Some mornings, like this one, I find myself with far too much about which I wish to "blog." To write, I mean. I dread the day that "blog," as a verb, enters the dictionaries. Of course, that may have already happened, and I just didn't notice, in which case the dread is retroactive. Anyway, yeah, too many things. Yesterday, I wrote 1,049 words on Chapter One of The Red Tree. The last section of Chapter One has become problematic. It does not seem to want to end, and I need to find its conclusion today. I still have Sirenia Digest #30 to get out next week, and I'd hoped to have three or four days to do a vignette for #31 before I abandon work on the 22nd (resuming work once my office is reassembled in Providence).

After the writing, there was packing, packing, packing. The last of the books in my office went into boxes. I am now working in a mostly book-free room, which is about as unnatural as it gets. Ah, but before the packing, after Spooky got home from the vet with Hubero (whose fine, of course), we needed more packing supplies, and so I made the sojourn with her into Big-Box Hell off Ponce. Actually, we went to PetSmart first, to get Mr. H. a good, solid plastic-and-metal carrier for the long trip to Rhode Island. We saw an utterly delightful Black-headed caique (Pionites melanocephalus). We have these spells where we want a smart, smart bird, but, fortunately, these spells pass. Anyway, after PetSmart, it was Staples, where we had to get packing tape, bubblewrap, biodegradable packing peanuts, air in a can, and wipes with which to clean Mac screens. Those stores, all those people, they drive me nuts. Anyway, Spooky went back out to get Dusty's BBQ for dinner. And then we watched two episodes of Millennium, "Luminary" and "The Mikado." And speaking of that second episode...

I did not actually see Gregory Hoblit's recent release, Untraceable, but, near as I can tell from having had to sit through the trailer a few dozen times, it's a pretty blatant rip-off of Micheal R. Perry's teleplay for "The Mikado." I just checked IMDb to be absolutely certain that Perry was not given story credit. He was not. Untraceable is credited to Robert Fyvolent, Mark Brinker (screenplay and story), and Allison Burnett (screenplay). I would be willing to bet there's a lawsuit here, and a cut-and-dried case of plagiarism, if the matter were brought to the attention the the WGA. But, anyway, there was a bit I wanted to quote (from "Luminary"):

We are meant to be here. We step from one piece of holy ground to the next under stars that ask, "Imagine, for one second, you could drop in on a past life. What would you like to find yourself doing there? What would charm you? Make you proud?" Ask yourself that. And the question what to do in this life becomes so simple it's terrifying. Just to do that thing that would charm you. It would make you say: "Yes, it's the real me." Do that, and you're alive.

After Millennium, I slipped into Second Life for the first genuine rp I've done in days. Thank you Pontifex and Omega. Oh, and since most of my now-very-limited SL time is being spent in New Babbage, behind the cut is a screencap of Artemesia Paine and the Professor in the vacant room above Miss Paine's pie shop (and I really need to ask blu_muse to show me how to take good SL screencaps).

( The Professor's Return )

What else? After Second Life, Spooky read me a bit more of House of Leaves, and then I read myself a bit more of the Osborn biography, and finally got to sleep around 2:30 ayem. And that, kiddos, was yesterday.

Looking back over the comments to yesterday's entry about the silly Yahoo list, "The Good, the Bad, and the Slimy: 20 Great Movie Creatures," I have resolved to make a list of my own. But it will have a well-defined set of criteria for inclusion, which I will state at the outset. It may take me several days to compile the list. I may not get it up until early June, after the move. It will include fifty creatures, not twenty. Oh, and a few people were confused by the term "Pull of the Recent." It was coined in 1979 by University of Chicago paleontologist David Raup*, and it states, simply, that "the level of biodiversity is inflated in younger fossil deposits because sampling of the modern world is so much more complete than in the geologic past." That is, the farther one goes back in the fossil record, the rarer fossils become, since they have had a greater period of time to be destroyed by various geological processes (erosion, metamorphism, orogenic events, volcanism, plate tectonics, etc.). Also, Raup posits a collecting bias favouring more recent strata. This generally creates an overall fossil record that, in terms of biodiversity, looks a bit like an inverted pyramid**. Which is also what the list on Yahoo looked like, with 50% of its sample coming from films made since 2002 (though it also included creatures from as far back as 1933 and 1939). And before anyone asks, today's icon shows much of Europe, north and central Africa, the Middle East, and western India during the Eocene Epoch, some 55.8 ± 0.2 — 33.9 ± 0.1 million years ago.

