Toren K. Smith

I read a review of the recently-published "Schulz and Peanuts" biography, which appears to portray him as cold, distant, occasionally womanizing, and plagued by chronic agoraphobia. It's not entirely filled with unflattering content, but several reviews I've seen gush at how it's the first real view that we've seen into this side of his personality.

Well, according to his family and friends, it's all a bunch of crap. They say they were interviewed extensively by the author, and their quotes were both distorted and cherry-picked in an attempt to further the author's view of Schulz.

Their rebuttal started out in the form of Monte Schulz (the eldest son) posting comments to a review on Cartoon Brew, and the discussion grew to include contributions from other children of Schulz, his widow, lifelong collaborators, fellow cartoonists, and fans who were lucky to interact with Sparky. Their anecdotes are almost all touching.

Here's the page with the comments. It's pretty clear that the comments therein contain a more accurate picture of the creator of Peanuts than the book does.

I'm sorry, everybody. I got the call this morning from the vet that Taura died.

For those who haven't heard, my cat Taura is very sick. She started showing real symptoms over the weekend, and I brought her into my regular vet on Monday, where she was diagnosed with liver failure due to hepatic lipidosis, presumably caused by her stopping eating at some point recently. This was complicated by her losing her ability to clot blood, making it impossible to safely install a feeding tube to reverse the liver damage. So, last night she received a blood transfusion which helped (but didn't totally fix) the clotting problem. Today she was transferred to a local internal medicine specialist who installed a temporary nasal feeding tube, with the hope that it'll get her recovered enough to be have the full feeding tube installed on Monday. They gave her about a 25-30% chance, which while low, was still higher than I expected after talking to other vets. It seems clear that she's getting the best care available.

I haven't given up hope, but I'm having a hard time with this. I've worried in the past about my difficulty making emotional attachments to other people, but I've learned this week that this does not extend to cats. It's also become clear that there's a large body of friends who love both me and Taura who are willing to help in any way they can, but taking advantage of such offers isn't one of my strong suits.

In the meantime, I'll try to post important updates here.

Hey, it seems that my favorite puzzle game from PalmOS has a web-based version!

Netwalk!

Now somebody needs to make a version for the Nintendo DS already.

I've been meaning to post this, but last Friday I won the 60-second category in our department's film festival. My entry ("Computer Dating") is available on that page as quicktime, and also on YouTube. While I was at it, I also posted the silent-film Aliens trailer that I made a while back.

About a year ago I went to Big Bend National Park with Wade and his friend Weber. I took about 9GB of pictures, and finally went through them to pick out good ones and clean them up.

The set is here.

Today I got mail from a person who downloaded Blocks from Hell, a game I haven't updated in nearly 9 years. He was confused by some of the documentation.

His problem? He downloaded an out-of-date version from some random website, and his documentation was over 14 years old. It referred to the "turbo button" that hasn't been seen on PCs in a good decade and a half.

"Oh, that version's much too old. You want the latest one -- it's only 9 years old."

Today the Wienermobile was on campus, so I took a bunch of pictures.

When I asked if I could take pictures of the interior, the girl in charge asked me somewhat skeptically "why do you want to?"

I just looked at her and said "because it's the wienermobile."

I went to _fool's 90s-themed party last night, and posted pictures from it on flickr.

Plus, I have a very stylish hat!

Well, it's been nearly six months since I've posted something, but that's the tradeoff when you're talking about content of this quality produced by someone of my laziness.

So, without further ado, here is the best thing I've seen on Wikipedia in a while:

Erdős–Bacon number.

First it was new Stand Alone Complex content, then a sequel to the LEGO Star Wars video game, and now there's confirmation that Futurama is coming back in 2008. I think my wish list may be complete.

All glory to the hypnotoad!

• This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
  
• Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
  
• This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
  
• What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
  
• The danger is in a particular location... it increases toward a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
  
• The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
  
• The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
  
• The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
  
• The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

(from Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the project to devise nuclear waste warning signs effective for 10,000+ years.)

I finally got around to posting a bunch of stuff on my Flickr account.

LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy has been announced, for release this Fall. Preview screenshots available here.

The developers have announced that the characters in LSW2 will have more distinct capabilities and attacks, e.g. Palpatine will invoke Force Lightning, and Vader can Force Choke.

Chewbacca's special melee attack is to rip LEGO enemies' arms out of their sockets.

Production I.G has announced that they're working on Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - Solid State Society, the third season of the series. The initial trailer will be presented at the Tokyo Internation Anime Fair in a week or so.

I cannot recommend this series highly enough.

First, Spoke POV is just really badass. If I rode a bike I'd be all over it.

Second, there are some excerpts from Stephen Colbert's (fake) unpublished SF novel, Stephen Colbert’s Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure:

Chapter 1: Once Again, Brave Warrior, Forth Into the Breach
Chapter 2: A Hero He Is, Yes, But Also Still a Man
Chapter 26: Abraxxia's Gambit

It's worth reading, partly because it's funny fake bad SF, and partly because Stephen Colbert is, in reality, a huge nerdlinger.

I'll tell you what's wrong with most movies: Not Enough Producers.

I haven't posted in quite some time, so many things have happened. Two of them are that I got glasses (slight astigmatism) and a shiny new EOS 20d camera.

For reasons unknown, last night around 2am I woke up with a cluster headache. This doesn't make a lot of sense, as they've previously only occurred in February or March. It went away after about an hour, but it was still a pretty crappy ride.

Ironically, this was just a few hours after a discussion with nyogtha about a possible screening of The Man with the Screaming Brain this week. Go figure.

In other news, I got a nice backpack from Fry's that's designed to hold an SLR camera plus accessories and a notebook. I also picked up the new Frogger game for the PSP, but I haven't tried it yet.

I think it's weird that the last thing I posted was bowling-related, but I must post this nonetheless, because it's probably never happening again:



In fact, I did significantly worse in the second game of the day, and mybloodyself carried the rest of the day.