Cephalopods rocking out!
Tuesday, 29 December 2009 at 19:07
Archie feeling the rock.
Foregoing drumsticks, Bandit takes on the drum pads bare tentacled.
Archie feeling the rock.
Foregoing drumsticks, Bandit takes on the drum pads bare tentacled.
Drug resistant tuberculosis hits the United States.
Tuesday, 29 December 2009 at 19:00
One might wonder if medical science is starting to feel the fear, as Hunter S. Thompson once put it. Disease has long been an adversary of human life; everything from the common cold to exotic diseases that could have given H.P. Lovecraft a rough night's sleep have been worthy opponents. In recent years, however, the no-holds-barred battle royale has turned into a game of four-handed chess due to the appearance of strains of common diseases which have developed immunities to commonly used antibiotics. In a nutshell, if you are instructed by your physician to take all of your prescribed antibiotics even if you feel better, follow their orders. The reason for this is because antibiotics work by building up in your bloodstream and tissues; regular doses over time maintain these levels which renders your body an inhospitible environment for infectious organisms. The idea is for the active concentration to last longer than all the bacteria do. If you don't do this, not all of the bacteria will have been killed off and the ones which remain will probably evolve a resistance to whatever it was that you were on. Maybe your body's immune system will mop up the ones that remain, and maybe it won't.It's the strains which escape that pose a threat today. The strains which killed an estimated 65,000 people in the United States in 2008.
More under the cut...
Now we can watch television while we're shopping?
Tuesday, 29 December 2009 at 18:51
On my way home after work this afternoon I stopped at the Safeway a couple of blocks from the apartment complex Lyssa and I live at to pick up a few last minute items for dinner. On my way out I stumbled across a most curious thing: a TV Kart, which appears to one of those shopping carts with the vehicle-like plastic thingy underneath that lets kids pretend they're driving with a pair of television screens attached to them. The idea is that you check one out on your Safeway membership card, unplug it from the recharging station, and wander around the store half watching television and half looking for whatever it is that you're there for. It would appear that kids need their pacifying media device also. The screens of the TV Kart I saw weren't functioning at the time so I don't know if they even work (though I strongly suspect that they do) or what they normally show. It wouldn't surprise me if they played an endless stream of commercials or adverts for Safeway. I've half a mind to go back there this weekend and try to chase down one of them just to see what's up with them.This twenty minutes into the future stuff is starting to give me a migraine.
Review: Cyberpunk by Colin Timothy Gagnon.
Tuesday, 29 December 2009 at 18:45
Yesterday afternoon while backstroking around in the Olympic-sized swimming pool of RSS feeds that is my Google Reader account I stumbled across a link in the blog Cyberpunk Review to an album recorded and released by Colin Timothy Gagnon called Cyberpunk. Feeling curious because their recommendations are more hit than miss, I downloaded the album from Colin's website (it's free, though if you enjoy it there is a Paypal donation link to show Colin some love), decompressed it into my .mp3 collection, and gave it a listen this afternoon. If you're expecting industrial music or something along the lines of older Hate Department or Psykosonik you're not going to find it. Between the years of 2002 and 2008 Gagnon wrote eleven tracks in the style of the background music of late 80's/early 90's sci-fi video games. The idea wasn't to write music that you'd hear if you were living in one of those worlds but stuff that you would hear if you were playing a game or watching a movie of that particular genre to provide atmosphere. Some of it's pleasant, some of it sounds like the action is about to heat up, and some of it sounds like boss music. The lead synth and associated melodies keep making me wonder if I'm listening to an Overclocked Remix of a tune that I should really remember from my misspent youth, the bass line gives me happy .mod and .s3m flashbacks, and the way the different parts are arranged sounds like it came right out of a game like Bloodnet or Burn:Cycle. I find that I can set the album playing in the background and not be too distracted to do anything else while still enjoying it.I enjoyed it and think it's well worth a download, so give it a listen and see what you think. You can use the embedded player on the page rather than pulling down the entire archive if that's how you roll. I'll be adding Cyberpunk to my iProduct to make the daily commute a little bit more pleasant.
Wikileaks in dire financial straits, has suspended operations.