*Raup, D. M. 1979. "Size of the Permo-Triassic bottleneck and its evolutionary implications." Science Vol. 206.

** It should be noted that a number of more recent studies indicate that the "pull of the recent" may be less an artefact of the fossil record than an actual increasing rate of biodiversity over geologic time. See, for example, David Jablonski et al., "The Impact of the Pull of the Recent on the History of Marine Diversity" Science (Vol. 300. no. 5,622; 16 May 2003). For now, though, I stand by Raup.

Ok. I am hunting information about sound equipment. I know I will need lights and large speakers and some sort of mixer, for both lights and sound. I have a laptop that I plan on using for the main unit of the setup.

This information I am hunting so I can setup a rave. Where would be suggested I look for 15 inch speakers and woofers? And cheap lights setups for the floor?

Anything else that would make a great rave would be useful also.

Thanks,
Pimp Bunny.

Hey all, Im going to throw a poll in here to see what you (the Dragoncon going public)would like to see being live riffed during my Cult of UHF late night mass panel on the podcasting track.

I do a video podcast called Cult of UHF where I show full length B-movies and this year Derek the director of the Podcasting track has given me a spot on Sat night to do a live show. I love all the movies I have shown and am having a hard time picking one that I think maybe the masses who don't watch a lot of B-movies might go for. (dont have a plus account so I'll have to ghetto poll)

1. Destroy all Monsters (a Gamera/Tokyo monster film)
2. Attack from Space (typical cheesy space sci-fi)
3. The Satanic Rites of Dracula (bad Hammer film about...well Dracula)
4. Zontar the thing from Venus (another alien sci-fi)
5. A very well known one like Plan 9 from outer space or Night of the Living Dead

I would appreciate any input and if you want to preview or watch any of those to see examples you can head over to my archive site at http://cultofuhf.wordpress.com/ Feel free to suggest any from my archives for the live show.

Thanks for the help all!
The Right Reverend Chumley

This is hilarious. It's also NSFW

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/05/not-really-about-anything.html

Let's see -- spoke at Maddy's school yesterday, to about a hundred 13 and 14 year olds. Survived. The pear tree and the cherry trees are coming into blossom too. Tomorrow, without the glorious leadership of Bee Boss Sharon Stiteler, I get to inspect the Kitty hive and go and see how the queen is doing...

I'm currently spending most of the time in the gazebo at the bottom of the garden, alternately writing a sort of outline for something and proofreading The Graveyard Book. This is the US edition of The Graveyard Book, and now I'm taking all the corrections and fixes I did to the UK manuscript when I was in Australia and transferring 90% of them over to the US version (only 90% because I'm letting a few Americanisms that my UK editor had problems with stand -- particularly the ones my otherwise wonderful UK copy editor and I butted heads over. )(There's me at two in the morning on Skype muttering, "Look freak out can't just be a newfangled Americanism -- it's in Fanny Hill, for heaven's sake...") [For the curious, http://fiction.eserver.org/novels/fanny_hill/09.html five lines from the bottom.]

....

If you're on the upper East Coast and sad that you won't get to see me at MIT as all the tickets have sold out, you could -- and should -- down your sorrows in Cory Doctorow. As you will learn over at http://www.cbldf.org/pr/archives/000357.shtml you can learn all about it....

What: Cory Doctorow Benefit Reading For CBLDF

When: Sunday, May 25 at 5 PM; VIP After Party at 7 PM

Where: Comix, 353 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10014

How Much:
General Admission: $20/advance $25/day of show;
VIP Admission: $100/advance only, includes preferred seating, copy of the book, & After Party with open beer/wine/soda bar

Tickets:
General Admission tickets available at
http://comixny.com/event.aspx?eid=416&sid=1302;

VIP Admission available at
http://store.fastcommerce.com/prod_cbldf-ff80818119f1676e0119f2fbcdc91642.html


You should go.

