L. Marcus

I'll share

Cumulonimbus 

The Young Ones are a pretty good fit for Warhammer's Chaos Gods...

Sister just had to put her cat down. She had been planning to do it on the weekend, but he was in too much pain. Mom and other sister are with her right now.

It was that part in The Fellowship of the Ring where Frodo & company fought the wargs, but instead of Caradhras, we were in front of a house owned by a lady in her late 50s-early 60s. I saw the wolf first, then Pippin came by. The wolf recognized a Hobbit and went to get its pack. Gandalf called for the Fellowship to take defensive positions, and Legolas shot a wolf. The woman went inside her house for safety. I joined the Fellowship to fight alongside them. My last thought before I woke up was that Legolas should be further back since he was the group's archer.

And hello again, folks, and greetings from the ER.
 
Short version:
 
Been a really bad year for us, and for the first time ever, Christmas was imperiled.  Because of the wave of increased prices in prescription meds (wierd we only heard about select ones), I had to choose between the heart and BP meds or getting the kids something for Christmas (you know:  like _food_).
 
I took a gamble, and I almost made it.  Middle of my last post I wasn't feeling right- head swimming a bit; trouble focusing.
 
So I cut it short, popped an aspirin and a nitro, and went to get looked at.
 
Still alive, and now I have another years-to-pay medical bill.
 
Yay, corporate medicine!
 
 
Going to bed as aoon as I get out of here, I think.

Durn straight!
 
Just got back home from Christmas Eve dinner -- we were almost everyone, missing only my sister and her boyfriend, who are down in Skåne to celebrate with his relatives. Fourteen people! The noise level! Got a touch of tinnitus going. The food was good and plentiful enough; the ham was a bit dry, but the meatballs were homemade and succulent. 
 
I've said it before and I'll say it again -- my family are good people and I love them dearly. I just wish they were a tad less loud.

I spent the half hour after seeing The Boy and the Heron trying (unsuccessfully) to explain it to my mother.  The fact that I was in open-mouthed awe throughout and was completely enraptured with the movie did not make sense to Mom, who couldn't understand it. It was the same condition I was in when we saw The Green Knight.
 
To my mind, the complexity of the ideas and emotions Miyazaki was exploring through the actions of his protagonist is a large part of the appeal. There is a great deal of religion and philosophy involved in what is basically the story of a deeply traumatized youth in 1944 Tokyo, who hears his dead mother might actually be alive and unwisely goes into a crumbling tower to find her, reluctantly aided by a nature spirit in the form of a heron.  The young hero's trauma is realistic, vivid, and even includes a dramatic incident of self-harm, which earned my immediate sympathy. Once in the tower he finds it leading to a strange fantasy world, filled with marvels and terrors, in which he is forced to confront his trauma, his true nature, and the cycles of his life that he must struggle to escape (a very Buddhist idea, as the central idea of Buddhism is about finding a way to escape the endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth).
 
My mother will not want to see it again, I fear, but I do. I feel there is a great deal more to this film than even I was able to grasp on first viewing.
 
(As a side note, my attempt to explain the appeal of Godzilla Minus One was equally unsuccessful. Her thought that Japan needed to "get over" the war struck me as both odd and unrealistic, because as we are seeing now some pretty terrible cycles repeat if the cost of following them is forgotten).

No matter what reality throws your way  -
 
May your Christmas be the best it can be for you and your family. 

That's what you need to make a cloaking device against detection via gravitational waves.

This is a recent real-science article suggesting that one could "look inside of", e.g., the Sun, by watching what happens to gravitational waves when the Sun moves in front of a source of those, like a compact neutron star binary.  The emphasis in the article is on the possibility of the technique and what you might learn from it.  It had never occurred to me before to think about gravity waves being "refracted" by astronomical objects but it could happen.  At the very least, it gives Star Hero GMs another kind of handwavium from which to make up detection systems.

I may need to play this concept...

Which is why I believe that in the long run, the Trump era could turn out to be a good thing. Rot has existed deep in American society and politics for a long time. It can't be recognized and cleaned out unless and until it's brought to the surface. Maybe Trump's blatant simplistic provocation has brought it out sooner than it otherwise would have been... and before it's too late to purge it.

This popped up on my FB feed this week...
 

Thanks, OM.
 
 
Yep.  Sad.
 
On the plus side, I am now happily aware that the "other word" doesn't even come to mind. 
 
I am never terribly delighted with me, but today, I am very proud.