interesting read. good history of VA's wine industry included

Fairfax County Project Highlights Tension Between Winemakers and Local Officials - washingtonpost.com:

Grapes have already bloomed on the vines growing in tidy, picturesque rows on the grounds of what could become Fairfax County's first winery.

But a legal tangle involving the owners, the county and the state threatens to kill the venture before its second harvest.

Paradise Springs Winery began as the project of a mother and son searching for ways to pay inheritance taxes on a historic farm. Its owners expect to hear any day whether the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Board will grant them a license to make and sell wine in Clifton, a corner of southern Fairfax filled with horse farms and sprawling five-acre lots. But even if the state grants a license, the county is likely to fight the winery, arguing that it is more of a factory than a farm and therefore inconsistent with zoning laws.

Besides rehashing frictions that exist between Richmond and Northern Virginia, the conflict demonstrates the tensions that have grown between local governments and increasingly powerful winemakers and their friends in the General Assembly.

Virginia's wine industry remains tiny compared with California's, but the state has made great strides in the quality and quantity of its wines. Thirty years ago, the idea that Virginia could produce a quality table wine was enough to draw gasps.

nothing should ever "replace" anything else in art. tools in the tool box are cumulative...

TAG Blog: Mo Cap Puppetry:

The Henson mo-cap studio is, I think, a descendant and cousin of that long ago operation: a streamlined method to get a type of animated children's show to the marketplace at a relatively low cost.

Motion capture has a place in theatrical features and television. It's proven, over the years, that it's a viable sub-set of the movie industry, but I would disagree with Variety about this:

Motion capture technology may still be new enough to intimidate actors and animators (with both groups terrified such technology could eventually render them obsolete) ...

Mo cap is what it's always been: digital rotoscope, the computerized grandchild of Out of the Inkwell and Gulliver's Travels.

Rotoscope didn't replace animators in 1939, and Motion Capture won't replace animators in 2009. Both technologies are tools, not art forms. Animation is an art form.

making "positive" change

I'd basically realized that since joining FB, my outlet for "one-liners" and trivialities has moved there instead of being here on LJ.  As such, this has become the outlet for Disney links (usually copied to FB), science and computer stuffs, and political rants and links, with the later kinda dominating.  This has also made my journal very negative over the last year, a negativity that has not been able to go away just 'cause "we" won the election.  There are still many things going on, things that I feel urged to share to those who might listen.

But I also know I don't need to share it with everybody who reads me for "me" (my life @ faire, my life @ team wench, my vacations, my geek-i-tude, my hassles in failing to keep the house clean or ever having any free time, my cat and rabbits, my love of disney and dr. who, my love of science, my love of music, or just the fact that we're IRL friends).

Many have opted in this type of situation to create a "politics" filter to allow friends to not subject themselves to such posts when they'd rather not.  However, that has the side effect of requiring that everybody who might read the filter

1. be on LJ
2. be listed by me as a "friend" (or even, someone I read regularly)
   
3. be interested in adding it to things to read

Really, I'd rather just require #3 above.  I don't want to lock out the outside world, nor do i want to feel obligated to having everybody who wants to read also be a journal that I have to see (I certainly don't have time for that during the day).  I merely want to give my real friends a choice to not have to see the often negative or political things that I link to and rant about.

SO, I'm creating a "community" (of one member, but anybody can comment) that I'll use as my outlet for that sort of thing (anti-creationists, politicians abusing their power, liars for Jesus, "compassionate conservatism", and all the ways the current administration is utterly failing to make good on their promises of cleaning up from the LAST administration regarding the bill of rights).  If I feel something posted there deserves a personal link as well, I'll put a one-liner reference to it here and nothing more.

I'll post here when things are ready, so anybody who wants to follow can.  In the meantime, anybody who's read my rants here over the last year and just thought "dude, lighten up" will see a change.  I hope.