Celemiri

Yesterday afternoon, a young man entered the mall three miles from where I live carrying an AR-15 and opened fire.  He killed two innocent people and himself, and a third victim is in the hospital in serious but stable condition with a gunshot wound to the chest.  I was not there when it happened, but I did pass through an hour before the shooting, and that particular mall has simply been "the mall" to me since childhood.  I am supposed to be attending a midnight showing of The Hobbit at that mall Thursday night.  Today the police released the identity of the shooter; I did not know him, but a few of my friends did, and they remember him as a sweet, caring kid.  They are all in complete shock.

I find myself reeling.  It's one thing to know intellectually that such a thing can happen anywhere, but to have such a senseless tragedy hit so very close to home is something I don't think anyone can ever be prepared for.  Certainly in Oregon we don't expect rampages like this: the last one I can remember anywhere in this state was back in '98, when 15-year-old Kip Kinkel murdered his parents and then went on a shooting spree at his high school down in Springfield.

I just can't wrap my head around it.  This is my hometown.  I've always felt totally safe here.  What the fuck happened?

On Saturday, August 25th, the world lost one of its last great explorers.  Neil Armstrong - Eagle Scout, decorated combat pilot, test pilot, and first human being to set foot on another celestial body - passed away from complications stemming from heart surgery.  He was 82 years old.

I feel a particular sense of loss at this, because Armstrong was one of my greatest personal heroes, and not just because he was tapped to be the first person out the door of the Eagle.  Firstly, he saved that landing: the landing zone they'd chosen turned out, at the last possible moment, to be covered in boulders, too dangerous to attempt to land on.  Armstrong had to hunt for a safer spot for the LEM while already most of the way through the process of landing.  I don't know how many of you have played the old vector game "Lunar Lander," but Armstrong played it for real, from inside that so-easily-smashed tin can.  The Eagle landed with about 20 seconds of fuel left.  If nothing else, the man had a steady hand and balls of pure titanium.

But despite that, despite the superhuman feat he accomplished, he remained humble.  He knew, he HAD to know, the moment he stepped off the footpad of the LEM and onto the surface of the Moon, that his name would be remembered for the rest of human history, that his "one small step" would be seen forever as a watershed moment for humanity - but he never let it go to his head.  Whenever someone heaped praise on him, he would demur, saying the praise truly belonged to the people who actually got him there: the engineers, the physicists, the programmers, and the countless other people at NASA, JPL, Lockheed and Boeing who made the Apollo program possible.  He looked first, always, not to aggrandize what he did but to inspire others to dream, to learn, and to explore.  To accomplish what he did and remain that humble and that focused on the overall good of the human race truly earned him the appellation "hero," and the world is sadly diminished by his loss.

Rest well, weary traveler.

I have a pair of good friends, Kyle and Megan.  They are lovely people and make an adorable couple.  On the first, they announced their engagement (not an April Fool's trick, they just wanted to have a bit of fun with it).  However, they are not going to be actually getting married for...well, years most likely.

They wrote a guest blog for the Huffington Post about why.  I would very much like for you all to read it: www.huffingtonpost.com/kyle-st…

I am very proud of my friends, and I support what they are doing unequivocally.  Here's to love winning out over hate and bigotry, however long it may take!

Alright, DeviantART.  What the fuck.

First, the death of fullview.  What's up with that?  I know it doesn't affect the art I make (not yet, anyway), but I have several people I watch whose art it does impact.  One particular piece went from being about eight inches tall and two feet wide to the width of my screen and about three inches tall.  That is NOT "full" view.  That kind of crap means that I am missing out on detail that the artist WANTED me to see.  I thought the whole point of dA was to provide a place where artists could share and display their art how they wanted it shared and displayed.  You don't fix what isn't broken, and the old way of sizing images was most definitely NOT broken.  Give us true fullview back, dammit.

Also, why can't I view JUST my deviation updates anymore?  I liked being able to see just the new deviations that had cropped up since I last logged in.  I watch a large number of people, so I frequently have 15 or more new deviations to look at.  I liked having them ALL on one screen; it made it much quicker and easier to look through them.  Now I'm limited to five per page on the Messages screen.  Why the hell did you do that?  That's stupid.  It does nothing to improve the site; it actually makes the site experience worse, in my opinion.  Get your fucking act together.

In the parlance of the internet, DeviantART: I am disappoint.

I took a class in oil painting a few years back, and I really enjoyed it (and if I may be forgiven a boast, I wasn't too bad at it, either).  So when I found out that I had some unexpected money heading my way, I promised myself that when the money arrived I would get myself the necessary supplies and start painting again.  Well, the money arrived last week, so today I went to Art Media and spent about half of it on painting stuff.  I am VERY EXCITED about this.  It will be nice to have an actual hobby again, one that doesn't involve sitting on my ass in front of the computer for hours on end (curse you, WoW, and your siren song!).  So perhaps in the future there will be some painted pieces popping up in my gallery.