GalacticMu

Not so many years ago, during the Perseid meteor shower, on this very day, our beloved Sundaynaut was born. And we’ve been counting the days to the apocalypse ever since.

From me and your entire crew: Happy Birthday to the finest captain in Starfleet!

We love you dood.

On our way west we spotted this car:

It’s a small photo, so you can’t see that in addition to the Quakecon or Bust! homemade bumper sticker and the PEBCAK license plate, the holder says “Will work for bandwidth.”

As an aside, aren’t we all working for bandwidth?

Everyone once and a great while I, like many, am bum-rushed by the villagers and the time comes to gather up the bindle and escape by the protection of night. Wait, I already mentioned I was moving to Los Angeles.

Anyway, things are reaching critical mass, so poor put-upon GalacticMu will be on silent autopilot for a short while. Hopefully our Engineer, who will be monitoring from a remote station, will have time to chat a little in my absence.

If I make speak of the mundane, but BALLS, moving is horrid. They say it’s worse than divorce/separation, but I don’t seem to recall divorce involving so much fucking physical labor. Or wait, are they including the having to move part? Because then it is worse. Otherwise, I pick divorce over moving, rain or shine. The emotional strain of realizing we are nothing but an accumulation of utterly disposable hauls of junk is SO HEARTENING. I swing wildly between saying “Fuck it all!” and throwing perfectly good crock pots into the trash and then scrabbling it back out muttering, “But that’s good, that’s a good thing for the apocalypse, if we had electricity, because it’s good for one-pot meals.”

Just. Give me some medication. Okay?

I wonder why people don’t do that. People get chemical intervention when they’ve had a loved one die or they’ve, I dunno, come back from war - I can imaging walking into a doctor’s office and saying, “I’m moving,” and have the doctor go, “Goodness me, here’s some Percoset.”

In the mean time, since folks are keen on asking, here’s a little FAQ:

Why are you moving to Los Angeles?

Process of elimination. It’s a boring story that involves work. But basically, we wanted to move back to the West Coast and Seattle was automatically out (it’s a beautiful city to visit, as they say), San Fransisco seems lovely but terrifyingly expensive, Portland was an option and the Los Angeles area was an option. Portland didn’t have any work nibbles. Los Angeles did. Done and done. And something I haven’t spoken too much of yet: I just feel something about Los Angeles. Oh, hello, Deanna Troi, when did you get here? It’s difficult to describe and I don’t like to flaunt it because it I fear being mistaken for one of busloads of folks who daily arrive and are certain that they’re mere days away from Fame and Fortune, but I have this hunch. I’ll leave it at that.

Where are you going to live?

No idea. That’s how I moved to Cincinnati, and if it’s good enough for Cincinnati it’s good enough for Los Angeles. Our plan is to stay for a little while (maybe 2 weeks) at a gracious friend’s house, after which we will have settled enough for finding a weekly hotel to stay at until we get an apartment. It’s going to be rough living - suitcases and take-out food, for the most part. But the alternative was to go to the Seattle area to stay with friends and family, then fly to Los Angeles to try and find an apartment, then fly back and get the car and drive down. Costly and ineffective. Normally a big draw for us, but not this time.

As an aside, the internet has been, as ever, an utterly unrivaled resource. Thanks to weeks of poking around I now have a good idea of what neighborhoods to concentrate our housing search in, as well as the never-ending driving advice. Right now I have reams of notes to aid our search and we have every confidence that we’ll find a big, free, wood-floored house in a crime-free part of the city where wild unicorns deliver baskets of ripe figs and avocados to residents every morning.

You don’t seem the type to want to live in LA.

Yes, well. You don’t know me very well, do you? I’ve talked about it for years, as a pipe dream. I’ve wanted to work on special effects (practical effects, not CG) since I was a kid. It is true that I am pale and my lips are naturally thin and pinched, but I suspect it’s an urban myth that everyone is made of plastic. That kind of thing only happens in Miami. And despite my nacho-eating, booze-swilling ways, I’m actually a closet health nut. I bitch constantly about high fructose corn syrup and bleached flour. I love salad and vegetables and bulgur wheat, when my Crohn’s Disease allows me to eat them. I’d slather an avocado on every thing I ate, if the baby jesus granted me the wish. I’d rather eat fish than any other meat. By all accounts, I’m already addicted to “California Cuisine,” but I’ve been calling it “Angry Hippie-Spawn Cuisine.” So we’ll see how me and LA get along.

