01/09/2009 - 18:57
I have an insane amount of work to do before Sunday night, all of it requiring a great deal of creative output. I'm already so far behind on the deadlines, I think I'm going to be up until the sun has charred the other side of the world and come back to us so I can get it all done.
I told Anne earlier today, "I don't mind any of this. I'm incredibly grateful that I can earn a living doing all of this stuff … but I am nearing physical and mental exhaustion, so anything I do between now and Monday is likely to have a certain, um, Bug Powder sensibility about it. I've never wanted to crank out widgets, but right now it would be a lot easier to turn my mind off and just do that."
I thought for a second.
"Man, I am really glad I don't have to do that."
It's not all bad, though. My office is currently warm in every sense of the word because:
- I'm drinking a pot of genmaicha green tea.
- The setting sun is streaming golden rays the color of my tea through my office window.
- The air is filled with the scent of a fig candle I absolutely love.
- I'm listening to Chill Out! from Instinct ambient.
I don't envy the task my editors have in front of them, but at least I'm going to enjoy the process of getting The Madness into their hands.
01/09/2009 - 05:37
I twittered about my dog needing surgery. Lorraine has written two blogposts that explain all to the curious...
http://lorraineamalena.blogspot.com/2009/0
http://lorraineamalena.blogspot.com/2009/0
...poor thing. He won't be able to go up stairs for six weeks, or be allowed to run.
Meanwhile, there's a photo of him, and me, and snowshoes from the other day, at http://twitpic.com/107mi.
01/07/2009 - 00:55
I am easily made happy. Today's mail brought a letter from AudioFile Magazine, with copies of the magazine along with Certificates saying that The Graveyard Book audio had won an Earphones award, and another certificate which said nice things about my reading aloud skills (Here's the full list of their Best Voices of 2008.)
I think, more than anything I do, I get concerned about the audiobooks, and made happy when they (and I) get recognised. They're hard work; I'm very aware that I'm not a professional reader-of-books-aloud; and, most of all, they're personal. If you don't like a book I've written I won't take it personally: I'm not the story, after all. But if you don't like a recording of me reading something... well, it was me sitting in that studio for three days reading aloud to a director and engineer in another room, for an imaginary audience, and yes, it's personal.
So, right. Big happies all around.
...
Several ones like this in today...
Kevin Murphy (Mystery Science Theater 3000's Tom Servo, and now of Rifftrax fame) wrote today that you are secretly Leonard Cohen. Are you? Photographic evidence points to yes: http://blog.rifftrax.com/2009/01/06/okay-n
Or to quote Kevin Murphy,
Why didn’t anyone else see this coming? Why am I the only one to realize that Neil is actually groaning, tortured, half-mad folk-rock poet Leonard Cohen, who maintains his astonishing youth and beauty by feasting on the pineal glands of innocent women?!I dunno.
Excuse me. I must pause to nibble a pineal gland.
I was wondering if you'd seen any of the coverage (boingboing, Ebert, QuestionCopyright) about Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues?
On the one hand, I think an artist using another artist's work as the basis of a movie should get permission/compensate that person. On the other hand, the creator in this case has been dead for twenty years, and forgotten for more. Meanwhile Nina is arguably generating value for the corporations that currently own the rights.
I also thought it was interesting that she's come to the conclusion that physical distribution is more likely *limit* the audience that can view her work.
It's a bitch. The film looks amazing from the description and the online bits I've seen. Music rights clearance issues are always a bitch. (Dave McKean ran into something similar with the Django music on The Week Before, which is why Keanoshow is only legitimately available outside the US.) I love Nina Paley's work, love the Ramayana, and would very much like to be able to see this.
Still, at least Nina Paley has a plan.
Now that you have a Wii, will you be playing the Coraline Wii game? Or would that be incredibly boring for you since you created the world it is set in?
The Coraline Wii is a mystery to me. (It might be less of a mystery if I asked anyone at Laika about it, mind you.) Then again, I seem only to be using the Wii as an exercisey fitness thingummy at present. Weight is dropping, waistline shrinking, and scores are going up for the most part, I'm loving the yoga and the balance stuff, and my trainer was impressed yesterday at stuff I seem to be able to do I couldn't do before, like snowshoe up the side of a hill without getting out of breath. (My first time in snowshoes. Interesting things. I thought they'd look more like tennis racquets.)