Saturday, 26 December 2009 at 11:31
For several years now, the website Wikileaks (mirrored across the global Net as well as a couple of darknets) has been the first place to go if you wanted to learn about anything shady going on. Founded as a clearinghouse for whistleblowers and do-gooders by Sunshine Press, they make it their business to archive and disseminate sensitive documents that were leaked because they provide proof of dastardly goings-on in the world, from illegal search and seizure to confidential e-mails about screwed up policies and procedures to hit lists of thorns in the collective side of the powers that be. A number of human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, have declared Wikileaks indispensable to their missions. It's been said that Wikileaks has been responsible for more news scoops in its three years of operation than the Washington Post in the past three decades (thus sayeth The National). It's also come under fire in court time and again for its actions and successfully won each and every case. However, Wikileaks has become popular enough that it's having trouble paying the bills because they get so many hits that they have to keep upgrading their computing infrastructure to handle the load. The project relies upon private contributions to keep running, and they can't accept funding from corporations or government organizations because it would compromise their impartiality; once you start taking money from the powers that be, the powers that be start exercising power over how you operate and that would include keeping certain documents from being released to the public.If you go to their frontpage (linked above) there are links to a number of ways of donating to the project. If you can't send money but you do have rackspace, processing power, storage space, and a network link that you can donate to Wikileaks for at least one calendar year contact them to work something out. They can always use more silicon and bandwidth to add to their infrastructure. If you can work pro bono on their legal defense if and when it comes up (and it does come up), please do so. If you have money that you can send their way, by all means please do so.
(Thanks to Spellbinder for the heads-up.)
Genetic origins of skin and lung cancer pinpointed.
Thursday, 24 December 2009 at 21:11
It is common knowledge that many forms of cancer have environmental as well as genetic components: for skin cancer, overexposure to sunlight can trigger its development. Lung cancer, of course, is blamed on smoking for lengthy periods of time. However, sometimes the genetic component can express itself without external assistance. Thus, it is worth noting that the genetic mutations which cause these two afflictions have been pinpointed by geneticists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute of the United Kingdom. The errors are very specific and should be readily detectable with a genetic workup. Something which I find surprising is the sheer size of the genetic defects: the mutation for skin cancer consists of 30,000-odd discrete errors in DNA while the mutation for lung cancer requires the presence of over 23,000 errors. The research team hopes that this knowledge will make it possible to develop treatment protocols customized to the patient as well as make it possible to develop tests which could detect the signs of cancer before the tumors are too far advanced for ready treatment.However, what really concerns me is the fact that (in the United States, at least), it is legal for a company to isolate a gene which codes for a particular trait in the human genome and patent it. In fact, approximately 20% of the human genome has been patented since the law permitting it was passed in 1980. Never mind the fact that neither the human genome nor discrete genes were not invented but discovered (prior art, anyone?), patents are granted on those discoveries. Case in point, a corporation named Myriad Genetics owns patents on two genes (BRCA1 and BRCA2) which are strongly implicated in breast and ovarian cancer. What this means is that licensing fees must be paid to Myriad if anyone is going to do research involving one of those genetic sequences (assuming that Myriad is willing to sign off on it; just because someone will have to pay you money does not mean that you have to accept it). This also means that you can't necessarily do anything with the knowledge unless the terms of licensing permit you to (like develop a test to detect the status of one of those genes). At this time there is a lawsuit against Myriad Genetics which makes the case that patenting genes violates the First Amendment by restricting research. The suit also states that you can't patent something that you didn't actually invent (vis a vis the human genome in general or a naturally occurring gene in particular). The suit hasn't been decided yet but a lot of people are keeping a close eye on this particular case because the health of a lot of people is at risk, to say nothing of a lot of post-graduate research.
So, where have I been since Snowpocalypse '09?
Thursday, 24 December 2009 at 20:24
Much of the DC metroplex is still digging out from under what has been dubbed Snowpocalypse 2009. At least where I live, the main roads are in pretty good shape, albeit they're down about three feet of clearance so they're more like one-and-a-half lanes in both directions. The side and back streets haven't really been plowed and are still touch and go should you need to drive on them. Generally speaking, unless stoplights are involved the snow removal strategy seems to consist of sunlight melting the snow, brave drivers breaking up the ice as they go, and the powers that be hoping that the gutters don't clog up. Traffic into and out of DC is even worse than usual when you take into account the holiday season. On Tuesday night, on my way home from work it took a little over two hours to make the drive from Greenbelt to the car dealership in northern Virginia.It seems that I wasn't the only person dumb enough to try braving the snowstorm on bald tires. Judging by how busy the car dealership was (they'll be open later than usual until next week at the very least) and what everyone was having done (getting their tires replaced), a lot of us were slapping our foreheads last weekend. For what it's worth, once I got the tires switched out for brand new ones and the alignment fixed (one was at +8 degrees, another at -9 degrees off vertical) my car handles much better than it has in months. To give you an idea of how busy things were on Tuesday night, the mechanics at the shop were passing around menus for the local Chinese takeout joint. The restaurant didn't even ask for our address because they knew exactly where to deliver to: the same place they'd been delivering to all day, fighting traffic in both directions the whole way.
