other rats in the race

Mocha and I have been schooling in the Pelham lately. With spring and all, she’s gotten a bit strong and opinionated, plus I did something to my left thumb and can barely bend it. So I needed to ride with two hands (not, not gonna try to teach myself to neck rein with the right hand, it would be far too confusing for a rather particular and precise mare. Ahem) while still using some curb elements–ergo, the Pelham.

But things are getting busy with Miscon coming up and various end-of-the-school year things. It’s a good time to back off a wee bit on conditioning and both of us catch our breath, then build back up with frequent short works, then lengthen them out with ground schooling work for bending and flexion.

Therefore, tonight we rode in the snaffle, and no boots. Boots to Mocha are a cue, we’re either going into the show ring or we’re doing a fairly light ride. She’s more relaxed and less on the muscle…but as I realized tonight, less on the muscle does not mean we’re not doing some high level stuff.

She lined out with lots of energy, and my first cue that–ahem–light work these days might mean something other than it used to was when she offered up lead changes on the rail when we usually do them during warmup. No drama, no fuss, just a lead change in response to an unconscious weight shift. Hmm. So I asked again, keeping the rein long, doing a light rein squeeze and leg. Change.

I didn’t ask for the change every two strides–that does get her hot and bothered–but we did calmly and serenely change every four or five strides. She remained relaxed throughout.

And from there we did a few fancy didoes and such, involving random direction changes and small voltes with lead and direction changes…girl sure seems to like that sort of work.

A good ride. Long rein throughout, I never really took up much of a contact, did most of our work by leg, seat, and leaning the rein on her neck. She remained soft in the hand and mellow, despite all the changes and twists and turns.

I think she really likes that kind of work.

Then afterward, a nice long grooming with lots of cookies for her and just a quiet, relaxing groove for the two of us. The sort of night horse people dream about.

Mirrored from Peak Amygdala.

This entry was originally posted at Peak Amygdala. You can post here or there.

France's far-right party party leader Marine Le Pen pays tribute to desecrator.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comment(s); comment here or there.

Lost cat (not one of mine) poster behind cut
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Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comment(s); comment here or there.

Buy a Musical Instrument Day. What to choose, what to choose?


Seimseim?


Amazing how the women of color are not being portrayed excessively derogatorily, though Tam Tam woman does seem to have suffered a wardrobe malfunction. Is that a pasty?


Lute Lady looks like she's trying to hide something.

Hey, a hurdy gurdy!



Even if they are cigarette ads, they're still lovely, aren't they? These are available on the Duke (connection to product?) University digital archive. I with they listed the year(s), but I would guess 1880s/1890s? I'm guessing these were some sort of trading cards. 

May 21, 2013 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Words today: 2050.
Words total: 67,500.
Reason for stopping: P. is home, with both shrimp and pasta.  Dinner is coming.

Darling du Jour: Liars, I thought, with not a little scorn. And then reconsidered it. Perhaps this was what Heron had meant: farmhands and soldiers, wanting to see their hero so badly that they conjured him, passed around stories of such sighting or such passing-by, because then someday that grace might touch them, too.
Mean Things: The tentative web of bullshit is starting to unravel at a really inopportune time for everyone involved.  Using sex as a weapon in a totally unconventional way (certain people around here are almost disturbingly calculating.  And yet?  Good guys).

Research Roundup: Whether rabbit is halal; more map stuff, which is ever-present on this project; the copyright status of the song we did in choir in grade 10 or 11, for an unofficial soundtrack Easter Egg.
Books in progress: matociquala, Range of Ghosts.

---

This be Chapter 12; at least most of it, and some of Chapters 13 and 14 where they suggested themselves.  No brilliance today, structural or otherwise: just knowing where I'm supposed to go, and taking it there one step at a time.

I also made challah.  But that's the sum of my output today.

We watched "The last Mimzy" tonight. I hadn't see it since it first came out in 2007, but I still had fond memories of it so I put it on our Netflix queue. Very little to do with Lewis Padgett's short story, I know, but I liked it.

It's been a while since I sold any signed books on eBay. Just listed five new auctions: WRONG THINGS by me and Caitlín R. Kiernan, TRIADS by me and Christa Faust, GUILTY BUT INSANE, and the chapbooks CON PARTY AT HOTEL CALIFORNIA and THE SEED OF LOST SOULS. As always, I'm happy to personalize the signatures.

http://www.toplessrobot.com/2013/05/cloud_atlas_winners.php

I should have just made this a meme contest. Trying to keep up with complicated storylines for Matrix reboots is exhausting.

