Random Bits from Facebook:

June 7:
Nikki: COMPLIMENT CHALLENGE comment your name and Imma tell you something that I like about you! Best challenge yet! We need positive energy in our lives.

Hyena: Sure, I ‘ll play. Uncle Hyena.

Nikki: You’re one of my favorite people ever– a rare anchor I trust thoroughly.


June 13:
A statement from my wife, which is relevant to the “Happiness” thread in this group of a few days ago.

“You can’t ‘make’ me happy; happiness is the mean to which I regress.”

June 16:
Life in my household:
Hyena: So a woman goes to her female friends… a woman who is not you, who HAS female friends…
Dementia: Hey, I talk to Sue two or three times a year… at a party… that she is hosting… with a house full of other people…

June 21:
Said in my household:
Dementia: What do you think of Dr. Doom?
Hyena: Graphically, pretty cool. Classic Jack Kirby. As a character… If Hans Gruber is a ten, and Snidely Whiplash is a one… Doom is a two or a three.

June 22:
Catching up on recorded television, finally running “The Expanse” from last winter. The story takes a LONG time to get going, and drags a bit, but it still makes me nostalgic for the old days of planetary science fiction. Case in point: Two characters are under fire and adrift in zero gee. One of them clips a tether to his partner, then kicks her straight into the black. HE sails back to a handhold and snatches it just as the tether comes taut, and holds on tight while his partner rebounds to him. Slicker and more accurate than ANYTHING in “Gravity”…

June 24:
Amanda W. is one of my more senior adopted nieces, one of several associated with IMSA and Makoto (an odd juxtaposition only if you weren’t there). She is an MIT grad, a robotics guru, and generally fierce and terrible. The following is from a post about her path, as a female, to becoming an uber-geek.

“I did not get a boost specifically towards engineering from going to SciFi conventions as a teenager, but I got huge amounts of encouragement and support towards being a self-determined human. Paul Haynie was one of my utterly terrifying Uncles who was a WONDERFUL influence. And he still is, from afar.”

Every now and then, apparently, I do something right…

June 26:
I am very close to being topped out in algebra, and it makes me unhappy. Concepts are still simple enough, but I am rubbish at factoring polynomials, and that weakness is getting in my way more and more as I advance. Unfortunately, to get better at factoring polynomials, I have to memorize a list of complex identities, and I am not sure that I CAN. It isn’t just that the memorization is unpleasant and boring (which it very much IS), it is that my mildly dyslexic brain simply is not capable of keeping fiddly, semi-random forty character strings straight. FRUSTRATED.