How are you moving there?

I’m glad you asked! We’re taking I-40 across Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Yes, we are aware it is summer, but it is a preferable route over driving through mountainous Colorado and then south through Las Vegas. On this end we are packing our goods into two ABF U-Pack cubes. We used them in 2006 and the system worked out great. You schedule the cubes to be delivered (you have to have street parking or a driveway available for them to be placed on), after which you have three days to pack them, after which you call and arrange them to pick up the cubes. From there they can either start to deliver them or they can send the cubes to their gigantic freight shipping yards for storage, for which they charge a perfectly reasonable monthly fee. What we are doing, since we don’t know when we’ll be needing them, is sending them straight to storage in Cincinnati (rather than store them at the other end in LA, for two reasons: one, there are three shipping yards in LA and you must pick the closest one to the destination, no exceptions, or they charge you additional moving fees and two, the contents will be cooler sitting in a shipping yard in Ohio). When we know where we need them we just make a phone call and within a week our stuff arrives. Pretty slick. Not terribly cheap, but we don’t have much of a choice.

So there you have it.

This interview with American astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the 6th human being to walk on the surface of the moon, has Dr. Mitchell by no means mincing around the subject of alien contact with humans. They are real. They have been here for a long time. He’s not joking and indeed, appears to not have a sense of humor at all.

Try to ignore the sniggering British interviewer and listen instead to a very articulate scientist lay it all out for you.

Note: I deeply respect this man and I’d appreciate if snarky comments were left to a minimum.

It’s not exactly science fiction, unless you count alternate history as scifi. Which I do.

I am an enigma.

On one hand, I despise the presence of people, loathe the crush of more than a handful of human beings in visible proximity to myself. I long for silence.

On the other hand I am terrified of spiders and need at least one other person on call to crush them for me at a moment’s notice. I need sushi, prepared by aloof, masterful chefs who don’t roll their eyes or say “Que?” when you say omakase onegaishimasu. I need Super Target.

Back to the first hand, I need a cave, a nest, a quiet abode both spacious and well-lit during the day and quiet, dark and well-protected at night. Surrounded by trees. And puppies.

And then to the second hand again - I need to not feel like I’m an extra in a hillbilly slasher flick when I go out for a hamburger. To not have someone gape and say “Why’d ya wanna go and move away from Seattle for?” when I tell them where I’m from (dear ignorant, blissful hillbillies: your rents here are one third what a person might hope to pay in other parts of the country, so try to enjoy it).

But mostly, both hands won with the following: I am just not getting enough apocalypse adrenaline in my life. Also, we just got evicted from our apartment so a “young professional” couple can move into a brand new condo in a few months.

To the Los Angeles pod, navigator - set a course!

While it is well known that for every idea there is an internet contingent, I was nevertheless surprised to discover that “beauty blogging” is a massive sub-culture about to shake the sub-. YouTube’s sidebar category of “Howto & Style” will have on any given day no less than three videos of someone applying eyeshadow on themselves. I suppose we should start a pool for how long before it is produced for cable along side “Ice Road Truckers.”

And a late warning to our readers: this post is 95% lame lady crap and 5% science. You’ll survive.

You see, I wear the make-up. I don’t put too much thought into it, but like any hobby you quickly and unhappily learn that for every cheap item that works great there are 50 that burn your eyes or make giant, pulsating cysts form on your forehead. And that alternately, for every expensive tube of lipstick that wears great, there is at least another one that rubs off on your teeth within seconds. It’s complicated. Lots of women like it, as evidenced by the entire industry. Just as many are intimidated and offended, as evidenced by me and Leesa clutching each other for support as we stumble around Sephora, eyes glazing over from a combination of fluorescent lighting and airborne mineral-foundation.

I distinctly remember guffawing at the sudden advancement of a new category of make-up: primer. Like, painting primer, I thought? Jesus, this industry is getting out of control. Primer! Small bottles of some viscous, milky-clear fluid for $40 and higher! We’ve been happily slathering on foundation (which, I believe, was supposed to be the bottom layer of make-up, as evidenced by its name) without ill effects for many a generation, and now you’re telling us we need “primer”?

