My NaNoWriMo novel: Finished at last!

Posted on February 7, 2008 by skullsinthestars

I just had to write a brief post to celebrate: I finally, finally finished writing my NaNoWriMo project!  For those who have been reading me for a while, you know that I officially completed NaNoWriMo’s 50k words by the 28th of November.  However, I still had two chapters to write to actually complete the book.  Those two damn chapters took me another two months to write!  (This is a good demonstration of why having a strict writing deadline is important.)  Now, at last, I’m finished: the final novel word count was 61.5k.  Maybe I can get back to writing my textbook, now…

Posted in Fiction | 3 Comments

Some of my favorite video game villains!

Posted on February 6, 2008 by skullsinthestars

One of my vices, if you would call it that, is an endless desire to make ‘top ten’ lists of things. Or top eight, or six… whatever I can find! I’m a lot like John Cusack’s character in High Fidelity (including the history of relationship troubles).

Anyway, today I’ve had video game villains on my mind. I thought I’d make a list of some of my favorite video game villains. My favorites include those with great personalities, those who scared the hell out of me, and those who just kick ass! My list below the fold. Some minor spoilers are involved, so if you’re planning to play the game mentioned, you may want to skip that description…

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Posted in Entertainment, role-playing games | Tagged | 9 Comments

A few bits of blog news!

Posted on February 5, 2008 by skullsinthestars

I thought I’d mention a few points of blog interest.

First, I’ve finally gotten myself a dedicated email address for my blog: skullsinthestars *that’at’thingy*skullsinthestars.com. Feel free to write with comments, criticisms, observations, or requests.

Science blogging is hard! It takes a lot of work to properly research even simple science posts. Nevertheless, I’ll soon have a post about so-called ‘superluminal’ light propagation. I’m planning to write a series of posts on the physics of invisibility, one of my pet ‘science’ projects. I’ll probably connect them with a discussion of invisibility in horror.

In horror blogging, I’m working on ‘horror masters’ posts on both Graham Masterton and Brian Lumley. Unfortunately, I can never go halfway on these things and have been frantically buying up used copies of their early work so that I can get a ‘complete’ picture of their talent! Hopefully I’ll have worked through enough of their works to write posts by next week. Speaking of buying used copies, I’m especially proud of managing to find a copy of Masterton’s book The Sphinx, which is actually pretty tricky on Amazon. Try finding it yourself and you’ll see it’s not exactly trivial…

Posted in Personal | 3 Comments

A short documentary about Steve Benen… (update!)

Posted on February 4, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Via Kevin Drum, I came across a short (less than 7 minute) documentary about Steve Benen, who writes The Carpetbagger Report political blog and subs quite often on Crooks & Liars and Talking Points Memo. Steve is perhaps my favorite political blogger and one of the biggest reasons that I got into blogging myself: he convinced me (through his posts) that the internet(s) are a place where you can have reasoned, intelligent discussions and learn a lot about the world.

Anyway, a friend of Steve’s made a short documentary about him. Steve mentions it himself here, and I’ve put the YouTube video below the fold…

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Posted in Politics | Leave a comment

Scientists make ‘blackest’ material ever!

Posted on February 4, 2008 by skullsinthestars

This was an interesting bit of science news from last week: according to an article on optics.org (free registration required), a research team from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Rice University has fabricated the ‘blackest’ material ever known, which reflects just 0.045% of the light incident upon it. This beats the previous record of 0.16% that was set by a nickel and phosphorous alloy.

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Posted in Optics, Physics | Leave a comment

Some unconventional vampire stories (updated)

Posted on February 1, 2008 by skullsinthestars

When I was younger, I was heavily into role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. I also ventured occasionally into other RPGs, and one of the popular ones was (and still is) Vampire: The Masquerade, in which one plays an Anne-Riceian vampire living secretly in contemporary society. I quickly got rather tired of Vampire, though; playing a character that is so much more powerful and special than ordinary folks left me with the pathetic feeling that I was trying to role-play somebody “cool”.

The ultra-trendy, ultra-sexy vampire seems to have become the standard image of the mythical bloodsucker. Alternatives exist, however; I thought I’d write a blog post highlighting some of my favorite stories in which vampires are depicted in a very different fashion…

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Posted in Horror, Robert E. Howard | 6 Comments

Science: It’s more complicated than creationists think

Posted on February 1, 2008 by skullsinthestars

The Bad Idea Blog recently contained a report about embarrassing arguments creationists in Florida are using against evolution:

“My objection to their proposal is that, at its core, the suggested science standard relative to evolution is a set of beliefs unproven. They believe that millions of years ago there was nothing and then suddenly there was something. They have no proof. It’s not replicable. It’s clearly a belief,” Kemple said. “You can give it a name and call it evolution, but it is nonetheless a set of beliefs.”

That quote comes from Terry Kemple, president of the Tampa Bay Christian public policy group Community Issues Council. ‘Bad’ already did a good concise job of pointing out how ignorant Terry is of evolution, but another part of this statement demonstrates a fundamental ignorance about science and I thought I’d rant about it a bit: “It’s not replicable. It’s clearly a belief.”

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Posted in ... the Hell?, General science | 9 Comments

Zombies for Romney!

Posted on January 31, 2008 by skullsinthestars

My friend Personal Demon (h/t) forwarded this image of a Romney supporter, from Yahoo! News photos:

Yes, the dead have risen and they’re voting Republican! (PD said in his email that he’s a mean, mean man.  I have to agree with him!)

Any suggested slogans for zombie supporters of Romney?

Update: Since the original link to the photo has broken (damn Yahoo!), PD managed to find a smaller archived version:

zombies-for-romney-digg-cache1

From now on, I copy all pics I use through links, so this doesn’t happen again…

Posted in Politics | 3 Comments

Y: The Last Man comes to an end… (update)

Posted on January 30, 2008 by skullsinthestars

CNN reminded me that the comic series Y: The Last Man is coming to an end; the final issue is released this week. For those not in the know, Y is the story of a plague that wipes out, in a heartbeat, all male mammals on Earth: with the exception of one young man named Yorick and his pet monkey Ampersand. Faced with a world in chaos completely run by women (note: the chaos comes from 3 billion people dying, not from the fact that the world is run by women; don’t write me angry comments), Yorick ventures out in search of his girlfriend, who was in Australia at the time of the ‘event’. Though it may sound like an opportunity for cheesy and wacky sexual hijinks, the story is actually quite serious and at times downright poetic. A few images and metaphors over the course of the series have blown my mind, as have a number of the plot twists. Unlike many, many comic series, Y is a story completely thought out: the issues I’ve read so far (up through #58) carried with them implications and consequences that were initiated all the way in issue #1.

It’s worth mentioning that CNN also reports that Brian K. Vaughn, the writer of Y, is now writing for Lost, whose season premiere is tonight. Knowing that Brian is penning some of the stories makes me eager to watch the show again!

Update: Whoops, the season premiere of Lost is tomorrow night; tonight is apparently the last season’s finale again.

Posted in Entertainment | 5 Comments

Sound as a fire extinguisher?

Posted on January 30, 2008 by skullsinthestars

A friend of mine forwarded me a link (h/t “JakeRyker”) about extinguishing fire with sound waves that appeared in Scientific American. As noted in the article, it has been known since experiments by John Tyndall in 1857 that flames could be extinguished by sound, but evidently the exact mechanism is still somewhat elusive. This is not necessarily surprising; combustion is a complicated physical and chemical process. What is more surprising, though, is that the author of the article and the researchers suggest that sound might be used as a fire extinguisher to put out significant flames. A few observations below the fold…

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Posted in Physics, Science news | 2 Comments