations with other women (most hbc), edward scissorhands, harry potter, the painted veil, the dark knight

teasers:


( so you two have been working together for ten decades... )


note:
` no hotlinking.
` i can give you the general idea of specific colorings if you ask. maybe i'll write a tut.
` please comment and credit.
` feel free to friend my journal.

I subbed in the 8 going to Diamond States this morning. We did four slightly shorter than normal race pieces (about 1200 meters) in a row against a men 4 and another women's 8. Beat them both every time, heh heh. It was fun and made me miss rowing in regattas, even though your forearms burn like crazy and you feel like you're going to up chuck on the person in front of you when you're actually racing. It's one of those crazy painful blisses that makes getting a tattoo on your back feel like a little mosquito bite. Laura really wants me to come back full time. And I really want to, too. Not to sound arrogant, but I have no doubt I'd be in the racing boat if I did. But that means practice every single morning and much neglect from kung fu. Plus, a $90 membership fee (or $30 if I just did a quarter.) On mornings like this, I want to say, "sign me up!" (She's trying to get me to at least do a July-Sept quarter so she can race me in the last couple of races. Oh man, and the club goes to the Dad Vails, too. I'd love to go to Phili again and visit the Mutter Museum! Anyhoo...) I told her right now is Jared's era. He's in school, doing awesomely I must add, and the spot light should be on him. I need to bend to what he needs to do and I can't pick up anymore projects though it pains me to throw away the opportunity. But subbing twice a week or so has given me something, at least. Jared keeps talking about looking for a beat up old scull for me. We'll probably have much better luck up north, where rowing is more popular (even though they can't row all year round like we can, hmmm.)

Casting Rumors for Tim Burton's 'Alice in Wonderland' - Cinematical
Well then.

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This blogpost (/Message: Hello New Social App. Why Should I Use You?) got me thinking about online social networks; the ones I use and the ones I don't.  Actually, this is something I've been thinking about for a while since it seems just about everything on the web these days has a social networking aspect to it.  Or has had one imposed upon it.

I have a five digit LiveJournal user number, and a low one at that.  (There are currently 1,749,925 active journals.)  On a sticky August night in 2000, a friend of mine, Henrik, introduced me to this online journaling thing that he had come across.  LiveJournal was pretty small back then.  If blogging and "Web 2.0" existed back then, I didn't know of them.  But the thing that made LJ different than just keeping a diary online, on your own personal webpage, was that it was easy to update and it had this...friends list. Other users could basically subscribe to have your entries and those of others "friends" collected on one page.  If there were RSS feeds in 2000, I didn't know of them either.  Of course, Henrik was my first LJ friend.  We had been email pals for a few years at that time.  But who else did I know that would use this service?  Really no one.  But never fear, you could add interests to your profile and people with like interests could add you.  Within a couple of days,  two fellow writers (pageeater   and skyeb  ) found me.  And thus it went.  To this day, there's only two people (other than Eric) on my LJ friends list that I have met in person.  And them I knew before I knew them on LJ.

Eventually, I became aware of MySpace.  I came upon it early in its inception as well, but with nothing going on and no one to hold me there, it didn't catch with me until a while later.  Eventually, after MySpace "hit," I figured it might be a good networking thing to make a profile.  For a while, I kept up with some of the Groups on Facebook.  They didn't hold my interest.  Most of the users are quite young.  Young people are on LJ too, but it's not quite the same dynamic.  And the difference in dynamic boils down to the main page for each.  Your main page on MySpace is your profile: a quick summary of who you are (often with a lot of junk included) and links to an anemic blog and groups.  At LiveJournal, your main page is your journal.  It's all content and the style of the content.  It wasn't long before I found some of my highschool and frisbee friends on MySpace as well as a couple of interesting people from various groups.  But MySpace couldn't hold my interest.  Keeping up with my friends' updates was difficult.  I had a journal elsewhere.  I had webpages that where more fun to modify.  I'm not much of a forum reader/contributor.  After a few months, my MySpace moldered.

In the meantime, Web 2.0 occurred.  Suddenly, everything had a "friends" attached.  I have Pandora, FineTune and last.fm accounts.  Do I bother with adding friends to these?  No.  I like music quite a bit, but these aren't social opportunities for me.  These are music opportunities.  I am a user of del.icio.us and Digg, but again, the social aspects are pretty much lost on me.  Why do I add links to them here?  Why not.

Twitter was the next thing that I tried out.  It took a while to catch on with me.  Again, the emphasis is on content.  Small chunks of content.  Like LJ, it has a page of people that users "follow."  I can keep up with these people, but once again who is it that I would follow?  I'm not one to go about inviting people to join social networking applications.  I was incredible embarrassed recently when StumbleUpon invited my email list instead of just showing me who was already using the service.  I caught on to the Twitter streams of some local podcasters.  I also follow some other celebrities and even a couple of people I know from LJ.  The most interesting people I've added are some ultimate frisbee players from other states.  The threads are thin, but it's entertaining hearing what these people are doing and what they might link to.  Why anyone would follow me (or "friend" me on LJ), I have no idea...

Lastly, there's Facebook.  Like MySpace, Facebook is profile centric, but yet not.  When I surf over to Facebook, I see an aggregation of what my friends on Facebook have been up to: what blog entries they've made, what news article they've found interesting and posted, what pictures they've taken or been a part of, or what inane aspect of Facebook they've recently updated. The real fun of Facebook for me is that most of my friends on Facebook are people I actually know.  Most of them are frisbee people, with some college, high school, and childhood friends.  And even a couple of LJ friends.  It's interesting to see what their online personas are like.  Or what silly shenanigans one can entice a generally stolid person into.