I haven't been posting a whole lot lately because I've been getting settled in at my new job. Late in November I resigned my position at the Prometheus Group to take a job with an aerospace contracting company called Emergent Space Technologies at NASA as a software engineer. For the past month or so I've been busily navigating bureaucracy, producing documentation, battling paperwork, and teaching myself how to get to and from work, and inhaling online classes as fast as I possibly can. I've also been retraining myself to handle the commute to and from Greenbelt, Maryland, a trip of one hour each way under ideal conditions, two to three under... normal beltway rush hour traffic, truth be told.
Feeling silly tonight.
Monday, 21 December 2009 at 20:45
Here's a picture of a stuffed squid posting on the Eclipse Phase forums:
So shines a good deed in a weary world.
Monday, 21 December 2009 at 16:28
Whatever holiday you celebrate this season, go out and try to do a good deed for someone. This is a rough time of year for a lot of people.Snowpocalypse 2009: Aftermath
Monday, 21 December 2009 at 13:33
This morning I took a short drive around my neighborhood to survey what damage I could from my car. I didn't take too many pictures because, frankly, it's not safe to drive and try to take pictures at the same time. The apartment complex Lyssa and I live in seems to have suffered damage to only a couple of evergreen trees, but seeing as how I haven't gone hiking to see what was going on I don't feel comfortable being quite so optimistic.You can view the photographs here.
AFP 2009 pictures are finally up.
Monday, 21 December 2009 at 13:07
I finally got the pictures from the Nervous Cabaret/Who Killed Amanda Palmer concert edited and put online. You can view the album here.Hilarity ensues.
Saturday, 19 December 2009 at 20:02
My .plan file has been updated. As always, there is NSFW content therein. Use discretion.Boosting the signal for Peter Watts.
Saturday, 19 December 2009 at 19:38
The Net is still on fire about what happened to Dr. Peter Watts a few days ago on his way back to Canada. Not too long ago, someone posted in Dr. Watts' blog that they witnessed the whole thing on the bridge that day, and Dr. Watts desperately wants that person or people to contact his lawyer (Doug Mullkoff) at phone number 734-761-8585. It's very important, and relevant to his impending trial.Spread the word, and more importantly spread that link!
Snowpocalypse 2009.
Saturday, 19 December 2009 at 16:14
After my utter failure to get to the store to stock up for the winter storm that I didn't expect would actually happen (cynical cat screwed the pooch this time), Hasufin and Mika cleared some space for me at their place while I packed up enough kit to last me a day or two. Nothing major, you understand, but there's a good chance that I won't be able to get home until Sunday night so I figured that I'd better be prepared. Hasufin and Mika are more than ready for the blanket of snow that brought the DC metroplex to a halt, and he was kind enough to brave the weather in his four wheel drive to pick me up and drive me to his place. Lyssa's in Pennsylvania visiting her family while I wrap things up in preparation for the Yule holiday so she's okay, too.It's a mess, outside. We saw a few people headed for the store on cross-country skis and there are a few cars that tried to go somewhere but got stuck in the snow. We even passed a snow plow that seemed to miss a turn and got stuck in a snow drift.
The Smithsonian is closed. Kennedy Center canceled everything going on tonight. The Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt is on red alert; no mission-noncritical staff are to drive in this weekend. College campuses are shutting down.
On the way here, Hasufin was nice enough to loan me his camera to photograph what I could from inside the truck.
First snowstorm of the year.
Saturday, 19 December 2009 at 11:56
Yesterday morning, the newswires were burning up with winter weather warnings, effective midnight last night for a region of the eastern seaboard as far north as Manhattan and as far south as North Carolina. A Pittsburgh native, I said "Yeah, right," and proceeded to battle the DC beltway, which happened to be clogged with people who forget how to steer or accelerate whenever they think something is going to fall out of the sky. This included a multiple-hour drive home last night which culminated in my getting in the front door around 2230 EST5EDT after a cut-short dinner at a nearby diner.Wow, do I suck.
