Grid of thirds

JetPens has an interesting kanji practice notebook, with a useful feature I hadn’t seen before: thirds markings. It has the usual half-grid lines, but also dots at the thirds to help you balance characters that aren’t split evenly. Naturally I immediately cloned this feature into my Perl script and made a PDF to try it out.

Explaining The Lost Dangerous Visions

So, The Last Dangerous Visions is out, finally completed after Harlan Ellison’s death by executor J. Michael Straczynski. I’m working my way through the stories slowly, but I thought I’d comment on JMS’ intro and explainer, in which he gives a brief history of his close relationship with Ellison over the decades. What explanation does he give for all the delays, broken promises, and outright falsehoods that surrounded this project?

TL/DR: Ellison was manic-depressive for his entire adult life and not only refused to recognize it for most of that time, but held off on seeking treatment until way too late.

Yup, that’d do it. I don’t discuss family here much, but I am very familiar with what happens when a bipolar person goes off their meds, and it maps well to Ellison’s reported behaviors. I would never have tried to diagnose him myself, since I was only ever in the same (large) room with him once, and his behavior that hour was quiet enough that I only knew he was there because he loudly harrumphed upon learning that C.J. Cherryh had just written a Lois & Clark tie-in novel. The crowd’s oh-Harlan reaction was louder than he was.

How are the stories so far? Pretentious twaddle from a vanished world where the Left still thought their ideas were “edgy”. Some of them have the excuse of having been written decades ago by people who died waiting for Ellison to publish, but others do not.

My-HiME, revisited

Not by me, I haven’t lit one up in years; the original show just had its 20th anniversary. The busty and titular heroine Mai was easy on the eyes, and the spoiler-heavy episode previews they inserted for the DVD release led off with a memorable slow-pan of her in lingerie, but the story was a mess, with too many heroines and too many mechs and too many easily-killed keys/hostages. Much of this was due to the fact that the original manga was more of an action/harem story centered around Tate, who got some memorable “unlocking” offers from various girls.

The second and third series were better planned out.

Unrelated, “secondhand smoke” was always bullshit

…and the American Cancer Society finally agrees. Yes, cigarette smoke is foul stuff. Yes, constant exposure has an impact on people with respiratory conditions. Personally, I’ve always rated it right up there with “excessive hairspray” for interfering with my breathing, and second only to pot for leaving rooms and clothing reeking.

Pipe smoke, on the other hand, is potpourri.

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