I liked http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/weekin
Won't you please pimp yourself out on the blog awards? Everybody's doing it....
http://2008.weblogawards.org/polls/best-l
Consider it pimped. Nice competition, though. I'd probably vote for Bookslut, but Maud Newton and Arts and Letters might edge them out... and then there's Mr Pepys... it's all good stuff.
...
And finally, The Office gives us http://princessunicorndoll.com/legend.sh
Urk. Bed.
01/09/2009 - 18:45
My friends at CliqueClack did an interview with Dean Devlin, creator of the sensational new series Leverage. Dean and I played hockey on the same team (with, I've just now remembered, Adam Baldwin, also) from around 1989-1991. He was a forward and I was a goalie. One night in Burbank, our team gave up a breakaway near the redline. I saw it happening when the puck was still in the offensive zone, so I was ready.
When the other guy crossed our blue line, I was already way out of the net, near the bottom of the faceoff circle on my left side. I skated backward with him to force him to shoot on my terms. I guess I was near the crease when I saw him pull his stick back way over his head. "Oh good," I thought, "he's just going to try to blast it past me. Those shots almost always go wide, or right into my glove."
The next thing I knew, there was an explosion in the rink, and a bright flash of light before everything went dark. When the lights came back on, I was on my knees, surrounded by a semicircle of skates. I pulled my helmet off, and watched a whole bunch of blood pour down onto the ice.
"Oh, the way it beads up is really neat," I thought. Then, "Wait. That's my blood."
I'd done my job and forced him to take a low-percentage shot that went wide, just like I was supposed to. Unfortunately, it went right over the net and into my skull. My helmet was crushed, and I got to take a trip to the emergency room for something like 36 stitches in my head. I also got whiplash, which was not awesome.
Anyway, in Dean's interview with CC, this game came up. He said:
“Wil was a dynamite goalie. When he was still shooting Star Trek, we were playing in a game and a puck actually cracked his helmet open and he needed stitches and the producers of Star Trek basically wanted to murder me. ‘You’re letting Wil stand there in front of a net while we’re shooting the series?’” Oh, the scandal.
I miss playing hockey so much. If I could justify the expense, I'd totally buy some new gear (I've outgrown my skates and pants, and I'd need a new helmet for obvious reasons) and find one of those leagues for guys who are in their thirties.
It may seem silly, but seventeen years after we played together, hearing that Dean thought I was a dynamite goalie means the world to me. I worked really hard to be a good keeper back in those days, and I was really proud of our team. I had a lot of free time, so I worked out at the rink almost every day, and played pick up games a couple of times a week. That season, I had a great record and a great save percentage. I even got to travel and play in an exhibition game against some members of the 1980 gold medal team in front of a sold out Boston Garden - where I was scored-on and pulled after one shot, which still makes me sad to this day. In my defense, it was Mike Eruzione who made the shot, and it was a two-on-none break. But still, I wish I'd stayed in the game.
Until I read this today, I had no idea the producers bitched Dean out, and it's amusing to me that they did because I wasn't even a regular on the series when this happened. In fact, shortly after the injury, I got a call from the Star Trek production office. I was surprised to hear from them, and assumed someone had heard about the accident and wanted to bitch me out about it.
They were actually calling me to tell me that Gene Roddenberry had died.
It's weird how memories are all woven together, isn't it?
01/09/2009 - 10:28
I should really tell OpenOffice that Stardate is a word, but now it's kind of amusing to me that it always tells me "UR DOIN IT WRONG!"
Coming of Age is as enjoyable to watch as I remember, even though I haven't seen it in at least twenty years. In fact, my only real complaint so far (I've watched a lot more of it than it would appear from this screenshot) is that my acting is pretty flat and predictable. I make a lot of obvious, weak choices. Of course, I'm not exactly objective about that sort of thing, so maybe I'm being too critical of myself. Also: really bad pre-helmet hairdo. There's a story behind that, but you'll have to wait for the book to find out what it is.
Oh, and to anyone who says that Memory Alpha isn't exhaustively comprehensive, I can only say: flux coordinating sensor.
