Facts & Fantasy - New Steampunk Webcomic, Glooper & MONIAC

In the Terry Pratchett book Making Money, Moist Von Lipwig learns about the secret in the basement. If you have not read Making Money and you do not want to read a bit of a spoiler, please skip this entire post. Here's a video of a kitten instead. If you don't mind the tiny spoiler, scroll past the kitten video and read on.




I had no idea that there was a real Glooper (you *are* a Discworld fan, right?)...wow! I found out about MONIAC (or Phillips Hydraulic Computer) because I just was introduced to 2D Goggles - a web comic about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage via BoingBoing.

Source: Wikimedia Commons "This is a faithful photographic reproduction
of an original two-dimensional work of art.
The work of art itself is in the public domain for the following reason:
This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired"

Source: Wikimedia Commons: "A scan or photograph of a page from The Illustrated London News Newspaper
by unknown staff artist
Permission: Published in 1871, copyright expired 70 years after publication, 1941.
This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired"

Here are two videos of the MONIAC at work:

Of course playing around with MONIAC doesn't actually make the world economy change, like Glooper did...or does it? I may have just invented a new world economic meltdown conspiracy theory.

Extreme Sheep LED Art - Another Brave Astro(bat)naut

I watch a Live Journal group, Discworld, and a member, mama_hogswatch posted this today (it's fitting for the Discworld group because she references Granny Aching and the Aching clan are shepherds) - it's rather amazing, not too long, do watch the whole thing.



Wow. The sheepdogs are the truly amazing part of the story - that they can take the commands and control the sheep to produce these amazing movement patterns.

And my DH just sent me the link to this clip (via Gizmodo)



Enterprise fans will recognize the theme song...

Lastly, I won't go into details, but I'm very happy right now with BofA's credit card customer service. Several things were frustrating me and now I've finally gotten to the bottom of it and they're fixing it all up. *whew*

Happy New Year!

Yeah, haven't posted since Thanksgiving, sorry about that. It's not that I was too busy, but I was preoccupied. I've been doing a lot of beading, spent time with my daughter and my family in southern California and am also trying to catch up on a backlog of books I've been wanting to read.

Just finished most of the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. I have a few more to go as I skipped the earliest ones and started with Mort, hopped over a few like Small Gods and Soul Music (even though I enjoy the story in that one about Susan).

The reason for this is that one of my favorite ways to go back through the Discworld books is to begin by re-reading the books featuring the Watch. Following the progress of Vimes and Carrot from Guards! Guards! through to Thud! always lifts my spirits. The newer books that have introduced new characters are fun as well - Moist von Lipwig (Going Postal and Making Money) is a great character and I hope there is at least one more book featuring him. Of course the news that Terry has been diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimers has me a bit down - I hope he overcomes all obstacles for many years to come.

I also skipped the Tiffany Aching books (Wee Free Men, Hat Full of Sky, and Wintersmith) so I'll be digging them out of wherever they're hiding, too. Speaking of which, I ordered some cool stuff from Paul Kidby's site that includes a Jock Mac Feegle statue and a White Horse Pendant like Tiffany wears since I love that design. I hope it arrives soon, I made the order back on the 12th of December.

I've been updating my LibraryThing list, too. Got a CueCat and it's been very handy. One of these day's I'll take my laptop out to the garage where I have my books stored and scan as many as I can. It'll be great to finally have an index of my books.

In other news I received a cool Christmas gift from my husband - a Portable Lighting Studio for Dummies kit! It's very nifty, came with two lamps and a fabric cube that diffuses the light. I'm waiting on a necklace display that's a bit shorter than the one I'm using now to get started taking new pictures of my beaded jewelry. Since I recently opened a shop on Etsy, I'm going to want to take some additional closeups since you can show your work in multiple images there.

We took the tree down yesterday so, aside from the new stuff that was under it, there are no lingering signs of the holidays, which is kind of sad. It went by so fast.

Well, I'll save some other ramblings and maybe put up a picture or two, for my next post - I'll try not to put it off so long this time.