"It" being Serenity, of course. It’s very good. I’ll see it again. I am slightly disappointed in two things, one of which I will discuss here: during the Captain’s stirring speech (you know there’s going to be a stirring speech from the Captain, so don’t go whining about spoilers), it’s all back-lit and smoky, positively Spielbergian. All in all, a very creditable first-time directing effort. I found the story worthy of the big screen, and the performances were outstanding. I was pleased to see Joss’s calm Wash ("I am a leaf on the wind; watch how I soar"), rather than Tim’s hyper Wash, though I think the DVD commentaries indicated Alan Tudyk was more comfortable with hyper.
In other notes, Jewel Staite said somewhere (maybe her blog) that she was happy Joss hadn’t made her gain weight for the movie, but, frankly, I think both she and Adam Baldwin were too skinny to be Kaylee and Jayne.

From Hugo’s Spanish Simplified, a text I would estimate was published in the 1910s:
“Teachers and students are hereby warned that any other book purporting to be Hugo’s Spanish System is nothing of the sort, but merely an imitation of the first edition, with just enough alterations to spoil the arrangement, and make the exercises laughable.*

*We may mention a very amusing instance of this. Not to copy our exercises exactly, the plagiarist altered one of our sentences, ‘Is your brother smoking?’ to ‘Is your sister smoking?’ thus avoiding a charge of copying word for word, but making himself ridiculous in the process.”

Needcoffee.com is posting their photos and other memories from Dragon*Con.

Want to know the latest on tropical cyclones? Sure, we all do! Visit the National Hurricane Center / Tropical Prediction Center for all kinds of useful info and graphics (including the lists of names—I hadn’t known there are only six lists).

DirtyLibrarian recommended threadless, and already I’m thinking about getting some new shirts!

There’s apparently a 14-month cycle of increasing tension and slippage in the neighborhood, where the Juan de Fuca and North American plates are colliding. Some geologists think the next megathrust quake will occur during a slippage event, one of which is happening right now.

What most caught my eye about this widely linked piece was its reference to Kohlberg ‘s work about the development of a moral sense. The author cites criticisms that Kohlberg’s structure is gender- and culture-biased, with some evidence to support those criticisms. I found the article to be very interesting, and especially enjoyed this bit:

Similarly, children growing up in deeply religious Mennonite communities distinguish between rules that apply because they are written in the Bible (e.g., that Sunday is the day of Sabbath, or that a man must uncover his head to pray) and rules that would still apply even if they weren’t actually written in the Bible (including rules against personal and material harm).

What I like best is that it clearly indicates that morality is unrelated to religious edict, and even children can detect the difference.

I think the fact that we kept coming up in searches for "forced" plus some other innocent word was causing a number of nefarious folk to include our content in their link-spam pages, which I suspect was causing Google to hate us. So while we continue to love the Forced Perspective, we’re now extra-trendy with mid-cap and all, to try to restore our sparkling reputation.