Amethyst's Shiny Pebbles

I've started watching Forest of Piano on Netflix. I'm just two episodes in, but I'm enjoying it. It's similar in feel to some sports anime: you have The Brilliant Kid, their Close Friend and Competitor Who's Good Because They Work Really Hard, and given the opening credits we'll probably meet Other Competitors soon. It's a nice change from my usual action-adventure fare. The fate of the world isn't at stake, and the piano playing is really quite good.

So we just finished watching Reichenbach Fall (conclusion to Episode 3 of Season 2.  You know.  That one).

<deep breath>
( Spoilers for end of season 2 if you care about that. )

Oh.  I am still alive.  Worky work.  Cats.  Some sewing stuff.  Singing going well.  The usual.  It's even raining!

So!  Lots of stuff to talk about.

• As intimated in a couple of earlier posts, I now have job security!  Starting on 2/22, I'll be joining a sequencing group at my current university.  Life has apparently changed quite a bit in the sequencing world; instead of running a single reaction in a single lane (or capillary), I'll be doing Illumina-style library sequencing - hundreds and hundreds of little reactions, all in a single - very expensive - lane.  (My current professor is a little sad at the cost of materials for the project I'm doing now - about $30K for the large amounts of the two most expensive components.  It will take us about a month and a half to two months to go through those materials and complete the study.  At my new job, when I've run two of these Illumina cartridges, with about eight "lanes" for each of them, I will have gone through a roughly equal cost in materials, and I bet I'll do that on my very first day.) 
  I'm excited, naturally; among other things, I'll be working with one of the people from my *last* position, at the Genome Center.  But at the moment, the sequencing group is a little understaffed; I'll be employee #3 in the group.  I'm also nervous, of course: with the cost of materials involved, I'm terrified of making mistakes.  But it'll be neat to pick up a new set of skills.  I know that I do pretty well with process work, so I think I'll be reasonably content.  Wish me luck!

• I have a working hypothesis for the itchy spreading red area around my cat bite.  I took off the bandage that the hospital had put over the bite to show my doctor Monday evening.  He didn't have any of these fancy bandages, so gave me a different sort, which I took off later to shower.  As the bite had pretty well closed up, I didn't bother putting a new bandage on.  The redness mostly went away.  A day or two later after I showered, I noticed that the remaining red area (inflamed a bit by the hot shower, and so more noticeable than previously) had an unusual shape to it that exactly followed the outline of the bandage.  I'd forgotten that my mother, my brother, and I all have sensitive skin, but I would bet that I have a contact allergy to some component of Coverlet Adhesive Dressing, probably the adhesive.  Oh, and doxycyclene is kinder to my system than clindamycin and sulfameth were.  I'll still be glad to be done with antibiotics, but, well...

• Check out the videos at Nova's Making Stuff miniseries site.  David Pogue has been hosting a series of programs on materials science, and the third program aired this past week.  Full episodes about making stuff stronger, smaller, and cleaner are available online, and making stuff smarter is next week.  This week's episode on 'cleaner' had no fewer than three jaw-dropping moments for me (one each in new methods of car component production, plastic bag reuse, and fuel cell development), and is well worth your time.

Real Men Watch Princess Tutu:

"Holy hell this is the manliest show ever. Its got people getting their hearts ripped out, evil ravens, knights, fables, romantic subplots, dancing, ballerina princesses. YEA YOU HEARD ME. Characters. Loads of characters more characters than you know what to do with. Too many characters? TOO BAD. You want music? Tutu's got it. You want hot blooded rock music? Get that weak sauce out of here. This show has Tchaikovsky. Does your show have Tchaikovsky? Hell no, you probably can't even pronounce Tchaikovsky. This is manlier than a lumberjack flossing with barbed wire and anybody who says otherwise just can't handle it. WATCH PRINCESS TUTU."

What?  No being on a horse, there at the end?

Last night was Not Fun.  ( TMI )

I wonder if the show title "Save Me! Lollipop" would sound half as bizarre if I weren't running a moderate fever?

Anyone have ideas for non-HuluPlus shows that would be particularly amusing?

