Felicia Day

I listen to NPR almost exclusively while driving.  That and XM radio, usually Fred because I like New Wave Rock.  The news shows have always plugged some website of theirs called Consumer Consequences and I finally sat down to check it out.   Oh boy.  Guilt trip.

It’s a little game-type website to show you how many Earths it would take to sustain the world population if every human on earth lived the way you do.  Now, I’m a rabid environmentalist, but after taking this test, “Hollywood Liberal” now has a new hypocritical member I guess.    According to this website, it would take 10.2 earths to sustain the world population on my “rich, extravagant” lifestyle.  I’m not rich and I didn’t think I was that bad!  I recycle everything, what more can I do?!

The game breaks it down for you pretty well by category.  The main thing wrong with my lifestyle, according to this chart, is my car driving habits.  I never take public transport, I rarely carpool, and despite my hybrid car, I’m still guzzling up acres of the earth like some rabid locust in a cornfield.

Well, look here, well intentioned avatar!  Were there public transport to be HAD in LA, believe me, I would take it! The thrills of my vacations are when I go places with an efficient subway or a trolley.  I always want to move to those places, because it’s obviously the civilized way to live.  Unfortunately, LA has horrible public transit, and it takes a real leader to push things through like subway systems and parks (Ever read the story of how Central Park came to happen?  Really breathtaking leadership) and we don’t have that many leaders willing to make people sacrifice for the greater good.  Long-term isn’t popular.  It doesn’t get votes.

Anyway, between this game and reading this book, it’s hard to feel like anything you do will really help the environment at all.

“The World Without Us” is a fascinating book, that imagines the planet if every human were to disappear tomorrow off the earth, and what would happen to our infrastructure, to the environment as a result of our actions, even after we are gone.   I’ll be honest, it’s a downer.  We’ve pretty much ruined it all, and the only way out is to get rid of all CO2 and get some negative population growth going on, which I’m a huge fan of.   Getting everyone on earth on board this though?…

I just can’t see there ever being a real, concerted effort to bring about change.  There are just too many damn people already, and we’re all basically motivated by self-interest.  I think part of our problem as a society is that the more people there are in a nation, the less we feel connected to each other, the harder it is to comprehend the scale of how we live and the impact it has.   This interview is very interesting in demonstrating the phenomenon of how the statistics of numbers effect the way we emotionally react to things.   An interesting quote from it:

: One of the experiments that you have done… is to show people a picture of a seven year old child in Africa who is starving and comparing their response to that to people who are shown the same picture, but are also given a statistical summary of the hugeness of the problem with millions of others who suffering. What was the outcome of that?

PAUL SLOVIC: When we showed just the picture of the child, the child’s name, and the information that they were suffering from malnutrition, and gave people the opportunity to donate money that would go to this child, we got a fairly strong response. These were actual donations that were made. Then we had a condition that we did not show a child, but we just gave a statistical picture of the large numbers of the starving children in Africa and ask people to donate to an organization that will transfer the money to deal with this problem – we got a rather small response. The third condition, another group of people, we combined the two conditions. We gave the statistical summary, but then we asked the people to donate to the individual who is one of the millions, but the money would go to the individuals, with the statistics, as putting the background of size of the problem. We got a very poor response. Not much different than the statistics alone. So, bringing the numbers in seemed to depress the willingness to donate. Our interpretation of that is, in order to donate you have to make an emotional connection with the person or the cause and you can do that with when there is one child. You can kind of focus and you can then make that connection. The numbers seem to distract from our attention and weaken that emotional connection, therefore; the donations are not as great.

Fascinating how our brains were probably built to work within small tribes and now we’re thrown into huge vats of humanity.  No wonder we need psychologists!

Back to Consumer Consequences, I also had to break down my meals, and if I wanted to be honest, I eat maybe 10-15 percent of my diet in fruits and veggies.  Ugh, not only a consumptive pig, but an unhealthy one at that!

I’m still obsessed with redoing my website.  I tried to make a “no internet” weekend to detox from my obsession, but then I stared at a computer screen for 8 hours a day watching the new episode of The Guild being edited, so really, I didn’t avoid the “new media” stuff like I would have liked.    I had finally broke down and decided to hire someone to do it for me, when I stumbled across this site, flashvillage.com, for free flash templates.  Oooooh, shiny pretty themes!

