Anatomy of Kaiju

No, not Steve (god, Steve!).  The other kaiju. Mythic fiction author and editor Midori Snyder posted an article on her blog this morning about Yōkai Daizukai, an illustrated encyclopedia of Japanese monsters. Intrigued, I checked out her source, (pinktentacle.com):

authored by manga artist Shigeru Mizuki, [it] features a collection of cutaway diagrams showing the anatomy of 85 traditional monsters from Japanese folklore (which also appear in Mizuki’s GeGeGe no Kitarō anime/manga). 

I'm incredibly amused by the preview entries. But it only makes sense ... the only thing that rivals the Japanese aesthetic for bizarre creatures is the old D&D Monster Manual. I wonder if there's a correlation there ... perhaps Gygax and crew consumed too much wasabi at some point, and it pickled their brains. That would explain the Rust Monster, wouldn't it?

For the record, the Kijimunaa is much cuter in Devil Survivor. (Really, what would a Shin Megami game be without fairy-demons?)

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Fun OCW Classes at ND

Did you know Notre Dame has a free, non-credited, online class in Creole Language and Culture? Or one on Reinveting the Fairy Tale?  Crime, Heredity and Insanity in American History could be fun, too.

I find these ... intriguing.

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Grammar geekery

It's all worth it for the last panel. (Click to embiggen.)

(Bitches!)

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Geek of the Week

A very quick note: Lowell Francis is officially the Geek of the Week. No, really.

Hint: If you go to RPG Geek / GeekDo and post questions on that thread, I'm pretty sure he's legally required to answer them. Several of his players have already joined the RPGG regulars in attempting to whittle his typing fingers down to nubs.

And now ... back to impossible deadlines.

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New SMT on the horizon

/Squee!



What is that, you say? Why is this cause for glee?

Why, it is a new Shin Megami Tensei game for the DS. It comes out in February 2010. And the writeup compares it to SMT: Nocturne, which is officially The Best Game Ever Made. And really, that's all I needed to know.

It will be mine. Oh yes. I am counting the days already.

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And a Good Day to You

Happy Tuesday!

Funny how things happen... I was just talking about Kula Shaker the other day with some friends -- the recent Rock Band: Beatles has KS heavy on my mind again. And then today Will was happy to pass on that they're releasing two Kula Shaker songs for RB 2! /squee!

Before I was obsessing over weird Finnish bands, I was obsessed with a weird Brit-pop band who was, in turn, obsessed with the Beatles and Indian spirituality. The whole thing also re-sparked a cyclical interest of my own in Hindu mythology, and, as it happened, helped me work through my own issues as I watched a good friend die of cancer. This year, 2009, happens to be the 10-year anniversary of both D's death and the last Kula Shaker album before they split. (The band is back together, now, but they've lost a lot of the original magic, IMO.)

So. This week I'm happy to report we're getting "Hey Dude" and "Knight on the Town," both off the album K. I'm very pleased by the selection of "Hey Dude," honestly. It's a fun song. I really hope we'll see more of the old stuff in the future. I don't know how well they'd translate for the other band pieces, but I'd love to sing "Tattva" and "Govinda" off of K and "Great Hosannah," "Timeworm," or "108 Battles" off of Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts. Actually, I suspect they deliberately chose some of the least Indian-influenced songs ... most of their lyrics aren't terribly subtle. Ah well.

In other retro-awesome news, I saw Monica's post on FlamesRising.com -- ABC is rebooting the "V" series. Remember? Leezards with stylish black shades and an appetite for rats? Robert Englund playing the bumbling vegetarian Visitor? The unsubtle manipulations of Diana and Lydia? Robin's half-Visitor baby? Yeah ... I loved that series. Sadly, my father saw an episode where the Visitors locked a patsy in a coffin with a dead body and ejected it into space. After that I could only watch it when neither parent was home. /sigh

--
Qwertial aphasia edit: It's Robert Englund, not William. Don't want Freddy Krueger bugging me about that one. Nope.

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Abhoth and Azathoth and the Dunwich Horror, Oh My!

I have played Arkham Horror + the Dunwich Horror expansion two nights in a row. Once with Cher Mere and her husband (we won, yay!), and once with Will, running two characters each (we got nommed, boo!).

Both were unusually long games. The first night, we faced off against Abhoth, and despite Nurse Heather making life rough for Cher Mere at the asylum (hee), it went fairly well over all. The second night was a slow but inevitable trainwreck. A series of tragedies, if you will. There was some amusement -- I ran into Nurse Sharon at the hospital, and good old Carolyn Fern-the-Psychologist (sanest woman you'll ever meet, but OMG is she slow) ended up as a super-prepared monster hunter -- but Azathoth feasted well that night, nonetheless. To give you an idea of how the entire game went, Will got poor Bob Jenkins unceremoniously gacked by pulling an Abyss encounter that sent everyone's favorite salesman to visit cranky, cranky Azathoth, who, as it turns out, was feeling rather peckish.