Just watched the pilot episode of the live-action version of The Tick.  My brain hurts now.  It walks an extremely fine line between funny and just plain stupid, and I honestly can't decide whether I like it or not.  I wanted a break from Samurai Champloo, though, of which I've watched a somewhat astonishing seven episodes in the last couple of days.  It's good - it's very good, particularly Lullabies of the Lost (verses 1 and 2), which made me cry.  But I decided to watch something different; watching the pilot of Magic Knights Rayearth just didn't quite cut it for me, despite having rather enjoyed episodes of it courtesy of hoshikage  back in grad school.

(The things you do while waiting for your system to recover from stomach bug.  Which it basically has now.  Hmmm, more soup?)

Home sick again today.  Better than yesterday, but I figured that staying home and continuing to rest was the better part of valor, and indeed I am going back to bed soon.  However, I wanted tea first, and having discovered yesterday that one of the cartoon series that I enjoyed watching as a kid, Voltron, was up on Hulu, I picked an episode at random and watched it as I drank my tea.

Wow.  Talk about gender stereotyping and massive inefficiency, not to mention bad science.

In the episode that I picked, "The Lion Has New Claws," all five of the lions are piloted by guys.  (Admittedly, one of them is some random kid, but still.)  The Galactic Council is all white males.  The good guys and bad guys appear to have one token interesting female each - the princess on the good-guy side (who will, in fairness, end up piloting one of the lions) and the witch on the bad-guy side.  (And the princess has an Older White Male to advise her, of course.)  There are other women on the good-guy side, but they're all effectively peasants and mothers, no figures of power.  Because the bad guys are aliens (and this particular episode showed very few of them) it's hard to tell whether there are any non-powerful women at all.

Inefficiency: Why do the pilots (1) have a drop-tube down to their individual transit vehicles, which (2) then take them to the lions?  Wouldn't it be more convenient to park the lions on the palace grounds?  (3) Why do they go through announcing the procedure of forming Voltron every time?  Why not just do it?  Everyone knows which part they're supposed to be.  Oh... It's so the writers have to come up with that many fewer seconds of actual plot!

Bad science: Yeah, it's sci-fi/adventure, I know.  But nonetheless, you have to laugh in disbelief when the witch tells her monster-of-the-day "It's only ten million light years to Planet Ares.  We'll be there in a matter of moments."

I think my brain just lost a few IQ points.  Now, will I risk further damage by picking up what will no doubt end up being further horrendously stereotyped episodes of those gotta-buy-them-all cartoons, He-Man and She-Ra, also currently up on Hulu?

I stayed home today with the vague cold-like sensation of having no energy at all.  (This, after coming home early from work yesterday, after having spent the morning making sure that whatever I worked on could be easily fixed/recovered if I did something appallingly stupid - which meant I mostly did sequence analysis and figure-building.)  I went back to bed for about an hour after dropping Huz off at the train station, and spent the remainder of the day largely hanging out at the computer.  I designed a few different itineraries to NZ and Australia to see what dates and order did to prices.  I watched Season Two Episode One of Dollhouse over on hulu, which was overall not bad TV but I made sure to visit Wikipedia afterwards to find out more of who exactly these people were.  And I played a fair amount of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2, which, some 70+ battles in, continues to be extremely engaging.  Didn't play any Scribblenauts today, though I did last night.  I continue to find the lexicon impressive, though aspects of control are less intuitive than might be desired.  Also, there's a HUGE difference in difficulty between the Puzzle levels (e.g. Reunite the girl with her kitten on the roof) and the Action levels (Starite is shown, need to overcome various difficult and/or dangerous obstacles to acquire it) within the same relative set. 

More energetic tonight than last night.  I cleaned the bathroom, at least partly, and swept the floor while getting an education on flavors of Linux.  Me, I like chocolate.  Does anyone make a chocolate-flavored Unix?

• It's kind of wrong for a torture scene to be screamingly funny.  Brilliant, brilliant writing.

• Jeez, what kind of insane high Constitution does Malcolm have??!?  Between this and "Out of Gas," Huz and I figure it's around 30 or so.

• Book can shoot!  Somewhat more surprisingly, so can River!

• Angst yet again that there were so few episodes of this fine, fine show.

Just watched the pilot episode of Firefly over on hulu.

Wow. Total awesomeness. Much more our style than Buffy.  Can't wait to watch more!