Just made lentil soup with borage greens from my garden. Makes me think of jwitchbaby

I picked up the cello for the first serious practice session I’ve had all summer. My hands hurt and I’m happy and tired and can play the first few bars to one of my favorite slip jigs. I’m amazed at how much muscle I’ve lost this summer. My hands are so much less muscular than they used to be.

I’m seriously wishing I had one more string on the cello, since it’d make playing a lot of fiddle tunes that I find on The Session a lot easier.

Since then, I’ve been going through the recordings I have on my computer and tagging them with genres (and more specifically the kind of dance they are) so I can actually search for things a bit better. I can’t tell you how apalling having everything filed under “Celtic” is. I don’t mind groups that play music from all over the celtic world calling themselves celtic, but I like knowing the Irish tunes from the Scots ones, and being able to see origins and influences and be able to find tunes when I want them.

Had dinner with my sister.

Well, with her guests since she had an abulance call. But it was fun!

Felixity (garlicfiend) wrote in transgender,

An amazing bundle of thought-provoking awesome

So brown_betty puts out a call for artwork of male comic book characters in “female” comic book poses in an effort to examine the stark gender divide in comic books.

This prompts ratcreature to post some scans from a guide to drawing comic characters, including sections on how to draw comic pornstarswomen.

In a brilliant display of awesome, vito_excalibur “fixes” the pages, switching all the men and women.

[remainder clipped]

brown_betty‘s original post links to a couple insightful posts too, and some examples.

Girl-Wonder.org is a site dedicated to women in (mainstream) comics, both characters and authors. Some neat stuff up there.

Sequential Tart’s “Bizarre Breasts” column, sadly no longer updating.

It’s been going on a long time, too, and not just in comics — Loomis’ drawing suggestions from the forties draws otherwise normal female nudes in heels. They’d never do something like this to the men, of course.

Some answers to the challenge: stephendann, naefox, kkglinka (again!), redplasticglass, theblackscorpio, ocarina

and on the subject of sexy superheroes, Racy Li writes sexy superhero stories, including one that’s free.

So what do you do when you decide to leave where you’re staying early during a road trip? Road trip it up another notch. So baileyjordan and I did.

We saw anandabrat and buzzycreature, of course, and made it to tsunobrat‘s 18th birthday. Sorry we missed kindredsgirl, since the opportunity to see her got lost in the change of plans. We headed up to Portland shortly after and saw ladyjausserande, pseudomammal, vruba, d_mcettiquette, whisperchild, snarkish and summerkid, and sadly missed saromia, wolftracks, dreefee, upna, instrumentalx and lightwalker. One day I’ll have to have enough time in town to meet rcoder and wallbrat too.

From Portland, we went to Occidental, CA to see rising_dawn at her rather hippy and hella nice intern job. It was so nice to be there that I entirely forgot to take photos, despite it being one of the prettier corners of the earth. baileyjordan managed to get poison oak, but other than that the only other downside was not being able to stay longer.

We dodged the Bay Area barely, (sorry notnotrebecca, jekissa and belovedmonster!), made a quick stop in Davis, CA to meet inthewall, who I’ve been dying to meet for ages, and hang out with apollotiger. Ran into thelhf, too, briefly, and missed elliotpp, which I am sad about.

We headed down I-5 (which is among the most boring drives ever. People who live in Stockton and Fresno: I pity you. There is nothing redeeming about where you live.) We skirted L.A., though if we’d had time, I’d have loved to stop in and meet dsch and check up on royaboya, though she was out of town anyway.

We camped at Joshua Tree National Park, which was too hot, and then the next morning headed for Prescott, AZ to see whetherwoman and jazkharma. Prescott is in a really nice spot, high in the Arizona mountains. Beautiful surroundings, and one kick-ass coffeeshop. We spent two days (luxurious!) mostly because whetherwoman is really good at helping one procrastinate about leaving.

I didn’t take any photos between Portland and nearing Prescott, AZ, but I like what I got. South of Prescott on AZ89:

Sedona, AZ:

In the canyons orth of Sedona:

The Navajo Nation is mostly flat, though there’s some really pretty canyons in there. It’s a huge area that took us nearly 4 hours to drive through.

We intended to be home that night, but as we prepared for the last leg of the trip from Dolores, Colorado through Telluride to home, we realized that Colorado highway 145 was closed from 10pm onward, so we decided to detour through Dove Creek, nearly on the Utah border. It added a lot of time to the trip, so we decided to camp that night. We wandered around outside of Dove Creek, couldn’t find the national forest and eventually collapsed into an exhausted heap after midnight.

We drove the last hundred and some miles home the next morning, and I got in to work at 13:00, just as the fibre optic line that had been destroyed by a woodpecker in Grand Junction was repaired, so I got to do cleanup as soon as I walked in the door.

Okay, folks, we have a problem here. When you distribute an app or library that uses JSON, will you please document which json you mean?

There’s JSON and there’s ruby-json (and is that related to ruby-json?)

Also, JSON library authors: do you think you could possibly merge all this and solve it? Or at least document your projects as something other than “the json library for ruby”?

And The Raven’s coffee is damn close. I’ll watch my back.

Pictures of geeks are much more interest in grainy, high-contrast black and white.

For all of you people who considered visiting whetherwoman and jazkharma, and then for some reason haven’t, you are missing out. Among other things, Marina has exceptional taste in coffeeshops, and the most theatregasmolicious workplace evar, at least in the costuming sense.

Mishka’s Café might actually have better coffee than the Black Cat.

Just sayin’.

We drove through Utah.

And then Idaho, then in eastern Oregon, we saw…

I got to reminisce about such absurdities as RV naming.

But in Corvallis, Robyn and Bailey were super cute.

And now baileyjordan and I are in Portland!

baileyjordan and I will be in Portland, Oregon tomorrow. Anyone want to meet up?

I’m in Corvallis, at the Haucks’ new ranch. It’s very pretty here, and the blackberries are ripe.

Seeing Lois and Mark again and having it be a strange mix of new interactions and same-as-ever is making my head spin a little. But I’m happy to be here.

Interface type is used in ways that book type isn’t, and it’s interesting to see how you can play with things. I realized this morning that my terminal type wasn’t letting me distinguish commas from periods easily, so I switched to P22 Typewriter, and despite it being an effect typeface, it turns out to be rather legible for coding. I like the gritty texture, so I tried it for a bit as the Gnome application type:

I like it for the window titles and menu headings. The variation in the letters makes it easier to read in some ways — a bit more visual texture than the Myriad Web I was using before. I’m not sticking with it as application type, since the wide spacing doesn’t let me fit much on the screen, and that’s important to me when reading email, so back to Myriad Web (or maybe Minion Web) for that. The terminal gets to stay old and clunky looking though.

(Yes, that’s the Gnome default wallpaper challenge image in the background.)

$500 in billable hours in the last 2 days.

And enough time to cook honest meals and kick back and drink a beer a couple times in there.