That card only takes effect if Azathoth is the Ancient One in play, by the way. /sigh

We also woke up the Dunwich Horror, who is a jerk. You can quote me on that. When you face him, you pull randomly from a small stack of possible configurations. The one I chose was immune to physical damage, I believe, and required five successful hits to take him down. Argh.

In other news, there were pastries from West End Bakery at work this morning. So delicious...

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Reusable Keurig cups

Okay, this is kind of cool -- a way to reuse Keurig K-Cups. We have a Keurig brewer at work, and I'm not particularly fond of most of the brews my office-mates pick, so half the time I end up mixing hot chocolate and coffee for a poor-girl's mocha-thing. If I could reuse the cups and fill them with delicious Kona or Dean & Deluca Charlotte ... oh, man, that would be a beautiful thing. This might be worth investigating...

Filed under geekery for the coffee geek in me.

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Geek Glee: LaTeX

Despite the deadline madness, I was able to attend the free workshop day of TUG 2009, the annual TeX Users Group conference. There were issues with the computer setup, so the presenters didn't have a working build of LaTeX to demonstrate for the first half of the day -- but that was okay, neither did I. Rather, I had the editing program but not the add-ons that allow you to actually "TeX" and view your formatted document. Still, after all the glitches, I did manage to get a full build on my laptop after lunch and then finally got to see what the coding I'd been faithfully copying down actually produced.

I am impressed and a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of tags and such in the language. One of the presenters made a point of commenting that LaTeX is much better at handling auto-numbering for sections and subsections than MS Word, but I'd have to dispute that point -- they both seem to work equally well, if you know what you're doing.

Another staffer of one of the academic departments attended the workshop as well, much to my delight. I don't generally have much contact with them outside of answering dissertation questions and fishing for publication updates. She offered to send me some files to practice my TeXing, so I'm looking forward to that. I'm also looking forward to deconstructing the dissertation class files and such that we have posted on our website to see if I can figure out how to fix the most common glitches. Better hurry on that though -- I have a standing offer from one of the presenters to try to catch her over the next few days for help if I can't figure it out on my own.

Also: I've been reading up on Visual Basic in MS Office and dang ... I think I've found my next project. Apparently I could write a macro to auto-format all the tables in a given document.

Glee!

In other news, going to see Harry Potter tonight with Edige and his sister. Should be fun!

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Oh yeaaah ... I'm an editor!

I received the files for a freelance job today, due by the end of the week. Woot! Both content editing and formatting, this time, for a dissertation meant for a different university. Nice. Here's hoping I can keep the taint of the internetz out of my editing long enough to get through the document.

This also gives me a chance to compare our formatting guide with the other school's, and our MS Word template vs. theirs. I'm already jealous of their fabulous formatting guide cover. (/sigh) My client pointed out some problems with their template that I managed to address with ours, as well, so I'll have to take a closer look at that as I go.

I also recently discovered that one of the changes from MS Word 2003 to 2007 seems to have perma-glitched my template's subheading settings for 2007 users, unless they use exactly what I've programmed into it and don't deviate from that at all. Which isn't very helpful, IMO. The previous system was incredibly intuitive, and the new version seems to have taken a perfectly reasonable, concrete setup option for programming subhead numbering and zapped it into a fine mist that permeates the program in a decentralized miasma.

Microsoft, I shake my fist at thee! Grr!

Also, I signed up for the TeX Users Group free workshop day for LaTeX. /happy dance!

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Geek-glee!

I finally hunkered down and installed MikTeX and TeXnicCenter on my XP machine at work yesterday, so I could start figuring out this LaTeX typesetting program. I expected it to be similar to HTML. As it turns out, it's more of a programming language than anything resembling a word processing application. I mean, it even has a compiler and everything -- I can't remember the last time I had to use a compiler. College, definitely. C++? Pascal? Hm, strangely fuzzy, that. Anyway. It's going to take a while to really get the hang of this, but it's already starting to make sense in small pieces.

And then! Imagine my reaction when I discovered, on the very next day, that the TeX User's Group is having their annual US conference at Notre Dame this summer. With a day of free workshops and everything! Glee!

Seriously, I literally giggled out loud with happiness and it took everything I had to not go to tell IT Guy the exciting news. I felt like such a geek.

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