Shadee’s Blog

Yesterday we signed up for Netflix, which is basically an on-line movie rental place that sends out the DVD’s you pick out and when you mail it back it sends you a new one from the list you’ve put together. The subscription starts with a free trial so I figured I’d test out all the features. One of them was seeing certain streaming movies right from their site. I tried several of them and they were all incredibly choppy and unwatchable because of that. And of course the only Help topics about it suggested problems which weren’t on their end (I later found a forum topic about the same problem where users said that most of their streaming movies just had really shitty compression and that that was the problem). Anyway, to rule my own connection out I ran a search for streaming movies. I was expecting to have to test it out on some dodgy sites but then I came across Hulu, which is a pretty nifty place. I played part of the last Battlestar Galactica episode from there and the video compression and quality are awesome! Sure it’s not 100% perfect but compared to most other “play on your TV through the net” places it’s pretty damn close

Then, after messing around and looking to see what movies they had I found David Hewlett’s (Some of you will know him as Rodney McKay from Stargate Atlantis) movie, A Dog’s Breakfast. I’d heard about it, mainly from Mr. Hewlett’s own twitter and I was pretty curious. So I started playing it and planted myself on the couch. Mord was playing a game but ended up kinda watching… then sitting on the couch’s armrest for a bit, and then he was hooked too

I have to say that I haven’t seen a movie that’s actually made me laugh out loud for a long time but this one certainly did the trick. I’m not going to give any descriptions or go into any more detail because I didn’t know what I was in for either when I started watching, so all I can say is sit your ass down and go watch this
The fullscreen button is at the top right once the commercial is over. (Oh and don’t worry about the commercials, it’s only one at a time and there’s not many of them).

Enjoy.

-Dee.

You guys know I don’t consider myself to be a religious person. I think agnostic is probably what would suit me best if I had to pick a label.

But sometimes, when watching nature in action it makes me wonder. How the hell did some of these things come to be by evolution. Because no matter how you twist and turn it, it just doesn’t make any sense.

Here are a few examples:

The first two are already pretty impressive. I know there are creatures who only mimic other creatures by behavior, and I can see how that could be something the smart ones learned and passed on over the millennia. Then there’s ones that just happened to survive because their coloration happened to match the surroundings better so the ones that didn’t get eaten got to procreate. Sure. I dig that.

But how the hell does an animal evolve looking =exactly= like the leaf of a certain plant including the dying edges and everything. For something to be recreated that specifically, with all the veins in the right place, the coloration of the leaf and the coloration of the decay in the right place and the holes in the decaying part of the leaf where it would in fact be brittle and deteriorate if it had actually been a leaf… and then to top it off have a nice rounded hole on the side looking like it’s been eaten away by an insect…

Wouldn’t something with that much detail and precision have to have been observed and purposely been replicated? It just seems like too much of a coincidence. Especially with so many different species of animals “accidentally” ending up in the same spot. The first is a katydid and the second is a butterfly.

Now even weirder, the 3rd is an orchid mimicking a certain type of wasp. Now the weirdness of a plant figuring out how to use insects for pollination is weird enough in itself. We grew up with it, it’s normal, but think about it… this didn’t start out this way if evolution is how they came to be. So how in the world did a plant go from just throwing stuff in the air for other plants to catch to devising clever ways of manipulating insects to do it for them? And if you think it’s probably not meant to look like a wasp, it just happens to look like it a little bit and then stuff started happening, let me add that this plant also gives off a scent exactly like the Pheromones of the female wasp of the species…

I don’t know, it’s just too strange for it to be coincidence. The thing has the shape of the wasp, the colors of the wasp and it smells like a female wasp. How can something like that “evolve” without either the plant itself or some outside manipulator observing and then applying all of these attributes together.

By no means am I saying I believe God did it. It’s a possibility, but I simply don’t know. All I’m saying is that there are some things out there that are just too strange to have “evolved” purely guided by the survival of the fittest rules, because that would all be a result of random mutations and chance. And I can’t imagine things as precise and uncanny like these happening like that.

-Dee.

This was made by an awesome animator who got bored one day and decided to create new animations for some of the World of Warcraft models from scratch and create this video. -Enjoy

The Craft of War: BLIND from percula on Vimeo.

-Dee.

Some of you already know that we haven’t had the best start of the new year. Mord’s mentioned what’s been going on to people here and there. Aside from the nasty flu we both had/have I haven’t really mentioned anything myself yet. I guess it’s mainly because it sucked and I’d much rather just move past it instead of getting into it. I didn’t even really know what to say about it. So that’s why I hadn’t posted any new blog entries since the last one. But now that I’m looking at my blog and trying to come up with something silly to post I’m held back by a certain amount of guilt too. Just blatantly skipping it and posting something funny seems kinda wrong.

So in a nutshell (yeah right), our cat had an ear infection so we decided to take her to the vet. Besides the ear infection she’s always had a bit of a whistle when breathing, she was a stray for many many years before we took her in to give her a cozy retirement. It’s a condition she’d already grown used to and it didn’t stop her from being an otherwise happy, active and affectionate kitty. She ate well, drank well, jumped up on the windowsill to sit in the sun, up on our laps for pets, chased her toys, stole the dog bed, everything normal cats do. So anyway, back to the day we took her to the vet. The vet noticed the breathing thing (which is a lot worse when she’s stressed, and being stuffed in a cat carrier and taken to a vet = stress, duh). But they were worried, wanted to take x-rays, put her in an oxygen tank for a while, give her a steroid injection etc. We figured, hey, they know what they’re doing right? Our previous vet had said nothing could be done about it but who knows, maybe these guys could finally fix the whistling breathing and cure her completely.

Wrong.

Her health went downhill really fast when we took her home that day, so bad that we ended up taking her to an emergency vet in the middle of the night where we were told that they thought the best thing was to put her down right then and there. Of course this came as a complete shock, we’d taken a happy active cat to the vet for a freaking ear infection and by the end of the day she needs to be put down?? So we decided to take her home. If a relative’s health goes downhill after treatment you don’t give up on them and have the doctors pull life support that same day, you give them a chance to recover. So that’s what we did. We made her comfortable, gave her nice canned food, some meds the emergency vet gave us to open up her airways a bit and the following week things started to gradually get better. She was starting to get her strength back, was starting to do her regular things again, sun, cuddles, happy things. She wasn’t ready to give up yet at all. It’s not hard to tell when animals are ready to go, I’ve seen it before, and I certainly wasn’t seeing it in her. But unfortunately by the end of last week things went south again and Friday night I knew it was time, and I sat with her until she passed away.

Fucking vets (I know, they probably did things right by textbook standards, and it’s not their fault it didn’t go the way it was supposed to, but being in the position I’m in now I feel like I deserve to be a little pissed off).

And you know what really kills me?
Our dog had an ear infection last year. They gave us ear cleaner and medication. I actually looked at it when the cat got her ear infection but the medication bottle said it was to be used on dogs only, so I was afraid to use it on the cat and didn’t.

The day we took her in they sent us home with 2 new bottles of the exact same meds they gave us for the dog…

Lots of could have, would have and should have’s in this.
But I can go over it till I drop, can’t change things now.

So RIP Kitty.

Hope there’s lots of mice and catnip up there.

-Dee.

We all are :/

Bring on summer now plz.

-Dee.