Umbral Echoes Blog

Well, things have finally come together, and today in the early afternoon we’ll be signing off the old house to its new owners.  I am hopeful that everything will go smoothly, but it just seems like it’s come together a little too well for something not to go wrong.  Like when we get there, they will have a donkey prepared.  “Oh, didn’t you read the fine print?  There’s a ‘Tijuana’ clause — it’s standard in contracts these days.  You didn’t think you could really sell a house in this market that easily, did you?”

This is an oldie, but I came across it again.

ABC News reports that libraries in southeast Michigan are drawing teens in by offering games for checkout, and having tournaments of Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero to draw a crowd.

On the one hand, maybe they just want to get the kids in the habit of going to the library, even if it’s not for reading.  But seriously, people… is putting teens in the physical presence of books going to make them want to read?  That’s like saying that putting a stripper on stage at the opera will encourage people to explore the theater (yes, that’s “theater” — I spell it “-er,” not, “-re.”  You wanna fight about it?), leading a horse to water will make it drink, or whatever analogy you care to throw at it.

The scientist in me would be interested to see statistics, though — if more teenagers have been checking out books (as well as video games) since this program started.  Maybe the mindset is, “Well I’m here anyway… might as well check out the latest Hirsute Prestidigitator novel.”  I’m skeptical, but it’s possible.

So wrong, it’s right.  Probably nsfw, so images below the cut.

Continue Reading »

From the web comic xkcd.com

This… could be interesting. From the New York Times:

Ajinbayo Akinsiku wants the world to know Jesus Christ, just not the gentle, blue-eyed Christ of old Hollywood movies and illustrated Bibles.
…
Mr. Akinsiku says his Son of God is “a samurai stranger who’s come to town, in silhouette,” here to shake things up in a new, much-abridged version of the Bible rooted in manga, the Japanese form of graphic novels.

Is anyone else reminded of Battle Pope, or Loaded Bible (wherein Jesus fights vampires, which of course reminds me of Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter — “The power of Christ impales you!”)? Or perhaps Xtreme Jesus:

So I was signing up for a site today that had a Captcha (the “type the text you see below”).  These things seem to be getting harder and harder to read by humans, it seems like.  Well, this one is over the line.  The instructions were to, “Enter both words below, separated by a space.“  Well, can you tell what the word on the left says?  Because I sure as hell can’t.

His cover of Baby Got Back.

 

 Baby Got Back (Jonathan Coulton cover): Play Now | Play in Popup

This is the man who brought us Re: Your Brains and Codemonkey.

The Japanese are, without a doubt, the oddest people on Earth.

The old house has sold! Or, at least, it’s under contract. An offer came in last weekend, but it was way low (considerably below the break-even point). So we countered a lot higher. I expected them to take a pass on it, since this is definitely a buyer’s market, and homebuyers have the pick of the litter, as it were. Not only that, but there were other houses in our neighborhood that were selling for lower than ours, and also new houses going up in the neighborhood that were less expensive.

But somehow, regardless of all of that, they accepted the counteroffer, and within the next 7 days or so they’ll have an inspection done. Anything found on the inspection will need to be taken care of, but pending that, we’ll sign over the house on March 4th.

Now what we need to do is have a bunch of friends over to the old house on the day of closing, and have a big drunken party after the buyers have done their final walkthrough. So when they come to their new home, they will have the added bonus of rooms full of empty booze bottles.  A “welcome home” gift, if you will.