Childhood cartoons

I promised Galspanic, Fugu and Pony a long time ago that I'd post a clip of Sally-chan, a cartoon I watched in kindergarten. Sally's family was from space somewhere and she had magical powers, but she lived on Earth and went to school among regular human girls and boys. She would travel back and forth to her parents, who lived in space, on her broom. It was great! I think all the girls in my kindergarten watched this! I don't think the boys got into it too much though. Probably because it probably didn't have any explosions or transformer robots.

Sonosheets!

Serious flashback seeing these. I don't think I had too many out of Japan but I used to love these guys. I bet they're still hidden away in a box somewhere. Anyone else got some? I'm sure they're worth billions!


Here's one of our own A1-BU9:

Via Pink Tentacle

Childhood: shat on

Since this weekend was evidently about destroying more of our childhood...

I think I was talking to someone here about the Orson Scott Card rant against gay marriage, which pretty much ruined every happy memory I had of reading his books as a kid. So here's some infuriating, head-exploding examples of his propaganda/fear mongering, "logic", and bigotry, in that order:

"Already in several states, there are textbooks for children in the earliest grades that show 'gay marriages' as normal. How long do you think it will be before such textbooks become mandatory -- and parents have no way to opt out of having their children taught from them?"

"If a court declared that from now on, 'blind' and 'sighted' would be synonyms, would that mean that it would be safe for blind people to drive cars?"

"With 'gay marriage,' the last shreds of meaning will be stripped away from marriage, with homosexuals finishing what faithless, selfish heterosexuals have begun."

My childhood hero is fucking dead to me.



On a happier note, I'm not even a parent and I found this to be an awesome alternative to the horribleness we watched on Sunday!

Both via GeekDad

The effects of liquid nitrogen on a human body

I'm pretty sure this clip from "V" the original miniseries deserves its own post.

Division of Labor in Space Lego

Here's a thing: It's no doubt because I used to watch so much Star Trek, but very early on, I discovered that the color of the spacesuits worn by my LEGO astronauts was, in fact, an identifier for their jobs.

The Red guys were all technicians and engineers. They built and repaired stuff, sort of like in Star Trek, except they didn't die all the time. I don't think any of my dudes ever died, because then you'd have to set them aside, and what kid in his right mind would voluntarily decide that he now had fewer toys to play with? They did lose hands, though. Kind of a lot. Space is dangerous, and large fragments from ships breaking up can shear your hand right the hell off.

The White guys were pilots. If I remember right, this was because I really paid a lot of attention to the brick color I used in the small, 1-2 man fighters I used to build. With space stations and planetary bases, you want to go big, so you're kind of at the mercy of your collection. For small ships, though, I really paid attention to the colors, sticking to white and gray and black; the natural colors of the materials I imagined I was using. You wouldn't paint a spaceship blue. That would indicate quite a bit of vanity, which my LEGO space explorers were certainly lacking. They were professionals. Anyway, the White-suited pilots looked pretty sharp in their sleek, minimalist fighters.

The Blue guys were in command. They stayed at the bases and gave orders, only going on missions when they were totally important. They got this job because I only had a very small number of Blue guys (This was before I learn how a real hierarchical organization actually works, with twenty-five managers giving orders to two workers).

When the Yellow guys came out, many months into the whole space lego thing, the whole division of labor thing kind of fell apart. At first, they were the Blue guys' bosses; admirals and generals visiting from Earth. Then I got more, and they stuck around, and I demoted them, deciding that they were actually ground troops; soldiers. Of course, with no one to really fight, this didn't make a whole lot of sense either. In fact, the biggest obstacle to my LEGO space explorers up until that point had been cataclysmic malfunctions and unfortunate accidents. Exciting, I know.

I think I toyed with the idea of making the Yellow guys the bad guys, maybe some breakaway faction who wanted to explore space... differently... or something. That idea never really got out of the gate. Pretty soon the whole system broke down, and I decided that suit color didn't have anything to do with their jobs any more. Everyone was kind of doing everything, and I guess if you liked blue, you could wear blue. Or maybe you were from a different ship.

And anyway, around this time, some wise-guy gave me some castle LEGO, and all of my reasoning about who was doing what had to go out the damn window, because why was that guy wearing a pointy helmet and carrying a sword anyway?