Miscellaneous Debris – Archive

“I WANT TO SEEK YOUR ATTENTION TO RECEIVE MONEY ON MY BEHALF;”

My spam is getting blunter. And in all caps, too. Go spam!

A very thorough round-up of comic book movies making their way to the screen in the next 5 years or so. Marvel are really whipping up a full ensemble here, doing one-off superhero movies and tying them all up into one big Avengers movie.

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/07/comic-based-mov.html

July bubbles closer and closer, something needs to be done about the smell. Public transportation is bad enough in the winter, but with summer approaching our nation’s buses are filled with the rank and acrid stench of stale sweat and pre-boarding cigarettes. I’m not saying a massive deodorant-and-gum awareness campaign is pointless, just of limited effectiveness. I’m saying that us passive stinkers need to take matters into our own, well, you know.

I’m sure people have sought solutions for personal odor experience before, and some limitations are obvious. For one, unlike sight and sound we cannot synthesize smells through purely electronic means – at least until we manage to stimulate nerves directly, and I don’t think that’ll happen any time soon. And I’m not even going for the possibility to synthesize smells with some chemical factory-in-a-box, generating volatile esters on demand. I would settle for a small cartridge of condensed materials that, when gently scraped or activated, emit a waft of a predetermined, prepackaged pleasant smell. This can be hooked up to a short tube that can be gently placed in the nostrils, and driven by a very simple electronic controller that can decide which of the odors in the cartridge are emitted based on a simple user interface. This can easily be programmed for a playlist-type affair, where I can have alternating citrus-vanilla flavors in 5-minute intervals, or some sort of more elaborate progression.

The first problem is that people might feel silly or uncomfortable with a tube up their noses on the bus. I can respect that. And I’m sure people felt pretty silly with headphones in the early days of the Walkman, but it’s now gotten ubiquitous. Sure, there’s also the whole hospital-connotations angle, but we can get used to anything.
Another problem is that cartridges have to be replaced regularly, since they’re full of an actual physical material. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem, especially for the commercial interests. Buy a new cartridge, plug it in.

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Bonus fact of the day: rotting flesh emits many aroma compounds, including Putrescine (NH₂(CH₂)₄NH₂) and Cadaverine (NH₂(CH₂)₅NH₂). I think that’s just dandy.

Several balances have been restored to my life, and certain lacks addressed, but it seems to have completely eaten my capacity for writing. I have a blog entry for Hahem that lost track of itself in midstream and got derailed. I have a small bit of roleplaying fan-fiction that I keep rehashing and tossing back into the midden, and a short story I have embarked on and promptly abandoned.

This is not a problem with my writing. It is a problem with my standards. I keep tossing back anything I don’t feel is perfect. Which is stupid, because nothing will be perfect. The main thing is to get things out there, even if they’re crap, just to get more practice, more feedback and more perspective.

So in the interest of productivity, I will try to relax my expectations and start writing more with a slightly less unrealistic standard, and hope it gets the ball rolling.