Cool Links
- Saving Desert Tortoises from Extinction - Desert tortoises are facing a threat from growing numbers of ravens in the Mojave desert. Why so many ravens? They follow people, who provide things like dumpsters with delicious (to a raven) offerings. But the ravens also enjoy eating tortoises and that's putting these little guys in danger. A man has made it his life's mission to protect the tortoises, not by harming the ravens but by using "aversive training" - making the environment so unpleasant they choose to move on elsewhere. Tools in his arsenal include artifical grape flavoring (which ravens apparently hate), green laser lights and 3D printed decoy turtles. Interesting short documentary (16 minutes) and I appreciate how it shows you don't have to kill one species to save another species - you can achieve that objective by merely annoying the crap out of it.
- The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age - We are creating more data than ever before but it's also more ephemeral than what we produced in the past. From the digital media the data is stored on becoming obsolete to corporations wiping out massive amounts of information (Yahoo killing GeoCities, MTV taking 20 years worth of music news offline, MySpace deleting everything prior to 2016 are just a few examples) our data can disappear in a blink of an eye. This article goes into what we should save, how it should be saved and why we need to save it in the first place.
- 109 Love Letters - Kind of tying into the idea of data we create being saved, this website was created to catalog letters that a woman found at a flea market. She bought one bundle, realized that some were from the same person writing to another, and went back to see if the seller had any more. They did and she ended up buying 109 letters which were found in an old trunk. They were written between 1905-1910 from Daisy to John (unfortunately, there are no copies of letters from John back to Daisy). The letters give an interesting look into what life was like at the turn of the last century. I'm not sure if all the letters have been posted and it's been several years since the site owner posted.
Quite a while ago I put a link up on my Fun Links section of the page that leads to coloring pages provided by various museums and libraries. There are some really cool ones available and I've been wanting to do some adult coloring for a while but somehow just never got to it. Well, I finally got around to it! I printed out a few, got out the huge box of Prismacolor pencils that were my mom's, loaded up a new podcast and started coloring away. Man, I should have done that sooner. It was so relaxing!
I don't think it really comes through in the picture but the sea monster has been colored with metallics. And I tried to give the water some depth by using 3 colors - a dark blue to color over the wave marks, a lighter green blue on top of some of the waves and the rest aquamarine. I have said before that I am no artist but I kind of like how this came out and it is currently hanging on my fridge. Not all the images available are as cool as man-eating sea monsters but there's definitely something for everyone if you just search around the directories.
I've been wanting to listen to a new audio drama/podcast but I haven't found anything that really appealed. I like science fiction/fantasy mostly. I'm not into horror although I tried to make my way through Tanis. I love the podcast series put out by DUST but they haven't put out a new series in a while. And I almost feel like The Fourth Ambit has spoiled me for anything else because it was SO GOOD. But, while I was looking for something to listen to while coloring I came across Ostium. A man finds a strange place while playing GeoGuesser, actually travels to it, and finds a town full of doors that lead to other places. I made it through episode 4 and so far it is really good!
The Center for Science and the Imagination on the ASU campus has started up their monthly History of the Future movie nights. Wednesday was the first of this semester's series and they showed Silent Running. I have a soft spot for that movie because I can remember watching it with my mom as a very young child. Admittedly, I didn't get much out of it at that point due to age. I was more impressed with the little drones. The speaker before the movie was a professor of environmental humanities and I wish I had taken notes because her talk was so interesting! What I do remember is she compared the closed system of the ship in the movie to the Biosphere 2 experiment in 1991 and talked about how one of the failure points in closed systems are people. Anyway, cool movie, good memories and, for a 70s movie, it wasn't too long and meandering. Rollerball, while I enjoyed it, felt like it was 14 hours long.
I keep meaning to mention that I fairly recently saw My Neighbor Totoro! I had never seen it before although I could recognize the figures of Totoro and the Catbus. Oh my gosh, that was such a delightful, sweet movie! Anime is a newish thing for me so I haven't seen a whole lot. On my own I watched Kiki's Delivery Service and I have my son to thank for introducing me to some cool stuff like Demon Slayer, Made in Abyss and Redline.
Reading
I finally finished Shadowheart, the last book in Tad William's epic Shadowmarch series. Oh, it ended so well! I know I had my doubts about the series when I first started it but I'm so glad I stuck with it. It was ... wow, just quite a ride. After being in an epic series like that for part of July and most of August, I felt the need to read something a little lighter. I'm currently reading Familiars, an anthology from a small press, Zombies Need Brains. I've Kickstarted several of his series because the anthologies are always so good! This book is about, as you could probably guess from the title, magic users' familiars. The story I just read had both a squid and a trilobite as familiars! This is just the mental palate cleanser I need after coming out of that epic fantasy.
Watching
Well, I'm trying to finish up My Life is Murder but Roku sucks. I bought an Acorn subscription through Roku. When it renewed, it bumped me out and made me log back in. And has refused to recognize my log in credentials. Roku is full of unhelpful advice. Restarting the Roku and resetting the network connection did nothing. Try deleting the app and reinstalling. But wait, I can't delete the app, there's no remove option! Oh, that comes back after you are no longer subscribed. (Insert the sideiest of side eyes at Roku). I have a Roku Ultra hooked up to the TV. I downloaded the stupid app on my phone, was able to remove the channel from the app, reinstalled it on the TV and ... no dice. It still doesn't want to accept my credentials. Judging from the web searching I've done, this has been on ongoing problem with Roku. I found complaints about this going back for several years. I can still get on Acorn - on my iPad, on my phone, on my computer. Just not on the damn Roku! So freaking annoying.
In the meantime, I've started on season 3 of Slow Horses. I may have mentioned this before but this show is so good!
I think that about wraps it up for this week!