Insomniacalicious

I am having trouble sleeping. I'm thinking about how glibly most women I know dismiss the fact that high heels damage feet. It seems that most rationalize this with "yes, but only if you wear it all the time" or "these aren't high enough to do any damage". Every time a person wears high heels they are damaging their foot a little, and in my opinion they really are the new footbinding. There is only one pair of shoes with heels which I will wear, and even my formal shoes don't have any. Looking good is not a good enough reason for me to hurt myself.

I really like these toy robots from the 80s. They look more like robots than what is seen in the toy section today. I used to love virtual/giga/robotic pets, and still have a mess of them around the house. I'm trying to figure out how to make use of them, also. The problem with virtual pets is that they're missing two of the crucial things which makes a pet worth having: behavior to observe and unpredictability. A worm is more interesting to observe than a Giga pet.
When we develop better pet robots, though, I am getting one hands down. They combine my love of electronics with my love of animals and pets.

This morning I want to do everything. I want to check out the underground comic stores and all of the cool little places here. I'm probably not going to get to do that, but waaaaaaah.

I like this article on behavioral economics and how it is more realistic than "rational man", but dislike how it paints humans as creatures unable to help themselves.

The Dorkiness is With Me

I want a Chapman Stick now. What is a Chapman stick?

An interesting article from Wired about scarcity vrs abundance planning.

"This is the power of waste. When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can change the world."

"The way to get from what the mathematicians call a local maximum to the global maximum is to explore a lot of fruitless minima along the way. It's wasteful, in a sense, but it can pay off in the end."

This feels like the correct way to treat waste vrs. what some American consumers has been doing. Of course, this would also require constantly monitoring trends and identifying the correct variables, though in any marketing projections the ability to model is kind of just a little bit central. What about perhaps literally applying these principals to trash?

Boing Boing columnist Cory Doctorow wrote a column.
I find it interesting that he mentions the fact that conspiracy theories are "pure gold for science fiction writers". Both conspiracy theorists and sci fi authors have the task of taking a fictional premise and making it sound convincingly real. The only true difference is the heading both are sold under. In fact, L. Ron Hubbard blurs this line significantly, though his creation is under the more general heading of religion.
The implication of this column is that ideas are the true genius in the world today. I disagree, as I think the fact that people have created so many DIY inventions is a testament to ingenuity on their parts. It's not necessarily some simple thing to create a fictional invention. Quite simply, it just shows that there are a lot of mechanically gifted people out there, but that is no reason to knock the talent.
This also makes me feel like building something, but I have work to do.

When I was a kid, I loved Star Wars. I didn't talk about the movies to my friends or engage in any fan activity besides imagining myself as a Jedi(don't you dare comment), but the concept of a universal "force" and the notion of peace through control were both extremely appealing to me. My dad and I had frank discussions about Buddhism, which I had only known about marginally before, and the rest is history. A lot of discussion can be had comparing East and West literature/theology and the societies that produced them.

But this is not what I am going to talk about.

During this period I suddenly acquired a taste for tunics. A recent article in io9 which I am too lazy to find discussed how fashion has started borrowing from science fiction. Thanks to recent shifts in fashion it is now becoming easier and easier to dress like a Jedi or Cyber Goth without having everyone around you suddenly converge into a mob of beating-the-passerby.
How long before we start actually looking like a mashup of science fiction characters?

I've always wanted to wear a cloak because I read one too many fantasy novels as a kid. The problem with cloaks is that since the invention of the jacket, they are much less functionally useful. That has never stopped fashion, though. Cloaks are awesome. Imagine one with a ton of useless contemporary buckles. Don't add any fake pockets, though, because those enrage me.

Of course, I'll most likely stick to my "uniform" of khaki pants and wifebeaters/tshirts. But still, you should listen to me fashion industry!

Self-Referential

This happens to me all the time, except that it's usually what I'm thinking and I don't eat giraffes. From xkcd.

