Atomic Nerds

As LabRat mentioned, yesterday I was elbow-deep in the guts of my computer performing a long overdue upgrade. Update: It’s all spoken for. Thanks, folks! Since I don’t have any projects laying around particularly suited to the old hardware, if our loyal reader (or if that person has a friend in need) can put some of this stuff to use, make an offer in comments or to the nerdsatomic at tha’ gmail address. In more or less constant use for the last three years were one SuperMicro X6DAL-TB2 motherboard, hosting two Intel Xeon 3.6ghz Irwindale processors and six 512mb sticks of ECC/Registered DDR2, Mushkin part number 991346. Also up for grabs is a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 - base model, no bells and whistles(spoken for) - and a GeForce 7800GTX. The processors also come with Danger Den TDX waterblocks for liquid cooling.

Everything was working when I yanked it out yesterday afternoon, and if anybody wants any of this stuff, of course every effort will be made to make sure stray static doesn’t ruin anything. I’ve got some other spare DDR and DDR2 ram laying around too, but since that’s scattered hither and yon from older projects, if you need anything there, best bet is to list what you need and I’ll see what’s lurking in the parts closet. Help me out here folks, I’m about a power supply away from that closet knitting itself into a giant supercomputing robot which may or may not have my best interests in its cold silicon heart.

Stingray is deeply enmeshed in rebuilding his computer, and if hayfever weren’t already shooting my concentration to hell and gone, the state of minor chaos would finish the job.

Check back semi-shortly for an old-computer-parts virtual garage sale…

Today was Attack of the Fifty Pound Pollen Monster. I woke up, had a massive sneezing fit, and have been too busy secreting and staring into space wishing for death for much else today.

Meanwhile, read all about the latest ominous thing to be coming out of this administration and Congress: What’s Really In H.R. 1388

The upshot of it is that a bill recently passed the House with great enthusiasm, the enthusiasm coming from the bill’s stated purpose: to find some way to compensate volunteers for various national service programs. There’s a certain amount of creepitude in the list of requirements you must fulfill if your volunteer organization- or say, college or school- chooses to receive grant money… but the part that really raises the hair on the back of the neck is down toward the bottom, which is the establishment of a Commission to study in depth the ramifications and feasibility of making the whole thing mandatory for everybody of a certain age who is able to be conscripted into it. Defenders of the bill are quick to point out that this is only to support EXISTING volunteer organizations, but there is no reason for any of this stuff to be in there unless the real goal weren’t to stretch it to everybody, volunteer or no.

Go read the whole thing. MuscleDaddy has given it a far more thorough analysis with a lot of direct quotes of the bill itself than I possibly could, especially when my main activity consists of sneezing and dripping.

I’d say it would be funny if, during the reign administration of our first black President, a national program in flagrant violation of the thirteenth amendment got shoved down our throats, but I find I can’t laugh about it.

To my liberal friends, and you know who you are: if you’re already shaking your heads about how harmless this is and how reactionary I’m being, take a moment and seriously imagine how you would feel if it was Bush- or someone further to the right than he is- and a Congress that firmly supported him shoving this through. Because thanks to elections and the way these programs almost never go away once created, it WILL be someone just like him if not actually worse in control of this, and every other expansion of government control that goes in. It’s never just one side’s nightmare.

After taking a completely bipartisan firestorm of outrage to the backside, the Obama administration backs off their plan to charge veterans’ insurance for injuries received in combat. Quote from Madame Speaker:

Based on the respect that President Obama has for our nation’s veterans and the principled concerns expressed by veterans’ leaders.

Uh, no, Nancy, I really don’t think so. Nobody decides on a measure that takes such a direct slap at veterans in an already crumbling, inefficient, and humiliating system in order to save only slightly more than half the amount they gave to freaking Hamas to rebuild their little hell out of respect of any kind for veterans. They do it out of obdurate stupidity, petty malice, or that Clarkeian event horizon in which they become indistinguishable from one another. He backed off because people were mad as hell, and the Democrats in Congress were both pissed about the measure and REALLY pissed that he’d put the party in that position in the first place. I don’t normally link to Huffpo and I’m normally even less inclined to recommend the comments, but check them out- the mixture of outrage, people that simply refuse to believe that it could be anything but a vicious Republican lie that Obama would do such a thing, and bizarre “this is all somehow actually Bush’s fault” is fascinating.

The day’s got one bright spot now- Ursula Vernon’s fantasy/adventure/? comic “Digger” has now gone to its own site free of subscription, as it was housed on the subscription-only section of Graphic Smash before.

This comic is very worth your time if fantasy is your thing, and you should still give it a try if it’s not. Ursula Vernon is a fantasy artist and author with a delightfully bent sense of humor; it is she who has given us Battle Hamsters, the entire series of paintings of what can only be described as “very active fruit”, and the pink lizards that seem to exist mostly to goggle at large weird things. The art lives here and is technically extremely good aside from just being funny and/or nifty.

Anyway, Digger. This is the story for you if what you’ve always really liked in a hero is relentless sensibleness; the main character is an anthropomorphic wombat (though it’s not quite accurate to call it a “furry” comic) who can only be called the personification of “down to earth”. The comic is pretty difficult to describe; I can tell you that there’s a tribe of anthropomorphic hyenas, an oracular slug, vampire vegetables, a selection of gods with the main god involved being Ganesh, a very sweet and innocent demon, and a lot of veiled monks that may or may not be bugnuts, and that Digger is trying to get home with as little involvement in the machinations of all of them as she can get away with, but that doesn’t really get the comic across. I can also tell you that the artist/author has an anthropology degree and it REALLY, REALLY shows in her construction of the world and the cultures in it- and in touches like the vampire vegetables, which believe it or not are a Balkan folklore reference. The biology she brings to the various sapient animal races is extremely accurate, too, and woven into the culture.

