Life/Writing - Attractive Adjectives

Let me theorize for a second, as I often wont to do. What people usually find attractive in the opposite sex (I don't understand same-sex attraction, therefore I'll refrain from commenting about it) are the distinguishing features of that sex. Meaning attractive women are womanly and attractive men are manly. Thus men are attracted to breasts because they don't have any (that's my theory anyway), and round buttocks, and despite recurring fashion for men to wear their hair long, long flowing hair. Generally, curvier and rounder features, and a non-intimidating size (or maybe that's just me). Women are (supposedly) attracted to tall, broad-shouldered, muscled men with more squarish features (and possibly more body hair). And of course, kind eyes, or a giant throbbing erection (just for her!), whatever the case may be.

That's all pretty simple and generally well understood, at least by people who are weird like me and like to overanylize life instead of just living it. What I don't understand is the use of "calloused hands" as an attractive attribute of men. I don't think the feeling would be pleasing, and unless the guy is in Oxford crew, it would almost certainly mean working-class. Why is that attractive? Or does it simply mean unprofessional, not thought-out, copy-paste writing? I do speak of fan fiction, after all.

Life - A year since I've lost a friend

Today was one year since Genya died. I was unable to attend because of the army, but my parents went. They are both very traumatized by that, much more than I am. They say I appear in some of the pictures (his Bar-Mitzvah, etc.) His parents aged a lot in one year.

Don't drink and drive, people.

Books - Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson - The Butlerian Jihad (Legends of Dune, Book 1)

My excuse or touching this: I was on guard duty and it was the only dead tree book I had available (on loan). A PDA sounds very tempting now, if only to avoid being stuck with that again.

I have read about 150 pages out of the ~700 total. I do not intend to wade through the rest to find out how it ends. It had a feeling of being either written by a sophisticated multithreaded Markov-esque machine regurgitating unrelated sci-fi cliche stories each targeted at a specific target market sector in a round-robin manner, or of something taken off FFN and miraculously proofread. It just didn't sound like professional (I won't bother with "best-selling") writing. And it appears I am not alone in this thinking: the hardcover edition is being sold on Amazon for less than the mass market paperback!

Some reviews say it would've been a good enough book had it not the pressure of the original Dune to drive it into the ground (sand?). I maintain that I see no reason to read junk, unless you specifically enjoy reading/MST-ing junk. And there is definitely no reason to endorse it by paying for it, even then.

Frank should have put a codicil in his will saying his son would lose the rights to the name should he use it for publishing crap.

Personal - Ill

I have the flu. Almost a week now, and although I think I'm recovering, it's very slow. Symptoms are mostly headache and fever (upto and including 38.5°C), when I'm not all drugged up. Got a single day of sick leave (yay). I'm self-medicating the top rated quotes from bash.org. Recommended to persons not offended by swear words.

Life - Updates

• Our new guy is a CS major from TAU. He has graduated together with two of my buddies from school. He's also dated a girl from my class in school.
• A guy who has enlisted (got drafted, whatever) on the same day with me and has been with me through half the training and then flunked and served one floor below as a tech got quietly discharged more than a full month before his due date. I barely had the time to say goodbye. Lucky SOB.
• Found out I was being ripped off by the national telco and ISP for a year. Phoned them and got six times more bandwidth for half the price. My advice: follow the price changes, and demand to be on the better programs, since they obviously won't upgrade you by themselves.
• I've noticed how my work as a coder is slowly spoiling my love for hacking. Doing it under time pressure, with arbitrary constraints, in a room with people I don't like, with a tight-ass PHB running around and sputtering nonsense really takes the fun out of this thing I enjoy doing. So much so, that I've found I haven't been inclined to pursue this at home for a while. Makes me really pity adult movie actors. T.S. has recommended to just say "screw with this" and hack for fun to get the feeling back. I have vowed to never work in an outfit that will give me this feeling — the army is one thing, but on the free market, I'm willing to sacrifice some pay so I won't have to dread mornings/Sundays.
• My department was moved out of our nice offices and into a shack. We've pained it and we've got new furniture for it and a new gigabit switch and they keep saying it'll be fine, but it won't be the same. I need some posters for decoration.
• Stupid, criminally incompetent, should've been shot, lazy-ass @#$%&^*!s in [censored] have [censored] our [censored] [censored] right during [censored] and of course the [censored] is not [censored] so our [censored] are [censored]. I'm glad I'm not the one there right now [censored] it, but I can't help with feeling useless because I can't do anything about it. But that's probably like "secret" or something…
• I'm seriously considering buying a computer, because my mom wants my old one. It would be a 3000+ (Venice) on AN8 Ultra (NF4U) with 1G Geil PC3200 CL2.5 and a 6600 (or I might shell out for a 6600GT). It's cheap and sounds great, but the cooling must be seriously considered.