...

I know that David Tennant's Hamlet isn't till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who in Hamlet jokes, so this is just me getting it out of the way early, to avoid the rush...

"To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll.... More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there, and well, when I say billions, I mean, when you add in the answers, not just the questions, weeelll, you're looking at numbers that are positively astronomical and... for that matter the other question is what you lot are doing on this planet in the first place, and er, did anyone try just pushing this little red button?"

There. Thanks. Sorry about that.

...

This came in from Laurel Krahn -- I've already mentioned Fourth Street Fantasy on this blog, one of my very very first American conventions, the one at which I first discovered the joy of talking to Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden (amongst others) and failing to argue with Steve Brust:

Any chance you could mention the return of Fourth Street Fantasy Convention in your journal/blog thing? We've extended the pre-registration date from May 15th to May 31st to give us all more time to plug the convention, it also gives those who haven’t registered yet a bit more time to gather the funds together to do so.

June 20 - 22, 2008 in Minneapolis, Minnesota with Guest of Honor Elizabeth Bear.

More details at http://www.4thstreetfantasy.com/

My friend Lillian Edwards pointed me at the TechnoLlama blog, where over This, this and finally this post the entire matter of Dr Who knitting patterns is discussed to within an inch of its life.

I crochet, and I'm a Doctor Who fan, so I've been following the thing with the knitted pattern a little. I've always had a set of Lil' Endless on my mental list of things to eventually crochet, but now that you've mentioned that DC is a bit strict about things I think I might just keep them to myself instead of writing up a (free, not to be sold) pattern. What would your feelings be about crochet/knitting patterns of your characters? It's not just The Endless I have in mind, I've done a seven legged spider before, and there are several other characters or concepts that I think would make neat projects.

As long as things aren't being sold in quantity, DC Comics is incredibly unlikely to grumble about it.

I don't mind at all, as long as it's not commercial. I don't mind anything that's creative, and I especially don't mind if people ask nicely first.

(I mind, very much, things like people selling on ebay CDs with PDFs of the complete Sandman books on them.)

(Nobody is going to complain if a fan turns a Barbie into a Death -- although I heard that DC said no to one of those appearing in a book of photos of interesting Barbie dolls. Nobody is going to grumble if a fan puts up a "how to make Barbie into Death" guide online. If someone put up a how to guide, and then one day hundreds of Death Barbies turned up on eBay, I can see Warners lawyers trying to close it down...)

...

Had a conversation with Paul Levitz the other day about Gaiman's Law of Superhero Movies, which is: the closer the film is to the look and feel of what people like about the comic, the more successful it is (which is something that Warners tends singularly to miss, and Marvel tends singularly to get right) and the conversation went over to Watchmen, which had Paul explaining to me that the film is obsessive about how close it is to the comic, and me going "But they've changed the costumes. What about Nite Owl?" It'll be interesting to see whether it works or not...

The grim smurfer. There are the sorts of things that show up on my desk at work.

Originally published at KimoKawaii. You can comment here or there.

This last week when I've been watching DVDs I've noticed that the video quality is suffering for some reason. Frames are being dropped pretty frequently, though the audio plays back fine. When there is any sort of movement on screen it becomes very irritating to watch. My amateur estimation is that about 3 or 4 frames are being dropped per second.

I've tried playing the DVD in both Front Row and regular old DVD player- both behave exactly the same. I uninstalled Perian (as I was running out of ideas), and all that did was make it so that now I can open fewer types of video files, and didn't make any changes to my dvd problem for the better or worse.

I've experienced this on the last 3 DVDs i've watched, so its not just one disc. However they all were from the same TV series on DVD (Dexter). I briefly searched for any kind of issues other people might have had with these particular DVDs, but out of 300 Customer reviews on Amazon, only 10 people rated them negatively, and only one of those mentioned it being "choppy", and frankly his description of the product didn't match up with what i'm experiencing.

