From a significant fraction of my f-list, including the_gneech, pyat, and leonard_arlotte:

• If you like, post this meme and your current wallpaper.
  
• Explain in no more than five sentences why you're using that wallpaper!
  
• Don't change your wallpaper before doing this! The point is to see what you had on!

This is an image from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day site, which I read every evening.

I regret to say that I can't remember just what this image is. I know that it's a false-color image of... something. I do remember that I chose it because a) it's wide enough to extend across two wide-screen monitors (which I am not currently using), and b) because it's orange and purple, and vaguely, sinuously dragon-like in the way that clouds and fractals can be.

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(If anyone recognizes this image, or has better search-fu on APOD than Your Obedient Serpent, please let me know and put a link to the appropriate APOD page in the comments!)

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It's a song about the loss of innocence... and we've all lost a little today.

Good night, Mary.

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Everything's better with Moar Dragons:

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Found by andreal

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The video doesn't mention it, but some of the technology for this has been in the works since the late '70s. I have copious notes in my old high school notebooks about similar developments.

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I know I haven't mentioned much about my current job since I started a couple of months ago, but I'm working on maps of the local water and sewer systems that are being rebuilt.

Today, I'm adding features showing the areas for which we don't yet have solid data. I have files that show what the original pipes looked like, I have annotations that show what's been demolished, and I've got a file with multiple contradictory proposals for the new pipe system -- but I don't know what's actually there, or what will be there.

I've named the shape file "incognita".

I'm fighting off the temptation to label the regions "hic sunt dracones".

Back in my days at Texas A&M, I spent a lot of time hanging with the SCA group there.

And with Cepheid Variable, the science fiction fan organization.

And with the now-defunct gaming group.

(...this may have a little something to do with my failure to graduate from that hallowed institution...)

Anyway, this afternoon, I happened to recall a song that was in the repertoire of an SCA friend of mine back in those days -- "Dragon Road". I did a Google search, looking for the lyrics, assuming it was an SCA standard.

Much to my surprise, I happened to find his own site -- and that was the only reference Google could find to that particular song. He doesn't know where it came from, either.

But he's got the MP3: Scroll down for "Dragon Road".

It's magnificently geeky: more D&D than SCA, to be honest, as the chorus reveals:

And there were dragons, dragons, flying o'er the road,
Wyverns all around us, and behind us, yellow mold,
And there were orcses, orcses, filling all the wood,
And they all jumped upon us because we were Lawful Good...


Update: I found the lyrics, with a credit line! "by Sir Cipriano d'Alvarez mka Guy Bradley "