The Wordsmith's Forge

I'm intrigued about this article on making egg cells from stem cells or bone marrow.  It has potential to allow reproduction for some people who can't reproduce the usual way.

Ray Harryhausen has passed away.  He was one of the greatest special effects artists ever.  I still think his original Clash of the Titans  looks better than the new CGI version, although I haven't figured out how to explain why.  I suspect it may be some quality of art that has nothing to do with technical anything.

He will be sorely missed down here, and welcomed with much rejoicing at the Great Con in the Sky.

 I find this solar-powered airplane encouraging.  Link courtesy of my partner Doug.

Here's an awesome article about sex and disability.  I'm impressed to see a bunch of average people taking most of their clothes off -- people who aren't spectacularly thin or beautiful, who look like real everyday people.  World always needs more of this.

The article also reminded me of Brenda in P.I.E. because, while I haven't written about her having sex yet, I have always written her as a sexy woman.  She knows how to dress hot when she wants to, and she has no trouble attracting male attention, even if 2/3 of them are dumbasses.  And she's picked the nice guy, so yay.

jewelfox tipped me to the search engine DuckDuckGo.  I am intrigued by its pyramid structure.  That is: it tends to put a definition and some likely hits at the top of the page, then other things underneath.  The visual interface is more legible than average too.

... is no more.  Now this was clearly fair use, in the category of satire (though not with the snarky tone usually applied to that), but those rights are useless if you don't have the money and energy to defend them.  Copyright owners rely on that.  So now nobody gets to enjoy those fanworks anymore.  This is where copyright stops being an asset (by protecting creators' right to profit from their work) and becomes a liability (by stifling creativity and cultural growth).  There was no profit being made.  It was just for fun.

Think about how much of modern culture is a reprise of things that have been done before, a way to take apart and re-imagine what we already have.  Except a handful of people keep taking things away, so there is less for everyone to work with.  That's a problem.

I am becoming increasingly fond of creators who show up and go, "I made a thingie.  Let's everyone play."  If it's a cool thingie and I like watching other folks play with it or I play with it myself, I'm morely likely to want to support it and fund more of it.  I am less and less inclined to spend my very limited funds on conventionally copyrighted material.  I still buy some of it.  But I'm buying less, and the bar is rising, and most of what I buy is stuff that I got hooked on a long time ago.  It's just less likely to feel worthy of my attention.

Food companies do intensive research to discover how to hook people into buying food -- even if that food is very harmful to them.  This is the kind of behavior that results from basing a company exclusively on profit, without requiring it to be beneficial or at least harmless to the population.  You're just a meat sack for money.  They don't care if they kill you.

 Here's an article about controlling technology with the mind.  Manipulating objects, okay, that's fairly safe.  Telepathy?  I'm counting on the fact that new advances usually start at the slow and stupid end of the spectrum, because that's not something most people are equipped to handle.