I've also checked Software Update, and there's nothing new for me there. I've checked everything I can think of, does any one else know what might be going on?

Cleaning my office, packing, I came across an invitation to the 70th anniversary of the opening of the Lynn-Henley Building of the Birmingham Public Library (which, at the time, was the Birmingham Public Library). This is the same building I visited on Tuesday and spoke of in my first entry on Thursday, the reading room with the Ezra Winter murals. Anyway, so I found an invitation to the 70th anniversary, April 7th, 2002. The building was opened to the public in 1932. My Grandmother Ramey was 17 years old. The US President was Herbert Hoover. Amelia Earhart flew from the US to Ireland in 14 hours and 54 minutes. Anyway, here's a contemporary illustration of the library, the one from the invitation:



Also, there was a somewhat odd list on Yahoo today, "The Good, the Bad, and the Slimy: 20 Great Movie Creatures." Some of these truly are iconic movie creatures — Kong, Giger's Alien, Jabba the Hutt, Godzilla, Oz's flying monkeys, Harryhausen's skeletons, Gollum, and heck, maybe even the magnificently erotic Davey Jones. A couple may, in time, prove to be iconic — the "Pale Man" from Pan's Labyrinth and the creature from The Host. But the list, as a whole, shows too much of what paleontologists call "the pull of the recent." That is, it's top-loaded with creatures from very recent films. In a list of 20 films spanning 1933-2008, 75 years, fully 50% of the list is derived from films released in the last six years! Even admitting that advances in CGI and SFX make-up are giving us many marvelous new monsters these days, this is baloney. Where's Lugosi's Dracula, Karloff's incarnation of Frankenstein's creature, Gort, or the "gill man" from the Black Lagoon? All of these are clearly more iconic, and far more deserving than some of those who made the list. The "ultra-cute baby Loch Ness monster" from The Water Horse? Not. Kraecher from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix? Wrong. The gelflings from The Dark Crystal. Nope (though you might make a case for the Skeksis). Saphria from the godsawful Eragon? That's a joke, right? You want a dragon, then choose Vermithrax Pejorative from Dragonslayer or Maleficent's draconic incarnation from Disney's classic Sleeping Beauty. Sheesh, people. Someone needs to look up the word "icon" in a dictionary and try again.

If you have movies in a folder on an external drive (as opposed to in your iTunes Library folder) and you click 'Consolidate' in iTunes, it'll copy them into your Library folder. What happens if you eject the external drive before clicking 'Consolidate'?

Oh, if only I had magical coffee, the coffee that bestows instant and perfect wakefulness, and eternal youth. That coffee. No, I just have this milky brown water.

Er...yeah.

Yesterday morning, Spooky took the following two photos (behind the cut) of me while I was trying to wake up. They should give you some idea of the disassembly of the hole where I hide...I mean, the office. Fold it all up. Stick it a box. Send it a thousand miles northeast. And hope this is the last big move, ever.

( Waking in an Empty Office )

Yesterday, I wrote 1,138 words on Chapter One of The Red Tree. Good pages. I think I'm finally beginning to find my way into Sarah Crowe. And after the writing, there was, of course, packing. Sorting through a mountain of papers and such atop my file cabinet (visible in the first photo, packed or discarded now) and on a shelf. But the good news is that Byron showed up about 6:15 pm, and we went to the Vortex for dinner. Moose was our waiter, which is always good. Afterwards, back home, we watched the final episode of the 9th Doctor's run, "A Parting of the Ways," because I found myself needing Christopher Eccleston. And then there was Martha Jones in the new episode of the current series, and then a particularly good episode of Battlestar Galactica. Good enough that even the commercials didn't ruin it for me. Afterwards, I spent a little quiet time in New Babbage (Second Life), mostly just sitting in the Great Hall of the Palaeozoic Museum, listening to a recorded thunderstorm (on Radio 3, Bratislava), unwinding, contemplating future exhibits. Later, Miss Paine (Spooky) showed up, and we walked down to her pie shop in the Canal District, on Bow Street. There's a room upstairs I rather love.

