There’s a new animation of the dwarf planet Ceres. It was made on the basis of images sent by NASA’s spacecraft Dawn, and resembles a travel destination video.
Flight Over Dwarf Planet Ceres by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
More photos, info, and spiffy infographics on Ceres at NASA’s Solar System Exploration site. I’d definitely go visit! How about you?
Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
The second trailer big TV spot for Captain America: Civil War dropped during Superbowl this past weekend:
Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War – Big Game Spot by Marvel Entertainment
(Of course, as anyone who can read is be able to tell, this isn’t the second trailer, but a preview. It was aired during Superbowl; hence, “big game spot.” D’oh. Aaanyhow.)
Not much to go on there – it’s only 30 seconds – but we do at least have a clear idea now who’s against who (Captain, Bucky, Falcon, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Ant-Man versus Iron Man, War Machine, Black Widow, Vision, and Black Panther).
Aaaaand the actual second trailer is below:
Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War – Trailer 2 by Marvel Entertainment
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Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Myths, legends, fairy tales, and other stories passed down through the generations are at the root of our storytelling tradition. They are the earliest stories in our literature and some of the first stories we learn as children. It is no wonder that we keep going back to mythology looking for deeper meanings. The drive to find hidden meaning in myth leads to some misguided interpretations. Two common mistakes are Freudian theory and the “forgotten history” theory.
Freudian slips
Freudian theory holds that myths are expressions of universal human drives which we have suppressed in the name of civilization. As the things that we cannot talk about openly come out in our stories, we can hold up mythology as a mirror to our own subconscious in order to see our hidden impulses better. Sigmund Freud’s attempts to explain the human psyche by reference to dreams, myths, and other supposed insights into the unconscious are at the root of this approach, but there are other classic exemplars, such as Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, which applies the theory to the Grimms’ fairy tales. (Note that I am speaking of Freudian theory as a way of interpreting myth; I am not in any position to judge Freudianism as a psychological theory.)
…frightful perfect for baking BB-8 gingerbread! This baking project by bokkototto on Imgur is very impressive.
(We got a good 7 inches of snow. The white fluffiness looks lovely, but it definitely turned my thoughts towards roasting your toes by a fire with a steaming mug of hot chocolate and something yummy to nibble on. After 3 rounds of shoveling the heavy wet stuff, however, I have no energy left for epic gingerbread builds. [So out of snow-shoveling-shape!] I’ll just admire the hard work of others.)
Geeks eat, too! Second Breakfast is an occasional feature in which we talk about food with geeky connections and maybe make some of our own. Yum!
I have to write a biographical paragraph for a conference. Ugh. I hate writing about myself in the third person.
I’m trying to be all
but feeling more like
Oh well. It goes with the territory, I guess. I like to think that being awkward about your own accomplishments is one of the tests of being a decent person. (But, then, does congratulating myself on being a decent person mean I’m actually not..? Argh! Why is it so hard?!)
Oh well. That’s my dose of self-pity for the day.
Images: Bust of Caesar, photograph by Andrea Wahra via Wikimedia (Naples; 1st c. BCE; marble) and text from Caesar, Gallic War 1.54, collage by Erik Jensen. Harriet Jones via brittaperry
When the suckage just sucks too much.
“Secrecy in Karhide is to an extraordinary extent a matter of discretion, of an agreed, understood silence – an omission of questions, yet not an omission of answers.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness
In the country of Karhide on planet Gethen, acceptable modes of behavior and communication—and through them, people’s social standing—depend on what isn’t said as much as what is. In that sense, the world reminds me of Jane Austen’s novels, where discretion and the ability to read other people’s reactions are highly valued. And as a Finn, I certainly know and sympathize with an understood silence. In Finland, silence—even beyond an understood silence—is normal. In the U.S., for me, silence is a way to connect to my home country and therefore a solace.
Le Guin, Ursula K.: The Left Hand of Darkness. New York, NY: Ace Books, 1976 [originally published 1969], p. 287.
(This quote comes from my 21 new-to-me SFF authors reading project.)
This post has been edited to correct spelling errors and for style.
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies opens tomorrow!
Now, I don’t typically go for horror or zombies, but I’m actually looking forward to this one: the trailers and clips make PPZ look kick-ass. Check ’em out:
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies | official trailer #1 US (2016) Lily James Matt Smith via moviemaniacsDE
“My daughters were trained for battle, sir, not the kitchen.” – Mr. Bennet
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Official Trailer #1 (2016) – Lily James Horror Movie HD via Movieclips Trailers
(There seems to be a bit of perv cam action going on. I hope this is as much as there is.)
I know nothing of the 2009 novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, but I do love some of the movie adaptation’s stars: Lily James as Elizabeth Bennet (James is no stranger to elegance based on her work in Downton Abbey) and Matt Smith (of the 11th Doctor fame) as Mr. Collins, and, finally, Charles Dance and Lena Headey (most lately, in genre interest, of the Game of Thrones excellence) as Mr. Bennet and Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Movie Clip – Admire via Sony Pictures Entertainment
“I do not know what I admire more, Elizabeth Bennet, your skill as a warrior or your resolve as a woman.” – Lady Catherine de Bourgh
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – Bloody Good Sneak Peek via Sony Pictures Entertainment
Ugh, pretty gruesome. Then again, it is a truth universally acknowledged, that to see and enjoy Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, one must be in a suitable frame of mind.
