Firefly Camp

I went to the readthrough, it was really fun. Thank you Emperor et al!

I cooked pasta bake for 12, with help from two assistants, especially Sebastian who had lots of experience scaling up shopping and cooking for larger numbers. It turned out pretty well.

The A14 has finished some building work, so now a couple of the worst spots have stopped being "two narrow lanes at 50 mph" and started being "two wide lanes with an extra peel-off lane for". But I need to stop pretending there ever won't be traffic.

See Liv's journal for a summary of how I felt about firefly: I love all the awesome bits more, but I've stopped being able to gloss over the problematic bits.

Too many books!

I have been trying to record at least a few thoughts about books or films I've consumed, but I've got too much of a backlog to think I'll actually do as much as I'd imagined, so here's a brief list.

Calgary

Set in Ireland, about a member of a small town who shoots a very nice priest in revenge against the church for allowing another priest to abuse him when he was a boy. Well done, I don't know if the portrayal of Ireland is good or horrible, the subject matter is very uncomfortable.

Firefight, Brandon Sanderson

The sequel to Sanderson's overly-specified novel about anti-superheroes. It continues the same strengths (worldbuilding, consistency of superpowers), and flaws (characters, emotional satisfaction). It fills in backstory from when powers were first discovered and some major heroes and villains were scientists who'd hoped to use them for good. It progresses the plot. Overall, it felt a bit flat, but gave me a lot of good ideas and I'll definitely read the third one.

planetary comics

A collected series of comics about an alternate history where an alternate-version of (roughly) Fantastic Four are villains who control most of the world, and the Planetary organisation which does... various stuff. It's beautiful, glorious, in showing "here's a cool thing, here's ANOTHER cool thing, here's a cool character, here's an even cooler character". Lots of it stuck with me. It doesn't try for much consistency in worldbuilding, which disappoints me, even though it might have been incompatible with what it does well.

Beauty and the Beast

Judith finally showed me another of the Disney films I'd never actually saw. It's really pretty good, both in a good story, and a good overall message: Gaston creeping on Belle is a great portrayal of a socially-powerful person imposing unwanted romantic attention on someone, enough that it's really obviously creepy, without descending into torture-porn.

The Beast is scary without being creepy in the same way, and it's clearly shown that he's doing a bad thing by kidnapping Belle even if it isn't completely her fault, and him saving her life redeems him, not her.

I'm also quite amazed at the Beast's animation, that he's beast-like enough to be menacing, but humanoid enough to be plausibly romantic with Belle.

Did saddam hussein have a quran written in blood

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/30152/did-saddam-hussein-have-a-quran-written-in-blood

This obviously sounds completely made up, but was reported straightforwardly in a bunch of mainstream articles. I couldn't figure out what those articles were based on though, and I couldn't find any earlier references, nor any mention on Snopes, so I don't know how to tell. Other than "I refuse to think about it, it's just obviously true/false", does anyone know where to go from there?