(Image can be embiggened at Flickr)
01/09/2009 - 08:45
Wizards of the Coast says:
It’s true! The folks at Penny Arcade and PvP (along with special guest Wil Wheaton!), took part in a second round of 4th Edition gameplay, recorded for a forthcoming podcast series. These podcasts are scheduled to begin airing mid-February.
That's sooner than I expected. I didn't think they'd come out until the end of March. I don't watch a lot of my own work, because all I can see are the mistakes, but I can't wait to listen to this podcast series; it will be like looking back at vacation pictures.
| bunnyfear wrote: |
01/08/2009 - 03:07
good morning. my throat hurts. its chilly. gonna go tubing. ya im trying to make that a phrase. tube. hee. sleepy.
| bunnyfear wrote: |
01/07/2009 - 16:27
Every time I walk down the street "Street Lights" and "Amazing" by Kanye West seems to play in my head...and then eventually I have to listen to them on my Ipod.
I know Kanye West is ya know...not ya know "good" but that boy can sample the hell out of shit.
Listen to both of them....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1nMBeTu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUTq3tHg
I'd post the lyrics to both because I like both lyrics and they both fit but its more than just the lyrics. Amazing is great to listen to as you walk down the streets and alleys with your head held high and you hear the click of your heels and you're just like...I dunno alive with.....life heh.
Street Lights is perfect looking around and envisioning the bold choices you make. For some reason I imagine the last line to be the word "fare" not "fair". I dunno why but it clicks better in my mind that way.
Oh guys if you only knew...if you only knew.
In the streets. I'm just not there in the streets. I'm just not there. Life's just not fare. See I know my destination.
01/08/2009 - 22:37
Oh kids … oh, kids. Our good friend amity1976 spared no expense to bring us all Part Three of Blue Light Mashup.
Now, watch in amazement as I use this post as an excuse to plug the audio version of The Happiest Days of Our Lives, which includes the story Blue Light Special. It's just $19.72! Cheap!
See what I did there? Yeeeaaahhhh.
01/08/2009 - 23:38
My brain has a lot of random thoughts it wants to spit out before it'll give me access to the creative areas. I keep trying to tell it that I'm the cat, but it insists on occupying my mind with further duties to control my SPACE MADNESS!!!
Prepare to surge to sublight speed:
I've been keeping a nasty sinus infection at bay since about the third week of December. Night before last, it found a weak spot in my defenses and sent an Orc carrying a bomb to blow it up while I slept. When I woke up yesterday, I … well, I'll spare the details, but it was horrible. Luckily for me, I already had an appointment with my sinus doctor, and he gave me some small nuclear bombs to use against the infection, and I'm feeling 100% better today.
When I went to the pharmacy to fill the prescriptions, I learned that making jokes about carrying the plague elicits a similar reaction to making jokes about bombs at the airport. Now you know.
How weird is this: last night, after I'd declared a sick day and decided to stay offline and on the couch to let my body fight the Sinus Orcs, I walked through my office and took a quick glance at Twitter. It was then that I learned, through the Twitter and not e-mail, that my friends are having a baby.
Bad Gods Monster Manual comix are fucking hilarious.
I see via CliqueClack TV that all seventeen episodes of The Prisoner are now online, in their entirety, for your viewing excitement. There are also one-minute recaps of each episode. The Prisoner is my favorite television show of all time, and it's the show that made it possible for me to truly grok fandom, because I was such a dork for it. I have both volumes of The Original Prisoner Scripts, I've had a map of Your Village since I was 15, I think I'm the only geek on the planet who really loved the graphic novel miniseries DC did in the 80s, and I've read through GURPS The Prisoner too many times to count. I'm cautiously optimistic that AMC's remake will stay faithful to the show that I love, and I think it's awesome that they're putting the original series online this way in advance of their own show.
The best argument in favor of Panetta to head CIA: "Few things could reflect better on Panetta's selection than the fact that Feinstein and Rockefeller -- two of the most Bush-enabling Senators -- are unhappy with it."
Feinstein is one of the most worthless Democrats in history, and I can't believe she represents one of the most liberal states in the nation. I hope she retires, but if she doesn't, I'll be working for her primary challengers with great vengeance and furious anger.
