Apparently German researchers have finally confirmed the identity of the Mona Lisa as Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, the wife of the wealthy Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. While this had been speculated on prior to this, there was little or no evidence to corroborate the statement.

I really don’t know how I feel about this. I’m all for academic achievement and discovery and the news doesn’t lessen the immense impact the painting has had but there’s a fairly large part of me that is saddened by this news. It’s one less mystery in the world. One less speculative dream that inspires conversation and thought. Now all that is left is one more hardened fact, one more pillar of Science strengthened.

*sigh* I guess I’m just a dreamer and romantic at heart and always will be.

…

On a completely random aside, I must say that the name Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo just looks and sounds extremely cool to me. So I guess that redeems the news somewhat in my eyes.

As a friend of a friend so aptly noticed, Serenity has been named the top Sci-Fi movie.

There was much rejoicing.

That is all. I now return you to your regularly scheduled dull and boring lives.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted, or at least awhile since I’ve posted something substantial or “serious”. The reason for that is simply that I don’t have anything to post.

My current job continues to actively suck monkey balls and while I’m looking for another one in between craptastic half-shifts with the half-wit crew, the only interviews that I’ve managed to land are for places just as craptastic as where I’m working now and I’m simply bone tired of going sideways rather than going forward. So to sum up, there’s still not much progress on that front. Trust me, if and when I get something better, or at least more financially secure, you people will be the… *counts sotto voce* sixth… no seventh to hear about it.

In other news, I’ve been working like a madman on the map for my game world for no other reason than the pure and primal joy that colouring with pencil crayons and inks brings. I’m such a dork. Still, it has been productive as well as fun. I’ve defined quite a few things about the world as I’ve been fiddling with things. I FINALLY decided on a scale to which I’m sure Jon is eternally grateful. No more will he be subjected to my long and rambling one-sided emails where I defeat my own arguments regarding the size of the world and then go back on my decision an hour later in another email. Of course this means I’ll just have to come up with something else to blather on to him about but as we all know, that won’t be too hard to do.

My only real problem that I have currently is that I’ve drawn this map out on four pieces of 11″×14″ paper in ‘landscape’ format and it’s a veritable pain in the arse to get scanned. Even as a single sheet it’s a pain. Eventually I think I’m going to have to find a business with an oversized scanner that can scan 22″×28″ and pay them to scan it for me. Either that or I’ll end up spending ungodly amounts of time pasting a patchwork of scans on my home scanner that only scans 8½”×11″. Based on my frustrations with the latter experience, I think it’ll be worth the money, regardless of how pricey it becomes.

In the meantime I’ll probably post another photo of the world once I stitch the 4 sheets together again. Give me a day or six.

Oh, yeah and in case anyone cares: 1 cm = 175 miles. The world itself is roughly 36,000 miles in circumference which makes it approximately one and a half times as large as Earth. See, I told you I was weird and obsessive over this sort of minutia.

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I’m easily amused. We all know this. It isn’t any secret so none of you can act surprised that I found this amusing:

(click the pic to watch the video)

I’m in a mindless mood, so all you’re getting is a mindless post and then I’m going back to doodling on my map some more — which I’ve redone yet again since my last post. No there aren’t any pictures yet and yes, I am twelve thankyouverymuch, now fuck off¹.

Err, where was I?

Oh yes, the poll. It’s not mine but I agree with the end result wholeheartedly. Farscape was a very close second and I’d have the original Stargate as a write in 3rd place vote just cause it’s that damn cool but only if Richard Dean Anderson came back full time.

¹ See Amanda, I even type it now and again.

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I find this is a very cool and interesting image. Do you know what it is?

I’ll give you until Friday and then post the answer in the comments.

Just a very minor update to the World Map page.

I decided to expand on the current map and ink in some detail regarding the rest of the world, or at least a larger portion of it. I didn’t have access to a scanner so I took a picture instead (I’ll scan it once it’s a little farther along) hence the wonky scale and page shadows and creases. I’m not 100% satisfied with the results but then again I never am so I’ll just have to live with what I’ve got… at least until the next revision.

Looks like good ol’ Mr. Martin actually heard and listened to my previous belligerent rantings about A Dance With Dragons and decided that ten and a half months between teasers is much too long of a time for the average fan to wait. He went ahead and posted a new teaser chapter as a milksop for us while he continues to muddle through with finishing the book. This is the first chapter with Jon in it (Cheer!) and will be alternately rotated with the existing Danaerys and Tyrion chapters that he’d already posted. I apparently have had crap luck because I had no idea that he’d even posted a Tyrion chapter. Every time I’ve checked the sample pages it’s always been the Danaerys chapter. Who knew. I guess I’ll have to keep an eye out and if I’m lucky I’ll be able to read it before the book is actually published.

In other news regarding the A Song of Ice and Fire series, I found this link to The Tower Of the Hand over on Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (I’m really link dropping a lot in this post) found it was a pretty interesting and thorough resource for the series with all sorts of fun tid-bits of information and obscure references and connections/theories that I had missed. If you like the series and want to learn more, I suggest you check it out but as always, your mileage may vary.

While we’re on the subject of books I guess I should mention, for those of you that hadn’t heard, that Tor books have announced that author Brandon Sanderson has been selected to write A Memory of Light, the final book in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. Apparently he was selected by Harriet Rigney, RJ’s widow, because she was impressed with his other work… to which I say “Wha–? Who? What other work? Who the hell is this guy?”

From what I’ve read, he’s apparently been given a mass of encyclopaedic notes and will be following an outline by RJ himself. I’m optimistic, even if I’ve never heard of the guy before. Let’s just all hope for no braid pulling and no “road to Caemlyn” chapters.

I recently added two features to the blog that I have somewhat mixed feelings about but I figured that I should at least give them a chance before I naysay them or take them down.

First up, I added Gravatar functionality to the blog’s comment section. What is a Gravatar you ask? It’s a Globally Recognized Avatar. Basically it’s a little picture or graphic like what you’d find on a forum that’s used to identify your posts and comments. All the Globally Recognized part means is that the image is linked to an email address of your choosing so any site that you go to that uses Gravatars will post associate an avatar with your email.

I personally like this idea and it’s native to 90% of the themes on WordPress (not surprising as the WordPress guys bought Gravatar recently) but it didn’t seem to be that way with the particular theme that I’m using so I got off my lazy arse and went ahead and played around and activated it (I’m still trying to clean up/tweak the sidebar widget to fix the number of list stars that appear in the background). Now all I have to do is manage to convince people to actually use Gravatars. So go sign up already. It’s free and there’s no spam involved. There, wasn’t that convincing?  Yeah, I didn’t think so.

The other feature that I added was Twitter, which is the add on that I’m unsure about. I just don’t know if I need it. For the most part though, I’m just trying to actually figure out what the point of the whole thing is and why everyone is making such a damn fuss over the idea. I mean, I get the general gist of it: you can use it to keep your readers “up to date” about your current whereabouts and such in “realtime”. It’s a perfect example of the whole interactive Web 2.0 ideal that everyone spouts off on in the media these days and from that theoretical standpoint I like it. From a practical standpoint however, I feel that I just don’t lead an interesting enough life to warrant 24/7 interaction.

Maybe I’m wrong though and there’s a dedicated cult of nubile young women out there stalking and tracking my every move (wouldn’t that be nice). Who knows. I guess I’ll leave it up for the moment and see how useful useless it turns to really be. If the nubile nymph cult comes calling, you lot will probably be the last to know.