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Today has been marvelous in that it's been mostly productive without being overly stressful.
I woke up early, played a bit of Skyrim, and then cleaned the rats' enclosure. After that I settled in to do my quarterly-ish harvest of castings from the worm box (sort of labor intensive, but I have a gallon bag full of lovely vermicompost to show for it), after which I gathered up the rat bedding, kitchen scraps, and expired produce and worked it all into the compost box, after which there was more Skyrim, and then a couple of hours at Kaldi's spent drinking tea and catching up with the Internet, which was good.
And then I came home, said hello to the dogs, and sat down next to my roommate, who was watching cartoons. Which is how I saw this commercial:
At which point I turned to him and said something like, "Other than the fact that they've changed the specific social signifiers around, I'm pretty sure they made this exact commercial back in the 1980s."
So I searched around on YouTube, and sure enough:
All of which amuses me tremendously because while Simon is actually pretty entertaining -- I occasionally consider picking up one of the little travel-size ones -- I have never in my life stumbled upon some sort of urban underground Simon ring where people circle around and look Really Excited about that Incredibly Cool Person with good hand-eye coordination and short-term memory skills.
You know, in the same way I've never seen a platoon of kids in the forest wearing uniform clothing and staging full-scale battles.
Truly, the world of advertising is a mystery.
Meanwhile, the roommate has now moved on to Skyrim. His mercenary companion just fell off a narrow bridge down a rather deep pit, with water at the bottom.
My response, of course, was to encourage him to jump in after her. "Do it! Save and do it! Maybe there's candy!"
Ladies and gentlemen, my brain.
Side note: this post, in which I make commentary on media and use examples, could get my entire website taken down by the government if SOPA passes.
Want a more in-depth take on the issue, check out How SOPA Could Ruin My Life, as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's weekly wrap-up on how things are going.
And, as always, US folks who are moved to act should contact their elected officials and/or support appropriate advocacy groups.
- With abortion access increasingly restricted in the US, women are resorting to more dangerous methods, being brought up on charges, and then being punished by their communities. This is the leading edge of the badness that comes of criminalizing abortion and removing access to it, and should be a warning sign. Just saying.
- HTTP errors in cat photo format. Yet more evidence that cat photos can communicate virtually any simple concept.
- According to the US Census, just under half of Americans are poor or low-income. The criteria for this figure includes anyone with an income less than 200% of the current HHS Poverty guidelines.
- Nnedi Okorafor writes about her World Fantasy Award -- the statuette for which is a bust of H.P. Lovecraft -- Lovecraft's racism, and her process in dealing with the issue.
- Not loving the title of this article about a judge dismissing a case seeking remedy for the high incidence of rape in the US military -- Judge O'Grady's comments seem to suggest that in dismissing the case, he is not dismissing the facts, which are both horrible and horribly real -- but the idea that being sexually assaulted by fellow service members is "incident...to military service," as DoJ lawyers argued in this case, is both offensive and absurd. In any other line of work, an employer who suggested such a thing would be vaporized by lawsuits.
- From the Boston Globe, one of the most sympathetic and lovely articles about a family with a transgender child I've seen in a while. I admire this family, and wish them all much happiness.
- What's that? Alabama's GOP is trying to fix their ridiculous immigration law because it's inconveniencing rich non-Hispanic people? Really? You don't say.
- "...and then I took an arrow in the knee" is one of my favorite Skyrim things right now. Which is good, because aforementioned roommate sent me this a couple of days ago. Me, I'm inclined to agree with Paul Cornell, whose comment that apparent adventuring career ending arrow-in-knee accidents are so common that the whole thing must be a euphemism for syphilis has had me in stitches for the last couple of days.
This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com
