They do have palm trees here. But the weather? Current temperature: 50°.
Okay, I get it: that's much nicer than Illinois, where it's 30°. I agree with you: given a choice between 30 and 50, most people are naturally going to take the higher temperature, because it's a lot closer to the optimum operating environment for the human body.
But not indoors. Indoors, we want our houses to be at that optimum temperature, about 75° give or take a few degrees. (I prefer 72° myself.)
My sister's house is kept at 65° in winter. I'm freezing my ass off. I finally hunted down the thermostat and turned it up to 70°; once the house reached that temperature I turned it back down to 65°.
It sure as hell ain't no Florida here, I can tell you that.
You'd think it'd be warmer than this--I mean, this place is a stone's throw from the freakin' Gulf of Mexico--but no, 50° is approximately seasonal for this area.
It's a muggy swamp in summertime, yet the winter temps are at best "cool". Shit.
* * *
IMAO tries to find logic in superhero comics.
Okay, your first mistake....
The post successfully compares the X-men to islamic terrorists:
...[T]he discrimination against them is supposed to parallel homophobia or something (which they’ve made more explicit by having them move to San Francisco), but of course that analogy breaks down pretty quickly. It would be a much different debate if gay people secretly went around in a paramilitary organization blowing stuff up all the time. And know who blows stuff up all the time and whines constantly about being discriminated against? Radical Muslims.I've never been too happy with superhero comics anyway. Even when I was a kid, I just couldn't get into them. The closest I ever came to being into American comics was a single compendium of Archie comics that I'd reread from time to time.
Maison Ikkoku is what got me into Japanese comics; before that I didn't read any comics at all. But in 1994 I was introduced to Ranma 1/2 and then learned that Rumiko Takahashi had done another series before that one; I bought the first tankobon one day, and went back the next for the second. After that, the TPBs were on my pull list at the comic store.
Guess what? The stories in Archie are (or were, anyway, in the 1970s) a hell of a lot closer to Maison Ikkoku than they are to Superman. There isn't a lot of complex drama in Archie and the plots are usually slapstick comedy, but it nonetheless was a story about more-or-less normal teenagers in a love triangle (Archie, Betty, and Veronica).
The only reason I liked The Dark Knight series of comics (in the late '80s and early '90s) was that it was different from how the stories had been told in the past; but these days doing comics that way is passé. (And, in fact, that version of Batman only came about because of the success of Watchmen.)
Oh well.
* * *
Sometime yesterday I was giving some thought to drawing The Sleigh Race while I was down here--or at least getting some kind of start on it--but I don't have any materials handy and I do not feel like going to the store to buy them. Besides, I don't have my references handy.
I should sit down at the computer (when I get back) and scan every last damn drawing I've done of Subaru et al, and put them on the Aluratek. *sigh*
* * *
My sister's boss bought her an iPad. She's annoyed; she wants a tablet computer that fits into the pocket of her lab coat, and an iPad is too big. She had an Android-based 7" tablet but the thing refuses to charge its batteries, so it's going back; and her boss loves his iPad.
Maybe I'll get to fiddle with the iPad a bit; then I can see whether or not the thing's actually the precursor of the PDAs in my SF universe, or what.
...unlike a lot of folks, I've been confident (since about 1993-ish) that the truly useful pocket computer interface terminal would evolve out of cell phones. No one was going to make a PDA and then add cellphone capability as it got small and inexpensive enough; it was going to go the other way, because a cellphone (particularly a digital one) already has a pretty sizable amount of computing power tucked into it, and at the time phones already had the ability to store names and numbers, like PDAs of the day did.
I figured on the following features: touch screen; a modicum of storage on the device with further storage space "somewhere" on the 'net; the ability to record and play audio/video; videoconferencing; and the ability to customize it with various programs.
The "storage" aspect hasn't come to be yet; the closest we have is the ability to buy apps from an on-line store. Otherwise, if you don't want to save your photos/videos to the device itself you've got to e-mail them or FTP them somewhere. In just about every other respect, though, the iPhone is pretty much what I thought the PDAs in my stories would look like.
Can you dig it.
Which isn't to say that I foresaw the iPhone; I actually borrowed the idea of pocket-sized remote computer terminals from Jerry Pournelle (who came up with it sometime in the late '60s or early '70s) and made some changes to suit my own prejudices. It just so happens that my version of the idea turned out to be the way it worked out in reality.
Hell, Heinlein was predicting folding cell phones in the 1950s. He's got us all beat.
* * *
Man, tomorrow is Christmas Eve. How did that happen?