And did I mention the art is very pretty? It is. It doesn’t exactly suck on the first page, but improves a lot in both style and quality over time. Go read it- I’m about to reread the entire archive, now that I can.

P.S. LawDog? I am very certain you will like this.

OH SWEET SCINTILLATING SHIVA I AM A WEAK WOMAN I CANNOT STOP MYSELF.

Combine this excerpt from this slobbering journalistic fellatio of Obama:

President Obama has done more in eight weeks than George W. Bush did in eight years — unless you include starting a couple of wars.

While the armchair quarterbacks second guess the new president, he gets up every day and does things, lots of things.

Whether it’s creating commissions for women and girls, ordering the investigation of President Bush’s use of signing statements, or jamming a huge stimulus package through Congress, the man is working his tail off. And he seems to be loving every minute of it. It’s almost as though our president was born to do exactly what he’s doing.

And this They Might Be Giants short:

And I think I might have a new nickname for our fearless leader.

I’d really like to get something else written on a NON-political subject today, but I really can’t let this one slide:

Soldiers and veterans: only necessary until 11/5/2008.

When I posted earlier on the Obama administration’s brilliant plan to stop paying for treatment for veterans wounded in the course of duty, I had kind of figured that this wasn’t so much Obama’s idea as it was some lower-level wonk on his team of lefties writing a bad decision into the budget, and that the administration would promptly back off it and throw the feckless ideologue on the growing pile of bodies under the bus as soon as the story went public.

I was wrong. The Best Plan Ever is, in fact, Obama’s Best Idea Ever- which he defended to the face of the American Legion representative that met with him in an attempt to talk him out of this boondoggle. Obama knows the moral arguments, he just doesn’t want to hear ‘em- because he plans to save five hundred and forty million with this cost-saving measure.

Think about that number for a bit. The budget includes six hundred billion plus of health care spending- including 19 billion, I really wish to emphasize that, for… converting all medical records to electronic format, which many hospitals and practices are doing anyway on their own dime. Better yet, it includes as one of eight principles for Congress in drafting health care legislations- this is a direct quote- “Aim for universality”.

Unless, of course, you were hurt in the course of defending the country, or if you want to put it in more cynical terms, risking your life to do the government’s bidding. In that case, you are on your own- and good luck finding coverage, that’s a dangerous job, you know.

Un. Fucking. Believable. Even to me.

Way back in the earlier days of the blog, I expressed my wish for a demon-fighting rabbi. My logic then was, I believe, sound: books and movies are already chockablock with Catholics of varying degrees of toughness that more or less stand in as the forces of Good against Evil, and they are mostly Catholic apparently because Catholics get uniforms and they have the most atmospheric churches. It’s not as if there are no Protestant demoninations that believe in demons and witchcraft, but unfortunately for them they mostly get to be the bad guys in “religion gone wrong” movies. This is what happens when you build pug-ugly churches and have bad hair and no cool outfits.

Anyway, Orthodox Jews, I felt, would make excellent Good Guys in your standard demon situation for a lot of the same reasons the Catholics do, and if they experienced any crisis of faith stuff at all at least their angst would hinge on new and interesting theological points. Well, someone else thinks so: meet Hereville, self-described as “yet another troll-fighting eleven-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl comic”. It’s a little more Buffy than Exorcist, but after a read-through of the first volume posted so far, the author/artist is either Orthodox himself or has *really* done the research, and I’m likin’ it so far. It looks like what’s posted won’t go any further as a webcomic and is mostly meant to be a starting point for a proper comic title, but it’s worth your time if you’ve similar tastes, and I’ll be waiting for the (very) expanded paper edition.

It takes a little while to get going. Be patient, it’s worth it.

Jason the devil tattoo artist just spent some three hours and change outlining the next phase of my lower leg tattoo on the inside, from just below my knee to just above my ankle and plenty of detail all the way. Since for work on my calf I had to lie on my stomach, for once I was facing the screen playing the movies Jason likes to run during sessions and was actually able to watch. So here are capsule reviews of the afternoon’s selections, which I assure you are not at all influenced or biased by circumstances.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Beginning: R. Lee Ermey delivers a surprisingly good performance as a Crazy Evil Sheriff that may well unseat my love for Ron Perlman playing basically the same role in Desperation. This movie is almost nonstop graphic, frequently pointless violence and psychological abuse of the characters and where it’s not that it’s suspense because you know graphic pointless violence and psychological abuse are coming in a minute or so. The main characters that aren’t psychopaths are a collection of one competent guy who is immediately identified by the killers as such and is the first to die, along with Captain Useless, his girlfriend the Loud Mannequin, and Worthless Woman. I had a brief moment of sympathy for Somewhat Competent Guy while he was getting skinned alive, but otherwise watching them die horribly was highly entertaining.

Verdict: The only possible way this movie could have been improved would have been by removing what little backstory there is. These people are all perfectly hateable enough without details.

300: Holy fucking shit Spartans like to talk and pose epically a lot. Talk talk TALK they never shut up. Also “you can’t go defend our civilization because it’s not war season” is the stupidest fucking reason for plot conflict I have EVER heard of in the entire multiverse.

Verdict: This movie needed a lot more battle scenes and a lot less boring emotional crap.