And that’s when I made several stunning scientific discoveries¹. The first is that “primer” is primarily dimethicone (short for polydimethylsiloxane), a silicon-based organic polymer that makes stuff slippery while still dry. Hmm, I think, I’ve been diligently slathering dimethicone in my hair for ages now (shout out to Aveda’s Light Elements Smoothing Fluid, whut-whut!). And lord knows I love a polymer. Secondly, an over-the-counter product made by Monistat (yes, that Monistat) called “Chafing Relief Powder-Gel” is… drumroll please… primarily dimethicone. The same consistency and appearance as the expensive “primer”. And at about $6 a tube.

So bladda bladda bladda, in the name of science I bought the tube of anti-chafing gel marketed toward ladies with chafing lady-parts and rubbed it on my face. And then I put make-up on. And you know what? It worked like a goddamn charm. Make-up went on smoother, blended better, wore better, felt better.

Turns out effortless, natural beauty like mine requires a base-coat of silicon-based polydimethylsiloxane.

Oh science. Will you ever stop being weird?

A public service announcement: some people have sensitivities to silicones, so do a test patch (inside of wrist or other tender area) before smearing all over your face. Follow this same advice for any material you feel you might be sensitive to: hot sauce, nanotechnology, foreign currency, etc.

Amazing polydimethylsiloxane at Wikipedia.

¹And by “stunning scientific discoveries” I mean that the first 10,000 Google hits bring up “Monistat Chafing Gel is best make-up primer!!!1!!“

Sorry about the twice-in-one-week jewelry report, but things seemed grim on the internets lately and well, I’m out of Uranus jokes.

This metal and enamel bracelet is shockingly affordable and while a little kitsch (anyone wearing it had better be armed with a bevy of answers to questions like”Where’s your invisible jet?” and “So you really like Weezer, huh?”), should be worn and appreciated now before the big Wonder Woman summer blockbuster is produced starring some skinny teenage Hollywood starlet who’ll ruin it for everyone.

Wonder Woman Cuff Bracelet  ($25) from The Wireless Catalog.

Found via In Yr Fshn. 

I admit that I read celebrity blogs, but covertly and with that brand of defensive, proud shame that comes with most porn-viewing. I’m a grown-up, I can read about Naomi Campbell’s repeated arrests if I want to.

One line of regular interest is whether or not Will Smith and his wife Jada are Scientologists. Or rather, whether or not they are going to publicly admit it. Because the public accepts Smith as the next great American Action Actor, seeing past his skin and into his car-chase-sequencing, slang-crowing heart. Now run the same experiment, but with the Scientology parameter added. Result: possible microscopic drop in the hundreds-of-millions Smith might could make on a picture. And we can’t have that, can we?

The Smiths are regularly spotted chillin’ with Shorty McLoonytoons himself, Tom Cruise, which some might argue is not a solid indicator of one’s religious beliefs. However, I beg to differ: it is made clear both in Scientology reference material and in members’ actions that fraternization with non-Scientologists is strictly discouraged. Though it is oddly not spoken of, Cruise’s own divorce from Nicole Kidman was most certainly due to her long-malingering refusal to submit to Scientology in total. Neither party has spoken of this directly, but Kidman’s quiet assurances that she remains Catholic at heart are as close as she can probably get without finding herself accidentally sticking her head into a noose and then accidentally falling off a balcony. The internet abounds with testimonies of ex-Scientologists who were parted from their non-Scientoligist friends and family - even marriage partners, and sometimes forcibly. Classic cult tactics. For the Cruises to be seen repeatedly with the Smiths in public is a very, very strong indicator that the Smiths are at least superficially entertaining Xenu.

The Smiths, as you may or may not have heard, are behind a new private school called The New Village academy (set to open this September), a charitable, benign venture few people fussed over until this week when it was noticed at the school’s website the inclusion of certain Scientology terms.

The school’s spokesperson claims that yes, certain teaching methods at The New Village Academy were pioneered by L. Ron Hubbard, but no, the school was not a “Scientology school.” She also defended the confirmation of several Scientologist teachers by pointing out there were Christian, Muslim and Jewish teachers as well.

