I'm back from spending the past week+ in Boston. Fun time! THe main goal was visiting Fanw, who I hadn't seen in *four years*. What was I thinking? Fortunately, while I've had various other friendships drift apart, I felt as comfortable with her as ever, after all this time. I'm grateful.

I didn't explore Boston nearly as much as I might have -- museums, seafood? MIT? natch -- but I don't feel bad about it. I've always gotten more out of travelling to people than to places, and I ran into a lot of sleep deprivation... some brought with me, some incurred by staying up a bit too late, but also incurred from housemates getting up ungodly early, downstairs neighbors starting a dance party at 1am, 50 mph winds making the house creak scarily, and so on. Basically I'm a noise-sensitive sleeper, and it was a noisy house, so past the weekend I semi-crashed until the evenings.

Which were fun too, as I roped in more people. The evening that I got in, she took me to a Caltech reception and talk from the current president. That was nicer than expected -- seems to appreciate the student culture. He also said a band or choir will be performing at Carnegie Hall, and amused me by saying "they probably won't be the best to ever perform there, but (stuff I forget)", which amused me, as it seemed a sign of engineer's honesty, saying things normal people shouldn't even patently true. But anyway, besides seeing Riiiiich! briefly, I met and chatted with an alum from around my time, and we got to talking about dancing, she said she had no coordination, I said it was probably just a matter of practice, and the next day I thought to try inviting her to a Monday swing dance that I'd noticed a post-it for on Fanw's fridge. We met first for Vietnamese -- my first pho -- and then went dancing, my tutoring bracketing a rather well-done lindy hop lesson from the organizers, where I thought she did decently well for a newbie with no confidence or experience, and she said it was more fun than she expected. Then the next night I lured her out again, for dinner with Mad (who has webcomic) and husband.

Wednesday I mostly did hide indoor, after a walk, but that moves us to linkage:
subvocalization tech approaches; moving the Earth is proposed via comet fly-bys, which is actually a rather slow and conservative method (format: ZIPfile of GIFs); Charlie "githyanki" Stross writes up the US Presidential candidates as D&D monsters; British Columbia starts a decently well done carbon tax (via a_steep_hill); and someone fanwanks Palpatine's plots into making sense. Grey goo may not be such a big threat, if you run some numbers; an oil company in Chad is experimenting with being socially responsible; someone writes up Geoffrey Landis's Venusian aerostats for Transhuman Space.

Also, I read Steven Brust's Firefly fanfic novel, My Own Kind of Freedom, which I liked a lot. Slid into the mood of it in just a few pages, and had to remind myself later that it wasn't canon -- characters and lines felt very on the mark.

Fanw took me by a game store nearby, which compared to Bloomington's Game Preserve felt a lot more 'standard' -- dingy looks (something about all those bagged miniatures on the wall and lack of decor) and very male -- she was the only girl there, and it was pretty crowded at 10pm Saturday, with a couple of basement rooms filled with boys gaming. OTOH, it also had more *stuff* than Game Preserve -- well, possibly fewer board games, but a lot more RPG books, and more than just d20, Warhammer, and a smattering of White Wolf; more like full White Wolf and a lot of GURPS. And a box full of out of print on-sale books whose volume nearly matched everything the Game Preserve sells. I got Technocracy Assembled 2 and GURPS Space.

And today's special: Justus Möser, conservative concern troll from 1772. "On the Diminished Disgrace of Whores and Their Children in Our Day.

LOLParrot

Huckabee endorses wifely submission. Fred Thompson calls him a liberal. All the GOPers endorse more tax cuts, because the federal government is running such a surplus right now... McCain says US was founded as a Christian nation.

Majikthiese notes the various male Presidents who have cried in public, without the grief that Hillary Clinton is getting over her voice wavering.

Greta Christina on the harm of woo-woo thinking. Links in passing to the total failure of a whole slew of phone pet psychics to detect that the pet in question did not exist.

(from pompe) More on how US doesn't regard foreigners as having any rights.

Dead heart stripped of cells, remaining matrix repopulated with stem cells. Woo!