Breathe it in and breathe it out and pass it on, it's almost out

gamera_spinning gave me the heads up on this: J. Michael Straczynski To Write Spike TV’s ‘Red Mars’ Drama Series Project. Okay, so Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy is among my favorite SF ever, and definitely my favorite SF series. I just...I loved it. Straczynski as screenwriter gives me some hope, but I am really worried about the fact that this is on Spike TV. I don't know a lot about the channel, mostly because it's kind of horrible, or at least it used to be. All MANLY MEN stuff with some seriously problematic stuff--everything you might imagine with a television channel FOR MEN. One of the things I liked about the Mars trilogy was Robinson's women characters who were pretty much just people, you know? Not Strong Female Characters. One of them does use her beauty and body to get what she wants (power), but it's not presented in a negative way (not the way I read it, anyway), and it's not like she isn't smart as a whip. She just uses all her qualities to her advantage. She happens to be attractive and charismatic, so she uses that just like she would any other tactic. Anyway. I'm trying not to dwell on it too much. It could be amazing, but. Well. I'm not getting my hopes up.

It's been a while since I bought any fandom tee shirts, and I've been trying really hard to avoid buying more (because, really, enough tee shirts already) but then this showed up on Tee Fury today, and...oh it's just so pretty.

A very interesting article on a possible reason for addiction came across my internet desk today.

...In the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?

In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.

The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.

The article goes on to talk about a situation in which it was observed that the same thing happens with humans. Go read the whole article if you're interested. It's worth it if you have any interest in how our environment can affect our brains and bodies.

Stories and articles like this make me think about my daily life and what I can do to make it more rewarding if not always enjoyable. I want my life to get better as I age. I want to make the next twenty-five years more amazing than the previous twenty-five, and then the twenty-five after that I want to be incredible. A realistic attitude has me figuring things'll slow down once I start closing in on 100, so I'm not putting hopes and expectations past that. But seriously, what can I do to ensure a rewarding quarter century to come? Something to think about.

I need to find a job that doesn't involve so much use of technology

My computer has been fucking up left and right all over the place. So bad that the IT guy finally threw up his hands and built me a new one. Which I used for one day (last Friday) and then Tuesday after the MLK holiday, it was fucking up again in the exact same way (Shockwave Flash errors All The Damn Time). The only thing he could figure out that would help was to uninstall and the reinstall both Flash and Shockwave when I got the errors (which means doing that about two or three times a day no I am no shitting you).

Today, Obama is talking AT KU and I really wanted to watch the Livestream. Of course I started to get the errors, so I uninstalled the softwares. I thought I'd try to load the livestream without them, but was told I couldn’t load the video b/c my browser wasn’t compatible. I downloaded and reinstalled Flash. While I was trying to re-install Shockwave, I got Shockwave errors WHILE I WAS TRYING TO DOWNLOAD THE SHOCKWAVE SOFTWARE.

So now not only do I not get to watch the livestream, I think I’ve hosed my system even more.