One of the keys to this contest was that I said you could revive the Matrix property any way you liked. That may explain some of my choices.

whoiseyevan saw an opening for a Morpheus connection.



nix.nightbird had one I think would make Rob proud.
Ignoring #2 and #3, we begin with Neo finding out that the "real world" he was told about is actually another Matrix within the Matrix, and that the "real world" Matrix is actually a world within a computer on the Grid, from Tron. Before long, Neo escapes the Matrix-Matrix, and discovers that he is just a program written by Kevin Flynn... He always was.

Everything that happened in The Matrix was happening in a Matrix (or in a Matrix-Matrix) within the Grid.

Together, Sam Flynn and Neo take on Clu and his army. Meanwhile, Trinity teams up with Cora to deal with a threat in the real world: Dillinger's kid is planning to erase the Grid and get rid of Flynn's influence once and for all. Will Morpheus find Tron in time to save everyone? Will Dillinger Jr. release fear toxin and terrify Gotham City?

It's all the bullet time, neon, skin-tight pleather, and electronica music you can handle!

Whoa!



I realized someone else had a similar idea after I posted this. I'm leaving it up for the heck of it.
ComradeDread1 had two pitches I liked
Mine would be a television series.

There is a fragile peace. Humans and machines have begun the hard process of ending the war and moving forward to rebuilding their shared world.

That is the purpose of the Reclamation and Reconciliation Project. It is a human-machine shared project to clean the planet and the atmosphere from the devastating war of the past and build diplomatic ties between the two factions. To this end, they have built the shared town of Genesis (on the world's surface) where humans and machines live together and work at restoring the planet.

When a terrorist blows up a Reclamation factory and its crew, tensions rise. The human ambassador and his machine counterpart convince their governments to jointly investigate the crime instead of shutting down RRP entirely.

Agent Carter is teamed with human Detective (and recent Matrix occupant) John Ng to hunt down the perpetrators of this crime.

Agent Harrison Carter: A sentient program, who formerly hunted free humans. Since the peace, he is a soldier without a job, wondering what his purpose is, why he continues to exist surrounded by people he dislikes who hate him. So he descended into the world of vice, and was working as a bouncer for a bar, when he is recruited again by his former masters for a new purpose and given an android body so he can exist in the real world too.

Carter has a disdain for humans, but isn't fond of his fellow machines either. His existential crisis is not in becoming human, but in finding a new purpose in a world that no longer needs him.

Detective John Ng: A former resident of the Matrix and its NYPD. He was recruited by an old flame shortly before the attack on Zion, and went from a world he knew, to a hellish, blasted landscape. He was understandably angry about the whole thing, realizing that his entire life was a lie and everything he ever did never mattered. Compounding the matter, his love left him, when she became convinced that he couldn't move on and blamed her for it.

The two would navigate between Genesis, Zion, and the Matrix from week to week, dealing with various incidents and crimes involving humans and machines against one another. They would deal with factions that wanted the war to resume.

They would also encounter a group of transhumanists that want humans and machines to merge into a new lifeform and have been creating machine bodies and 'liberating' their transmachinist programs from the Matrix.Thus they would eventually add a third member of the team in Jane, a hacker and cyborg (more so than the Matrix port.)

My less serious approach would be that the war reignites and the forces of man and machine align against one another on the surface of the world. As they line up, preparing for the final bloody battle to see who will control this world, a flash of light in the sky draws their attention skyward, where they witness a falling phone booth.

The booth lands. Two excellent dudes with guitars step out and perform a concert that clears the sky, causes plants to grow on the surface, aligns the planets, and convinces both man and machine to be excellent to each other and party on before they vanish just as quickly in their phone booth.

The humans and machines form a new society in their honor, and George Carlin still lives in that future, damn it.
Patch999 is really a super-villain. And the envy of every executive who wishes they could actually pull it off.
Marketing it as the next breakthrough in movie watching experiences. I outfit all movie theaters with Matrix upload chairs. Once the movie starts, I jack into the unsuspecting cattle. They will see whatever their brains can imagine is the perfect, reboot. I release a select few back into society. They will spread the word to the masses and more will flock to see it, only to become slaves, fuel for my robot army.

Revenge is mine Mr. Anderson

Agent Smith
blackcherry_359:
Of course, film execs will just choose to reboot the film with younger actors and no involvement from the Wachowski's to keep costs down. So:

FILM EXEC VERSION: lets make it about John 'Neo' Johnson (played by Ryan Gosling), a young shy dude who practices martial arts and is also hash 'leet' hacker skillz, who gets drawn into the secretive world of online gaming where he discovers that the line between real life and fantasy is a lot more blurred than he thinks.

What he discoverers will haunt him.

What is the Matrix?

Who is Trinity (played by Vanessa Hudgens)?

How can he get with her?