And after that little bit of Second Life, Spooky read to me from House of Leaves. That most frustrating chapter, at least for me. XVI. The examination of the wall samples, following the "Evacuation" of the house on Ash Tree Lane. But most of the data recovered by Mel O'Geery's Princeton lab, the knowledge of the age and geological composition of those walls, has been lost, replaced with XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, because Johnny placed a leaky fucking jar of ink on that stack of pages. And pages went missing at the publisher. And, on the one hand, every time I read the book, this section drives me mad, and on the other, this is Danielewski doing it exactly right. He taunts with hints of answers, then pulls back, lest the mystery be dissolved in mere fact. When Spooky got sleepy, I read some of Chapter 7 ("Osborn, Nature, and Evolution") of the Henry Fairfield Osborn biography. At 2 ayem, I turned off the lights and drifted down to the dreams.

Spooky's taking Hubero to the vet at 2 pm, to have him checked out before the move, and to get him a bottle of kitty Valium.

Oh, and I should post this again, because the sale price of $12.99 is good until Monday:



And, also, 350.org.

I have some questions about Time Machine (TM) that I was hoping someone here could answer. Firstly, on the subject of older backups - I have around 200GB left on my external drive, so obviously I'm not too worried about it filling up in the near future. However, when it does get full, it will start to delete older backups. So, say that the first backup I made was backup1, the second was backup2, and so on - when it deletes backup1, will it move all the files that backup1 and backup2 had in common into backup2's directory and delete only the files that had changed between backup1 and backup2? That would seem most sensible, but I have no idea whether I'm on the right track or not.

Secondly, is it possible to tell TM not to archive specific files, as opposed to folders? I have some DVD rips in my iTunes library, and I don't want TM to archive them, but I also have some VHS rips, and since they're such a pain to rip, I'd like TM to archive them. Since they're all in the same directory, it would be a major bonus if it were possible to select individual files not to be backed up.

Thirdly, and lastly, there is a file on my TM drive: /private/tmp/tempVM/vm/swapfile0 (no other files or folders are on the drive outside of the Backups.backupdb folder) - does this have anything to do with TM? If it doesn't, does anyone know what it is, and what it's doing there? It's 64MB.

EDIT: Thanks to wibbble for helping me out!

1. has anyone found a place that sells a tank top that looks like the one on BSG? if so where?
2. is there a list of Dragon con related LJ pages?
3. I know someone posted a list of restaurants to be found around D*C, could you please repost? i am having difficulties finding it.
4. ???
5. profit.
6. sorry for the cross post apparently there has not been much activity on dragon_con.

Is the Indiana Jones Parade group organized ahead of time? or is it just a bunch of friends who get together and show up? I'm thinking of doing a costume from the new movie and I would love to join in if anyone is putting this together!

Thanks for the info in advance!

I need free mental health counseling in or around Tampa. Can anyone direct me where I can call or something?

Recently I was very happy to find Sunscreem on iTunes. But then after purchasing serveral of their songs, I found them to be scratched imports that crack and pop when you listen to them. Even the comments on the When Single says the last two songs are messed up. Click here to read for yourself.

I've looked all over itunes and I can't find any place to report broken content in itunes.

Another song that's broken is Sunscreem - Secrets - (Picchiotti Dub Mix) -- you can hear it in the sample as well.

So how do I inform the itunes folks that several of the Sunscreem recordings on iTunes are broken and messed up and need to be re-imported? And when they fix them I shouldn't have to pay to re-download them given the versions they posted are messed up to begin with.

Well, not entirely. I really did have some kind of stomach crud at the beginning of the week, but the main reason I've not been posting is because it has been creeping back. The black dog. The truth the dead know. The old bald cheater (OK, I think that one actually referred to time, but it rings true either way). The characterization of depression that has always worked best for me is "the bell jar," but while Sylvia Plath was a fine writer, she has been so unjustly diminished by her posthumous association with weepy teenage girls making half-assed razorblade scratches on their wrists that her excellent and apt phrase seems hardly worth mentioning. That's still what it feels like to me, though. A layer of glass -- thicker at some times, thinner at others -- that descends over you and cuts you off from the world, muffling the things that once seemed important, the things you need to hear and the things you try to say, layering you off from what once gave you pleasure and sustenance.