It seems odd to me that, in this comm just lately, I had to justify myself in wanting to have a disciplined and regular practice.  I mean, okay, I didn't post directly about that, but rather about the difficulties that rose from within when I'd promised to do one single half hour sitting, confessing that I didn't end up getting it done.

What some people seemed to say (maybe I was misunderstanding) was, screw being disciplined, it's easy to steal some time here and there to practice!  Okay.  True.  That can be done.  Five minutes on the bus, in the doctor's office, while my wife is in the bathroom and my son is playing in his room.  Make due with what you have, and let whatever comes up interrupt you, no worries.  Okay.  But what about a disciplined practice?  What about making a little time in my life every day for Zazen?  It seems that the thought is ridiculous to some folks reading this group.  Totally dramatic and self-aggrandizing.  Boy do I need to be taken down a peg!

Making room in my life for a regular practice changes my life in ways that stolen moments of meditation don't.  Even when I fail, there's a strong difference which makes me keep coming back to attempting this thing that I've found to be very difficult.  There are large barriers to overcome which I don't have to face if I just take a laid back attitude and stealing five minutes here and ten minutes there.  Stolen time is great, but it's not the same, and for me it's not enough.

If there's no reason to change your life, why begin this practice at all?  If it isn't having an impact on your life, what's the use of practice?  I want my life to contain a disciplined and regular practice because I've experienced exactly what difference this makes in my life; in order to have the practice, I need to push at my life to keep room for it, and that itself is a part of the practice.  I would recommend this practice to anyone, especially anyone who sees a need to embrace change as a means to living a more vibrant and open life.

That's all.

http://www.shadowrun4.com/wordpress/?p=240

Catalyst Game Labs wants to give a big thank you to all of our gamemasters, the Origins Game Fair, and, most importantly, our players for a great weekend of gaming at this year’s convention.

The Shadowrun tables were packed all weekend. We ran over 200 players through 35 tables of events. Plus, we introduced dozens of new players to the game world and rules system at our demos in the dealer hall.

Shadowrun Missions players got a sneak peak at the New York City campaign. These events were consistently overfilled, and we appreciate the the enthusiasm on everyone’s part. The first adventure – SRM03-00 Everyone’s Your Friend will be broadly available later this month.

This year’s Origins Shadowrun tournament – Death of a Samurai – gave players a look into the underworld turmoil that the upcoming Ghost Cartels book introduces. The competition between teams was fierce. The winning team barely eked out their victory.

We tried a new handout this year – NERPS Cards. These gave players some extra tricks to influence the games as they played through them, and everyone seemed to enjoy the added flexibility. These seemed to be trading pretty hotly on the black market, so we’ll have more of them at GenCon.

GenCon Indianapolis is just a few weeks away. If you’re planning on attending, make sure to look up the Catalyst Game Labs Shadowrun events. We’ll have the same great gamemaster team, more Shadowrun Missions Scenarios, and this year’s tournament – Bad Moon Rising – also ties in to Ghost Cartels. Of course, we’ll have game demos available in our dealer’s hall booth to introduce new players to the system.

 There are plenty of moments currently in my life that always have this thought; things are going to get worse and that I will always have a depressing life. I guess I would think that especially this year because a lot of unfortunate things have happened this year; both of my parents were in individual car accidents, pessure from college classes, changes in work, and changes in the relationship with my family have all contributed to that thought.

I have an upper porch connnected to my room in the side of my house and I use that area as my sanctuary to think about things in life. The first thing I see as I sit down on one of the lawn chairs there is a giant weeping willow tree. Now, for some strange reason I adore weeping willows, I guess it's because of its unusual shape and leaves, it just looks so mysterious. I've recently begun to notice that some of its branches and leaves have begun to grow back. Last year, lightening had struck the tree and half of its limbs were removed because of damage. The tree had looked so depressing and bare and nothing like its formal glory.

But, I've noticed that the tree is getting thicker and more like it was before its accident. And for that it reminded me that nothing ever lasts forever. Just because I've been experiencing these unfortunate events this year doesn't mean  that it will last for the rest of my life. It may take a few months for me to recover or it may take years, or all of this maybe a form of bad karma at work, who knows. But, I need to keep in mind to be strong and things will get better eventually, like that tree. Still, it will be so hard to think about it sometimes though. 

If anyone is reading this, how do you keep the thought in mind that nothing lasts forever?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/s4/news/080705_news_01

Mystery bug means Journey's End problem.

Gundam 00, which just started airing last fall, ended its run this spring, and will have a second season this October....is already planned for release in America on Scifi this November. Holycrapfast. Also, for as shiny as it is, I don't think it's anywhere as good as SEED...because it takes about 15 of its 25 episodes to get anywhere.

Also, if Brad Swaile (Quatre in Gundam Wing, Dearka and Auel in Gundam SEED/Destiny, Amuro in Mobile Suit Gundam) is any of the four Gundam pilots, Trinity brothers, or Graham, I will throw something. Considering, really, how he voices Amuro, he ought to be given Ribbons' part, since he's also done by Amuro's seiyuu. I have a feeling he's gonna be Michael Trinity or Graham Aker though.