After much fiddling and dinking around,

I finally answered the Selectsmart.com Religion Selector's questions as accurately as I possibly could. I'm not very happy with the phrasing of one or two of their questions, but I chose the options that were closest to what I actually believed...

According to the SelectSmart.com Belief System Selector, my #1 belief match is Mahayana Buddhism. What do you believe? Visit SelectSmart.com/RELIGION

Given that I was expecting to see Sikh, Liberal Quaker, or possibly some form of Liberal Protestant show up based on the results I got when I took the test last year, this is something of a surprise. Not a bad surprise, but not something I expected. Hrm.

Another way you know you're me...

You hate hate hate meeting people's eyes if you don't have to, because it feels like you're staring. Looking straight into someone's eyes seems rude under most circumstances, and you'd rather pay attention to someone by looking in their direction and pointing an ear at them, because the important thing is that you hear and pay attention to what they say. You sometimes wish you could wear sunglasses more often because then you wouldn't look like you were staring if you wanted to look at a person's face, but generally, as far as you're concerned, a person's eyes are part of their Personal Space and ought to be respected as part of the sphere of privacy that includes the territory around their body. You'd rather be stuck in a subway train crushed up against a complete stranger's back than stuck in that same subway standing a foot away from the stranger, but forced to maintain eye contact for that length of time.

. . . wait, that's how you tell you're a New Yorker. . .

Anyway, you get the idea. Damned if I know where it came from. My best guess is that when I was little and my mom would yell at me for the standard kid infractions, she'd get extremely angry if I didn't look her straight in the eye while she was yelling, and the whole process became intensely uncomfortable for me. I don't want to give the wrong impression about my family, the yelling wasn't much in comparison to the overall really pretty wonderful rest of childhood; I'm just saying that when I got yelled at or otherwise lectured I had to stare my mom in the eye or risk getting the lecture extended. And my God, how I hated that.

The important thing is that now I don't much like making eye contact unless it's someone I'm extremely familiar with and know won't mind the familiarity. If it's work-related or something official, I'll do it because otherwise they won't trust me, but I won't like it. It's easier to do if I'm a few feet away from the person rather than close up, because then it doesn't feel as much like staring. I'm not looking them Dead in The Eye, I'm looking at their face and the eyes happen to be in the middle of that, and that's more okay.

And yes, I had a tremendous pang of sympathy and/or familiarity when I read about how Native American kids were often yelled at in White schools for not looking straight at the teacher because their culture taught them that to do so was rude - and when I read about how Japanese body language and feelings on what's rude and what's not have a tendency to complicate international business dealings.

Today's pulp survival tip is #153. It is probably best to ignore the words of anyone who screams out the names of combat maneuvers as they are executing them. The ones who aren't flat-out insane have a nasty tendency to lie, and either way it all ends up with their foot protruding from your eye socket.

VicMage Earth update

Bought the Replogle globe yesterday, got it home, and carved the holes. I now have the globe mounted properly for VicMage purposes. The continents are all staying exactly where they are in our world, because I am having enough trouble painting over stuff without obscuring the names I need that I do not want to slice things off and reposition them, but for now it's a decent reference. . .

Thanks to the wonders of Testors Aluminum colour, all of Siberia east of central Mongolia now lies beneath the ocean, except for a few islands. Kamchatka's definitely gone - sorry, Risk fans. No attacking the Westlands through that peninsula for you. Korea is floating around loose. The Japanese island chain has been successfully shattered, with Honshu taking the brunt of it; they're in about five or six pieces. Kiss the Indochina peninsula and most of the island of Sumatra goodbye, the only thing left in that region is a bit of northern Vietnam and Laos that forms the Kingdom of Annam. The Borneo portion of the island that features Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei has been sunk, as has the island of Mindanao and quite a few of the other smaller islands. Other bits of Indonesia get to stay, though. Nothing like a good island chain for pirate raids*.

Manchuria lies at the bottom of the ocean now, too, except for a few bits around the Inner Mongolia region. Mongolia itself is all above water. Most of Tibet is beneath the waves, having been violently subducted under the Indian continental plate during the original quake. Lhasa's definitely gone, but there's a few cities still available. Nepal's still there, although its geography is almost entirely vertical. Annapurna has been subtitled 'Olympus' and Everest's English name has been painted over, replaced with Chomolungma. Dots of Testors Lime Gold indicate where parts of China are still above water; I'm not very happy with that part of the paint job, but it was the best I could do, and it's only a rough reference anyway. Hainan and Taiwan Islands are both above water, although Taiwan is a bit smaller than it used to be. The non-Chinese names for Macau, Canton, and Hong Kong have been painted over. Beijing's gone and Nanjing has been renamed, since it no longer qualifies as the 'southern capital'. Xi'an was renamed to Chang'an, although the quake means that it's a couple hundred miles from where it used to be.

According to the general arrangement of things, the Empire is a pretty damn warm place. Sanxing Province, the former Sichuan region, is reasonably close to the same latitude as our world's Sri Lanka, unless I miss my guess. It's not gonna be snowing very often in Chang'an, either. Other parts of the Empire have cooler climates, but it'll take me a while to work it all out and relabel the globe for latitude and longitude... I will note, though, that it's a good thing Tibet and the neighbouring countries have been pushed to such obscenely high altitudes, because I posited snowy mountains and woolly antelope hunting and yaks, and the equator runs through FSCKING BHUTAN. Right spang through Thimphu. At least this explains the old elephant sacrifices in pre-Cataclysm Sanxing.

I'm sure there's plenty more to muck with, but my room's not all that well ventilated and I didn't want to breathe the fumes any more last night.

*Everything's better with pirates. Everything is also better with monkeys. Pirates with monkeys are exponentially better than either pirates or monkeys alone. Giant robots also make things better. Monkeys who are ALSO pirates are even better than ordinary pirates with monkeys. Monkey pirates who pilot giant robots are almost infinitely better than either pirates with monkeys or pirates with giant robots or ordinary monkeys with giant robots. Just so you know.

Look, ma, a bandwagon!

*jumps*

LiveJournal Trading Cards Paid Account Edition camwyn User Number: 440668 Date Created:1/16/02 Number of Posts: 287 An innately scary person through no conscious fault of her own, Camwyn is a rampaging Sinophile, a self-described computer weenie, an aspiring fiction writer/game developer, and a MacGyver wannabe. Strengths: Loyal as a dog, stubborn as all hell, resistant to fusillarium wilt, generally pretty friendly Weaknesses: Procrastinates, mildly paranoid, v. messy in personal space, no fashion sense Special Skills: Powerful geek fu, CCM/CIA culinary training, dab hand w/a pencil, can say 'I'm very sorry, I'm only an American' in four languages incl. Finnish Weapons: 40-lb. Hoyt Custom Pro recurve bow, encyclopedic knowledge of really disgusting diseases, willingness to talk about same @ length Standing Offer: I own a Green Lantern ring. It does not work. If you can activate its powers as per DC Comics Silver Age depiction of such a ring, you can have it.

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