Thoughts on Star Trek:
1.)I like that after any of the characters have an outburst, they apologize
2.)Apparently being in space for so long has made the crew and captain susceptible to any pretty female who is not in charge of the ship's communications.
3.)Those are really short skirts. The crew is lucky that gusts of wind don't exist on the ship.

This article on memory strengthens the theory of memory connections I mentioned before. There is probably a more eloquent way to phrase the previous sentence.

This article from Jezebel about the abuses of the fashion industry, where young girls are powerlessly in the hands of much older and more experienced men, and citing the prevalence of rape in our society, is devastating and something I would definitely recommend checking out.

Another article discusses the true perils and motivations for mothers who adopt from Africa vrs celebrities like Madonna. It also elaborates on a sentence that I posted yesterday: "I don't think that all people from third-world countries are broken or something similar". There is a difference between feeling empathy for others and portraying them as simple, lower beings needing our mercy. People were whole, complete beings long before electricity was harnessed; I just don't think it's fair that somebody's relative or child could potentially die of the flu or something similar. I could write a lot on this topic, clarifying and clarifying, even putting in my own personal experiences, but I will leave it here for now.

Muhahaha, my picture is the first, second, and third result for my full name on Google. On one hand I want this blog to be the first result, but on the other I have an unusual enough name that it probably would not be hard to find out a lot of details about me, especially since I have mentioned the general area where I live. Perhaps when I need to be hired I will make the switch, as I know potential employers look for web presence. I have deliberately not promoted this blog up to this time.

It's interesting that the first hits for "SchizotypalVamp" are ones which I barely use. I don't particularly comment on io9 or Jezebel. I haven't used Library Thing since I was fifteen or sixteen. My original idea was that a searchable database for our collection would be ideal so that we could confirm if we had a book or not before buying it, since we did accidentally get a few books twice. One hundred and twenty-two books later I realized that if I continued I would never get a chance to actually read anything since there remained many more still to be listed. I have posted once on Twitter. I haven't visited The Planted Tank/Frank's Aquarium/MFK in forever. I haven't used my Flickr in a long time, either. But it's nice that my pseudonym retains exclusivity in a Google search.

Frosty posted about Vermicomposting in her apartment earlier today. My attempts to create a compost pile at home fizzled, and it's always something I wished I could do. There was the slight issue in my last home that my parents would string me up as a warning to other messy daughters. However, looking at the composting bins in the pictures of this article, I could always get a box and put it outside. Heck, I could even pretend it was a table, a table my mom would never, ever sit at.
Now when I mentioned getting more plants to my mom, her answer summarized to "you better not make it any more difficult to move out", a sucky but valid point. However, I live right by a university. If making a few calls does not help, I can always dump the fertilizer in the random nature park.

"Why did you bring a large plastic bag on the bus?"
"Uh...no reason"

I'll figure it out. Meanwhile, I believe they sell earthworms at Petsmart. I'm off to go get myself in trouble. Also some pizza.

This is SO COOL

Sexy

"He lured her downstairs into the Crypts; she led him from altar to altar in the Church of St Nikolai."
-From The Call of the Toad by Gunther Grass

I want to save this quote because I feel that it has high metaphorical value. Did you know that the name Pomeranian originally applied to a group of Slavic tribes?

What are your thoughts on this condom packaging? It's from China, which is why there is no Mao on there. I honestly find it to be twisted but humorous. Please don't think that I find the millions of people these men killed and oppressed to be funny; rather, it honestly feels good to see them ridiculed. Besides George Bush, humor at their expense would most likely have been the ultimate insult for many of them. They wanted people to fear them even after they died. So I think that while remembering and learning from these dictators's regimes (again sans Bush) is of the utmost importance, let's laugh at their images and tear down the legacies they wanted to create.

The Call of the Toad is a good book. I generally don't like to write down full reviews or thoughts about novels I read, and I won't be in this case.

I want that dress really badly.