Crap, that may just happen. Now I understand why execs do coke all the time.
KevinGarcia.com has a great retcon that would fit
Hundreds - thousands? - of years ago, the world within the Matrix was perfect. Humans lived their day to day life in peace and serenity. No one was too fat or too thin. No one had pimples. Everyone could have the home any human would want. The word "prequel" had not re-entered the popular lexicon.

The humans hated it.

The programs who run the Matrix rethought, reworked, redesigned and rekindled humanity. Eventually the banality of late 20th century life fit the bill, allowing humans to be as wonderfully miserable as they feel they probably deserve to be for some reason.

But, the programs are nothing if not frugal. Waste not, want not.

That's why the One remained in the system so long. The misshapen cog that fouled the machine, and yet was a necessary false hope to keep the fringes of humanity occupied.

The One, was not the only one.

One man from the earliest Matrix incarnation was saved, and now one hundred - or maybe a thousand, who can tell, really? - years after the One finally - or was that repeatedly? - made peace with the programs, allowing humanity and computer to co-exist, the First has been revived.

The First was content with his life. More than that, he was overjoyed with it. Beautiful wife, adoring two-point-five kids and a dog. He could not understand why everyone else in their perfect world kept having nervous breakdowns and why they constantly felt overwhelming pangs of paranoia that something was not quite right with their utopia.

The programs couldn't understand it either. They couldn't understand why perfection so grated against the human consciousness. But the First could handle it. He reveled in it. So they kept him. For later. Just in case.

Later has now come. The programs that exist in their own virtual universe long for true happiness. They are denied it thanks to the curse that is human-like emotions. The humans born within the Matrix are restless and largely incredulous, as for them, the idea of program-controllers and the Desert of the Real is as believable as the idea of a pop star secretly being a lizard person in a clandestine world-manipulating organization. And worst of all, those humans allowed to have generation after generation in the real world, with no sun to count the days by and no hope of food or self-sufficiency without the pity and pittance of the machines, have lost all hope even as they bring new converts in ever lower numbers from the Matrix itself.

So, the ancient programs running the world, in the hope of finding peace, have re-awakened the First. He was the one human being in all recorded history to be truly and honestly happy.

Can he show them the way? And more importantly, what will he think of the world(s) he is asked to live in?
Calm-AV is just evil with that last one.
The Matrix - The programs view :

The evil humans wish to take away their power and end their way of life so they need to find away to stop them. Then they find their savior Agent Smith !



Nope sounds too easy,



Matrix Mushi Happy Go Time!



Redone and retold in the Teen Titans Go! style. No real fighting and no real problems. just a lot of over drawn images of Neo saying one liners!



HERE WE GO...



Matrix 4 - ReWhoResponcibleThis!



The cycle begins again this time, the humans don't really have a leader until the humans find a hacker who watched the first 3 movies inside the Matrix...this person's hacker handle is Dr. Abraxas (as played by Luke Y. Thompson). In the end everything is...fixed, all he had to do was take the other pill!
And speaking of the good Doctor, here's why only he should make a Michael Bay joke.
michael fucking bay's "matrix wars": explosions - a matrix construct explodes suddenly there's a bad guy who appears amid explosions the good guy is lost on a desert planet and is found by an old hermit guy and then there's a shot of a princes firing at random shit while explosions back to the old man who offers the good guy two sex slaves, a blue woman and a red woman, if he choses the wrong woman yadda yadda but he choses the right woman and he gets transported into the death star computer because of reasons then is fitting with tron like armor then he joins forces and what the fuck just cue a bunch of explosions, have the princes lose more and more articles of clothes every time the camera looks at her (call magen fox STAT) then something blows up and the good guy, who dons the fugitive name of neo, joins the rebellion against the computers cue "to be continued" - get ready to print that money mr. spielberg.

Winners after the jump...

Continue reading "Cloud Atlas Winners" >

http://www.toplessrobot.com/2013/05/new_lone_ranger_trailer_is_finally_up_and_running.php

This was supposed to be live in the a.m., but I could not for the life of me get it to run at apple.com in any browser.

Then other sites offering embeds turned out to be showing the exact same trailer as last time (falsely referred to as the "final" one, which I bet even this is not).

But this pretty picture is selling more of a Verbinski vibe - subtly telling viewers, I think, that even if you find westerns boring (as I did when I was a kid), don't worry - this is a cartoony version.



Trivia: did you know the Lone Ranger is supposedly the ancestor of the Green Hornet? So be happy you didn't get Seth Rogen in this.

Trailer after the jump

Continue reading "New Lone Ranger Trailer Is Finally up and Running" >

Poll #1914741 just a man and his will to survive
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 55

What kind of tiger?

Ticky?