This marks the beginning of the snowstorm which has turned my parking lot into a snowbank and required a hour-long job just to dig out the TARDIS.
EDIT: The DC Metro's aboveground service will be shutting down at 1300 EST5EDT due to the snowstorm. Thanks for the heads-up, William Gibb.
More under the cut...
Treasure hunting as black op.
Sunday, 13 December 2009 at 00:08
One of the mainstay tropes of fiction is sunken treasure: pirate treasure, ancient payrolls, treasure of the ancients... to quote The Goonies, "rich stuff". Gold. Gems. Artifacts. Stuff that would make Indiana Jones push his professorly duties off onto his overworked and underpaid grad students, grab his khakis, fedora, and bullwhip, and make a beeline for the middle of nowhere. However, since diving and its associated technologies have advanced over the years sunken treasures are growing more and more rare. Maybe there is only so much treasure to go around and a lot of it's been salvaged already. Maybe the tide and the shifting sediment have covered up much of it through the centuries. Perhaps a lot of it was lost in depths that humans have yet to really explore.It is for this reason that the salvage of what may well be the Merchant Royal is so noteworthy. The Merchant Royal is said to have been a merchant vessel which went down in a storm near Sicily in 1641 while en route to Antwerp.
It's taken two years of careful, steady work, but an outfit called Odyssey Marine Exploration has salvaged approximately 250 million British Pounds worth of treasure from the seafloor, amounting to seventeen tons of gold, silver, tableware, and assorted undisclosed artifacts. OME hasn't said how long it took them to find or bring up the treasure or even which wreck it was though speculation continues as to which wreck it may have been. Operation Black Swan, as they called it, was carried out in deepest secrecy; a number of ROVs were used to locate the wreck, ascertain what it carried, and shuttle its cargo to the surface. The wreck was located in international waters which actually made the salvage operation easier from a legal perspective but to avoid having to give the United Kingdom a cut of the action (because it was located off the coast of Cornwall) they transported each load of cargo to Gibraltar, which was used as a tax haven for the purposes of this project. The government of Spain is investigating whether or not the salvage was actually in international waters; the descendents of the now-deceased captain of the Merchant Royal are also looking into whether or not they have a claim to part of the treasure. Last Thursday the whole shebang was flown from Gibraltar to the United States by private jet where it was appraised by an expert in ancient coinage.
It is interesting to note that the level of secrecy was such that the crews of the salvage ships kept their mouths shut even when partying in port while the operation was in execution. It is also interesting to note that the location of the wreck and identity of the ship have not been announced. It should also be noted that they seem to have played things a little loose on the legal end of things because a federal judge granted them salvage rights only the day before they airlifted the treasure to the states (disclaimer: IANAL).
If you actually got a snow day down here, you wouldn't be able to make it to Starbucks.
Saturday, 12 December 2009 at 23:29
Dr. Peter Watts was arrested and beaten at the US/Canadian border last Tuesday.
Friday, 11 December 2009 at 18:35
Note: additions are being made after the cut and edits areIf you're not familiar with the work of Dr. Peter Watts, you really should be. His degrees in marine ecophysiology aside, he is also a sci-fi author of some talent and is best known for releasing his novels under a Creative Commons license in addition to having them published through Tor, among them Starfish and the mind-bending transhumanist novel Blindsight, which will certainly make you reconsider what you think about how you think. His work is well known by the science fiction fandom for taking hard SF in new directions, which is why I'm posting about this.
Last Tuesday while crossing back into Canada (his country of citizenship) from Michigan after helping a friend in the States move he was taken into custody after being pepper sprayed and having the shit kicked out of him by police. By all accounts, what went down was this: he was swarmed by police while stopped at the pre-border checkpoint in Port Huron while trying to cross back into Canada. At some point, he got out of his car (whether or not he was ordered to do so is unclear at this time); he tried to get back into his car after being ordered to do so and was then beaten soundly. He was thrown in jail, possibly pressured to waive his Miranda rights (he didn't, and I don't think that he would be able to do anyway as he isn't an American citizen), denied legal counsel, and brought up on charges of assaulting a federal officer. As one would expect of the Border Patrol, all data storage media (including a USB key and dead-tree notebook) were confiscated. His rental car and luggage are still impounded at this time. The icing on the cake was
Cindy Cohn of the EFF put Dr. Watts in touch with civil rights lawyers in the state of Michigan, and his partner in Canada was able to swing bail to get him released from custody. It is said that there are people attempting to get hold of the surveillance camera footage from the border crossing and the court records will probably be pulled from PACER and put online shortly. An unsubstantiated statement made by a commenter at Dr. Watts' blog says that (s)he gotten in contact with someone at US DHS and eyebrows have been raised over the incident. I've set a search agent to keep watch for any breaking developments that hit the Net and I'll post what it finds.