There will be murder and mayhem, surely…
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Movie Clip – Enviable Talent via Sony Pictures Entertainment
…aaand apparently everything ends in a double wedding:
Seems like a combination of very silly and very kick-ass – “hopefully magnificently so,” to quote husband. 🙂
Images: Poster via IMDB. Bennet sisters by CTMG Inc. via Showbizjunkies. Double wedding by Jay Maidment via Entertainment Weekly.
In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.
It’s a good time to be a Sherlock Holmes fan. There are now plenty of adaptations to choose from. There’s the BBC’s Sherlock if you like visual inventiveness and whip-crack dialogue. For a more traditional procedural that does interesting things with characters, there’s CBS’s Elementary. For Hollywood thrills you can go back a few years to the films starring Robert Downey Jr. as the great detective. For series in the Holmesian spirit without the same characters there’s the medical drama House or the mystery/comedy Psych.
However the setting may change, there are some key elements of Sherlock Holmes’s character that remain the same: the keen powers of observation and deduction, the cycles of intense focus on a problem and lethargic dissipation, the antisocial habits that make him near impossible to live with.
Oh, and Sherlock Holmes is a total jerk-ass.
The standard interpretation of Holmes in modern media is that he is an asshole with no patience for anyone else, either because he’s not neurotypical in some fashion or because he just can’t be bothered to care about anything so pedestrian as decent manners. He gets away with it because he’s just so brilliant.
Well, lately I’ve been rereading the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Conan Doyle, something I’ve been meaning to do for years. I’ve gotten very used to the modern Holmes, so I was surprised to rediscover that the original Holmes wasn’t like that at all. In fact, Conan Doyle’s Holmes is compassionate and generous.
My latest reading project rolls on with The Left Hand of Darknessby Ursula Le Guin (first published in 1969).
Genly Ai is sent to planet Gethen (also known as Winter due to its extremely cold climate) as an envoy for the Ekumen of Known Worlds, an interstellar conglomeration for trade and cultural exchange. His mission is to convince the planet to join the Ekumen, easier said than done on a world where the conditions are semi-arctic even at the warmest time of the year and where cultures and technologies change at a glacial pace. (Pardon the pun!)
I knew a little of Left Hand before reading it. I knew that it’s highly regarded, that the inhabitants of the world are androgynous (or something) and that there’s an arduous trek across a glacier (or snowy steppes or somesuch) that’s somehow significant.
I also knew that some people describe the book as being about gender. Gethenians are all of the same sex – or, rather, of no sex until their monthly reproductive cycle known as kemmer comes around. At that point, depending on who else is in kemmer nearby, a person may turn either into a Gethenian male or female, and it’s quite usual for someone to be both a mother and a father.
I’m not entirely sure yet what Left Hand is about for me. The Gethenian biology does get a lot of attention, but I suspect it’s because it’s so unfathomable to Ai. The importance of hospitality and cooperation in the cold climate is also significant, as are the balancing of opposite forces (like you-me or individual-society), the complex Gethenian honor system shifgrethor and their aversion to war. Karhide’s neighboring country Orgoreyn sounds like a communist regime, with its people described as units instead of citizens and its communal resources or endless bureaucracy; Orgoreyn may, in an unprecedented step, be moving towards starting a war with Karhide, and we might have a Cold War echo there.
Structurally, Left Hand avoids infodump by alternating the present-day narrative chapters with short chapters on Gethenian mythology. I was a little bothered by how much longer the primary narrative chapters were, for it made reading the novel choppy; I may well change my mind about that if I read Left Hand again.
I’ve seen Le Guin’s writing described as zen-like. The descriptor fits her style in Left Hand well, especially when she’s describing traveling across the icy landscape. A fascinating read, and one I may well like to get back to after mulling it over. Considering that I very much enjoy and have read Le Guin’s Earthsea stories several times in two languages, I can’t believe I haven’t read The Left Hand of Darkness before!
Image by Eppu Jensen
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ICBIHRTB—pronounced ICK-bert-bee—is short for ‘I Can’t Believe I Haven’t Read This Before’. It’s an occasional feature for book classics that have for some reason escaped our notice thus far.
At the end of last year, I wanted to make myself something fun. Since the new Star Wars release date was coming up, that something turned out to be a BB-8 bag.
I used an old pair of pants and various fabric scraps to make it, so the materials were completely free. The bag took me a few nights to make – combining all of those little pieces adds up surprisingly fast. The most time-consuming part for me, though, was deciding on the droid design.
Here’s a quick how-to in pictures:
1 of 4: Deciding on the droid design and cutting as large piece as possible from one pant leg.
2 of 4: Adding stripes and pieces of fabric to the outside to suggest pieces of the droid.
3 of 4: Making box corners, adding an edge binding strip to the top, and adding an inner pocket.
4 of 4: Finished bag.
Not bad for a little fur ball zero dollars! 🙂 If I were to make another, though, I’d probably try a different droid design and fiddle with the inner pocket so that it has more compartments.
Images by Eppu Jensen
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In Making Stuff occasional feature, we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.
Co-Geeking 
