That's Crazy Talk

I tried updating last night, but Blogger was being annoying and didn't post.
It's been a couple of days since I've posted, mainly due to work. One geology teacher seems to think that we really like lots of work. We've been getting tons of various things just piled on to our already large workload. The other geo professor likes to give us work over and over again, shit that I don't understand. Political Science is boring as fuck and History is just plain awesome. Doesn't quite balance things out the whole way, but it's just frustrating. And tomorrow, I have to get up really early to go on a field trip to New York State, in the Adirondacks, to look at some rocks. We're going to be out for a long time. It was intended to be a two day trip, but we were able to talk it down to a single day, by talking to the Geology department chair. I don't think Prof was happy.

I attended the Colby Military Writer's Conference yesterday. It was the tenth one that they've done. It's basically a group of military historians, writers and former/military personnel, and they generally talk about current events, or something that's relevant to today's world somehow. This year's topic was torture, how it should be used, if it should be used and how the military should generally handle gathering intelligence. They also touched on procedures for asymetric warefare. Overall, it was a really good talk. They went over a couple of things in a really good fashion, better than last year's talk, which I thought was a biased argument for the war against the War on Iraq. This time, the talk was mainly for and against limited torture. Putting prisoners in uncomfortable postisions, and most psychological stress doesn't constitute torture, but things suck as physical harm, dismemberment and physical pain do constitute torture. We had people advovcating finger cutting and other similar methods to be used in an urgent situation, which really had some military people pissed off, which surprised me. Somewhat Ironically, it was a holocaust survivor, a 2 star general who headed the Special Forces branch of the military. I talked to him today, and told him that while I didn't agree with everything that he and others said, and did for other things, I really enjoyed the talk and debate.
The entire thing comes at an interesting time, with some things in SciFi really pulling at the human rights ideas, mainly a Galactica, Firefly episode and a novel called City of Pearl. I'm planning on writing an essay on this issue, but not now.

Found some excellent news today:

"Prior to going up in theaters, the trailer will make an online debut. Where and when will be posted on the Browncoats site close to the time of the online debut, so you will all be able to see it BEFORE it is in theaters."
That's regarding the Serentiy trailer, which is supposed to be released with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Apparently, it's being released online first, which is outstanding. When it's released, I'll be posting up a detailed summary of it. I don't have a release date yet, but it'll probably be closer to the 29th. With my luck, it'll probably be while I'm at Celebration 3.

Which, by the way, it's going to be in less than two weeks. I can't wait!