Dr. Watts' family and friends are spreading the word to collect donations for his legal defense; if you go to his backlist page there is a PayPal link at which you can donate money. I checked it out and sent in a donation so I'll vouch for it; it's under donate (at) rifters (dot) com (there it's called the Niblet Memorial Kibble Fund, through which he normally collects donations to help pay for food and trips to the vet for cats he rescues in Toronto).
Please, spread the word and get people to help out. He needs help and we can give it to him.
More under the cut...
Genetic drift always keeps life interesting.
Wednesday, 09 December 2009 at 22:30
H1N1, the disease that's kept supplies of vaccine low, doctors' offices and emergency rooms packed, and way too many people feeling like crap this season has thrown the medical community a curveball in recent weeks. Beginning early last spring Tamiflu-resistant strains of the virus started appearing around the country, most notably in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington state. The antiviral compound Tamiflu is one of those administered to the sickest of patients, and this means that physicians will have to figure out another drug or combination of drugs because their best treatment thus far is likely to become less effective as time goes on. It is thought that treating patients for extended periods of time with Tamiflu had something to do with resistant strains of H1N1 developing; it's also worth mentioning that the resistant strains were found in people who already had compromised immune systems, which may also play a part in the virus' mutation.I find it interesting that the article seems to conflate a pathogen spontaneously mutating to be resistant to a particular drug with a human body developing a tolerance to a drug. The two are not the same; people develop tolerances to drugs because the body becomes adapted to metabolizing and excreting certain compounds to return to a state of homeostasis. Pathogens develop immunities to compounds (from their point of view, toxins) to remain functional and thus reproduce their genes more effectively. But now I'm splitting hairs because it's an easy mistake to make when an article's on a deadline.
Life with the HTC Hero.
Sunday, 06 December 2009 at 17:27
A couple of weeks ago my old Treo started acting too wonky for comfort (such as refusing to hold a charge for any reasonable length of time) so I started hunting for a replacement. Interestingly, Sprint (my cell carrier) started offering a number of smartphones running the Android OS from Google back in October. I waited as long as I could while keeping an eye on the newswires to see what the going opinion of it was (as well as camped out at my local Sprint store for a while to play with all of their demo Android phones) and finally bought one the first weekend of November. The Sprint store was kind enough to copy my contact list (though none of my data) into my new phone when they activated it which saves a lot of time when you're getting set up. One of the things you will have to do if you want to get any real usability out of it is linking it to a Gmail account. This will pull your Gmail contacts into your phone book, which I find slightly irritating because it effectively quadrupled the number of entries that have to be traversed to find the correct person to call. This also means that one person can have more than one entry but you won't know which it is (Gmail, cellular, home phone, business card) until you actually look at it. I wish that the contacts app worked more like the Treo's in this respect in that it was context sensitive (if you accessed a contact from the SMS app it only displayed cell numbers, while the e-mail app would only display e-mail addresses).I don't know whether or not it'll work with Google Apps accounts; I haven't tried.
That said, the Android App store is amazing. Every time I go through it I find something new (though I don't necessarily install it). Among the apps that I find useful and thus recommend are the following:
- ASTRO - File manager for Android phones.
- Beelicious - Connects to your del.icio.us account and lets you access your links without having to start the web browser first.
- Car Locator FREE - GPS app that saves a waypoint (like where you parked your car) and can lead you back to that waypoint later.
- MyBackup - Backs up your apps, data, and messages to the internal MicroSD card. So worth it that I'll be buying for the full version.
- Note Everything - Android doesn't come with a notepad application of its own. This free app corrects that oversight.
- Password Vault - Encrypted password database. I can't live without one of these on my smartphones.
- Ringdroid - Convert audio files into ringtones for use on your Android phone. I use this to organize my contacts by assigning a particular sound or song to categories of people.
- Wardrive - Just what it sounds like.
