blo.gs seems to be broken for good this time. It'd be very easy for me to write some code to manage my blogroll, but the thing I liked about blo.gs was that it told me when sites updated. I wish I could get that data out of Ping-o-Matic somehow. Without ping data, I'll have no choice but to poll.
Maybe I could use PubSub, but I'd have to have a Jabber client running on my server.
Update: Testing PubSub. Also, what's always been frustrating to me about Blogrolling is that even though they must have the information about the time a site updated, they only expose a flag indicating whether the site has recently updated, where "recently" is some fixed time period you specify in your preferences.
Update: blo.gs just worked for the first time in days for updating my blogroll, but the blogroll on my site isn't mine. Weird.
Steven Den Beste responds to my question about anime. Thanks!
Generally, characters who are young, or beautiful, or sympathetic, are drawn with very generic facial features. Characters who are old, ugly, eccentric, or evil, are drawn with more distinctive facial features.
To me that immediately brings to mind Chihiro in comparison to Yu-Baaba in Spirited Away.
[McCloud's] theory was that when characters are drawn with minimal and generic facial features, then they are more accessible because we fill those characters with our own ideas of what they are. If characters are drawn with more specific details, then we do less of that, and as a result the character feels more different, more foreign. It's like being held at arm's length.
This is very helpful. I've been fascinated by how anime artists/cartoonists are able to capture certain things often which such simple art. As one example, I've always found Yuu in Samurai Champloo to be pretty. But she's pretty not because the artists drew every detail of her face, but because they were able to capture some essentials and leave the rest of the details out.
I do have to find my copy of Understanding Comics when I get back to Nashville.
Update: Steven has an update to his post that covers another thing I was thinking about:
I've long had a suspicion that one of the big reasons so many anime characters have unusual hair colors is that some character designers simply need more than are present in nature in order to differentiate the characters they're designing, due to the fact that they can't individualize them using the natural cues we actually rely on to recognize other humans.
That doesn't get done in every anime[, but it's] an extra degree of freedom to add along with differences in hair length and style, figure size, height, and presence of glasses.
Dr. Greg L. Bahnsen: ten years after, by Robert Meyer:
Dr. Bahnsen was opined by many as the most prolific Christian apologist in the last quarter of the 20th century in terms of defending the Christian perspective against the assaults of atheism.
In one [of his seminars,] entitled "Worldview Apologetics," Dr. Bahnsen told of when he first read the arguments of C.S. Lewis against naturalism, he starkly realized he would be able to debate anybody. After listening to several of Bahnsen's tapes, I had a similar awareness. If I was to diligently apply the methodology being taught, I too, could answer the critic. In the same lecture, Dr. Bahnsen exhorts his audience, telling them that anyone right down to the janitor sweeping the floor can effectively defend the faith via "presuppositional" argumentation. Bahnsen simplified and distilled the erudition of his own wise mentor, Cornelius Van Til.
The aspects of Dr. Bahnsen's approach that struck me were numerous. While Bahnsen was a scholar of no small magnitude, as he earned two degrees concurrently, he yet had a down-to-earth, bucolic approach that made him easy to understand and appreciate... Dr. Jacobs expressed his own thoughts about Greg Bahnsen, saying, "while he was one of the keenest minds in the world of Christian apologetics, he had a gentle heart and always stressed love in 'the battle.'
Too many followers of Bahnsen forget the spirit with which he conducted his apologetic, instead only remembering its content.
Sunday, December 4, 2005
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Spider solitaire
Dont be silly - there are a great %that cannot be won - freecell forexamp...
mZex: Aug 4, 6:57am