Edited to add: I was trying to articulate this thought earlier today, but couldn't make it go. Andrew Sullivan: "The more I think about this, the more it seems to me that the snub of these two was a deliberate signal. Their oversight of Bush's war crimes was pathetic. Ditto Harman. Obama is telling us he is serious about both improving intelligence and drawing a clear line - for the entire world to see - between the United States and the war criminals who will soon be leaving office, and those who enabled them."
On the off-chance that one person in the universe doesn't know this already: Apple's taking everything in the iTunes Music Store DRM-free. Great jorb, Apple! Now, about iMovie 08 and how much it sucks …
Speaking of music, I've been listening to Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra's Beethoven Symphonies No 3 Eroica and No 8 from Magnatune most of today, and now you can join me if you like, through the magic of embedding media:
Beethoven Symphonies No 3 Eroica and No 8 by Philharmonia Baroque
Nolan and I watched the World Junior Championship gold medal game a couple days ago. Goddamn do those kids play with passion and ferocity. Yesterday afternoon, I watched the history of the Philadelphia Flyers on NHL Network, and thought the exact same thing about those teams, especially in the mid-70s to mid-80s. Then, last night, Nolan and I watched the Kings skate against the Ducks. I say "skate against" instead of "played hockey with" because neither team looked like they gave a shit about the game. After watching intensely passionate players leave everything on the ice in the gold medal game (and congratulations on 5 in a row, Canada) it was especially underwhelming. The Kings seemed to forget how to forecheck, and they managed three – THREE – shots on goal in the third period. In the post-game interviews, the commentators and players from both teams talked about how the game was some kind of great defensive battle, but I grew up watching Adams Division defensive battles, and this wasn't one of those games. I mean, hit someone for fuck's sake! You're supposed to be rivals, guys. This kills me. It's like watching the Dodgers and Giants phone it in; we fans expect you guys to hate the other team as much as we do, goddamit.
Nolan kept complaining about how boring it was, and I had to agree with him. I hope the Kings feel humiliated by their pathetic performance so they actually show up to play tomorrow; I'm taking Nolan to the game.
I plan to leave the Sinus Orcs at home, but I'll bring rain gear to give the people in front of me, just in case. Eewww. Gross.
01/08/2009 - 19:22
…so we had to have the pudding.
Awwwwww Yyyeeeeaaaahhhhhhh.
01/09/2009 - 08:42
I'm not the only person who was wondering how Gabe's D&D session went. So many people asked him for details, he posted a picture of his setup and talked a little bit about his first time sitting behind the DM screen. His enthusiasm for DMing is just infectious, and he couldn't have picked a better time to pick up the hobby; the 4E DMG really is that good, and best of all, it's useful for whatever system you play. If you want to run a game, but have been intimidated by the idea, this book will Dispel Fear and Inspire Confidence like no other. Quoth Mike:
The Dungeon Master Guide is really a great resource. It will give you all kinds of ideas about what you might want to pick up for your game. It even goes into detail about the environment you play in and gives great tips on getting your friends into the spirit. Where the Player's Handbook is really about rules, the DMG is more about the philosophy of be a Dungeon Master and the mechanics of creating a world for your friends to play in. I was really impressed with it.
I don't know how much the general public knows about the guys behind the characters in Penny Arcade, but I know them fairly well. I don't think it would be cool to rip back the curtain too much and spoil their mystique, but they are just good people. I'm really lucky to call them friends.
Speaking of RPGs, Green Ronin has just released a new Mutants and Masterminds book in stores, called Freedom's Most Wanted. It's full of supervillains! SUPERVILLAINS! Have you ever played M&M? It's insanely fun. But don't take my word for it, you can try it out for free. Get started here.
01/08/2009 - 17:44
I joined the cast of Loading Ready Run at the Child's Play Dinner last month for another episode of Commodore Hustle!
It's long, but it's worth it.
THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID!
Ah, that joke never gets old.
| new_shit wrote: |
01/07/2009 - 12:07
With the recent news about LiveJournal cutting its staff dramatically, people are wondering whether their journals are still safe under the current regime running LJ. We'd like to take a few minutes of your time and let you know that our service has improved since the acquisition, and we are doing quite a few things to improve DeadJournal even more. To give you some idea about the safety of your journal here, the MySQL database is running on Amazon's Elastic Block Storage on a Linux XFS file system. Together this provides speed and massive redundance, as well as the ability for us to frequent database snapshots which we can roll back to in the unlikely event of a failure. System-wise, we are running on Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud, which gives us a huge advantage of not having to deal with hardware, plus extremely easy scaling when the load increases.
