The parking garages whose construction was used to justify the large increase in parking fees are now reserved for metered parking and faculty. the large garage for the Convocation Center is frequently unusable by students due to sporting events.

Which brings us to this.

One of the few remaining parking lots available to students at ODU.

Moments after this picture was taken my radiator hose broke.

Moments after that...it began to sleet.

3 hours after discovering just how awkwardly placed a Cressida's aft radiator hose is....I got home.

It's been one of those days. I may not get to sleep before work...in 3 hours.

Math egzam 2morrow...ghaaah!

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Over at Colleen Doran's Facebook page it is mentioned that someone is making the claim that they contributed creatively to her book (A Distant Soil ) and have had credit denied them.

No.

Reading this post it is clear to me that I know the person in question. He worked in her mail room. I know this because I worked briefly in the mail room. I know this because he was briefly a business partner of mine and I spent a decade paying off the bills he left me with. I know this because he tried to frame a friend of mine for Kiddie Pr0n. (Read the whole thing.)

As far as I know the only contribution he made to the comic book was applying zipatone (badly), packing boxes, running a table at conventions and a lot of unwelcome drama. He was fired primarily for passing himself off as a creative contributor. This was a highly dishonorable and quite deliberate act. His termination was over a decade ago.

I'm not going to name the fink unless he attempts something else, but as  my friend found out to his dismay, this fellow has a nasty habit of holding grudges and acting on them in a potentially very destructive and always quite passive aggressive manner. He is exceedingly good at passing himself off as harmless and likeable. He is neither.

So let me state that if you've encountered the claim that an affable, seemingly innocent fan is an uncredited contributor to A Distant Soil it is not in any way true and the gentleman's affability is an astoundingly convincing mask concealing a dark dark soul. 

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Exam day. I have no time but there is a full-on old-fashioned filibuster going on now.

This is a really compelling speech.

It may well be a historic one.

Senator/Doctor Paul is going to talk till he drops, or the President states categorically that he rejects drone strikes on American citizens. More here.

C-Span feed here.


"...are signature strikes going to be the standard for law enforcement?"


Interestingly, Drudge posts a headline with just the correct amount of hype.
more...

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Midterms are upon me.
I have nothing, and will likely have nothing until Friday or Saturday.

As compensation for this, here is some publicity art for Yamato 2199 which I post with some trepidation as the LAST bit of Yamato 2199 cheesecake somehow caused a bit of consternation. Apologies in advance gentle readers for any distress.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 09:21 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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For some time now, I've noted that my 13 month old niece really likes my red T-shirt for some reason. Seeng me in it brings a big smile to her face. As a result, I've kept it handy and only worn it when she shows up.

You can imagine my horror when my sister relayed to me that my niece recently identified her colors as blue, green, yellow and "Unc".

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 09:11 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Usagi Drop is no longer available on Crunchyroll, but it is available for purchase on DVD.
This is an impressive release with the 4 dvd only episodes, and an artbook.




To my considerable dismay, Squid Girl Season 2 (volume 3 of the DVD) seems to be cancelled. This is old news but I'd missed it. I'm not the only one. At least one other person I know was still expecting a March release.

It seems it was cancelled about two weeks after the release date was announced back in November.

This is one to look forward too. It's a surprisingly thoughtful and well paced show.

Additional Yamato related cheesecake below the fold.

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...with some contraption that looks like someone crossed a xylophone and a zither to produce some bizarre and unnatural hybrid.

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I want to start a band with a Harpsichord, a Ukelele, a Dulcimer, a Clavichord, a Theremin, an Armonica, a Calliope and a set of Bagpipes.

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Via Ace of Spades: There is an article on tankery in the Wall Street Journal.

^{"Best...article...EVAH!"}

_{Enthusiastic young lady is Yukari Akiyama from Girls ind Panzer.}

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...the tweet being mocked here is depressing and not a little frightening. 

Bob Woodward of course is one of the reporters who took down Nixon. This is major 20th century history, and history it seems is at least as poorly understood by our polity as civics.

Of course one might ask why Bob Woodward came up in casual conversation and then one would find oneself in the middle of something even more disturbing.



Worse it involves  #politics.....so we'll continue this below the fold.

 
more...

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 04:31 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Ben at Midnight Tease just revealed a dark secret about himself. However, we won't hold that character flaw against him as he has been doing an interesting day by day post of the battle of the Alamo. He's up to day 5: here, here, here, here and here.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 09:20 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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...that's making the rounds, is here. Everybody else on the starboard side of the blogosphere seems to be missing two, which is much better than most Americans.