I stopped taking Cymbalta a couple of months ago now, I think, mainly because Augie had gotten sick and the vet bills were murderous and I never was sure whether the shit was doing anything anyway. When I stopped, though, I asked Chris to keep a close eye on me, and if he thought I was sinking badly enough that I needed to start taking it again, he should tell me.

Yesterday morning, he told me. I refilled the prescription. Unsurprisingly, it still costs a fortune ($127 for a month's supply; no generic). The kind folks who offered to help subsidize my brain chemistry needn't send money, though; people have been very generous with donations recently and we are doing more or less OK. Besides, I don't even know if it will help, and I don't suppose I'll ever really know; for me, depression (though often extenuated by factors such as catastrophic levee failures, pet deaths, etc.) seems to be a chemical thing that comes and goes at will. Things can be awful and I'll weather it surprisingly well. Things can be fine and suddenly life looks like a big pile of shit. I never know when, how, or why. Right now I'm just doing what Chris tells me because I don't know of a better alternative.

(I do not feel in the least suicidal, and am going ahead with my plans to purchase a gun and learn to shoot. In fact, that's one of the few things I feel genuinely interested in right now.)

The only reason its arrival comes as a surprise this time is because I guess I mistook my acceptance into the Catholic Church for some sort of Get Out of Depression Free card, which was foolish, but I've been riding so high and feeling so much better since then that I just kind of went with it. I mean, why wouldn't I? However, I have come too far and put myself and my loved ones through too much worrisome bullshit to let this turn into another long downward slide. I'm taking the stupid Cymbalta. I'm going to Mass and trying to help with the movement to save Our Lady of Good Counsel, though I feel like deadweight in that respect. I'm not eating much, I admit, but I'm forcing myself to keep weightlifting. I'm hoping the trip to Grand Isle next week will clear some cobwebs out of my head.

I also have an Unofficial Birthday Crawfish Boil to attend tomorrow, which is a bright spot.

That is all for now. You may commiserate if you wish, but please, for the love of God, no ADVICE.

[Addendum: I have banished all the "peeps," a.k.a. neighbors who ask for sandwiches, codranks, and such. If you are not a delivery person, a cop, or a friend I'm expecting, you are not allowed to knock on our front door. If you do, you will be ignored. If you do it repeatedly, I will set off the burglar alarm. I regret having to adopt this scorched-earth policy, but if I don't stop hearing that tap-tap-tap (which is usually more like BANG-BANG-BANG) on my door repeatedly each day and night, I'm not just going to be depressed; I'm going to have a nervous breakdown that may result in a machete attack.]

Now I'm confused about a whole new host of things!

I found out that I'll be a guest at DragonCon again this year - I LOVE this show!

BTW, chewing the wart off WORKED. My finger is nice & flat with a little tiny scar. And who cares if the inside of my throat has become Yakuza-textured?

(20 Points if you get the reference)
(No, I'm not explaining it if you don't.)
(Kidding.)

It's a long shot, but I thought I'd ask. Is anyone heading down from the Virginia area? I'm doing some heavy thinking about attending the writer's workshop and, if so, how I'd travel to Georgia.

I finally got the news that I'm coming back as a guest this year. I've been cloistered in my studio, wearing a hair shirt and beating myself with a cat o' nine til I got the wise notion to pop off a note to the D*C Overlords. Apparently, their email got eaten by my spam filter back in January.

I'm a fine artist, a former comic book inker, a face & body painter (come see me in the Art Room!), and lately, I've been doing a LOT of storyboarding. Just finished boarding a TNT movie: The Librarian 3: Curse of the Judas Chalice, with Jonathan Frakes directing. How often can you say you've been on an Away Team to a haunted Louisiana plantation with Number One??

Now, I'm creating art for a film based on Peter Beagle's Unicorn Sonata. And I really should get off LJ and get my butt back into my studio.

If you're inspired, you can see my work here. Thanks for looking, thanks for having me back, and I'll see everyone in a few months!