With your paid accounts, you are ensuring that DJ will continue to grow and provide you better service and features. We also invite you to ... invite those LiveJournal users who are worried to come on over and try us out. We will be increasing the number of invite codes for you to give to them and your friends. I recommend taunting, torturing, and other devices to get them on here.
01/08/2009 - 09:54
AOL is shutting down Ficlets on January 15, and in their infinite corporate wisdom and understanding of how communities on the Internet work, they're not providing any easy way to archive the stories you've written there beyond advising that you try "copying the text and pasting it into a plain text or Word document." Right. That's going to be really fun and easy for people who have written dozens of Ficlets. [::facepalm::]
Ficlets' creator, Kevin Lawver, even tried to get AOL to do something with it other than just stick Christopher Lee inside it and set it on fire, but they refused:
I knew this was coming, I just didn't know the day. I tried, with the help of some great people, to get AOL to donate ficlets to a non-profit, with no luck. I asked them just to give it to me outright since I invented it and built it with the help of some spectacular developers and designers. All of this has gone nowhere.
I don't get this. I don't understand what AOL has to lose by letting someone who wants to care for it take it over, and I don't understand what AOL has to gain by simply destroying it, but that's probably why I'm not in middle management at AOL: I like to actually nurture and support cool and unique things that don't suck.
Ficlets was important to a lot of people. There are over ten thousand writers, thirty-five thousand stories, and eighty thousand comments. It was also important to me. On my author page, I wrote:
I am a professional narrative non-fiction writer. I’ve published three books, and write several geeky columns on topics like technology and gaming.
What I really want to do, though, is write fiction, and I figured Ficlets was the perfect place to find my fiction voice.
The 1024 character limitation, the ability to draw inspiration from quotes and pictures, and the collaborative nature of the prequels and sequels all worked together to help me create some super short stories that I'm still really proud of, like They Don't Come Out at Night, Snowfall, and The Fifteenth. My story A Godawful Small Affair , inspired by listening to way too much Ziggy Stardust (as if there's such a thing!), turned into a truly wonderful collaborative fiction project that branched out into dozens of multiple universes.
A fellow Ficleteer, Chris Meadows, wrote a Requiem for Ficlets that touched me in a way that, if Loretta touched me, I'd say, "Oh yeah, that's nice."
As a site, Ficlets did have its problems. (Some of which could have been alleviated by more development.) As a busy site that received hundreds of posts per day in its heyday, it never really developed a workable method for making sure that new ficlets weren’t quickly buried in the rush of more ficlets. There were lists of “popular” and “active” ficlets, but getting on the lists was a crapshoot that largely relied on whether your ficlet stayed in the “Most recently posted” list long enough for enough people to see and read it.
[…]
On the other hand, the site had a number of excellent innovations. The ficlet format itself was made for creativity … unlike cluttered competitor Writing.com, the Ficlets interface was completely uncluttered, and it allowed infinite story branching instead of writing.com’s two-predefined- choices-only.
Another especially clever touch was the ability to search through Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos and use them for “inspiration”. This was the sort of creativity that Creative Commons was meant to engender, and seeing it in action was a thing of beauty.
Chris came up with a way to save your Ficlets, using a tool called HTTrack. He's included fairly simple instructions that shouldn't be too difficult to follow, so you can create an archive of your work, as well as any prequels or sequels that it inspired.
Through extensive trial and error, I've managed to come up with a set of rules that will fetch all the stories I want and not too many that I don't want. And as the doom of Ficlets draws nigh, I figure it would be best to get this slightly imperfect set out there now, so people can save their stuff right away, and perhaps worry about refining it later. If anyone who knows HTTrack better than I do can send me tips or corrections, I'd be thrilled to update this post with them.
I really loved Ficlets, and I get the feeling that a lot of Ficleteers discovered it because of me or Scalzi. I'm really sad to see it go, and I'm hopeful that something new is created to take its place. Until that happens, though, thanks for reading my stories, and even collaborating with me on some of them. Keep writing!