• Full Civic Literacy Exam (from our 2008 survey)

  Are you more knowledgeable than the average citizen? The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking the following test was 49%; college educators scored 55%. Can you do better? Questions were drawn from past ISI surveys, as well as other nationally recognized exams.

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Despite the music choice this AMV is actually surprisingly faithful to Song of the Sky....and yet it is COMPLETELY misleading as to what sort of tale this thoughtful and inspiring show is.

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As one of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes points out, "Boom!" does not do justice to what may be coming to the planet Mars.

"2x10¹⁰ Megatons is hard to visualize so think of it as being about this much 'splody."

It seems that recently discovered fast parabolic comet C/2013 A3 is going to pass pretty close to Mars. Exceedingly close. Best guess now has it passing within 63,000 miles of Mars. However the margin of error in plotting its course due to uncertainties about it's mass, its extreme speed and the limited time this object has been observed mean that the cone pf probability extends from 74,000 miles out from Mars to 0.000 miles.  This is much closer to Mars than the moon is to Earth.

The comet is moving exceedingly fast and is a retrograde orbit to boot so its relative velocity is around 35 miles per second, or 5 TIMES Earth escape velocity!

Since C/2013 A1 is a hyperbolic comet and moves in a retrograde orbit, its velocity with respect to the planet will be very high, approximately 56 km/s. With the current estimate of the absolute magnitude of the nucleus M2 = 10.3, which might indicate the diameter up to 50 km, the energy of impact might reach the equivalent of staggering 2×10¹º megatonnes! This kind of event can leave a crater 500 km across and 2 km deep. Such an event would overshadow even the famous bombardment of Jupiter by the disintegrated comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 in July 1994, which by some estimates was originally 15 km in diameter. - See more at: http://spaceobs.org/en/2013/02/25/comet-c2013-a1-siding-spring-a-possible-collision-with-mars/#sthash.SS7W2n7v.dpuf

The comet is 50 clicks across (by comparison the "Dinosaur Killer" was only 10 clicks in diameter). This would be a planet changing event.

Scott Lowther has thoughts on what the (admittedly unlikely) impact might mean for ambient Martian atmospheric pressure. Assuming it didn't blow the atmosphere clean off, it could be interesting indeed.

In any event, with a magnitude of 8.0 as seen from Earth, the comet should be visible with the naked eye in rural areas, which means we get a neat show regardless of whether it hits.

_{"Science Babe" is Shizune Hachimaki, from Katawa Shoujo.}

Since C/2013 A1 is a hyperbolic comet and moves in a retrograde orbit, its velocity with respect to the planet will be very high, approximately 56 km/s. With the current estimate of the absolute magnitude of the nucleus M2 = 10.3, which might indicate the diameter up to 50 km, the energy of impact might reach the equivalent of staggering 2×10¹º megatonnes! This kind of event can leave a crater 500 km across and 2 km deep. Such an event would overshadow even the famous bombardment of Jupiter by the disintegrated comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 in July 1994, which by some estimates was originally 15 km in diameter. - See more at: http://spaceobs.org/en/2013/02/25/comet-c2013-a1-siding-spring-a-possible-collision-with-mars/#sthash.SS7W2n7v.dpu

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 10:21 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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It seems that Seven Seas Entertainment has picked up several new titles including Monster Musume no Iru Nichijou.



I note that all the titles involve monster girls. I was unaware that this was "a thing" (I mean outside of 4chan and Pixiv ). This is a genre now?

We live in interesting times.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 11:01 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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While virtuously scouring the internet for content to further the causes of science and liberty, I, by merest happenstance, encountered this...

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 09:55 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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I'm massively busy and may not be online for the rest of the week. However, I note that Steven Den Beste has made an argument  which, although, admittedly compelling, is nevertheless one I cannot allow to go unanswered.

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Just got this via twitter.

CNN.com is reporting this afternoon that NASA has lost contact with the International Space Station.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 04:30 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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The Google Bubble is is explained here. Note that it's basically an ad for Duck-Duck Go, but it does explain the problem succinctly.

How bad can it get?

I noticed hadn't cleared my search history or cookies all year when a recent search on my computer for BAD APPLE CHINESE resulted in Newt Gingrich vs. Piers Morgan  and a search for AMVs in general included Bill Whittle videos.

No doubt someone to the left of me would be getting Obama hymns and  such.

It can be somewhat mitigated by clearing ones search history and all cookies periodically.

 On the political level this means that getting people to change their minds about things political is going to be even more of a herculean task than is discussed here, here, here and here.

On a rather more profound level it cannot be good for the nations polarization or getting people to change their minds about important things like immunizations and GM foods.

This is a huge structural problem, but I'm at a loss as to what to do about it.

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