- GPS OnOff and WiFi OnOff - Android Widgets that do one thing and do it well - toggle the GPS receiver and WiFi chipset to save power without having to hunt through the system settings each time.
The Gmail app is really handy but what you can do to messages is limited by the user interface; you can't report spam, you can't undelete messages, and you can't un-archive messages if you accidentally do so (which is easy to do). I'm very fond of the text messaging app because it handles multiple incoming messages in the background rather than popping up a new window over top of the one you're already typing in. If you attach an image to an outgoing text message you'll have to make it a slide show with one picture in it because the largest outgoing message you can send is one megabyte in size; when you take into account the fact that the HTC Hero has a five megapixel camera built in you'll overrun that limit every time unless you do so. The calendar app silently hooks your Google Calendar so you don't have to worry about messing around with it. I strongly recommend that you calibrate the onscreen keyboard after you get your phone because it makes it much easier to use; also, you'll probably have a couple of days of adding unknown words to the Hero's internal dictionary because the text prediction mechanism can be a little overzealous at times.
One annoying thing which I ran into was the fact that my phone stopped receiving text messages a couple of days ago, though it could send them without any apparent trouble. I found that letting my phone update its firmware to the latest revision (v1.56.651.2, released 11 November 2009) helped somewhat (though the hot reboot probably had something to do with that), as well as fixing a couple of annoying glitches with the camera app, the onscreen keyboard, and a couple of other things.
I also discovered during the firmware update that you won't lose your apps, stored data, or settings in the process. Once your phone boots back up you'll be able to pick up right where you left off and won't have to re-do everything. I backed everything up before installing the update but really didn't have to. I do recommend, however, plugging your phone in to power it during the upgrade procedure because if your power cell runs out in the middle of the update it might wreck your phone (but if anyone knows differently please leave a comment).
Winter weather advisory until 2200 EST5EDT, 20091205.
Saturday, 05 December 2009 at 15:44
Why yes, we are experiencing winter weather at the moment. Why do you ask?
It's funny... Lyssa and I just finished getting the apartment cleaned up for the yearly cookie party and it's snowing today.
Google announces free public DNS servers.
Thursday, 03 December 2009 at 19:56
It could be said that DNS is one of the services which underpins the Internet by translating hostnames (like drwho.virtadpt.net) into the IP addresses which are actually used under the hood (such as 66.93.100.253). Unless you remember the IP addresses of the sites you usually visit or you have them hardcoded on your system, if your local DNS isn't available there isn't a whole lot that you can do online. Scattered around the Net are publically available DNSes that you can configure your machine to use in the event that something goes wrong with your ISP (which would not impact connectivity per se, only your computer's ability to resolve hostnames). Everyone's favorite pre-Singularity lord and master Google has brought their own public DNSes online for everyone to make use of should you desire to (or in case your ISP is doing something hinky, like filtering your net.access by controlling DNS). If privacy and/or anonymity are your concern I strongly suggest that you check out the Google Public DNS Privacy Policy, which lays out what they will and will not record and how long they'll keep it for.For the record, the IP addresses are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.
There's cosplay, and then there's cosplay.
Thursday, 03 December 2009 at 19:21
One of the big draws at Dragoncon every year are the costumes: all shapes, all sizes, all genres. You name it, chances are there are two of 'em wandering around, a third trying to cool off in the late summer heat, and one more camped out by the Cruxshadows' table waiting for an autograph. But sometimes, just sometimes, you see something that's downright amazing. Harrison Krix, the brains and hands behind Volpin Props, along with his fiancee' Emily amazed everyone at D*C this year with costumes from the videogame Bioshock - Emily went as one of the Little Sisters, and Harrison as a Big Daddy. Harrison's suit netted him two awards, "Best Journeyman" and "Best Professional Design" at the end of the con. A couple of weeks ago they got together with Dim Horizon Studio and did a photoshoot at the Georgia Aquarium. They arrived before the aquarium opened to be photographed near two of the exhibits, Tropical Diver and Ocean Voyager. If you've ever played Bioshock you'll be amazed; it's hard to not think that these are promo shots for the game because the costumes fit in so well with the aquaria as the background. The Big Daddy suit is picture-perfect, and the first time I saw Emily as one of the Little Sisters I shivered a little because she looks absolutely deranged.Harrison and Emily, I hesitate to say this because it's done to death, but you did an epic job on your costumes and props.