As you can probably guess, the logic starts to fall apart pretty quickly. For starters, there are no Jesus or Mohammad methods of teaching at the school as there are L. Ron Hubbard methods. A tiny bit of digging also reveals that the method The New Village Academy will be employing, called “Study Tech,” is in itself a method of converting/reinforcing Scientology beliefs. In other words, it is like saying that a school will have bible study, but that the school in not religious in nature.

A good breakdown of what a Scientology school is structured like can be found at the Ex-Scientology Kids website. Take special note of the section titled “What are the differences between a Scientology school and a public school / regular school?” It takes some reading through, but once you start to spot the typical “Study Tech” weirdnesses, you can see them worded differently or renamed in The New Village Academy’s website. And example of this is the Scientology method of the “clay demo,” or being able to demonstrate understanding of an idea as a 3D piece of clay (the idea being that the spirit learns based on physical, 3D events - this all goes back to space aliens, trust me). At The New Village Academy, it is referred to as:

Mastery can be tested traditionally with pen and paper, but often we prefer to have children demonstrate their understanding by creating models.

I’ll leave it to you to determine how a student might demonstrate their understanding of spelling or long-division by creating a model.

The New Village Academy website.

“Scientology is focus of flap over Will Smith’s new school,” at The LA Times.

I’ve been wanting to say it for many months now and today I just said fuck it:

Boing Boing sucks.

Wee! Oh, that was cathartic. A very quick breakdown of what is finally making me break my timid silence (and remove Boing Boing from my feeds, and to formally announce that GalacticMu won’t be linking to Boing Boing):

• They talk almost exclusively about copyright, free speech and fair use, but their comment moderator removes whole comments without warning - not just the ones full of stupid troll speak, but also ones that simply don’t agree - Google it if you don’t believe me, but I’ve seen it happen. Someone was deleted because they said a video was “boring.” I swear. Any comments that are nasty but pro-Boing Boing remain up. Moderator also often posts nasty responses.

• Tired of reading 10 posts a day about Cory Doctorow’s literary adventures. I don’t dislike Doctorow, I just don’t want a non-stop feed of how many translations a certain excerpt of a story is going through. I thought that was why he has his own separate blog, but I guess not.

• Both Leesa and I have notice a sharp increase in recent months of stories being scooped/stolen directly from Neatorama, Ectoplasmosis and other blogs, all without giving credit back to where they got them from. Often times also they used the exact same image from the story, right down to the size. Our feeling is that everyone at Boing Boing is just too busy with their personal success/lives to do anything but scoop.

• Boing Boing in the last few months began a policy of having individual posts sponsored by individual corporations. For example, a post about environmentalism might be sponsored by Honda. This violates so many rules of ethics I can’t begin to list them here. Boing Boing defended this by saying, to no one’s surprise, “Its our blog, we can do what we want to.” Which is true. And also translates to, “It’s our blog, we don’t have to offer trustworthy news if we don’t want to.”

• More recently, a series of unusual events occurred. Sex-blogger Violet Blue had all reference to her totally deleted from Boing Boing (including interviews), an event that was brought to her attention through several people who found pre-existing links suddenly dead. She openly expressed that she didn’t know what had caused it, and was waiting for an explanation (and assumed some kind of server glitch). Today Boing Boing announced in their now-typically snide tone that Violet had done “something” that made them want to delete her. Xeni Jardin then said (and I paraphrase, but barely) that since Boing Boing was a “Directory of Wonderful Things” and since they no longer considered Violet Blue to be “Wonderful,” they’d deleted any existence of her.

art by Flickr user johnralston

In truth, I’ve just been mass-deleting Boing Boing posts in my feed for a long time now. And in truth, its no secret, at least quietly here behind the scenes at GMu, that we are afraid of speaking poorly of Boing Boing. We don’t want to upset them when we could get a link from them at some point and suddenly jump our traffic up by the thousands. This is a petty feeling to be dragging around and I think we are ready to let it go. I am afraid of pissing off the moderator, Theresa Nielsen Hayden, because she is also an editor at the largest science fiction publisher in the world, Tor. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that Boing Boing is the popular gang roaming the internet, and since I’m afraid of them stealing my lunch money, I always lower my head and tell them how totally cool they are.

I’m done with that. Mind you, I’m whispering it here over on the other side of the gymnasium where they can’t hear me, but I’m doing it.