Now, I hate waiting for a flash site to load up, and I really hate it when music plays automatically, but all the cool shiny buttons and animation is so scrumptious!  There aren’t very many templates, but there are several good ones. Of course, the TV one is too on the nose for me, but this one is a possibility, I could put all my headshots where the photographs are,  and what little information I need to convey on the main site will fit fine in the boxes.  The only thing is, the Flog would be linked to a non-Flashy site, and it might look kinda downscale.    Sigh.  I hate deciding about things I shouldn’t even be obsessing on!  Go do something better with your time woman!

Well, I have several books I read the last few weeks,  a few of which I didn’t love, but I want to be fancy and add their covers here anyway.

First up is “Priestess of the White”, by Trudi Canavan. I actually like this cover. The colors are nice, and it promises to be a good vaginal fantasy series; pretty girl in toga, I’m seeing hot guys with two-handers in the mix. Well, not so much. I have many criticisms for this book, not least of which is that the prose felt rather young-adult in tone, although it is sold as an adult book, with the random sex scene thrown in to boot. Also the main character, Auraya, is special and gifted from page one, and then she just gets more special and more gifted from there. Not the most exciting arc. There’s a weird romance that I never really bought as well, so I started flipping pretty fast through to the end. I liked the concept of having Gods use priests as their earthly vessels and appear in person to them, but the magic powers seemed pretty arbitrary and in the end, it was an easy decision not to pick up the next in the series. I read this author’s other series “The Magicians Guild” and I would recommend it over this one.

Next is “The Privilege of the Sword” by Ellen Kuschner. I was really exited about this book. I read several reviews on various blog sites that were raving, and I loved her previous book “Swordspoint” so much. This new book shares the world and a few characters with her previous one, but it’s not necessary to have read the first to understand the second. I enjoyed this book, but I couldn’t help but have a little bit higher hopes for it. It’s fairly standard chick-lit mixed with a Dumas flair, almost like it could be a Disney film starring a plucky Anne Hathaway, who learns fencing on her crazy uncle’s bequest despite the scorn of society. Except there’s some strange sexual ambiguity that I still can’t figure out after finishing the book. Regardless, I really liked the characters, and I read it in one night because I really wanted to know how it ended. I suppose that was all the enjoyment I could expect! Oh, and this cover is pretty hot. I love the font and the girl, so five stars for that!

My favorite book in this group is “Mistborn” by Brandon Sanderson. Every so often, you discover a book with a magic system that makes you go, “Wow! That’s awesome! I want to be able to do that!” I can’t recommend this book enough to anyone who loves to read about interesting magical systems, and really good world-building. Not since Robert Jordan have I been so “bespelled” by magical creativeness. I really really liked this book, I liked the main character, I loved her mentor character, and the evil forces were interesting. Vin, the main character, picked up her talents a little quickly, sure, but hell, we’re not paying to read about an untalented bimbo. Fantasy characters are preternaturally gifted and learn things swiftly because they are invariably “Chosen”, you gotta buy that concept when you sign up for the genre. The only criticism I have is that the characterizations were pretty slim, you don’t really have much affinity for the secondary people in the plot, which could have made for an emotionally satisfying ending. Nonetheless, I will eagerly buy the next one in hardback!

Wow, that was a lot of vagina book. Let’s get in some penis! Too bad I’m not into it The book, not penis. Ahem.

Ok, chalk up Gene Wolfe and Stephen Donaldson together in the Felicia column of “I’ll never like these dudes and their writing even though I know I should.” I don’t know how many times I’ve picked up the “New Sun” books, or the Thomas Covenant series and struggled to appreciate them, longing for something to click in my brain and I’ll gobble all the yummy novels up. It’s not gonna happen. This book is the first in an epic trilogy, and I would definitely recommend it to boys everywhere if they like a very high tone, fairytale-esque, brutal boy world. It’s strange and the prose is beautiful and I APPRECIATE it, but after 2 weeks on the nightstand, struggling to get myself to finish, I had to call it a day. In the future I hope to come back to it as I did the Elric series which I now love, but for now, I would kinda rather read a horrible “girl finding secret powers through sexy mentor” book any day. I’m trashy, what can I say.

So, I am done, I must walk away for a while.  This skin amused Ben and it’s Halloweeney so I’ll keep it up until I find one I really like.  The one I REALLY wanted to use was this one, strangely from the same site I got the old skin from, Digital Pop.  But it’s pretty weird the way it makes you label posts and whatnot, and it’s outdated and not supported, so it’s not even workable.  Sigh.

Oh well, I’ll find something else or I’ll go back to the old one.  I really need to hire someone to actually do it right, I’m obsessed with this blog, but the dude lives in England and stuff, so I’ll continue my quest to find the perfect tweakable WordPress.  Until then, enjoy the witchery!